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8 It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played. Compare T. H. Huxley:

The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient (Lay Sermons, etc, iii, A Liberal Education).

9 I should like to be a Queen, best. Alice’s aspirations to power conform to the conventions of chess and also to those of fairy tales. They also represent a plausible psychological reality for the child. Compare chapter i: ‘Let’s pretend we’re kings and queens’, p. 124).

10 Lily’s too young to play. The White Queen’s daughter Lily is mentioned in the previous chapter. The name relates the ‘live flowers’ to the chess game. It may also be a reference to one of Carroll’s child friends, Lily MacDonald, the eldest daughter of George MacDonald, often photographed by Carroll.

11 Thirst quenched, I hope? The thirst-quenching biscuit is another looking-glass inversion.

12 in the Eighth Square we shall be Queens together. Like a prophecy in fairy tales, the Queen’s words map out the future course of the narrative – and the game. When it reaches the eighth square a pawn in chess becomes a Queen.

13 she was gone. Alice (the white pawn) and the Red Queen have been side by side, but with this first move of the game, the Queen moves to KR 4 (see the introductory diagram). Being a pawn inside the game, Alice doesn’t yet understand what is going on.

CHAPTER III: LOOKING-GLASS INSECTS

1 a grand survey of the country. In wanting to make such a geographical survey Alice is very much a Victorian traveller.

2 in fact, it was an elephant. A rare touch of geographical exoticism in Carroll’s work; the country Alice surveys momentarily takes on the contours of imperial India or Africa. Compare the gardener’s song, ‘He thought he saw an Elephant,/That practised on a fife;/He looked again, and found it was/A letter from his wife’ (Sylvie and Bruno, The Complete Works, ed. Alexander Woollcott, London, 1939, reprinted Harmondsworth, 1988, p. 296).

3 the first of the six little brooks. The six little brooks (and the six rows of stars in the text which indicate them) represent the six boundaries on the chess board which Alice must cross in order to become a queen.

4 “Tickets, please!” said the Guard. As anticipated earlier by the Red Queen (p. 144), Alice travels quickly through the third square ‘by railway’. Carroll’s ‘fairy tale’ is set squarely in the technological world of its time and this particular episode is packed with references to the ways Alice could be transported passively through all manner of Victorian communication systems – not only by railway, but by telegraph, post and parcel post. Carroll travelled by train with Alice and her sisters at various times, as recorded for example in his diary for 25 June 1863: ‘Ina, Alice, Edith and I (mirabile dictu!) walked down to Abingdon Road Station, and so home by railway: a pleasant expedition, with a very pleasant conclusion’ (Diaries, vol 1, p. 199).

5 “like the chorus of a song,” thought Alice. This looks like an allusion to a popular song of the time, but if so it hasn’t been traced. More to the point, Alice in the railway carriage has to hold her own against a chorus of bullying voices for whom ‘language is worth a thousand pounds a word’. Perhaps this is related to the gentleman ‘dressed in white paper’, the world of politics and newspapers. At any rate it suggests the degree to which Alice in this episode is treated as a mere item in a system of social exchange through which she is travelling.

6 he was dressed in white paper. In Tenniel’s illustration the man in the white suit bears a striking resemblance to Benjamin Disraeli (and in particular to Tenniel’s cartoons of Disraeli in Punch). Perhaps his being dressed in paper reminded Tenniel of Disraeli’s constant presence in the newspapers (including Punch); ‘Disraeli dressed in newspapers