Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [138]
Duckworth and I made an expedition up the river to Godstow with the three Liddells: we had tea on the bank there, and did not reach Christ Church again till quarter past eight, when we took them on to my rooms to see my collection of microphotographs, and restored them to the Deanery just before nine (The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, ed. R. L. Green, 2 vols, London, 1953, vol 2, p. 181).
The following February he added a marginal note to the entry:
On which occasion I told them the fairy-tale of Alice’s Adventures under Ground, which I undertook to write out for Alice, and which is now finished (as to the text) though the pictures are not yet nearly done.
He gave a much later and more elaborate account of the same occasion in ‘“Alice” on the Stage’ in The Theatre, April 1887. (See pp. 293—8.) For a fuller account see ‘The Genesis of Alice’ in the Introduction (pp. xxx ff).
Carroll shows his characteristic formal complexity by preceding the frame narrative of the ‘childish story’ with a frame poem about its origins and his friendship with the Liddell children. Compare the Introduction to Blake’s Songs of Innocence, a book that was clearly important to Carroll, where the child commissions the poet to pipe songs for him just as the three Liddell girls ‘beg a tale’ from Carroll. During the course of Carroll’s first meeting with the publisher of Alice’s Adventures, Macmillan, he asked him to print “some of Blake’s Songs of Innocence on large paper” (Diaries, vol I, p. 206). The metre and idiom of Carroll’s prelude is reminiscent of The Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
2 Like pilgrim’s wither’d wreath… far-off land. Pilgrims often returned with wreaths of flowers on their heads. Carroll strikes the note not only of a ‘far-off land’ but a far-off time here, a touch of Bunyan’s dream-narrative A Pilgrim’s Progress or Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
CHAPTER I: DOWN THE RABBIT-HOLE
1 without pictures or conversations. The dream narrative that follows fulfils Alice’s wish for a story with ‘pictures’ and ‘conversations’.
2 I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Alice’s figure is pretty accurate about the distance involved (3981. 25 miles). Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre was published in 1864, the year after Carroll’s MS was written and a year before Wonderland first appeared in print. Carroll treats gravity with comparable levity in Sylvie and Bruno: in chapter 8 he demonstrates some of the problems of having tea in a falling house and in chapter 7 he speculates on the idea of an underground train with gravity as its sole means of propulsion.
3 Dinah was the cat. The name of the Liddell family’s tabby cat, a favourite of Alice’s, named after the music-hall song ‘Villikins and his Dinah’. She recurs in the opening chapter of Through the Looking-Glass.
4 a tiny golden key. The scene has a curious resemblance to the ‘Crystal Cabinet’ of William Blake (‘The Maiden caught me in the Wild,/Where I was dancing merrily;/She put me into her Cabinet/And Lock’d me up with a Golden key’). The story ‘The Golden Key’ by Carroll’s friend George Mac-Donald was not published until 1867 in Dealings with the Fairies, but Carroll may have seen it in manuscript by 1862 and/or read MacDonald’s poem ‘The Golden Key’ published in Victoria Regis,1861.
5 those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains. They have reminded some readers of the gardens of an Oxford college, such as those of Christ Church, where both Carroll and the Liddells lived. The garden is also a version of the gardens of romance, a reminder that Carroll is a contemporary of the Pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson, and that nonsense – represented here by her huge head and the idea of shutting up like a telescope – involves an absurd telescoping of romance.
6 several nice little stories. Carroll is poking fun at the moralistic literature