Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [150]
While the duck and the Dodo, the lizard and cat,
Were swimming in milk round the brim of a hat.
Carroll then enlarged the poem to the present sixteen lines for Savile Clarke’s stage version of Alice at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London, in 1886. Subsequent editions of Alice – both the 6s and People’s Editions – print this expanded version thereafter.
8 And concluded the banquet by———. The withheld conclusion featured in the 1886 edition of Savile Clarke’s musical Alice: ‘eating the owl’.
9 Shall we try another figure of the Lobster-Quadrille? At this point the story returns to the original manuscript of AAUG.
10 Turtle Soup. Originally ‘Mock Turtle Soup’, AAUG, p. 288. During this chapter Alice continually tries to avoid mentioning eating fish out of sensitivity to the Mock Turtle, but it ends with his mournful celebration of the beauties of Turtle Soup. Perhaps as a Mock Turtle he has no qualms about soup made out of real turtles.
11 Beautiful Soup. A parody of ‘Star of the Evening’ by James M. Sayles, a song Carroll records hearing Alice and Edith Liddell sing on I August 1862 (Diaries, vol 1, p. 185).
Beautiful star in heav’n so bright,
Softly falls thy silv’ry light,
As thou movest from earth so far,
Star of the evening, beautiful star.
CHORUS
Beautiful Star,
Beautiful Star,
Star of the evening,
Beautiful, beautiful star.
Only the first verse of Carroll’s parody appeared in AAUG. With ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bat’, this makes two anti-stellar spoofs.
CHAPTER XI: WHO STOLE THE TARTS?
1 In the very middle of the court. The court scene, now two chapters long, occupied a mere page of the original manuscript (AAUG pp. 289–90). The careful setting of the scene is all added. We take up the original again with ‘Herald, read the accusation’.
2 Alice had never been in a court of justice before. Carroll visited the Assize Court on 13 July 1863, after he had completed AAUG. He recorded that he’d seen ‘some very petty cases, but they were interesting to me, as I have seen so little of trials’ (Diaries, vol 1, p. 199).
3 The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts. This is first recorded in the European Magazine, April 1782, as part of a much longer poem about a pack of cards, but it may have been, as the Opies suggest, a traditional nursery rhyme well beforehand (Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes,1951, p. 360). It was included in James Orchard Halliwell, The Nursery Rhymes of England (1844) and formed the basis of The New Story of the Queen of Hearts, illustrated by George Cruikshank c. 1860. It is the only bona fide ‘nursery rhyme’ in Wonderland. Through the Looking-Glass makes systematic use of nursery rhymes throughout.
4 Consider your verdict. The entire text from the end of the song to the King’s final command to the jury at the close of the trial (p. 107) represents new material added to the original manuscript of AAUG.
5 the twinkling of the tea. The Hatter is getting mixed up about the line ‘Like a tea-tray in the sky, from ‘Twinkle, twinkle little bat’ which he had sung for the Queen’s last concert.
CHAPTER XII: ALICE’S EVIDENCE
1 upsetting all the jurymen. In The Nursery ‘Alice’ Carroll remarks on the fact that Tenniel’s illustration includes all twelve assorted jurymen.
2 Rule Forty-two. There is also a ‘Rule 42’ mentioned in the Preface to The Hunting of the Snark, of equally obscure significance: ‘No one shall speak to the Man at the Helm… and the Man at the Helm shall speak to no one’ (The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, pp. 677–8).
3 whilst the White Rabbit read out these verses. This sentence was added in Carroll’s final revision of 1897, replacing the flatly factual ‘These were the verses the White Rabbit read’ which had appeared in all previous editions.
4 They told me you had been to her. A revised and shortened version of Carroll’s ‘She’s All My Fancy Painted Him’, first published in The Comic Times,1855. This affecting fragment started as a parody of ‘Alice Gray’ by William Mee, a popular love song of the day which he was to parody once again in ‘Disillusioned’ (The