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VIII “IT’S MY OWN INVENTION”

IX QUEEN ALICE

X SHAKING

XI WAKING

XII WHICH DREAMED IT?

INTRODUCTION: ALICE’S ADVENTURES UNDER GROUND

ALICE’S ADVENTURES UNDER GROUND

‘“ALICE” ON THE STAGE’

NOTES TO ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

NOTES TO THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

APPENDIX I: PREFACE TO THE EIGHTY-SIXTH THOUSAND 6/- EDITION OF ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

APPENDIX II: PREFACE TO THE SIXTY-FIRST THOUSAND EDITION OF THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Too many people have played their part in the production of this edition to be named here. The critical and editorial history of the Alice books involves a large cast of players, a fact which has inspired and inhibited me at the same time. The annotation in this edition is more indebted to my editorial predecessors than I can acknowledge in detail, in particular to editions by Martin Gardner, Douglas Gray and R. L. Green, and the trailblazing essay of the great poet critic William Empson.

My thanks to the staff of Cambridge and York University Libraries and all those who have helped me personally in producing this edition, in particular Tony Fothergill, Kenneth Fuller of Marchpane Books, David Haughton, Karen Hodder, Hermione Lee, Jacqueline Rose, the late Geoffrey Summerfield and Marina Warner. Special thanks go to my patient and inspiring editor at Penguin, Paul Keegan, who commissioned it and bore with me during its long adventures underground, to Adam Phillips whose conversations have helped make sense of it all, and to Fiona Shaw who has gone the whole distance with me.

The edition is dedicated to my daughters Eliza and Jesse with love.

INTRODUCTION

“No! No! The adventures first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: “explanations take such a dreadful time.” (‘The Lobster-Quadrille’)

“Even a joke should have some meaning – and a child’s more important than a joke, I hope.” (‘Queen Alice’)1

1: The Child, Nonsense and Meaning

‘“The adventures first”’, says Carroll’s Gryphon, with his dread of ‘explanations’, and all readers know this is the right order. Yet introductions inevitably come before adventures and introductions tend to mean explanations. Lots of things happen the wrong way round in these texts – ‘“Sentence first – verdict afterwards”’, shouts the Queen of Hearts2 – so readers who share the Gryphon’s priorities can always read the introduction after the stories, or not at all. You simply follow the instructions of the King of Hearts: ‘“Begin at the beginning… and go on till you come to the end: then stop”’.3

Yet Carroll’s heroine, at the heart of these adventures, is very much concerned with questions of meaning. When she dreamily finds her way to the other side of the looking-glass, one of the first things she encounters is a poem called ‘Jabberwocky’. After reading it, Alice remarks ‘“It seems very pretty… but it’s rather hard to understand!”’ ‘“Somehow it fills my head with ideas”’, she reflects, ‘“only I don’t exactly know what they are!”’4

In this respect, the nonsensical mirror-poem ‘Jabberwocky’ stands as a mirror of the classic literary double-act of which it is part. All readers of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, those undisputed classics of nonsense literature, find themselves in much the same predicament as the heroine. The stories fill our heads with ideas, but we don’t know what they are.

All the same, readers tend to divide between those who are content to find the stories ‘pretty’ – as Alice somewhat incongruously finds that monstrous travesty of a heroic monster-slaying saga ‘Jabberwocky’ ‘pretty’ – and those who want to know what those obscure ‘ideas’ Alice intimates really are. Of the verses read out in the court-room scene at the close of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice declares ‘“I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it”’, which prompts the King to reflect:

“If there’s no meaning in it,” said the King, “that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any. And yet I don’t know,” he went on, spreading