The Annotated Alice

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Chapter I

Down the Rabbit- Hole

1 lice was beginning to get very tired of sit- 1. Tenniel’s pictures of Alice are not pictures of Ating by her sister on the bank, and of hav- Alice Liddell, who had dark hair cut short with straight bangs across her forehead. Carroll sent ing nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into Tenniel a photograph of Mary Hilton Badcock, the book her sister was reading, but it had no pic- another child- friend, recommending that he use her for a model, but whether Tenniel accepted tures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of this advice is a matter of dispute. That he did a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conver- not is strongly suggested by these lines from a letter Carroll wrote some time after both Alice sations?” books had been published (the letter is quoted So she was considering, in her own mind (as well by Mrs. Lennon in her book on Carroll):

as she could, for the hot day made her feel very Mr. Tenniel is the only artist, who has drawn for sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making me, who has resolutely refused to use a model, and declared he no more needed one than I a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting should need a multiplication table to work a up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White mathematical problem! I venture to think that he was mistaken and that for want of a model, Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. he drew several pictures of “Alice” entirely out of There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor proportion—head decidedly too large and feet decidedly too small. did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself “Oh dear! Oh dear! I In “Alice on the Stage,” an article cited in the first note on the prefatory poem, Carroll gave shall be too late!” (when she thought it over after- the following description of his heroine’s per- wards, it occurred to her that she ought to have won- sonality:

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What wert thou, dream- Alice, in thy foster- father’s eyes? How shall he picture thee? Loving, first, loving and gentle: loving as a dog (forgive the prosaic simile, but I know no earthly love so pure and perfect), and gentle as a fawn: then courteous—courteous to all, high or low, grand or grotesque, King or Caterpillar, even as though she were herself a King’s daughter, and her clothing of wrought gold: then trustful, ready to accept the wildest impossibilities with all that utter trust that only dreamers know; and lastly, curious—wildly curious, and with the eager en- joyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names—empty words signifying nothing!

I agree with correspondent Richard Ham- merud that it was Carroll’s intention to begin his fantasy with the word “Alice.” The symbol at the lower right corner, which you see on all of Tenniel’s drawings, is a mono- gram of his initials, J. T.

dered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite nat- ural); but, when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat- pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat- pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and, burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit- hole under the hedge. In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again. The rabbit- hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so sud- denly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well. Either the well was very deep, or she fell very

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slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down 2. Carroll was aware, of course, that in a nor- mal state of free fall Alice could neither drop to look about her, and to wonder what was going to the jar (it would remain suspended in front of happen next. First, she tried to look down and make her) nor replace it on a shelf (her speed would out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to be too great). It is interesting to note that in his novel Sylvie and Bruno, Chapter 8, Carroll de- see anything: then she looked at the sides of the well, scribes the difficulty of having tea inside a and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and falling house, as well as in a house being pulled downward at an even faster acceleration; antic- book-shelves: here and there she saw maps and pic- ipating in some respects the famous “thought tures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one experiment” in which Einstein used an imagi- nary falling elevator to explain certain aspects of the shelves as she passed: it was labeled “OR- of relativity theory. ANGE MARMALADE,” but to her great disap- 3. pointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the William Empson has pointed out (in the sec- tion on Lewis Carroll in his Some Versions of jar, for fear of killing somebody underneath, so man- Pastoral) that this is the first death joke in the aged to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell Alice books. There are many more to come. 2 past it. 4. In Carroll’s day there was considerable pop- “Well!” thought Alice to herself. “After such a fall ular speculation about what would happen if one fell through a hole that went straight as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down- through the center of the earth. Plutarch had stairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, asked the question and many famous thinkers, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the including Francis Bacon and Voltaire, had ar- 3 gued about it. Galileo (Dialogo dei Massimi Sis- top of the house!” (Which was very likely true.) temi, Giornata Seconda, Florence edition of Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an 1842, Vol. 1, pages 251–52), gave the correct answer: the object would fall with increasing end? “I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this speed but decreasing acceleration until it time?” she said aloud. “I must be getting somewhere reached the center of the earth, at which spot its acceleration would be zero. Thereafter it would near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would slow down in speed, with increasing decelera- be four thousand miles down, I think—” (for, you tion, until it reached the opening at the other see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her end. Then it would fall back again. By ignoring air resistance and the coriolis force resulting lessons in the school-room, and though this was not from the earth’s rotation (unless the hole ran a very good opportunity for showing off her knowl- from pole to pole), the object would oscillate back and forth forever. Air resistance of course edge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was would eventually bring it to rest at the earth’s good practice to say it over) “—yes, that’s about the center. The interested reader should consult “A Hole through the Earth,” by the French as- right distance—but then I wonder what Latitude or tronomer Camille Flammarion, in The Strand Longitude I’ve got to?” (Alice had not the slightest Magazine, Vol. 38 (1909), page 348, if only to idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but she look at the lurid illustrations. Carroll’s interest in the matter is indicated thought they were nice grand words to say.) by the fact that in Chapter 7 of his Sylvie and Presently she began again. “I wonder if I shall fall Bruno Concluded, there is described (in addi- 4 tion to a Möbius strip, a projective plane, and right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to other whimsical scientific and mathematical de- come out among the people that walk with their vices) a remarkable method of running trains with gravity as the sole power source. The track heads downwards! The antipathies, I think—” (she runs through a perfectly straight tunnel from was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, one town to another. Since the middle of the

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tunnel is necessarily nearer the earth’s center as it didn’t sound at all the right word) “—but I than its ends, the train runs downhill to the cen- ter, acquiring enough momentum to carry it up shall have to ask them what the name of the country the other half of the tunnel. Curiously, such a is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand? train would make the trip (ignoring air resis- Or Australia?” (and she tried to curtsey as she tance and friction of the wheels) in exactly the same time that it would take an object to fall spoke—fancy, curtseying as you’re falling through through the center of the earth—a little more the air! Do you think you could manage it?) “And than forty- two minutes. This time is constant regardless of the tunnel’s length. what an ignorant little girl she’ll think me for ask- The fall into the earth as a device for enter- ing! No, it’ll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it ing a wonderland has been used by many other writers of children’s fantasy, notably by L. written up somewhere.” Frank Baum in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, and Ruth Plumly Thompson in The Royal Book so Alice soon began talking again. “Dinah’ll miss me of Oz. Baum also used the tube through the earth as an effective plot gimmick in Tik- Tok of very much to-night, I should think!” (Dinah was the Oz. cat.)5 “I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at 5. The Liddell sisters were fond of the family’s tea- time. Dinah, my dear! I wish you were down here two tabby cats, Dinah and Villikens, named with me! There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but after a popular song, “Villikens and His Dinah.” Dinah and her two kittens, Kitty and Snow- you might catch a bat, and that’s very like a mouse, drop, reappear in the first chapter of the second you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?” And here Alice book, and later, in Alice’s dream, as the Red and White Queens. Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, “Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?” and sometimes “Do bats eat cats?” for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and was saying to her, very earnestly, “Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?” when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over. Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment: she looked up, but it was all dark overhead: before her was another long passage, and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it. There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear it say, as it turned a corner, “Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting!” She was close behind it when she turned the corner, but the Rabbit was no

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6. A gold key that unlocked mysterious doors was a common object in Victorian fantasy. Here is the second stanza of Andrew Lang’s “Ballade of the Bookworm”:

One gift the fairies gave me (three They commonly bestowed of yore): The love of books, the golden key That opens the enchanted door.

In his notes for an Oxford edition of the Alice books, Roger Green links this gold key to the magic key to Heaven in George MacDonald’s famous fantasy tale “The Golden Key.” The story first appeared in an 1867 book, Dealings with Fairies, two years after the publication of Alice in Wonderland, but Carroll and MacDon- ald were good friends and it is possible, Green writes, that Carroll saw the story in manuscript. MacDonald also wrote a poem titled “The Golden Key” that was published early enough (1861) for Carroll to have read it. The story is longer to be seen: she found herself in a long, low reprinted in Michael Hearn’s splendid anthol- ogy The Victorian Fairy Tale Book (Pantheon, hall, which was lit up by a row of lamps hanging 1988). from the roof. There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again. Suddenly she came upon a little three- legged table, all made of solid glass: there was nothing on it but a tiny golden key, and Alice’s first idea was that this might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted!6 Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat- hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the

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7. T. S. Eliot revealed to the critic Louis L. loveliest garden you ever saw.7 How she longed to Martz that he was thinking of this episode when he wrote the following lines for “Burnt Norton,” get out of that dark hall, and wander about among the first poem in his Four Quartets: those beds of bright flowers and those cool foun-

Time present and time past tains, but she could not even get her head through Are both perhaps present in time future. the doorway; “and even if my head would go And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very All time is unredeemable. little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been only knew how to begin.” For, you see, so many out- Point to one end, which is always present. of-the- way things had happened lately, that Alice Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take had begun to think that very few things indeed were Towards the door we never opened really impossible. Into the rose- garden. There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little The little door to a secret garden also appears door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she in Eliot’s The Family Reunion. It was for him a metaphor for events that might have been, had might find another key on it, or at any rate a book one opened certain doors. of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little bottle on it (“which certainly 8. The Victorian medicine bottle had neither a screw top nor a label on the side. It was corked, was not here before,” said Alice), and tied round the with a paper label tied to the neck. neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “DRINK ME” beautifully printed on it in large let- ters.8

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It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise 9. The “nice little stories,” Charles Lovett re- minds me, were not so nice. They were the tra- little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. “No, ditional fairy tales, filled with episodes of horror I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s and usually containing a pious moral. By doing marked ‘poison’ or not”; for she had read several away with morals, the Alice books opened up a new genre of fiction for children. nice little stories9 about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts, and other unpleasant 10. This is the first of twelve occasions in the book on which Alice alters in size. Richard Ell- things, all because they would not remember the mann has suggested that Carroll may have been simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, unconsciously symbolizing the great disparity between the small Alice whom he loved but that a red- hot poker will burn you if you hold it too could not marry and the large Alice she would long; and that, if you cut your finger very deeply soon become. See “On Alice’s Changes in Size in with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never Wonderland,” by Selwyn Goodacre, in Jabber- wocky (Winter 1977), for many discrepancies forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle in Tenniel’s pictures with respect to Alice’s size. marked “poison,” it is almost certain to disagree 11. Note Tweedledum’s use of the same with you, sooner or later. candle-flame metaphor in the fourth chapter of However, this bottle was not marked “poison,” so the second Alice book. Alice ventured to taste it, and, finding it very nice (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffy, and hot but- tered toast), she very soon finished it off.

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“What a curious feeling!” said Alice. “I must be shutting up like a telescope!”10 And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the lit- tle door into that lovely garden. First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; “for it might end, you know,” said Alice to her- self, “in my going out altogether, like a candle.11 I wonder what I should be like then?” And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the

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12. “alas for poor Alice!”: Did Carroll intend a candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever pun on “alas”? It is hard to be sure, but there is no question about the intent in Finnegans Wake having seen such a thing. (Viking revised edition, 1959, page 528) when After a while, finding that nothing more happened, James Joyce writes: “Alicious, twinstreams she decided on going into the garden at once; but, twinestraines, through alluring glass or alas in 12 jumboland?” And again (page 270): “Though alas for poor Alice! when she got to the door, she Wonderlawn’s lost us for ever. Alis, alas, she found she had forgotten the little golden key, and broke the glass! Liddell lokker through the leafery, ours is mistery of pain.” when she went back to the table for it, she found she For the hundreds of references to Dodgson could not possibly reach it: she could see it quite and the Alice books in Finnegans Wake, see Ann McGarrity Buki’s excellent paper “Lewis Car- plainly through the glass, and she tried her best to roll in Finnegans Wake,” in Lewis Carroll: A Cel- climb up one of the legs of the table, but it was too ebration (Clarkson N. Potter, 1982), edited by slippery; and when she had tired herself out with Edward Guiliano, and J. S. Atherton’s earlier paper “Lewis Carroll and Finnegans Wake,” in trying, the poor little thing sat down and cried. English Studies (February 1952). Most of the “Come, there’s no use in crying like that!” said allusions are not in dispute, though what is one to make of such oddities as the identical initial Alice to herself rather sharply. “I advise you to leave letters of the names Alice Pleasance Liddell and off this minute!” She generally gave herself very Anna Livia Plurabelle? Is it a coincidence, like the correspondences in the names of Carroll and good advice (though she very seldom followed it), Alice (noticed by reader Dennis Green) with re- and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to spect to word lengths, and the positions of vow- bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered els, consonants, and double letters in the last names? trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, ALICE LIDDELL LEWIS CARROLL for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. “But it’s no use now,” thought poor More letterplay: Consider the initial conso- 13 nants of “Dear Lewis Carroll.” Backwards they Alice, “to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s are the initials of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. hardly enough of me left to make one respectable Of more serious interest is the fact that Alice person.” had a son named Caryl Liddell Hargreaves. An- other coincidence? Alice’s one major romance, Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying before she married Reginald Hargreaves, was under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very with England’s Prince Leopold. They met when he was a Christ Church undergraduate. Queen small cake, on which the words “EAT ME” were Victoria considered unthinkable his marrying beautifully marked in currants. “Well, I’ll eat it,” anyone other than a princess, and Mrs. Liddell agreed. Alice wore a gift from the prince on her said Alice, “and if it makes me grow larger, I can wedding gown, and she named her second son reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I Leopold. A few weeks later, Prince Leopold, can creep under the door: so either way I’ll get into married to a princess, named a daughter Alice. It is hard to believe that when Alice called her the garden, and I don’t care which happens!” third son Caryl she did not have her old mathe- She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself matician friend in mind, but according to Anne Clark, in her marvelous book The Real Alice “Which way? Which way?”, holding her hand on the (Stein & Day, 1982), Alice always insisted that top of her head to feel which way it was growing; the name came from a novel. The novel’s iden- tity is unknown. and she was quite surprised to find that she re-

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mained the same size. To be sure, this is what gen- 13. There is no evidence, Denis Crutch and R. B. Shaberman maintain in their booklet Under erally happens when one eats cake; but Alice had got the Quizzing Glass (Magpie Press, 1972), that so much into the way of expecting nothing but out- Alice Liddell liked to pretend she was two peo- of-the- way things to happen, that it seemed quite ple. However, in keeping with their contention that Carroll injected much of himself into his dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way. fictional Alice, they remind us that Carroll was So she set to work, and very soon finished off the always careful to keep separate Charles Dodg- son, the Oxford mathematician, and Lewis Car- cake. roll, writer of children’s books and lover of little girls. **** *** ****

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