Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [139]
7 EAT ME.‘Eat’ or ‘To be Eaten’ would be more normal labels, equivalent to the spoken instruction ‘Eat it’. ‘Eat me’ introduces a more disturbing note of animation and self-sacrifice. The threat of eating and being eaten runs through both Alice books. It is a sign of Carroll’s psychological realism that Alice’s dream is so preoccupied by ideas of changing size and growing, drinking and eating. According to his nephew, Carroll was ‘very abstemious always’, taking nothing in the middle of the day ‘except a glass of wine and a biscuit’, so that ‘the healthy appetites of his little friends filled him with wonder, and even with alarm’ (Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, London, 1898, p. 390).
CHAPTER II: THE POOL OF TEARS
1 how to speak good English. Alice, as a respectable upper-middle-class child, shares Carroll’s preoccupation with ‘good English’. The pleasure in transgressing the rules of language and logic in nonsense depends on belief in the conventions of linguistic correctness. Isa Bowman recalls how he ‘loved correct elocution’ (Isa Bowman, Lewis Carroll as I Knew Him, London, 1899, p. 88) and in a letter to his sister Mary written in 1892, Carroll having ticked her off for the slipshod grammar of a pamphlet she had written, affirmed:
Good English, and graceful arrangement, are higher qualities, not attainable by rule, but only by having read much good English, and so having got a musical ‘ear’, so to speak… I think newspapers are largely responsible for the bad English now used in books. How few novels of the day are written in correct English! To find any such, you must go back 50 years or more. That is one reason why I like reading the older novels – Scott’s, Miss Austen’s, Miss Edgeworth’s, etc. – that the English is so perfect (Letters, vol 2, p. 916).
Alice in general speaks as correctly as any of Jane Austen’s heroines.
2 what nonsense I’m talking. The first time Alice uses the term ‘nonsense’ to describe what is happening (though it has cropped up in the introductory poem). According to the Concordance, she is the main critical user of the term in the book. Of the fifteen times ‘nonsense’ appears in the text, nine of them refer to Alice’s judgement on the absurdity of what is being said.
3 a pair of white kid-gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other. The fan was originally a ‘nosegay’ (Alice’s Adventures under Ground, see p. 254). The White Rabbit’s fussiness about gloves was shared by Carroll who, according to one of his child friends, ‘had a curious habit of always wearing, in all seasons of the year, a pair of grey and black cotton gloves’ (Bowman, Lewis Carroll as I Knew Him, p. 9).
4 I’m sure I’m not Ada… I ca’n’t be Mabel. In the original MS written out for Alice Liddell, the names were Gertrude and Florence, names of her cousins. The change later on from ‘I must have been changed for Florence’ to ‘I must have been changed for Mabel’ saved Carroll from family embarrassment but lost a nominal geographical joke.
5 I shall never get to twenty at that rate! Gardner explains why as follows: ‘the multiplication table traditionally stops with the twelves, so if you continue this nonsense progression – 4 times 5 is 12, 4 times 6 is 13, 4 times 7 is 14, and so on – you end with 4 times 12 (the highest she can go) is 19 – just one short of twenty’, The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner, Harmondsworth, 1965/1970, p. 38.
6 How doth the little crocodile. The first poem in the story, like most of those that follow, is a parody of a well-known children’s poem. It parodies the first two stanzas of ‘Against Idleness and Mischief from Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715) by the poet and divine, Isaac Watts (1674–1748):
How doth the little busy Bee
Improve each shining Hour,
And gather Honey all the Day
From ev’ry op’ning