Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [146]
11 their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie. The ‘three little sisters’ are an allusion to the ‘three Liddell sisters’: ‘Elsie’ is a punning reference to Lorina (or L. C. Liddell), ‘Lacie’ an anagram of Alice, and ‘Tillie’ an abbreviation of Matilda, a nickname given to Edith. They are the Prima, Secunda and Tertia of the opening poem.
12 It was a treacle-well. Alice understandably says ‘there’s no such thing’ but medicinal springs in Oxfordshire seem sometimes to have been known as ‘treacle-wells’ (R. L. Green ed. AAIW and TLG, Oxford, 1982, p. 259). Ironically eating the treacle from the well makes the sisters ill.
13 ‘much of a muchness’. Nowadays the word ‘muchness’ only survives in the idiomatic phrase ‘much of a muchness’, meaning ‘very much the same or alike’, but ‘muchness’ is recorded by the OED as earlier meaning magnitude or greatness as in Hylton’s ‘The endles mochenes of the loue of God’ (1494) and current as late as William James ‘We have relations of muchness and little ness between times… as well as places’ (1887).
14 Just as she said this. At this point, after completing the two new episodes of ‘Pig and Pepper’ and ‘A Mad Tea-Party’, Carroll returns to the original story line of AAUG.
CHAPTER VIII: THE QUEEN’S CROQUET-GROUND
1 last of all this grand procession, came THE KING AND THE QUEEN OF HEARTS. Alice soon notices they are ‘only a pack of cards’ (p. 71) but in animating it Carroll has dealt out the pack with care. Spades are gardeners, clubs are soldiers, diamonds are courtiers, hearts are the royal children and the court cards are the titled members of the court. The Queen of Hearts comes last as the most powerful in Carroll’s ‘grand procession’. Wonderland, like the chess world of Through the Looking-Glass, is a matriarchal society. In ‘“Alice” on the Stage’ Carroll wrote: ‘I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion – a blind and aimless Fury’ (see p. 296). Christina Rossetti published a poem called ‘The Queen of Hearts’ in The Prince’s Progress (1866), which suggests another kind of ‘passion’:
How comes it, Flora, that, whenever we
Play cards together, you invariably
However the pack parts,
Still hold the Queen of Hearts?
Carroll’s interest in cards began in 1858, as he records in the Diaries: ‘Bought Hoyle’s Games: I have taken to learning cards in the last few days, for the first time in my life’ (Diaries, vol 1, p. 138). In 1858 he invented a new game he called ‘Court Circular’, the rules of which he printed out for the Liddells in 1860 and again in 1862. See The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, ed. Alexander Woollcott, London, 1939, reprinted Harmondsworth, 1985, pp. 1140–3.
2 Alice was rather doubtful. This paragraph was added to the original manuscript account of the Croquet-Game in AAUG.
3 Off with her head! An allusion to Richard III, where the future king cries ‘Off with his head. Now, by Saint Paul I swear,/ I will not dine until I see the same’ (3. 4. 76–7). Carroll joked on the same phrase in a letter of 1889 to his stage Alice, Isa Bowman, after she had appeared as the Duke of York in a production of Shakespeare’s play: ‘I do not wonder that your excellent Uncle Richard should say “off with his head!” as a hint to the photographer to print it off’ (Letters, vol 2, p. 735).
4 Can you play croquet? The Liddell children all played croquet and Carroll often took part in their games. In his diary for 26 May 1862, six weeks before the first version of Alice, he records rowing with the three Liddell children: ‘Afterwards we went in and had a game of croquet with them in the Deanery garden.’ (Diaries, vol 1, p. 176). He invented his own variant for them, the rules of which he outlined in Croquet Castles, originally written down in Oxford on Alice Liddell’s birthday, 4 May 1863, and reprinted in The Lewis Carroll Picture Book,1899, p. 271 (The Complete