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And abus’d not my health and my vigour at first,

That I never might need them at last.’

The youth puts two further variants on the same question and receives two further variants of the same reply, the last being as follows:

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

‘And life must be hast’ning away;

You are cheerful and love to converse upon death;

Now tell me the reason, I pray.’

‘I am cheerful, young man,’ father William replied,

‘Let the cause thy attention engage;

In the days of my youth I remembered my God!

And He hath not forgotten my age.’

Carroll’s parody undermines the pious didacticism of Southey’s dialogue and gives Father William an eccentric vitality that rebounds upon his idiot questioner. The poem clearly bears upon the conversational preoccupations of Alice and the Caterpillar – who are both concerned with growing up and growing old.

2 one side… the other side. Originally ‘the top… the stalk’ (AAUG, p. 275).

3 Well! What are you? A version of Alice’s recurrent question, ‘Who am I?’ The pigeon’s apparently nonsensical classification of Alice as a ‘serpent’ makes sense in terms of its definition of a ‘serpent’ as something which eats its eggs. ‘The next thing is to get back to that beautiful garden’, Alice decides at the close of the chapter and behind this scene may stand the first ‘beautiful garden’ and its ‘serpent’, as described in the book of Genesis: Alice finds herself treated as a serpent in the trees by a version of the sacré pigeon, who understandably sees her as a predator. ‘I’ve seen a good many little girls in my time, but never one with a neck like that!’, the bird notes, and William Empson remarks that the whole episode gives Alice a strangely phallic role and appearance. The pigeon is concerned with her eggs, and the following chapter takes up the idea of babies.

4 As she said this. In AAUG this led straight into the opening of the penultimate paragraph of what is now chapter 7 (see p. 277). Chapters 6 and 7, which tell of ‘Pig and Pepper’ and ‘The Mad Hatter’s Tea-Party’ were added during revision and played no part in the first version of the story.

CHAPTER VI: PIG AND PEPPER

1 The Frog-Footman. Tenniel’s drawing is clearly modelled on a caricature by the great French illustrator Grandville.

2 the Duchess was sitting. Tenniel has modelled his portrait of the Duchess on a painting now in the National Gallery, London, A Grotesque Old Woman by Quentin Massys or an imitator, possibly modelled on a grotesque drawing attributed to Leonardo.

3 whether it was good manners. Alice is characteristically conscious of her manners at all times. Carroll praised his sister-in-law for bringing up her family to “have the high spirits of children with the good manners of grown-up people”, Letters, vol 2, p. 676.

4 It’s a Cheshire-Cat. ‘To grin like a Cheshire cat’ is a proverbial expression, the origin of which was extensively discussed in Notes and Queries, no. 55, 16 November 1850, and no. 130, 24 April 1852. It was suggested that the expression referred either to the fact that 1) Cheshire was a county Palatine and 2) some Cheshire cheese was produced in cat-shaped moulds or 3) some painted inn-signs in Cheshire notoriously looked more like grinning cats than growling lions. Carroll, who was born in Cheshire, was a regular subscriber to Notes and Queries and may well have grinned at these linguistic speculations.

5 Speak roughly to your little boy. The Duchess’s ‘sort of a lullaby’ is a parody of a poem, ‘Speak Gently’, by David Bates, published in The Eolian in 1849 and in his Collected Works (1870). The first four of its nine stanzas go as follows:

Speak gently! It is better far

To rule by love than fear;

Speak gently; let no harsh words mar

The good we might do here!

Speak gently! Love doth whisper low

The vows that true hearts bind;

And gently Friendship’s accents flow;

Affection’s voice is kind.

Speak gently to the little child!

Its love be sure to gain;

Teach it in accents soft and mild;

It may not long remain.

Speak gently to