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from being very long at first, gradually got shorter and shorter, till it ended with 50 or 60 lines of 2 syllables each!’ (Letters, vol I, p. 37). The mouse’s tale is shorter, has nothing to do with fairies, and ends, like so many of the poems and jokes in the Alice books, in the threat of ‘death’ (Old Fury is one of the grimmest of the many tyrannical authority-figures who haunt the book). Jeffrey Stern suggests that Carroll’s poem echoes ‘Trial by Jury’, a poem about a fairy trial that appeared a little later in Poems Written for a Child published by his cousin Menella Bute Smedley in 1868: it includes such lines as ‘They all refuse to be jury/ They all desire to be judge:/ They all strut about in a fury,/ Each oweing the other a grudge’ and has a judge putting on his ‘black cap/ In a death-condemning speed’ (Jabberwocky, vol 12, no. 1, Winter 1982, pp. –11). The tail-shaped poem recited by the mouse in the original AAUG, though weaker, has more bearing on its ‘history’ and ‘why it is [it] hates cats and dogs’ (see p. 262).

CHAPTER IV: THE RABBIT SENDS IN A LITTLE BILL

1 The Duchess. Originally ‘The Marchioness’, AAUG (see p. 265). The Rabbit’s fears of execution come hard on the heels of Cunning Old Fury’s intemperate death sentence and prepare the ground for the Queen of Hearts’ general recourse to the death penalty as a solution to all difficulties.

2 When I used to read fairy tales. Alice’s historical period witnessed a spectacular renaissance of the fairy tale. The publication of Taylor’s translation of Grimms’ German Popular Tales (1823–6) first opened the way for a ‘literary’ acceptance of fairy tales and the first of many English translations of Hans Christian Andersen in 1846 helped popularize the idea of a modern fantastic literature for children. The Victorian period saw the development of a consciously invented children’s literature based around the ‘fairy tale’ exemplified by writers such as John Ruskin (The King of the Golden River,1841), Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol,1843), William Makepeace Thackeray (The Rose and the Ring,1845), Christina Rossetti (Goblin Market,1862), Charles Kingsley (The Water-Babies,1863), George MacDonald (At the Back of the North Wind,1871, The Princess and the Goblin,1872). Carroll occasionally refers to AAIW as a ‘fairy tale’, as in the letter to Tom Taylor of 1864 about ‘fixing a name for my fairy tale’, but in the same letter he notes that though the heroine meets ‘various birds, beasts, etc… endowed with speech’, there are ‘no fairies’ (Letters, vol 1, p. 65). It is part of the originality of Carroll’s tale that, unlike MacDonald’s, it avoids all reference to the supernatural and ‘fairy’ dimensions of children’s stories.

3 digging for apples yer honour. By the gardener’s stage Irish accent, this must be an Irish ‘bull’ – though a Frenchman might well dig for ‘apples of the earth’ or ‘pommes de terre’ (i.e. potatoes).

4 a crowd of little animals. Originally more specific: ‘guinea-pigs, white mice, squirrels, and “Bill” a little green lizard, that was being supported in the arms of one of the guinea-pigs, while another was giving it something out of a bottle’ (AAUG, p. 270).

5 Safe in a thick wood. Originally this was the close of chapter 2, AAUG.

CHAPTER V: ADVICE FROM A CATERPILLAR

1 You are old, Father William. The first line of ‘The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them’ by Robert Southey (177–1843), first published in The Annual Anthology, i, 1799. Southey’s poetry had been satirized as early as ‘The Knife Grinder’ in The Anti-Jacobin Review of 1797 (and Carroll’s library included both Southey’s poems and selections from The Anti-Jacobin Review). Like the earlier parody of Isaac Watts’s hymn, Carroll’s ‘You are old, Father William’ is a parody of the earlier poet’s faux-naïf didacticism:

‘You are old, father William,’ the young man cried,

‘The few locks which are left you are grey;

You are hale, father William, a hearty old man;

Now tell me the reason, I pray.’

‘In the days of my youth’, father William replied,

‘I remember that youth would fly