Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [148]
9 as pigs have to fly. Withals in his dictionary defines terra volet as ‘pigs flie in the ayre with their tayles forward’. ‘When pigs fly’ is a slang idiom meaning ‘never’, just as ‘pigs might fly’ means ‘perhaps’ (Partridge, A Dictionary of Historical Slang, London, 1937). One of the ‘many things’ of which the Walrus in The Walrus and the Carpenter’ desires to speak is ‘Whether pigs have wings’ (See p. 161).
10 Those whom she sentenced. At this point the narrative resumes that of AAUG.
11 It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from. Mock Turtle is ‘Calf’s head dressed with sauces and condiments so as to resemble turtle’ (OED). Mock-turtle soup was usually made from calf’s head, which is why Tenniel gives the Mock Turtle a turtle’s shell but a calf’s head and feet. This is more plausible than Carroll’s drawing of a Mock Turtle which shows a pathetic nondescript sort of creature like an earless rabbit in badly fitting armour.
12 a Gryphon. A fabulous composite creature, of more respectable ancestry than the Mock Turtle: in classical mythology ‘a fabulous animal having the head and wings of an eagle and the body and hindquarters of a lion’ (OED). It survives in heraldry (for example in the emblem of Trinity College, Oxford) as well as poetry (for example in Milton’s ‘As when a Gryphon through the wilderness… Pursues the Arimaspian’, Paradise Lost 2, 943).
13 We called him Tortoise because he taught us. Carroll resorts to the same pun in ‘What the Tortoise said to Achilles’, a philosophical article he contributed to Mind in 1895. The tortoise refers there to ‘a pun that my cousin the Mock Turtle will make… Taught us’. Turtles are of course marine tortoises and so the Mock Turtle and the Tortoise are indeed cousins.
14 Yes, we went to school in the sea. The account of the Mock Turtle’s schooldays that follows is an insertion into the original manuscript story, AAUG (see p. 286). The original storyline is resumed again in the second paragraph of the next chapter, ‘The Lobster-Quadrille’ (p. 87). In 1857 Thomas Hughes published Tom Brown’s Schooldays, based on his education at Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School, the public school where Carroll was educated (1846–50). In 1863 Charles Kingsley, an acquaintance, published The Water-Babies about the watery education of a boy. The Mock Turtle’s account might be seen as a comic conflation of the two.
15 Reeling and Writhing. The Mock Turtle’s school subjects are all puns, i.e. mock subjects: reading, writing, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, history, geography, drawing, sketching, painting in oils, Latin and Greek. His curriculum reads as a satire on Victorian education. The Mock Turtle is a composite creature, fathered by an ambiguity in language, so it is appropriate that he should speak a dialect largely composed of puns – a kind of speech based on the possibilities of double meaning in language. Addison thought them a sign of false humour: ‘There is no kind of false Wit which has been so recommended by the Practice of all Ages, as that which consists in a Jingle of Words, and is comprehended under the general Name of Punning’. Nevertheless he concedes that ‘The Seeds of Punning are in the Minds of all Men, and tho’ they may be subdued by reason, Reflection and good Sense, they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest Genius, that is not broken and cultivated by the Rules of Art’ (Spectator, No 61).
16 the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel. The Liddell children had a particularly distinguished drawing-master at this time, John Ruskin, who was to claim that Henry Liddell ‘first showed (him) the difference between classic and common art’. He taught Alice drawing in the deanery, lending her paintings of Turner to copy, assuring her that a child could copy them. Alice later enrolled in Ruskin’s Art School and won a prize for one of her sketches