Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [158]
CHAPTER II: THE GARDEN OF LIVE FLOWERS
1 the garden. At the opening of Wonderland Alice sees ‘the loveliest garden you ever saw’ (p. 12) and eventually gets there in chapter 7. While the desire to see a garden plays a part in the opening of both books, it is easier to get into in the second book. Once again, though, it is not long before pastoral nonsense dissolves back into a world of social contradictions.
2 O Tiger-lily! In Wonderland Alice addresses her second interlocutor with equal poetic formality as ‘O Mouse’ (p. 21). Here Alice enters a version of pastoral reminiscent of Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ – Little Alice in a prospect of flowers – or Blake’s Book of Thel but clearly modelled on a more contemporary poem. Alice’s conversation with the flowers alludes to that in section 22 of Tennyson’s Maud (1855), especially the talking flowers of stanza 10:
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near;’
And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late;’
The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear;’
And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’
Most of the flowers mentioned in the episode crop up in the Tennyson too – rose, lily, violet, larkspur. ‘In the original manuscript’, according to Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, ‘the bad-tempered flower was the passion-flower’ corresponding to Tennyson’s ‘passion-flower at the gate’; ‘the sacred origin of the name never struck him, until it was pointed out to him by a friend, when he at once changed it into a tiger-lily’ (Collingwood, Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, p. 127).
3 one of the kind that has nine spikes. Until 1897, this read ‘She’s one of the thorny kind’ – possibly an allusion to Alice’s governess Miss Prickett or ‘Pricks’ as she was called (see also note 5 below). Alice refers directly to her governess later in the chapter (p. 152).
4 It succeeded beautifully. This works of course because it represents a mirror inversion of the normal situation.
5 Look up, speak nicely. In ‘“Alice” on the Stage’ Carroll sketched her portrait as follows:
The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm; she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the tenth degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses (see p. 296).
6 as sensible as a dictionary. The Queen’s comparativist positions are enunciated with all the positive trenchancy of an absolutist, though they absolutely dissolve any fundamental distinction between sense and nonsense. Carroll’s career in Oxford coincided with work on what was to become the OED. Though not completed until 1928, it began with the appearance in 1858 of ‘A Proposal for the Publication of a New English Dictionary by the Philological Society’. The proposed dictionary was to ‘contain every word occurring in the literature of the language’ and adopt ‘the historical principle’ in the treatment of individual words. This ‘sensible’ dictionary was very much in the air, particularly in Oxford, when Carroll was writing Through the Looking-Glass. Its primary definition of nonsense is ‘That which is not sense; spoken or written words which make no sense or convey absurd ideas; also, absurd or senseless action’. Carroll’s library at his death contained a large collection of different dictionaries – such as Johnson’s, Bailey’s, Webster’s, a Slang Dictionary and Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language.
7 just like a large chess-board. Though Alice had encountered small actual chess pieces in the first chapter, this is the first recognition of chess as a narrative principle of the book. Tenniel’s illustration is like