Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [154]
This suggests that the idea of a story about the looking-glass came after the ones ‘to do with chessmen’ recalled by Alice Liddell (see note 3 above).
6 just like a bright silvery mist. Carroll took a number of photos of girls with mirrors in their hands, but significantly Alice does not look at or see herself in the mirror in either the text or illustration. The dissolving mirror is also used as a gateway into fantasy in George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858). In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty gives an account of the influence of mirror-models of perception, truth and language in Western philosophy. In sending his dreaming Alice through the mirror, Carroll offers a commentary on one of the founding dreams of Western philosophy – that philosophy (and art) can, in Hamlet’s words, ‘hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature’.7 two Castles walking arm in arm. Tenniel’s illustration of the chess-pieces shows the strolling Castles alongside the Knights, King and Queen who all figure in the story, but it also shows some bishops, one of whom is reading a newspaper. This draws attention to the fact that Carroll – presumably out of deference to the clergy and the Church – punctiliously excludes all reference to bishops in his book’s curiously secular game of chess. We never find out what nonsense the bishop is reading.
8 memorandum-book. A portable notebook, perhaps like that mentioned in a letter of Jane Carlisle in 1843 which speaks of ‘a pretty memorandum-book in my reticule’.
9 That’s not a memorandum of your feelings. Elizabeth Sewell gives the poor King’s memo as an example of the ‘insulation against emotion and dream’ which she sees as characteristic of all nonsense, ‘which will… treat matters of emotion according to its own rules, emphasizing words rather than their supposed content, the verbal rather than the real, and will keep as close to things as possible’ (The Field of Nonsense, London, 1952, pp. 13–5).
10 . In January 1868 Carroll wrote to his publisher Macmillan with the question: ‘Have you any means, or can you find any, for printing a page or two, in the next volume of Alice, in reverse?’ This suggests that he originally wanted the whole poem – or something comparable – to be printed in mirror-writing. Macmillan assured him there was no technical problem involved in producing wood-blocks in reverse script but warned it would cost ‘a good deal’. (See Lewis Carroll and the House of Macmillan, ed. Morton N. Cohen and Anita Gandolfo, London, 1987, p. 59). Perhaps it was the cost that restricted the author to one stanza in mirror-writing.
11 Jabberwocky. The first stanza appeared in 1855 in ‘Misch-Masch’, one of the private handwritten magazines Carroll produced for his brothers and sisters. It was presented in a mock-scholarly way ‘as a curious fragment’ under the heading of a ‘Stanza of Anglo-Saxon poetry’ and accompanied by a set of pseudo-philological notes and a ‘translation’:
BRYLLYG (derived from the verb to BRYL or BROIL), ‘the time of broiling dinner, i.e. the close of the afternoon.’
SLITHY (compounded of SLIMY and LITHE). ‘Smooth and active.’
TOVE. A species of Badger. They had smooth white hair, long hind legs, and short horns like a stag: lived chiefly on cheese.
GYRE, verb (derived from GYAOUR or GIAOUR, ‘a dog’). To scratch like a dog.
GYMBLE (whence GIMBLET).‘To screw out holes in anything.’
WABE (derived from the verb to SWAB or SOAK).‘The side of a hill’ (from its being soaked by the rain).
MIMSY (whence MIMSERABLE and MISERABLE). ‘Unhappy.’
BOROGOVE. An extinct kind of parrot. They had no wings, beaks turned up, and made their nests under sun-dials: lived on veal.
MOME (hence SOMEOME, SOLEMONE and SOLEMN). ‘Grave.’
RATH. A species of land turtle. Head erect: mouth like a shark: forelegs curved out so that the animal walked on its knees: smooth green body: lived on swallows and oysters.
OUTGRABE, past tense of the verb to OUTGRIBE. (It is connected with the old verb to