Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [144]
Will have enough to bear;
Pass through this life as best they may
’Tis full of anxious care.
The Duchess’s version of this long, sentimental piece of advice is the literary equivalent of a short sharp shock – a burlesque of conventional lullabies and accepted views of child-rearing.
6 neither more nor less than a pig. If the whole scene travesties nurses and babies, it may also reflect Carroll’s attitude towards little boys. In a letter of 1860 he wrote ‘(parenthetically, I hate babies, but that is irrelevant)’ (Letters, vol I, p. 392) and in one of 1882 ‘Boys are not in my line: I think they are a mistake: girls are less objectionable’ (Letters, vol 1, p. 455). In Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, a character called Uggug is described as ‘a hideous fat boy… with the expression of a prize pig’; he eventually turns into a porcupine.
7 they’re both mad. ‘Mad as a hatter’ and ‘mad as a March hare’ are proverbial English expressions. Correspondents in Notes and Queries disagreed over the origin of the first of these: it may have been a corruption of ‘mad as an adder or have owed its currency to the fact that hatters were indeed liable to madness due to the side-effects of the mercury used in curing felt. ‘Mad as a March hare’ alludes to the acrobatic capering of hares in the mating season in March. Alice reflects that ‘as this is May it won’t be raving mad’, but the eccentricity of the March Hare in Wonderland has nothing to do with the mating season. Carroll’s near contemporary at Rugby Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown’s Schooldays makes a reference to ‘a very good fellow, but mad as a hatter’ (1857). The hare’s pedigree may be more ancient. John Skelton, for example, has ‘Thou madde Marche hare’ (1529) and The Two Noble Kinsmen refers to a woman ‘as mad as a March hare’ (III.v. 73).
8 we’re all mad here. Compare the Cheshire-Cat’s observation with an entry in Carroll’s diary for 9 February 1856:
Query: when we are dreaming, and as often happens, have a dim consciousness of the fact and try to wake, do we not say and do things which in waking life would be insane? May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: ‘Sleep hath its own world, and it is often as lifelike as the other. (Diaries, vol 1, p. 76).
Freud would no doubt have found confirmation for his views in Carroll’s remarks on the relation of dreams and madness. The ‘dream realism’ of the Alice books depends on it.
CHAPTER VII: A MAD TEA-PARTY
1 the Hatter. Tenniel’s drawing of the Hatter is reputed to have been based on an eccentric Oxford character called Theophilus Carter, known as the Mad Hatter because he always wore a top hat (‘Tenniel was brought down to Oxford by the author to see him. The likeness was unmistakable’, H. W. Greene in a letter to The Times,13 March 1931). In ‘“Alice” on the Stage’ Carroll describes Sydney Harcourt’s impersonation of him: ‘To see him enact the Hatter was a weird and uncanny thing, as though some grotesque monster, seen last night in a dream, should walk into the room in broad daylight, and quietly say “Good morning!” I need not describe what I meant the Hatter to be, since, as far as I can now remember, it was exactly what Mr Harcourt has made him’ (see pp. 296–7).
2 having tea at it. Isa Bowman records the mild eccentricity of Carroll’s tea par ties at Christ Church:
He was very particular about his tea, which he always made himself, and in order that it should draw properly he would walk about the room swinging the tea-pot from side to side for exactly ten minutes. The idea of the grave professor promenading his book-lined study and carefully waving a teapot to and fro may seem ridiculous, but all the minutiae of life received an extreme attention at his hands (Lewis Carroll as I Knew Him, pp. 36–7).
3 a Dormouse. According to the OED,‘a small rodent of a family intermediate between the squirrels and the mice; espec. the British species Myoxus avellanarius, noted for its