Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [161]
13 You shouldn’t make jokes… if it makes you so unhappy. Another looking-glass inversion, but it is also a reflection of the interplay between jokes and unhappiness represented by Beckett’s ‘nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that’ (Endgame, London, 1958, p. 20) and the currency of the ‘sad comedian’.
14 answers to the name of ‘Dash’. ‘Dash’ is a name, but could also be a sign for a blank where a name might be ‘—’ (as earlier in “Come here——,” p. 152).
15 into the—into what? Nearly everything in the chapter hinges on names and naming – like the Gnat’s penchant for puns – but here Alice suffers from what is now called nominal aphasia, the inability to remember names. Though frightening, this also enables a quasi-Wordsworthian communion between the human and natural worlds which is unlike anything else in the Alice books.
16 L, I know it begins with L. Alice’s ‘L is for ‘Liddell’, though when she recovers her name it is ‘Alice’ not ‘Liddell’.
17 they must be. The chapter ends without a full stop which indicates that this last sentence should continue into the title of the following chapter, to make the rhyming couplet:
Feeling sure that they must
be Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
In fact an erroneous stop crept into the 1897 edition, later removed. A chapter about losing names (and coining names through bad puns) ends with a signpost towards a chapter coined out of traditional nonsense names.
CHAPTER IV: TWEEDLEDUM AND TWEEDLEDEE.
1 They were standing under a tree. In Tenniel’s illustration, the brothers, standing as rigidly as wax-work schoolboys, are very evidently identical twins. The only difference between them is in the last syllable of their names, as written on their collars. Their names hark back to John Byrom’s rhyme on the quarrels between Handel and Bononcini in 1725:
Some say compared to Bononcini
That mynheer Handel’s but a ninny;
Others aver that he to Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a candle,
Strange all this Difference should be
’ Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee.
Twins are a special case of looking-glass doubling and Tenniel’s illustration shows them as mirror-images of each other. Their penchant for ‘Contrariwise’ conversation represents a different kind of mirror effect, inversion.
2 the words of the old song. The nursery rhyme Alice quotes is first recorded in Original Ditties for the Nursery of 1805 or so, and was included in The Nursery Rhymes of England edited by J. O. Halliwell, 1853. In The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes the Opies suggest the rhyme might have either preceded Byrom’s satirical verses (see above) or developed out of them. Carroll’s version differs marginally from Halliwell’s, so he is probably quoting from memory. The Tweedles are the first of several characters in Through the Looking-Glass to owe their existence, like the Queen and Knave of Hearts in Wonderland, to the words of an ‘old song’.
3 Here we go round the mulberry bush. This is another ‘old song’, and given by J. O. Halliwell as an example of a children’s ‘Game Rhyme’ or ‘ring-dance imitation-play’ in Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales,1849.
4 The Walrus and the Carpenter. A rare instance of a nonsense poem in the Alice books which is not a parody. In a letter to his uncle Hassard Dodgson of 1872, Carroll wrote:
In writing ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’, I had no particular poem in my mind. The metre is a common one, and I don’t think ‘Eugene Aram’ suggested it more than the many other poems I have read in the same metre (Letters, vol 1, p. 177).
‘The Dream of Eugene Aram, the Murderer’ (1829) by Thomas Hood (1799–1845), is indeed written in the same metre and begins:
’Twas in the prime of summer time,
An evening calm and cool,
And four and twenty happy boys
Came bounding out of school:
There were some that ran and some that leapt
Like troutlets in a pool.
The opening of Carroll’s poem may also recall the nonsensical close of Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy’ from Lyrical Ballads (1798): ‘The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,/And the sun did shine so cold’. ‘The Walrus and