• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

17 Laughing and Grief. The crabby ‘Classical master’ teaches Laughing and Grief rather than Latin and Greek, but the Greeks taught us Laughing and Grief too in the shape of Comedy and Tragedy (Aristotle wrote treatises on both, though only the second survives). The Mock Turtle is especially prone to Grief, though his puns inspire Laughter. Alice’s father, Dr Liddell, was a classicist too and editor, with Dr Scott, of the famous Greek lexicon, first published in 1843, used in all public schools and universities. The Mock Turtle and the Gryphon are travesties of the new public-school ethos of the time.

CHAPTER X: THE LOBSTER-QUADRILLE

1 Quadrille. A fashionable ballroom dance, known to the Liddell children through their dancing lessons. Alice’s grandmother reported on their progress, “I hope five or six lessons more will make them dance a quadrille and polka” (quoted in Gordon, Beyond the Looking-Glass, p. III).

2 Will you walk a little faster? The song is a parody of Mary Howett’s famous nursery song ‘The Spider and the Fly’, published in her Sketches of Natural History,1834. It begins as follows:

‘Will you walk into my parlour?’ said the spider to the fly

‘’Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy

The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,

And I’ve got many curious things to show when you are there.’

‘Oh no, no,’ said the little fly, ‘to ask me is in vain,

For who goes up your winding stair can ne’er go down again.’

The dance provides an interesting commentary on the predatory invitation of Howett’s spider. In AAUG the Mock Turtle sings a different but equally fishy dancing-song:

Beneath the waters of the sea

Are lobsters thick as thick can be—

They love to dance with you and me,

My own, my gentle Salmon!

CHORUS:

Salmon come up! Salmon go down!

Salmon come twist your tail around!

Of all the fishes of the sea

There’s none so good as Salmon!

(AAUG, p. 288)

This was a parody of the Nigger Minstrel Song ‘Sally Come Up’ by T. Ramsey and E. W. Mackney which Carroll had heard the three Liddell girls sing at the Deanery the day before the river trip on which he improvised the first version of Alice (Diaries, vol 1, p. 181).

3 as to the whiting. The dialogue on the next three or four pages represents an addition to AAUG; the original version is resumed when the Gryphon asks ‘Shall we try another figure’ and they sing ‘Beautiful Soup’ (p. 93).

4 they have their tails in their mouths. Carroll is later reported to have said: ‘When I wrote that, I believed whiting really did have their tails in their mouths, but I have since been told that fishmongers put the tail through the eye, not in the mouth at all’ (Collingwood, Life, p. 402). Alice’s natural history here is influenced by the fact that her main acquaintance with much of the marine world has been at the dinner table.

5 blacking. A now archaic term for black shoe polish.

6 ’Tis the voice of the sluggard. The first line of ‘The Sluggard’ from Divine Songs for Children,1715, by Isaac Watts. Watts’s song opens:

’Tis the voice of the Sluggard; I hear him complain,

You have wak’d me too soon, I must slumber again.

As the Door on its Hinges, so he on his Bed,

Turns his Sides and his Shoulders and his heavy Head.

Its ending conforms perfectly to the Duchess’s view that everything should have a moral:

Said I to my Heart, ‘Here’s a Lesson for me,’

This man’s but a Picture of what I might be:

But thanks to my Friends for their Care in my Breeding,

Who taught me betimes to love Working and Reading.

7 ’Tis the voice of the Lobster. A parody of Watts’s moral nursery poem. Until 1886 this consisted only of the first four lines of the first stanza and the first two of the second. An additional two lines were added to the second stanza for William Boyd’s Songs from Alice in Wonderland,1870, so that it read:

I passed by his garden, and marked with one eye,

How the owl and the oyster were sharing a pie,