Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [147]
5 Where’s the Duchess? In AAUG, ‘Where’s the Marchioness?’. Alice’s brief exchange with the Rabbit originally suggested a less violent but more confusing political situation:
“Hush, hush!” said the Rabbit in a low voice, “she’ll hear you. The Queen’s the Marchioness: didn’t you know that?”
“No, I didn’t, said Alice, “what of?”
“Queen of Hearts,” said Rabbit in a whisper, putting its mouth close to her ear, “and Marchioness of Mock Turtles” (AAUG, see p. 282).
6 live flamingoes. Originally ‘live ostriches’. Tenniel’s picture of Alice with her flamingo seems to be closely modelled on Carroll’s original sketch in AAUG, one of the relatively few instances where the artist seems to have worked from one of the author’s drawings.
7 Alice began to feel very uneasy. From this point Carroll diverges from the text of AAUG until half way through the next chapter, where he resumes the original story with ‘those whom she sentenced were taken into custody by soldiers’. Alice’s conversations with the Cheshire-Cat and the Duchess weren’t in the first version.
8 “A cat may look at a king,” said Alice. This proverb is recorded as early as J. Hey-wood’s Dialogue of Proverbs (1546). In Robert Greene’s Never Too Late (1590) we find: ‘A Cat may look at a King, and a swaynes eye hath as high a reach as a Lords looke’. Carroll’s library at his death included H. G. Bohn, A Handbook of Proverbs (1855).
CHAPTER IX: THE MOCK TURTLE’S STORY
1 the Duchess. The long dialogue with the Duchess is added to AAUG and adds a very different dimension to the Croquet Game.
2 .camomile. Still used to make herb tea, this was a common herbal medicine taken by Victorian children.
3 Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it. The Ugly Duchess here embodies the ugly moralism of much earlier nineteenth-century children’s literature. She offers a complementary (though uncomplimentary) image of education to the Mock Turtle later in the chapter.
Compare Carroll’s anonymously published The New Belfry of Christ Church, Oxford (1872), a satirical pamphlet attacking Dean Liddell’s architectural innovations: ‘Everything has a moral, if you choose to look for it. In Wordsworth, a good half of every poem is devoted to the Moral: in Byron, a smaller proportion: in Tupper the whole’ (Lewis Carroll Picture Book, p. 117).
4 Oh, ’tis love, ’tis love, that makes the world go round. Perhaps a reference to Ségur’s Chansons nationales et populaires (1851) which includes ‘C’est l’amour, l’amour,/ Qui fait le monde/ A la ronde’. In Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, the two children sing a pious song that spells out much the same claim:
Say whose is the skill that paints valley and hill,
Like a picture so fair to the sight?
That flecks the green meadow with sunshine and shadow
Till the little lambs leap with delight?
’Tis a secret untold to hearts cruel and cold,
Though ’tis sung, by the angels above,
In notes that ring clear for the ears that can hear—
And the name of the secret is Love!
For I think it is Love,
For I feel it is Love
For I’m sure it is nothing but Love!
(The Complete Works, p. 626)
5 Somebody said… it’s done by everyone minding their own business. I.e. the Duchess herself in chapter 6.
6 Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves. A play on the proverb ‘Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves’ (‘Old Mr Lowndes, the famous Secretary of the Treasury, used to say… Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves’, Lord Chesterfield, Letters). The Duchess’s advice also evokes Pope’s famous formula from The Essay on Criticism, I, 365: ‘The sound must seem an echo to the sense’.
7 Birds of a feather flock together. In 1600 Secker referred to ‘Our English Proverb… That birds of a feather will flocke together. To be intimate with sinners is to intimate that you are sinners’. See also Ray, Collection of English Proverbs,1678, p. 101. In this and the previous chapter proverbs flock together.
8 Be what you would seem to be. Another proverbial