Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [141]
2 Speak English. At the beginning of the previous chapter Alice forgot ‘how to speak good English’. The Dodo here is speaking English, despite the Eaglet’s impatience – not ‘good English’ exactly but a good imitation of the English spoken by committees. In ‘The Pool of Tears’ Alice translates Latin grammar and speaks French to the Mouse (on the assumption ‘it’s a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror’); in ‘A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale’, she hears an account of the Norman Conquest and the twilight of Anglo-Saxon England. This means that the Eaglet’s tetchy appeal to the Dodo to “Speak English!” occurs in a context in which the Latin, Norman and Anglo-Saxon roots of current English are invoked via Alice’s textbooks. ‘Jabberwocky’ had originally been offered as a ‘Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’ (see TLG, chapter I, note II).
3 a Caucus-race. The OED defines a ‘caucus’ as I. In USA: A private or preliminary meeting of members of a political party, to select candidates for office… 2. In England: a committee popularly elected for the purposes of securing concerted political action in a constituency; as a term of abuse, an organization seeking to manage an election and dictate to the constituencies (1878). Carroll self-mockingly portrays the Dodo as prone to political pom-posity, no doubt learned at Oxford. In his near contemporary satire ‘The Elections to the Hebdomadal Council’, Carroll wrote: ‘To save beloved Oxford from the yoke,/ For this majority’s beyond a joke,/ We must combine, aye! hold a caucus-meeting,/ Unless we want to get another beating.’ A note to this topical squib quotes a letter of 1866 by Godwin Smith to the Senior Censor of Crist Church: ‘Caucus-holding and wire-pulling would still be almost inevitably carried on to some extent’ and ‘I never go to a caucus without reluctance.’ (The Lewis Carroll Picture Book, pp. 82–83.) The idea of a ‘caucus race’ undermines the whole idea of a caucus as well as that of a race. The caucus race was added to the original manuscript, AAUG, replacing a dry narrative about how the original party managed to get dry, recorded in Carroll’s diary. It ended as follows:
After a time the Dodo became impatient, and, leaving the Duck to bring up the rest of the party, moved on at a quicker pace with Alice, the Lory and the Eaglet, and soon brought them to a little cottage, and there they sat snugly by the fire, wrapped up in blankets, until the rest of the party had arrived, and they were all dry again (AAUG, see p. 261).
The prosy snugness of this is alien to the frictional Wonderland of the final version.
4 the position in which you usually see Shakespeare. Carroll refers to this again as the ‘approved Shakespeare attitude’ (Letters, vol 1, p. 456) elsewhere, but none of the ‘usual’ images of Shakespeare show him in this position. The influential sculptures of the poet by Schumaker in Westminster Abbey and by Roubiliac show him with his hand under his chin rather than on his forehead.
5 it is a long tail, certainly. Carroll uses a similar pun to similar effect in a letter to Gertrude Chataway, one of his child friends: ‘Why is a pig that has lost its tail like a girl on the sea-shore? Because it says, “I should like another Tale, please!”’ (Letters, vol I, p. 236).
6 Fury said to a mouse.‘The Mouse’s Tale’ is a kind of visual pun, a mirror of the verbal pun in its title, and one of the most famous ‘figured poems’ in English (see John Hollander, ‘The Poem in the Eye’, Vision and Resonance, New York: OUP, 1975, pp. 245–87). The idea of the poetic tale included in Alice’s dream may have been sparked off by a dream of the Poet Laureate’s. In a letter of 1859 Carroll describes a visit to Tennyson at Freshwater in which the poet spoke of dreaming ‘long passages of poetry’; he particularly recalled ‘an enormously long one on fairies, where the lines