Annotated Alice (1960) and More Annotated Alice (1990)
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eVersion 4.0 - click for revision history THE ANNOTATED THE DEFINITIVE EDITION Lewis Carroll W • W • NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK • LONDON Copyright© 2000, 1990, 1988, 1960 by Martin Gardner Previous editions published as The Annotated Alice (1960) and More Annotated Alice (1990) All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 The text of this book is composed in Devinne text, with the display set in Mona Lisa and Engravers Roman Composition by Allentown Digital Services Manufacturing by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Book design by Antonina Krass Page makeup by Carole Desnoes Frontispiece: Posthumous painting of Lewis Carroll by Sir Hubert von Herkomer. Courtesy Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carroll, Lewis, 1832-1898. [Alice's adventures in Wonderland] The annotated Alice : Alice's adventures in Wonderland & Through the looking-glass / by Lewis Carroll; with illustrations by John Tenniel; updated, with an introduction and notes by Martin Gardner. — Definitive ed. p. cm. This edition combines the notes of Gardner's 1960, The annotated Alice with his 1990 update, More annotated Alice, as well as additional discoveries and updates drawn from Gardner's encyclopedic knowledge of the texts. It includes Tenniel's classic art with some recently discovered Tenniel pencil sketches. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-393-04847-0 1. Fantasy fiction, English. 2. Carroll, Lewis, 1832-1898. Alice's adventures in wonderland. 3. Carroll, Lewis, 1832-1898. Through the looking-glass. 4. Fantasy fiction, English—History and criticism. 5. Alice (Fictitious character : Carroll)—Fiction. 6. Alice (Fictitious character : Carroll) I. Gardner, Martin, 1914— . II. Tenniel, John, Sir, 1820-1914. III. Carroll, Lewis, 1832-1898. Through the looking-glass. IV Title: Through the looking-glass. V Title. VI. Title: Annotated Alice—the definitive edition PR4611 .A7 1999 823' .8—dc21 99-35647 CIP W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 To the thousands of readers of my Annotated Alice and More Annotated Alice who took the time to send letters of appreciation, and to offer corrections and suggestions for new notes. C O N T E N T S PREFACE TO THE DEFINITIVE EDITION OF The Annotated Alice xi INTRODUCTION TO The Annotated Alice xiii INTRODUCTION TO More Annotated Alice xxiii Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 3 Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There 129 The Wasp in a Wig 275 ORIGINAL PENCIL SKETCHES BY TENNIEL 299 A NOTE ABOUT LEWIS CARROLL SOCIETIES 303 SELECTED REFERENCES 305 ALICE ON THE SCREEN, BY DAVID SCHAEFER 309 Alice, Where Art Thou? Quaint child, old-fashioned Alice, lend your dream: I would be done with modern story-spinners, Follow with you the laughter and the gleam: Weary am I, this night, of saints and sinners. We have been friends since Lewis and old Tenniel Housed you immortally in red and gold. Come! Your naivete is a spring perennial: Let me be young again before I'm old. You are a glass of youth: this night I choose Deep in your magic labyrinths to stray, Where rants the Red Queen in her splendid hues And the White Rabbit hurries on his way. Let us once more adventure, hand in hand: Give me belief again—in Wonderland! —Vincent Starrett, in Brillig (Chicago: Dierkes Press, 1949) PREFACE TO THE DEFINITIVE EDITION OF The Annotated Alice The Annotated Alice was first published in 1960 by Clarkson Potter. It went through many printings here and in England, in hardcover and paperback, and was translated into Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Hebrew. I was unable to persuade Crown, which took over Potter before Crown was in turn taken over by Random House, to let me do a major revision of the book by adding a raft of new notes that had accumulated in my files. I finally decided to put them in a sequel titled More Annotated Alice. Random House published it in 1990, thirty years after the previous book. To distinguish the sequel from The Annotated Alice I substituted Peter Newell's 80 full-page illustrations for Tenniel's art. Michael Patrick Hearn contributed a fine essay on Newell. I also was able to add to More Annotated Alice the long-lost "Wasp in a Wig" episode that Carroll left out of his second Alice book after Tenniel strongly urged him to remove it, but one still had to open two separate Alice books simultaneously, which seemed a bit impractical. In 1998 I was surprised and delighted when my editor at Norton, Robert Weil, suggested that the notes from both Alice books be combined in a single "definitive" edition. They are all here, some of them expanded, and many new notes have been added. Tenniel's pictures in The Annotated Alice were poorly reproduced, bristling with broken type and fuzzy lines. For this volume they have been faithfully copied in their original clarity. The "Wasp in a Wig" episode is included in this book, along with the introduction and notes I wrote for its first publication by the Lewis Carroll Society of North America in a 1977 limited edition. I had the great pleasure of tracking down the New York City collector who had bought the original galleys at a London auction, and persuaded him to let me reprint them in a small book. In addition to thanking Weil for making this edition possible, I also thank Justin Schiller, the nation's top seller and collector of rare books for children, for permission to include reproductions of Tenniel's preliminary sketches from Schiller's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, privately printed in 1990. Thanks, too, to David Schaefer for providing a checklist of film productions of Alice, based on his great collection of such films. INTRODUCTION TO The Annotated Alice Let it be said at once that there is something preposterous about an annotated Alice. Writing in 1932, on the hundred-year anniversary of Lewis Carroll's birth, Gilbert K. Chesterton voiced his "dreadful fear" that Alice's story had already fallen under the heavy hands of the scholars and was becoming "cold and monumental like a classic tomb." "Poor, poor, little Alice!" bemoaned G.K. "She has not only been caught and made to do lessons; she has been forced to inflict lessons on others. Alice is now not only a schoolgirl but a schoolmistress. The holiday is over and Dodgson is again a don. There will be lots and lots of examination papers, with questions like: (1) What do you know of the following; mimsy, gimble, haddocks' eyes, treacle-wells, beautiful soup? (2) Record all the moves in the chess game in Through the Looking-Glass, and give diagram. (3) Outline the practical policy of the White Knight for dealing with the social problem of green whiskers. (4) Distinguish between Tweedledum and Tweedledee." There is much to be said for Chesterton's plea not to take Alice too seriously. But no joke is funny unless you see the point of it, and sometimes a point has to be explained. In the case of Alice we are dealing with a very curious, complicated kind of nonsense, written for British readers of another century, and we need to know a great many things that are not part of the text if we wish to capture its full wit and flavor. It is even worse than that, for some of Carroll's jokes could be understood only by residents of Oxford, and other jokes, still more private, could be understood only by the lovely daughters of Dean Liddell. The fact is that Carroll's nonsense is not nearly as random and pointless as it seems to a modern American child who tries to read the Alice books. One says "tries" because the time is past when a child under fifteen, even in England, can read Alice with the same delight as gained from, say, The Wind in the Willows or The Wizard of Oz. Children today are bewildered and sometimes frightened by the nightmarish atmosphere of Alice's dreams. It is only because adults—scientists and mathematicians in particular—continue to relish the Alice books that they are assured of immortality. It is only to such adults that the notes of this volume are addressed. There are two types of notes I have done my best to avoid, not because they are difficult to do or should not be done, but because they are so exceedingly easy to do that any clever reader can write them out for himself. I refer to allegorical and psychoanalytic exegesis. Like Homer, the Bible, and all other great works of fantasy, the Alice books lend themselves readily to any type of symbolic interpretation—political, metaphysical, or Freudian. Some learned commentaries of this sort are hilarious. Shane Leslie, for instance, writing on "Lewis Carroll and the Oxford Movement" (in the London Mercury, July 1933), finds in Alice a secret history of the religious controversies of Victorian England. The jar of orange marmalade, for example, is a symbol of Protestantism (William of Orange; get it?). The battle of the White and Red Knights is the famous clash of Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. The blue Caterpillar is Benjamin Jowett, the White Queen is Cardinal John Henry Newman, the Red Queen is Cardinal Henry Manning, the Cheshire Cat is Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, and the Jabberwock "can only be a fearsome representation of the British view of the Papacy.