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According to another of Carroll’s illustrators, Harry Furniss, Carroll told him that Tenniel ‘remonstrated against the walrus and the carpenter as a hopeless combination, and begged to have the “Carpenter” abolished – I remember offering “baronet” and “butterfly”… but he finally chose “Carpenter”’ (Dorothy Furniss, ‘New Lewis Carroll Letters’, Pearson’s Magazine, December 1930, pp. 635–6). Had Tenniel decided otherwise, we might have known this grimly carnivorous nonsense masterpiece as ‘The Walrus and the Butterfly’ or ‘The Walrus and the Baronet’. In Tenniel’s illustrations the Walrus has the air of a down-at-heel Baronet beside the mean and clean-faced Carpenter, suggesting an alliance of grandee and artisan in taking advantage of the neat and well-trained oysters. The Carpenter’s hat is the standard paper cap of the mid-Victorian workman comparable to those in various Tenniel cartoons for Punch (see Michael Hancher, The Tenniel Illustrations to the ‘Alice’ Books, Columbus, Ohio, 1986, chapter 1).

5 Were walking close at hand. As Carroll explained in a later letter, this had originally read ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter/Were walking hand-in-hand’ but this ‘was altered to suit the artist’ (Letters, vol I, p. 222). The suggestion that they might be a homosexual couple would certainly alter the implications of their appetite for young oysters. If ‘Oysters’ were a nonsense word, it might suggest some blend of ‘boys’, ‘choristers’ and ‘ostlers’. The oysters behave like a party of excessively well brought-up schoolboys, and it brings them to a sticky end.

6 If seven maids with seven mops. This is oddly reminiscent of the nursery rhyme ‘As I was going to St Ives,/I met a man with seven wives,/Each wife had seven sacks,/Each sack had seven cats,’ etc. It reads as a parody of a kind of mathematical exam question no doubt familiar to Carroll.

7 And whether pigs have wings. Perhaps an allusion to the expression ‘when pigs fly’ meaning ‘never’ (see note 9, chapter 9, AAIW). The Walrus’s ‘many things make up one of the most celebrated agendas in the history of nonsense literature as well as one of the most memorable lists in poetry (which loves lists).

8 ‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter. As Michael Hancher has pointed out, Tenniel’s illustration of the oyster-eating Carpenter here is very close to a cartoon he had done earlier in Punch on ‘Law and Lunacy, Or, A Glorious Oyster Season for the Lawyers’ (1862), a cartoon based on the proverb ‘The oyster is the lawyer’s fee’. Hancher suggests Carroll may have had in mind another later Punch squib illustrated by Tenniel during the time he was illustrating Wonderland, ‘The Proverb Reversed’. This tells of oysters protesting to the Lord Chancellor against the greed of lawyers, while ‘edging away from the Cayenne’, and ends:

‘Henceforth the rhyme that carries smart

To my poor Oyster’s oozy heart,

Shall in another fashion run,

And thus be passed from sire to son:

“The Oyster” where it ought to be,

And shell and shell the lawyer’s fee.”’

Again he smiled, so says the fable,

And drew his chair up near the table,

When all the oysters, seen and hid,

Cried, ‘Eat and welcome.’ And he did.

(Michael Hancher, The Tenniel

Illustrations,1986, pp. 15–20)

9 They’d eaten every one. Carroll’s seaside ballad has a characteristically grim ending. In the stage version of Alice, however, Carroll added a kind of moral coda:

The Carpenter he ceased to sob;

The Walrus ceased to weep;

They’d finished all the oysters;

And they laid them down to sleep––

And of their craft and cruelty

The punishment to reap.

In this stage version the ghosts of two of the oysters go on to sing mazurkas while stamping on their consumers’ chests, singing ‘O woeful, weeping Walrus, your tears are all a sham!/You’re greedier for oysters than children are for jam,’ etc. Such moral quittance may have seemed appropriate for the stage, but luckily Carroll did not modify the poem in subsequent editions of the book (as he incorporated the additional verses of ‘The