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She’s all my fancy painted her,

She’s lovely, she’s divine,

But her heart it is another’s,

She never can be mine.

Carroll’s parody took off from here:

She’s all my fancy painted him

(I make no idle boast)

If he or you had lost a limb,

Which would have suffered most?

But then it took its own way:

He said that you had been to her,

And seen me here before;

But, in another character,

She was the same of yore.

There was not one that spoke to us,

Of all that thronged the street:

So he sadly got into a ’bus,

And pattered with his feet.

They sent him word I had not gone

(We know it to be true);

If she should push the matter on,

What would become of you?

They gave her one, they gave me two,

They gave us three or more;

They all returned from him to you,

Though they were mine before.

If I or she should chance to be

Involved in this affair,

He trusts to you to set them free,

Exactly as we were.

It seemed to me that you had been

(Before she had this fit)

An obstacle, that came between

Him, and ourselves, and it.

Don’t let him know she liked them best,

For this must ever be

A secret, kept from all the rest,

Between yourself and me.

In the song being parodied the speaker says he loved ‘as man never loved,/ A love without decay,/ O my heart, my heart is breaking/ For the love of Alice Gray.’ Carroll’s love for another Alice may be ‘a secret’ encoded in this parody.

For Wonderland Carroll tightened up five of the original eight stanzas and added a final twist in a new final stanza. The result is a nonsense poem quite unlike any of the others, based on a phenomenal pronominal comedy of errors.

5 I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it. The accusation which launches the trial is an absurd nursery rhyme and the main evidence produced in it is a nonsense poem of Carroll’s invention. Alice’s dream explodes soon after these items of nonsense language are put on trial and subjected to elaborate judicial interpretation.

6 If she should push the matter on… What indeed. Carroll added these four phrases in his revision for the final 1897 edition.

7 Let the jury consider their verdict. At this point the text reverts to the original AAUG (p. 290), with variations.

8 First she dreamed about little Alice herself. This and the following two paragraphs are an elaboration of the original dream frame of AAU G (pp. 290—91).

9 this same little sister of hers. AAU G reads ‘this same little Alice’. In the MS, the phrase ‘perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago’ read ‘even with these very adventures of the little Alice of long–ago’ and the whole book which Carroll sent to Alice in November 1864 ends with a photograph of ‘little Alice’, aged seven. When, in 1976, this was removed, a small drawing of Alice by Carroll was found concealed beneath it. In preparing the book for publication, Carroll removed the picture of Oxford, the dream’s setting, and generalized his heroine a little, preferring to recapitulate the dramatis personae of the ‘dream of Wonderland’ than build it all around Alice Liddell herself. AAUG, unlike the published book, is a love-gift to its heroine, with whose image it closes.

NOTES TO THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

NOTE ON THE TITLE

As with the earlier book, Carroll had problems in settling on a title for the second Alice book. When he sent off the first chapter to Macmillan’s in 1869 he referred to it as Behind the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there (The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, ed. R. L. Green, 1953, vol I, p. 279). It later became Looking-Glass House and what Alice saw there. The actual title was decided very late in the day as proofs survive in the Huntingdon Library (Los Angeles) with the title Looking-Glass House and what Alice saw there, dated 1870 (reproduced in The Lewis Carroll Handbook, Plate VII). The proofs also show that the book as originally envisaged was to have forty-two illustrations (like Wonderland) rather than the fifty afterwards included in the