Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [145]
4 Why is a raven like a writing-desk? In his preface to the 1896 edition Carroll wrote:
Enquiries have so often been addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter’s Riddle can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz. ‘Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!’ This, however, is merely an afterthought; the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.
5 I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles. Lewis Carroll’s letters to girl correspondents are literally riddled with riddles. See Letters, vol I pp. 157, 158, 221, 236, 292, 320, 323, 367, 384, and vol 2, p. 942.
6 The fourth. Since Alice noted it was May in the previous chapter (p. 58), this makes the date of her adventures 4 May, Alice Liddell’s birthday Alice Liddell was born on 4 May 1852, making her ten on that ‘golden afternoon’ of July 1862; however, the photograph Carroll affixed to the original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures under Ground shows her aged seven and in Through the Looking-Glass she says her age is ‘seven and a half, exactly’ (p. 174), so that Carroll’s fictional Alice in Wonderland is probably seven exactly, which is three years younger than her real-life counterpart on the date he told her story. In fictional time, then, the story is set in 1859 at the latest – during the period for which the Carroll diaries have not survived (though they were available to his biographer in 1897).
7 Two days wrong. A. L. Taylor notes: ‘it would be possible to measure time by the phases of the moon, and this is the principle of the Mad Hatter’s watch… on that day, 4 May 1862, there were exactly two days’ difference between the two ways of reckoning the date. As the amount varies with every month and year, there can be no doubt that Dodgson consulted an almanac and based his calculations upon it’ (A. L. Taylor, The White Knight: A Study of C. L. Dodgson, Edinburgh, 1952, p. 57).
8 Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! A parody of the first verse of the famous nursery song by Jane Taylor (1783–1824), first published in Rhymes for the Nursery by A. and J. Taylor, 1806.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
Alice remembered it as one of the ‘songs popular at the time’ they sang on their picnics on the river.
9 It’s always six o’clock… it’s always tea-time. In Alice’s Recollections of Carrollian Days’ (Cornhill Magazine,73, July 1932, reprinted in Lewis Carroll: Interviews and Recollections, ed. Morton N. Cohen, London, 1989) she remembers:‘We never went to tea with him, nor did he come to tea with us. In any case, five-o’clock tea had not become an established practice in those days… At the time when we first went to Oxford, my parents, having had luncheon at one o’clock, did not have another meal until dinner, which they took at 6. 30 p.m.’ However, in his Diaries, Carroll records that in 1863, on 4 July, the Liddells had ‘tea on the bank’ of the river, and on 9 June he had ‘tea with the three in the schoolroom’; again on 19 December ‘at five went over to the Deanery, where I stayed till eight, making a sort of dinner at their tea’.
In The Blank Cheque: A Fable (1874) he remarks on ‘five o’clock tea’ is a phrase our ‘rude forefathers, even of the last generation, would not have understood, so completely is it a thing of today’ (The Lewis Carroll Picture Book, ed. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, London, 1889, p. 150).
10 Once upon a time there were three little sisters. Isa Bowman recalls Carroll saying:
‘Tell me a story, and mind