TENNIEL’S ORIGINAL DRAWING
11. The Frog has a frog in his throat.
12. Victorian Cockneys had a habit of exchanging initial ws for vs and vs for ws. “Wexes” is how Mr. Pickwick’s servant Sam Weller pronounces “vexes” in Pickwick Papers.
13. This is a parody of Sir Walter Scott’s song, “Bonny Dundee,” from his play The Doom of Devorgoil.
Bonny Dundee
To the Lords of Convention ’twas Claver’se who spoke,
’Ere the King’s crown shall fall there are crowns to be broke;
So let each Cavalier who loves honour and me,
Come follow the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.
“Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can,
Come saddle your horses, and call up your men;
Come open the West Port, and let me gang free,
And it’s room for the bonnets of Bonny Dundee!”
Dundee he is mounted; he rides up the street,
The bells are rung backward, the drums they are beat;
But the Provost, douce man, said, “Just e’en let him be,
The Gude Town is weel quit of that Deil of Dundee.”
Come fill up my cup, &c.
As he rode down the sanctified bends of the Bow,
Ilk carline was flyting and shaking her pow;
But the young plants of grace they look’d couthie and slee,
Thinking, “Luck to thy bonnet, thou Bonny Dundee!”
Come fill up my cup, &c.
With sour-featured Whigs the Grassmarket was cramm’d
As if half the West had set tryst to be hang’d;
There was spite in each look, there was fear in each e’e,
As they watch’d for the bonnets of Bonny Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, &c.
These cowls of Kilmarnock had spits and had spears,
And lang-hafted gullies to kill Cavaliers;
But they shrunk to close-heads, and the causeway was free,
At the toss of the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, &c.
He spurr’d to the foot of the proud Castle rock,
And with the gay Gordon he gallantly spoke;
“Let Mons Meg and her marrows speak twa words or three,
For the love of the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.”
Come fill up my cup, &c.
The Gordon demands of him which way he goes—
“Where’er shall direct me the shade of Montrose!
Your Grace in short space shall hear tidings of me,
Or that low lies the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, &c.
“There are hills beyond Pentland, and lands beyond Forth,
If there’s lords in the Lowlands, there’s chiefs in the North;
There are wild Duniewassals, three thousand times three,
Will cry hoigh! for the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, &c.
“There’s brass on the target of barken’d bull-hide;
There’s steel in the scabbard that dangles beside;
The brass shall be burnish’d, the steel shall flash free,
At a toss of the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, &c.
“Away to the hills, to the caves, to the rocks—
Ere I own an usurper, I’ll couch with the fox;
And tremble, false Whigs, in the midst of your glee,
You have not seen the last of my bonnet and me!”
Come fill up my cup, &c.
He waved his proud hand, and the trumpets were blown,
The kettle-drums clash’d, and the horsemen rode on,
Till on Ravelston’s cliffs and on Clermiston’s lee,
Died away the wild war-notes of Bonny Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can,
Come saddle the horses and call up the men,
Come open your gates, and let me gae free,
For it’s up with the bonnets of Bonny Dundee!
14. No Victorian reader would miss the pun. To cut is to ignore someone you know. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable distinguishes four kinds of cuts: the cut direct (staring at an acquaintance and pretending not to know him or her); the cut indirect (pretending not to see someone); the cut sublime (admiring something, such as the top of a building, until an acquaintance has walked by); and the cut informal (stooping to adjust a shoelace).
15. Roger Green thought Alice’s dialogue with the pudding might have been suggested to Carroll by a cartoon in Punch (January 19, 1861) showing a plum pudding standing up in its dish and saying to a diner, “Allow me to disagree with you.” Michael Hancher reproduces the Punch cartoon in his book on Tenniel, and points out the reappearance of the pudding, its legs in the air, at the lower left corner of the chapter’s last Tenniel illustration.
16. The answer: an oyster. The Lewis Carroll Handbook (1962) reveals (p. 95) that a four-stanza answer to the White Queen’s riddle, in the same meter as the riddle, appeared in the English periodical Fun, October 30, 1878, p. 175. The answer had been previously submitted to Carroll, who polished up the meter for the anonymous author. The answer’s final stanza, as quoted in the Handbook, is:
Get an oyster-knife strong,
Insert it ’twixt cover and dish in the middle;
Then you shall before long
Un-dish-cover the OYSTERS—dish-cover the riddle!
17. The reference is to candle extinguishers, small hollow cones used for snuffing out candles to prevent the smoke fumes from circulating around the room.
18. The White Queen has moved away from Alice to QR6; an illegal move in an orthodox chess game because it does not take the White King out of check.
19. This is Alice’s capture of the Red Queen. It results in a legitimate checkmate of the Red King, who has slept throughout the entire chess problem without moving. Alice’s victory gives a faint moral to the story, for the white pieces are good and gentle characters in contrast to the fierce vindictive temperaments of the red pieces. The checkmate ends the dream but leaves open the question of whether the dream was Alice’s or the Red King’s.
Chapter X
Shaking
1
She took her off the table as she spoke, and shook her backwards and forwards with all her might.
The Red Queen made no resistance whatever: only her face grew very small, and her eyes got large and green: and still, as Alice went on shaking her, she kept on growing shorter—and fatter—and softer—and rounder—and—
1. The American writer and critic Everett Bleiler, in a front-page article “Alice Through the Zodiac” (Book World, August 3, 1997), makes a curious conjecture. Because Carroll stretched his second Alice book to twelve chapters by making this and the next chapter extremely short, is it possible he had the twelve zodiac signs in mind? For example, the Tweedle twins may allude to Gemini, the Lion to Leo, the Sheep to Aries, the Goat to Capricorn, the White Knight to Sagittarius, Humpty to Libra, and so on. Striking though these correlations are, few Carrollians have taken Bleiler’s conjecture seriously. They point out that Carroll had no interest in astrology and that he wanted his second Alice book to have the same number of chapters as the first.
Chapter XI
Waking
—it really was a kitten, after all.1
1. Rose Franklin, one of Carroll’s child-friends, recalled in a memoir that Carroll had said to her, “I cannot decide what to make the Red Queen turn into.” Rose replied: “She looks so cross, please turn her into the Black Kitten.”
“That will do splendidly,” Carroll is reported to have said, “and the White Queen shall be the White Kitten.”
Recall that in Chapter 1, before she fell asleep, Alice said to the black kitten, “Let’s pretend that you’re the Red Queen.”
Chapter XII
Which Dreamed
It?
“Your Red Majesty shouldn’t purr so loud,” Alice said, rubbing her eyes,
and addressing the kitten, respectfully, yet with some severity. “You woke me out of oh! such a nice dream! And you’ve been along with me, Kitty—all through the Looking-glass world. Did you know it, dear?”
It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they always purr. “If they would only purr for ‘yes,’ and mew for ‘no,’ or any rule of that sort,” she had said, “so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?”1
On this occasion the kitten only purred: and it was impossible to guess whether it meant ‘yes’ or ‘no.’
So Alice hunted among the chessmen on the table till she had found the Red Queen: then she went down on her knees on the hearth-rug, and put the kitten and the Queen to look at each other. “Now, Kitty!” she cried, clapping her hands triumphantly. “Confess that was what you turned into!”
(“But it wouldn’t look at it,” she said, when she was explaining the thing afterwards to her sister: “it turned away its head, and pretended not to see it: but it looked a little ashamed of itself, so I think it must have been the Red Queen.”)
“Sit up a little more stiffly, dear!” Alice cried with a merry laugh. “And curtsey while you’re thinking what to—what to purr. It saves time, remember!” And she caught it up and gave it one little kiss, “just in honour of its having been a Red Queen.”
“Snowdrop, my pet!” she went on, looking over her shoulder at the White Kitten, which was still patiently undergoing its toilet, “when will Dinah have finished with your White Majesty, I wonder? That must be the reason you were so untidy in my dream.—Dinah! Do you know that you’re scrubbing a White Queen? Really, it’s most disrespectful of you!
“And what did Dinah turn to, I wonder?” she prattled on, as she settled comfortably down, with one elbow on the rug, and her chin in her hand, to watch the kittens. “Tell me, Dinah, did you turn to Humpty Dumpty?2 I think you did—however, you’d better not mention it to your friends just yet, for I’m not sure.
“By the way, Kitty, if only you’d been really with me in my dream, there was one thing you would have enjoyed—I had such a quantity of poetry said to me, all about fishes!3 Tomorrow morning you shall have a real treat. All the time you’re eating your breakfast, I’ll repeat ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ to you; and then you can make believe it’s oysters, dear!
“Now, Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should not go on licking your paw like that—as if Dinah hadn’t washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too! Was it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to know—Oh, Kitty, do help to settle it! I’m sure your paw can wait!” But the provoking kitten only began on the other paw, and pretended it hadn’t heard the question.
Which do you think it was?
1. Alice’s point is fundamental in information theory, Gerald Weinberg says in a letter. There is no one-value logic—no way to record or transmit information without at least a binary distinction between yes and no, or true and false. In computers the distinction is handled by the on-off switches of their circuitry.
2. Why did Alice think Humpty was Dinah? Ellis Hillman, writing on “Dinah, the Cheshire Cat, and Humpty Dumpty,” in Jabberwocky (Winter 1977), offers an ingenious theory. “I’m one that has spoken to a King, I am,” Humpty said to Alice. As we know from the old proverb that Alice quoted in Chapter 8 of the previous book, a cat may look at a king.
Fred Madden, in his article cited in Chapter 3, Notes 11 and 18, points out that when the initials of Humpty Dumpty are reversed, they become D. H., the first and last letters of “Dinah.”
3. The term queer fish, meaning someone considered odd, was current in Carroll’s day. In stressing fish in this book, was Carroll thinking of all the odd fish it contained? Or that there is something “fishy” about his nonsense? Coincidentally, fish is slang in the United States for a mediocre chess player.
A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—
Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—
Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?1
1. In this terminal poem, one of Carroll’s best, he recalls that July 4 boating expedition up the Thames on which he first told the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the three Liddell girls. The poem echoes the themes of winter and death that run through the prefatory poem of Through the Looking-Glass. It is the song of the White Knight, remembering Alice as she was before she turned away, with tearless and eager eyes, to run down the hill and leap the last brook into womanhood. The poem is an acrostic, the initial letters of the lines spelling Alice’s full name.
Matthew Hodgart wrote from England to suggest that in this stanza of his acrostic poem Carroll was consciously echoing the sentiments of that anonymous canon, well known in England at the time:
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream;
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
Ralph Lutts, a correspondent who makes the same suggestion, points out that “merrily” in the canon links to the “merry crew” in the prefatory poem of the first Alice book.
The real world and the “eerie” state of dreaming alternate throughout Carroll’s two Sylvie and Bruno books. “Either I’ve been dreaming about Sylvie,” he says to himself in Chapter 2 of the first book, “and this is reality. Or else I’ve been with Sylvie, and this is the dream! Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?”
The prefatory poem of Sylvie and Bruno, an acrostic on the name of Isa Bowman, conveys the same theme:
Is all our Life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time’s dark resistless stream?
Bowed to the earth with bitter woe,
Or laughing at some raree-show,
We flutter idly to and fro.
Man’s little Day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.
Morris Glazer wonders in a letter if Carroll intended “Alice” to begin the poem’s middle line, thus putting her at the center of the poem as she was central in his life.
Contents
Preface
Introduction
The Wasp in a Wig
Preface
In 1974 the London auctioneering firm of Sotheby Parke Bernet and Company listed, inconspicuously, the following item in their June 3 catalog:
Dodgson (C.L.) “Lewis Carroll.” Galley proofs for a suppressed portion of “Through the Looking-Glass,” slip 64–67 and portions of 63 and 68, with autograph revisions in black ink and note in the author’s purple ink that the extensive passage is to be omitted.
The present portion contains an incident in which Alice meets a bad-tempered wasp, incorporating a poem of five stanzas, beginning “When I was young, my ringlets waved.” It was to have appeared following “A very few steps brought her to the edge of the brook” on page 183 of the first edition. The proofs were bought at the sale of the author’s furniture, personal effects, and librar
y, Oxford, 1898, and are apparently unrecorded and unpublished.
The word “apparently” in the last sentence was an understatement. Not only had the suppressed portion not been published, but Carroll experts did not even know it had been set in type, let alone preserved. The discovery that it still existed was an event of major significance to Carrollians—indeed, to all students of English literature. Now, more than one hundred years after Through the Looking-Glass was first set in type, the long-lost episode receives its first major publication.
Until 1974 nothing was known about the missing portion beyond what Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, a nephew of Lewis Carroll, had said about it in his 1898 biography of his uncle, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll. Collingwood wrote:
The story, as originally written, contained thirteen chapters, but the published book consisted of twelve only. The omitted chapter introduced a wasp, in the character of a judge or barrister, I suppose, since Mr. Tenniel wrote that “a wasp in a wig is altogether beyond the appliances of art.” Apart from difficulties of illustration, the “wasp” chapter was not considered to be up to the level of the rest of the book, and this was probably the principal reason of its being left out.
These remarks were followed by a facsimile of a letter, dated June 1, 1870, that John Tenniel had sent to Carroll. (The letter is here reproduced on pages 281–83.) In Tenniel’s sketch for the railway carriage scene, Alice sits opposite a goat and a man dressed in white paper while the Guard observes Alice through opera glasses. In his final drawing Tenniel gave the man in the paper hat the face of Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister he so often caricatured in Punch.
Carroll accepted both of Tenniel’s suggestions. The “old lady,” presumably a character in the original version of Chapter 3, vanished from the chapter and from Tenniel’s illustration, and the Wasp vanished from the book. In The Annotated Alice my note on this ends: “Alas, nothing of the missing chapter has survived.” Collingwood himself had not read the episode. We know this because he assumed, mistakenly as it turned out, that if the Wasp wore a wig he must have been a judge or lawyer.
The Annotated Alice Page 36