Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [140]
How skilfully she builds her Cell!
How neat she spreads the Wax;
And labours hard to store it well
With the sweet Food she makes.
In works of labour or of skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
When reflecting on the French translation of Alice in 1867, Carroll observed: “The verses would be the great difficulty, as I fear, if the originals are not known in France, the parodies would be unintelligible”, Lewis Carroll and the House of Macmillan ed. Morton N. Cohen and Anita Gandolfo, Cambridge, 1987, p. 50.
7 Alice had been to the seaside once in her life. The references to the seaside and railway were not part of AAUG. They may refer to Alice Liddell’s visit to Llandudno for a summer holiday in 1861. Bathing-machines: horse-drawn changing rooms on wheels, a feature of the most popular Victorian seaside resorts, and a monument to the era’s rather public cult of privacy. One of the ‘five unmistakable marks’ of a Snark is its taste for them:
The fourth is its fondness for bathing-machines,
Which it constantly carries about,
And believes that they add to the beauty of scenes—
A sentiment open to doubt.
Seaside resorts played a large part in the annual rituals of Victorian families like the Liddells – as they did for the bachelor Lewis Carroll in cultivating his friendships with little girls like Alice. Carroll regularly spent his holidays by the sea, first at Whitby, then on the Isle of Wight and latterly at Eastbourne.
8 her brother’s Latin Grammar. Presumably a reference to Harry Liddell (1847–1911), Alice’s brother, a pupil of Carroll’s for a short period. The Latin Grammar in question would probably be Kennedy’s, later known as The Public School Latin Primer. Though like most Victorian girls Alice does not learn Latin herself, her reflexes are always towards ‘the right way’ of addressing those she meets – as in this evocatively punctilious vocative, ‘O Mouse!’
9 the first sentence in her French lesson-book. It is indeed the first sentence of the first lesson of the often reprinted La Bagatelle: Intended to introduce children of three or four years old to some knowledge of the French Language,1804. Alice’s recourse to it during her conversation with the Mouse is a sad index of the difficulty of applying text-book French to the real world.
10 afraid that she had hurt the poor animal’s feelings. Compare Carroll’s letter to Mrs Blakemore:
It is curious how apt one is, sometimes, to say just the thing the most mal-à-propos. I was calling not long ago on a lady, whose husband suffers from periodic attacks of madness – so that one would wish to avoid all allusion to so painful a subject: and before I knew what I was saying, I found myself in the middle of a comic story about a madman! (quoted in Jeffrey Stern, ‘Lewis Carroll and Mrs Blakemore – an Unpublished Correspondence’ Jabberwocky vol 10, no 3 Summer 1981 p. 69)
11 there was a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and an Eaglet, and several other curious creatures. The whole episode is a disguised allusion to an ‘Expedition to Nuneham’ recorded in Carroll’s diary for 17 June 1862 (Diaries, vol 1, p. 178). This took the form of a boating-party involving Carroll, Duckworth and the Liddell girls, during which they all got thoroughly ‘drenched’. The Duck is the Reverend Duckworth, the Dodo is Lewis Carroll himself (with his stutter he would often pronounce his name ‘Do-do-Dodgson’). The Lory (a brightly coloured Australian parrot) is Lorina Liddell, the Eaglet Edith Liddell. The other ‘curious creatures’ in this ‘queer-looking party’ refer to Carroll’s aunt Lucy Lutwidge and his sisters Frances and Elizabeth Dodgson. When Carroll published the facsimile of the original manuscript of Alice in 1886 he inscribed Duckworth’s copy, ‘The Duck, from the Dodo’. ‘The Dodo’ is an apt disguise for a conservative bachelor don, but the success of the Alice books has ensured that Dodgson/Carroll’s name is not extinct.
CHAPTER III: A CAUCUS-RACE AND A LONG TALE
1 William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by