But for a copper halfpenny,
And that will purchase nine.
‘I sometimes dig for buttered rolls,
Or set limed twigs16 for crabs:
I sometimes search the grassy knolls
For wheels of Hansom-cabs.17
And that’s the way’ (he gave a wink)
‘By which I get my wealth—
And very gladly will I drink
Your Honour’s noble health.’
I heard him then, for I had just
Completed my design
To keep the Menai bridge18 from rust
By boiling it in wine.
I thanked him much for telling me
The way he got his wealth,
But chiefly for his wish that he
Might drink my noble health.
And now, if e’er by chance I put
My fingers into glue,
Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
Into a left-hand shoe,19
Or if I drop upon my toe
A very heavy weight,
I weep, for it reminds me so
Of that old man I used to know—
Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow,
Whose hair was whiter than the snow,
Whose face was very like a crow,
With eyes, like cinders, all aglow,20
Who seemed distracted with his woe,
Who rocked his body to and fro,
And muttered mumblingly and low,
As if his mouth were full of dough,
Who snorted like a buffalo—
That summer evening long ago,
A-sitting on a gate.”
As the Knight sang the last words of the ballad, he gathered up the reins, and turned his horse’s head along the road by which they had come. “You’ve only a few yards to go,” he said, “down the hill and over that little brook, and then you’ll be a Queen—But you’ll stay and see me off first?” he added as Alice turned with an eager look in the direction to which he pointed. “I sha’n’t be long. You’ll wait and wave your handkerchief when I get to that turn in the road! I think it’ll encourage me, you see.”
“Of course I’ll wait,” said Alice: “and thank you very much for coming so far—and for the song—I liked it very much.”
“I hope so,” the Knight said doubtfully: “but you didn’t cry so much as I thought you would.”
So they shook hands, and then the Knight rode slowly away into the forest. “It wo’n’t take long to see him off, I expect,” Alice said to herself, as she stood watching him. “There he goes! Right on his head as usual! However, he gets on again pretty easily—that comes of having so many things hung round the horse—” So she went on talking to herself, as she watched the horse walking leisurely along the road, and the Knight tumbling off, first on one side and then on the other. After the fourth or fifth tumble he reached the turn, and then she waved her handkerchief to him, and waited till he was out of sight.21
“I hope it encouraged him,” she said, as she turned to run down the hill: “and now for the last brook, and to be a Queen! How grand it sounds!” A very few steps brought her to the edge of the brook.22 “The Eighth Square at last!” she cried as she bounded across,
* * * *
* * *
* * * *
and threw herself down to rest on a lawn as soft as moss, with little flower-beds dotted about it here and there. “Oh, how glad I am to get here! And what is this on my head?” she exclaimed in a tone of dismay, as she put her hands up to something very heavy, that fitted tight all round her head.
“But how can it have got there without my knowing it?” she said to herself, as she lifted it off, and set it on her lap to make out what it could possibly be.
It was a golden crown.23
1. The Red Knight has moved to K2; a powerful move in a conventional chess game, for he simultaneously checks the White King and attacks the White Queen. The Queen is lost unless the Red Knight can be removed from the board.
2. The White Knight, landing on the square occupied by the Red Knight (the square adjacent to Alice on her east side), absent-mindedly shouts, “Check!”; actually he checks only his own King. The defeat of the Red Knight indicates a move of Kt. X Kt. in the chess game.
Although most Carrollians agree that Carroll intended the White Knight to represent himself, other candidates have been proposed. Don Quixote is an obvious choice, and the parallels are ably defended in John Hinz’s “Alice Meets the Don,” in the South Atlantic Quarterly (Vol. 52, 1953, pages 253–66), reprinted in Aspects of Alice (Vanguard, 1971), edited by Robert Phillips.
Charles Edwards wrote to tell me about a passage in Cervantes’s novel (Part 2, Chapter 4) in which the Don asks a poet to write an acrostic poem, the initial letters of its lines to spell “Dulcinea del Toboso.” The poet finds seventeen letters awkward for a poem with regular stanzas because seventeen is a prime number with no divisors. The Don advises him to work hard on it because “no woman will believe that those verses were made for her where her name is not plainly discerned.” “Alice Pleasance Liddell” has twenty-one letters. This made it possible for Carroll, in his acrostic terminal poem, to have seven stanzas of three lines each.
Another candidate for the White Knight is a chemist and inventor who was a friend of Carroll’s and is often mentioned in Carroll’s diary. See “The Chemist in Allegory: Augustus Vernon Harcourt and the White Knight,” by M. Christine King, Journal of Chemical Education (March 1983). Other candidates are considered in Chapter 7 of Michael Hancher’s The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books. Because Tenniel in later life had a handlebar mustache (and his nose resembled that of the White Knight), it has been suggested that Tenniel drew the Knight as a caricature of himself. This seems farfetched because at the time that he drew the White Knight he did not wear a mustache.
Tenniel’s frontispiece picture of the White Knight in many ways resembles Albrecht Dürer’s etching of the Knight in the presence of Death and the Devil. Was this intentional? When I wrote to Michael Hancher for his opinion, he called my attention to Tenniel’s cartoon in Punch (March 5, 1887), titled “The Knight and His Companion (Suggested by Dürer’s famous picture).” The Knight represents Bismarck and his companion is Socialism. “Obviously Tenniel had a copy of the Dürer in front of him when he drew this cartoon,” Hancher wrote. “My hunch is that he did not when he drew the Looking-Glass frontispiece, but that he called it up out of his remarkable visual memory.”
“The White Knight,” Carroll wrote to Tenniel, “must not have whiskers; he must not be made to look old.” Nowhere in the text does Carroll mention a mustache, nor does he indicate the knight’s age. Tenniel’s handlebar mustache and Newell’s bushy mustache were the artists’ additions. Perhaps Tenniel, sensing that the White Knight was Carroll, gave him a balding, elderly look to contrast his age with that of Alice.
Jeffrey Stern, in his article “Carroll Identifies Himself at Last” (Jabberwocky, Summer/Autumn 1990), describes a game board hand-drawn by Carroll that was recently discovered. The nature of the game is unknown, but on the underside of the cardboard sheet Carroll had written “Olive Butler, from the White Knight. Nov. 21, 1892.” “So, at last,” Stern comments, “we know for certain that Carroll did portray himself as the White Knight.”
DÜRER’S KNIGHT
3. Carroll may be suggesting here that the knights, like Punch and Judy, are merely puppets moved by the hands of the invisible players of the game. Note that Tenniel, unlike modern illustrators in his scrupulous following of the text, shows the knights holding their clubs in traditional Punch-and-Judy fashion.
4. Many Carrollian scholars have surmised, and with good reason, that Carroll intended the White Knight to be a caricature of himself. Like the knight, Carroll had shaggy hair, mild blue eyes, a kind and gentle face. Like the knight, his mind seemed to function best when it saw things in topsy-turvy fashion. Like the knight, he was fond of curious gadgets and a “great hand at inventing t
hings.” He was forever “thinking of a way” to do this or that a bit differently. Many of his inventions, like the knight’s blotting-paper pudding, were very clever but unlikely ever to be made (though some turned out to be not so useless when others reinvented them decades later).
Carroll’s inventions include a chess set for travelers, with holes to hold pegged pieces; a cardboard grill (he called it a Nyctograph) to assist one in writing in the dark; a postage-stamp case with two “pictorial surprises” (see Chapter 6, Note 5, of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). His diary contains such entries as: “The idea occurred to me that a game might be made of letters, to be moved about on a chess-board till they form words” (Dec. 19, 1880); “Concocted a new ‘Proportional Representation’ scheme, far the best I have yet devised…Also invented rules for testing Divisibility of a number by 17 and by 19. An inventive day!” (June 3, 1884); “Invented a substitute for gum, for fastening envelopes…, mounting small things in books, etc.—viz: paper with gum on both sides” (June 18, 1896); “Thought of a plan for simplifying money-orders, by making the sender fill up two duplicate papers, one of which he hands in to be transmitted by the postmaster—it contains a key-number, which the receiver has to supply in order to get the money. I think of suggesting this, and my plan for double postage on Sunday, to the Government” (Nov. 16, 1880).
Carroll’s rooms contained a variety of toys for the amusement of his child-guests: music boxes, dolls, windup animals (including a walking bear and one called “Bob the Bat,” which flew around the room), games, an “American orguinette” that played when you cranked a strip of punched paper through it. When he went on a journey, Stuart Collingwood tells us in his biography, “each separate article used to be carefully wrapped up in a piece of paper all to itself, so that his trunks contained nearly as much paper as of the more useful things.”
It is noteworthy also that, of all the characters Alice meets on her two dream adventures, only the White Knight seems to be genuinely fond of her and to offer her special assistance. He is almost alone in speaking to her with respect and courtesy, and we are told that Alice remembered him better than anyone else whom she met behind the mirror. His melancholy farewell may be Carroll’s farewell to Alice when she grew up (became a queen) and abandoned him. At any rate, we hear loudest in this sunset episode that “shadow of a sigh” that Carroll tells us in his prefatory poem will “tremble through the story.”
The role of White Knight was taken by Gary Cooper in Paramount’s 1933 film, Alice in Wonderland.
5. A deal box is a box made of fir or pine wood.
6. “I suggest that when the White Knight said that his horse’s anklets were to guard against the bites of sharks, the compositor in his first proof made the very easy substitution of an ‘n’ for an ‘h’, and set Carroll wondering what the bites of snarks were like…wondering until inevitably The Hunting of the Snark followed, which is the way such things get written.”
—A. A. Milne, Year In, Year Out (1952).
7. Janis Lull, in Lewis Carroll: A Celebration, argues that Carroll and Tenniel together loaded the steed with objects closely related to things mentioned or pictured elsewhere in the Alice books: the wooden sword and the umbrella are similar to the sword and umbrella owned by the Tweedle brothers; the watchman’s rattle looks like the rattle over which the brothers fought; the beehive recalls the elephant bees in Chapter 3; the mousetrap stands for the mouse in the first Alice book; the candlesticks allude to the candles that go off like fireworks at the end of Chapter 9; the spring bell suggests the two bells on the door in Chapter 9; the fire irons and bellows are like those in Alice’s living room below the mirror; the shark anklets could be identified with the sharks in Alice’s recitation in Chapter 10 of the previous book; the two brushes are related to the hairbrush with which Alice combs the White Queen’s hair in Chapter 5; the plum-cake dish is, of course, the one that the March Hare produces like magic from his small bag when the Lion and Unicorn are fighting for the crown; the carrots may be there as food for the March Hare; and the wine bottle, perhaps empty, suggests the nonexistent wine that the March Hare asked Alice to drink at the Mad Tea Party, as well as the real wine at the feast in Chapter 9.
“The Knight is a sort of property master,” Lull summarizes, “whose furniture both recapitulates what has gone before and anticipates what will come.”
For more inventions by Carroll’s White Knight, see Chapter 9 of my Visitors from Oz.
8. In Carroll’s day refined sugar was formed into conical chunks called sugar loaves. The term sugar loaf is commonly applied to cone-shaped hats and hills.
9. Is Carroll alluding to the proverb “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”?
10. In two-valued logic this would be called an example of the law of excluded middle: a statement is either true or false, with no third alternative. The law is the basis of a number of old nonsense rhymes: e.g., There was an old woman who lived on the hill, / And if she’s not gone, she is living there still.
11. In his diary (August 5, 1862) Carroll wrote: “After dinner Harcourt and I went to the Deanery to arrange about the river tomorrow, and stayed to play a game of ‘Ways and Means’ with the children.” I am told that Carroll’s relatives own a set of rules in Carroll’s handwriting, but no one seems to know if the game was invented by Carroll or by someone else.
12. To a student of logic and semantics all this is perfectly sensible. The song is “A-Sitting on a Gate”; it is called “Ways and Means”; the name of the song is “The Aged Aged Man”; and the name is called “Haddocks’ Eyes.” Carroll is distinguishing here among things, the names of things, and the names of names of things. “Haddocks’ Eyes,” the name of a name, belongs to what logicians now call a “metalanguage.” By adopting the convention of a hierarchy of metalanguages logicians manage to sidestep certain paradoxes that have plagued them since the time of the Greeks. For Earnest Nagel’s amusing translation of the White Knight’s remarks into symbolic notation, see his article “Symbolic Notation, Haddocks’ Eyes and the Dog-Walking Ordinance,” in Vol. 3 of James R. Newman’s anthology, The World of Mathematics (1956).
A less technical but equally sound and delightful analysis of this passage is included in Roger W. Holmes’ article, “The Philosopher’s Alice in Wonderland” (Antioch Review, Summer 1959). Professor Holmes (he was chairman of the philosophy department at Mount Holyoke College) thinks that Carroll was pulling our leg when he has the White Knight say that the song is “A-sitting on a Gate.” Clearly this cannot be the song itself, but only another name. “To be consistent,” Holmes concludes, “the White Knight, when he had said that the song is…, could only have burst into the song itself. Whether consistent or not, the White Knight is Lewis Carroll’s cherished gift to logicians.”
The White Knight’s song also exhibits a kind of hierarchy, like a mirror reflection of a mirror reflection of an object. Carroll’s eccentric White Knight, whom Alice couldn’t forget, is also unable to forget another eccentric with traits that suggest that he too may be a caricature of Carroll; perhaps Carroll’s vision of himself as a lonely, unloved old man.
13. The White Knight’s song is a revised, expanded version of this earlier poem by Carroll, which appeared anonymously in 1856 in a magazine called The Train.
Upon the Lonely Moor
I met an aged, aged man
Upon the lonely moor:
I knew I was a gentleman,
And he was but a boor.
So I stopped and roughly questioned him,
“Come, tell me how you live!”
But his words impressed my ear no more
Than if it were a sieve.
He said, “I look for soap-bubbles,
That lie among the wheat,
And bake them into mutton-pies,
And sell them in the street.
I sell them unto men,” he said,
“Who sail on stormy seas;
And that’s the way I get my bread—
&
nbsp; A trifle, if you please.”
But I was thinking of a way
To multiply by ten,
And always, in the answer, get
The question back again.
I did not hear a word he said,
But kicked that old man calm,
And said, “Come, tell me how you live!”
And pinched him in the arm.
His accents mild took up the tale:
He said, “I go my ways,
And when I find a mountain-rill,
I set it in a blaze.
And thence they make a stuff they call
Rowland’s Macassar Oil;
But fourpence-halfpenny is all
They give me for my toil.”
But I was thinking of a plan
To paint one’s gaiters green,
So much the colour of the grass
That they could ne’er be seen.
I gave his ear a sudden box,
And questioned him again,
And tweaked his grey and reverend locks,
And put him into pain.
He said, “I hunt for haddocks’ eyes
Among the heather bright,
And work them into waistcoat-buttons
In the silent night.
And these I do not sell for gold,
Or coin of silver-mine,
But for a copper-halfpenny,
And that will purchase nine.
“I sometimes dig for buttered rolls,
Or set limed twigs for crabs;
I sometimes search the flowery knolls
For wheels of hansom cabs.
And that’s the way” (he gave a wink)
“I get my living here,
And very gladly will I drink
Your Honour’s health in beer.”
I heard him then, for I had just
Completed my design
To keep the Menai bridge from rust
By boiling it in wine.
I duly thanked him, ere I went,
For all his stories queer,
But chiefly for his kind intent
To drink my health in beer.
And now if e’er by chance I put
My fingers into glue,
Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
The Annotated Alice Page 33