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[25 June] since I have seen anything of them, to speak of (Diaries, vol 1, p. 208). The Alice he is addressing here then is a remembered figure, almost a figure of memory, rather than the current companion she had been in the earlier book, and the poem looks back nostalgically not only to her but ‘the tale begun in other days/When summer suns were glowing’. We are in a world of ‘echoes’ that ‘live in memory’ and that is haunted by a coming ‘voice of dread’. The poet speaks from a climate of ‘the frost, the blinding snow,/The storm-wind’s moody madness’ – and it is this world which the ‘magic words’ of the tale have to hold at bay. The climate of Through the Looking-Glass is altogether colder than that of Wonderland.

Carroll made five handwritten alterations to the 1870 proofs, substituting ‘Melancholy’ in verse four for ‘Wilful weary’, and in verse five substituting ‘frost the blinding’ for ‘whirling wind and’ and ‘the storm wind’s moody’ for ‘that lash themselves’.

2 happy summer days. The last words of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

3 vanish’d summer glory. The word ‘glory’ calls up Wordsworth’s ode ‘There was a time’, with its question: ‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/Where is it now the glory and the dream?’. The question underlies the whole of Carroll’s brief elegiac poetic prelude on the passing of childhood.

4 The pleasance. In the 1870 proofs this read ‘pleasures’. This is one of Carroll’s numerous poetic plays upon the names of his child friends; ‘Pleasance’ was Alice Liddell’s middle name. It is also an archaic poetic word for ‘delight, pleasure, joy’ (as in Chaucer’s ‘Thus is the quyen in plesaunce & in Ioye’), or for a ‘pleasure-giving quality’ (as in Spenser’s ‘With plesaunce of the breathing fields’), and in Carroll’s day it could be used to describe ‘a pleasure ground, usually attached to a mansion’ (as in ‘The Poet’s Pleasaunce or Garden of all sorts of pleasant Flowers’ from 1847).

CHAPTER I: LOOKING-GLASS HOUSE

1 Do you know what to-morrow is Kitty? The sticks for the bonfire suggest ‘tomorrow’ is 5 November, Guy Fawkes Day. This would make the date 4 November, exactly six months after the fictional trip to Wonderland on 4 May, which was Alice Liddell’s birthday. Alice tells the White Queen she is ‘seven and a half, exactly’ (p. 174) which is therefore exactly right. Six years passed between the publication of Alice’s Adventures (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871, though dated 1872), but only six months of Alice’s fictional time. As the first book of adventures has a warm spring-time setting, the second has a cold wintry background of autumn leaves and snow.

2 Snowdrop. Probably named after a kitten belonging to another of Carroll’s child friends, George MacDonald’s daughter Mary. MacDonald (1824–1905) was the author of At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872). ‘Snowdrop’ was named after a fairy tale of that name included in Mrs MacDonald’s Chamber Dramas for Children (1870).

3 Kitty, can you play chess? Alice Liddell records that much of the book was based on stories ‘to do with chessmen’ that Carroll made up when the Liddell children were learning to play chess (‘Alice’s Recollections of Carrollian Days’, Cornhill Magazine,73, July 1932, reprinted in Lewis Carroll: Interviews and Recollections, ed. Morton N. Cohen, London, 1989, p. 5).

4 Let’s pretend we’re kings and queens. This suggests that Alice’s ‘Let’s pretend’ games are the origins of her dream adventures, and like them a clue to her fantasies. The fantasy of adult power, of being ‘kings and queens’, is important to Wonderland but Alice’s desire to be Queen is given greater force in TLG. Freud suggests that kings and queens in dreams typically symbolize someone’s parents (Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey, London, 1954, p. 353).

5 my ideas about Looking-glass House. Carroll’s ideas about Looking-glass House owe something to a meeting with another girl called Alice – ‘I’m very fond of Alices’ he told her – Alice Raikes, whom he met in the gardens of Onslow Square in 1868