Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [137]
Of Miss Phoebe Carlo’s performance it would be difficult to speak too highly. As a mere effort of memory, it was surely a marvellous feat for so young a child, to learn no less than two hundred and fifteen speeches—nearly three times as many as Beatrice in “Much Ado About Nothing.” But what I admired most, as realising most nearly my ideal heroine, was her perfect assumption of the high spirits, and readiness to enjoy everything, of a child out for a holiday. I doubt if any grown actress, however experienced, could have worn this air so perfectly; we look before and after, and sigh for what is not; a child never does this: and it is only a child that can utter from her heart the words poor Margaret Fuller Ossoli so longed to make her own, “I am all happy now!”
And last (I may for once omit the time honoured addition “not least,” for surely no tinier maiden ever yet achieved so genuine a theatrical success?) comes our dainty Dormouse. “Dainty” is the only epithet that seems to me exactly to suit her: with her beaming baby-face, the delicious crispness of her speech, and the perfect realism with which she makes herself the embodied essence of Sleep, she is surely the daintiest Dormouse that ever yet told us “I sleep when I breathe!” With the first words of that her opening speech, a sudden silence falls upon the house (at least it has been so every time I have been there), and the baby tones sound strangely clear in the stillness. And yet I doubt if the charm is due only to the incisive clearness of her articulation; to me there was an even greater charm in the utter self-abandonment and conscientious thoroughness of her acting. If Dorothy ever adopts a motto, it ought to be “thorough.” I hope the time may soon come when she will have a better part than “Dormouse” to play—when some enterprising manager will revive the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and do his obvious duty to the public by securing Miss Dorothy d’Alcourt as “Puck”!
It would be well indeed for our churches if some of the clergy could take a lesson in enunciation from this little child; and better still, for “our noble selves,” if we would lay to heart some things that she could teach us, and would learn by her example to realise, rather more than we do, the spirit of a maxim I once came across in an old book, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”
NOTES TO ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
For the sake of simplicity the notes that follow refer to the author of the Alice books by his pseudonym of Lewis Carroll throughout. They do not distinguish (as the Introduction does) between the biographical Charles Dodgson and the authorial Lewis Carroll.
NOTE ON THE TITLE
In a letter to Tom Taylor of 10 June 1864, Carroll speaks of his difficulties over finding a title for his story:
I should be very glad if you could help me in fixing on a name for my fairy-tale, which Mr Tenniel (in consequence of your kind introduction) is now illustrating… I first thought of ‘Alice’s Adventures under Ground’, but that was pronounced too like a lesson-book, in which instruction about mines would be administered in the form of a grill; then I took ‘Alice’s Golden Hour’ but that I gave up, having a dark suspicion that there is already a book called ‘Lily’s Golden Hours’. Here are the other names I have thought of:
Alice among the elves/goblins Alice’s doings/hours/adventures in elf-land/wonderland.
Of all these I at present prefer ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’. In spite of your ‘morality’, I want something sensational. Perhaps you can suggest a better name than any of these (The Letters of Lewis Carroll, ed. Morton N. Cohen, with the assistance of R. L. Green, 2 vols, London, 1979, vol 1, p. 65).
INTRODUCTORY POEM ‘ALL IN THE GOLDEN AFTERNOON’
1 All in the golden afternoon. The brief poetic prelude (not in AAUG) retells the origins of ‘the tale of Wonderland’ on the boating expedition undertaken by Carroll, the