Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [152]
NOTE ON DRAMATIS PERSONAE
As in 1872, but omitted in 1897 and later editions except the People’s Edition. It may be that Carroll deliberately omitted the Dramatis Personae on the grounds that it only confused a rather confusing chess game further. This could equally be grounds for retaining it, as I have here.
NOTE ON THE CHESS GAME
Opinions vary about the plausibility of the chess game. In The Lewis Carroll Handbook, S. H. Williams and Falconer Madan, pronounce a particularly severe verdict on the game, despite Carroll’s explanation in the Preface (see Appendix II):
… in spite of this explanation the chess framework is full of absurdities and impossibilities, and it is unfortunate that Dodgson did not display his usual dexterity by bringing the game, as a game, up to chess standard. He is known to have been a chess-player… He might have searched for a printed problem to suit his story, or have made one. But he allows the White side to make nine consecutive moves(!): he allows Alice (a whitepawn)
and Alice becoming a Queen, to be two separate moves: he allows the White King to be checked without either side taking any notice of the fact: he allows two Queens to castle(!): he allows the White Queen to fly from the Red Knight, when she should take it. Hardly a move has a sane purpose, from the point of view of chess (The Lewis Carroll Handbook, originally published 1931, revised edition, 1979, p. 66).
Such a view of the game played out in Through the Looking-Glass ignores two fundamental facts. I. This is not a conventional game of chess. It is a game played on the other side of the mirror (where, as Alice notes, ‘they don’t keep the room so tidy as the other’) – and in a dream. 2. It is dramatized from Alice’s point of view. The heroine of the book is a mere pawn in the game and the progress of the game is seen through her eyes – unlike most conventional accounts of chess which see it through the eyes of either players or spectators. In Through the Looking-Glass Carroll has used his dexterity not to bring the game ‘up to chess standard’ but to represent a dream of a pawn’s – eye view of a looking-glass game of chess.
NOTE ON THE FRONTISPIECE
The frontispiece shows Alice in conversation with the White Knight whom she meets in chapter 8: ‘It’s My Own Invention’. It is clearly a parody of one of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the time, Sir Isumbras at the Ford by John Everett Millais, first exhibited in 1857 under the title A Dream of the Past (now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight). Millais’s painting represents an elaborately armoured medieval knight on a beautifully armoured horse bestriding a river while bearing two children (a rather Alice-like girl and a small boy with a bundle of sticks). In Tenniel’s drawing the chivalresque armour becomes household furniture, the sword a toy wooden sword, and the bundle of sticks a bundle of carrots and turnips. The noble figure of the knight becomes a walrus-moustached and rather anxious-looking dodderer. Carroll had originally intended the illustration to ‘Jabberwocky’ to stand as frontispiece, but when the parents to whom he showed it confirmed it was ‘too terrible a monster’, he opted instead for the altogether less disturbing picture of the Knight (see Diaries, vol I, pp. 162–3).
INTRODUCTORY POEM ‘CHILD OF THE PURE UNCLOUDED BROW’
1 Child of the pure unclouded brow. The introductory poem strikes a darker note than that of Wonderland, giving a vivid sense of time and distance. On 13 March 1863, Carroll noted: ‘I began a poem the other day in which I mean to embody something about Alice (if I can at all please myself by any description of her) and which I mean to call “Life’s Pleasance”’ (Diaries, vol 1, p. 194). Soon afterwards Mrs Liddell effectively cut off relations between Carroll and her daughters for reasons we do not know. On 19 December Carroll noted: ‘It is nearly six months