Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [163]
10 only a sort of thing in his dream. This idea bothers Alice and recurs at the opening of chapter 8 (p. 205) and the final paragraphs of the book (pp. 239—40). Martin Gardner compares Bishop Berkeley’s idealist proposition that the material world is the dream of God. Problems about dreams and existence and the existence of dreams recur in Symbolic Logic:
By ‘existence’ I mean of course whatever kind of existence suits its nature. The two Propositions, ‘dreams exist’ and ‘drums exist’, denote two totally different kinds of ‘existence’. A dream is an aggregate of ideas, and exists only in the mind of a dreamer; whereas a drum is an aggregate of” wood and parchment, and exists in the hands of a drummer (Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic, ed. William Warren Bartley, III, Brighton, 1977, pp. 232–3).
11 He called it a helmet. In text and illustration the Tweedles dress up as traves tied schoolboy versions of the medieval knights of Mallory and Tennyson – as well as of the chess knights of chapter 8.
CHAPTER V: WOOL AND WATER
1 the White Queen came running. Carroll gives a retrospective account of his idea of the Queen in ‘“Alice” on the Stage’, where he describes her as ‘helpless as an infant; and with a slow, maundering, bewildered air about her just suggesting imbecility, but never quite passing into it’ (see p. 296).
2 bread-and-butter. Alice helps herself to bread-and-butter, that staple of Victorian tea parties, in A Mad Tea-Party’ (AAIW, chapter 7), the Hatter complains bread-and-butter is ‘getting so thin’ in the Trial (AAIW, chapter 11) and there is a ‘bread-and-butter-fly’ in ‘Looking-Glass Insects’ (TLG, chapter 3). Though it is not, as the Hatter says, ‘always tea-time’, tea-time is never very far away.
3 The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day. Now proverbial, the phrase originates here. The Queen’s preoccupation with ‘jam’ fits in with her mutterings about ‘bread-and-butter’ earlier.
4 Living backwards. Another looking-glass inversion. The Queen later claims her remarkable two-way memory is ‘the way things happen here’, but in fact she is the only character to lay claim to prospective memory of this kind.
5 exactually. This is actually a conflation of ‘actually’ and ‘exactly’. Alice’s exact age makes her six months older than she had been during her adventures in Wonderland (see chapter I, note 1).
6 one ca’n’t believe impossible things. Gardner compares Carroll’s letter of 23 May 1864 to Mary MacDonald in which he tells her ‘not to be in such a hurry to believe’ his tall stories next time:
If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you’ll be so weak you won’t be able to believe the simplest true things. Only last week a friend of mine set to” work to believe Jack-the-giant-killer. He managed to do it, but he was so exhausted by it that ”when I told him it ”was raining (which was true) he couldn’t believe it, but rushed out into the street without his hat or umbrella, the consequence of which ”was his hair got seriously damp’ (Letters, vol 1, p. 64).
Questions of ‘belief preoccupied Carroll all his life but he had ‘a deep dread of arguments on religious topics’, as he told Edith Rix in 1886, telling her she could ‘do more good… by showing… what a Christian is than by telling… what a Christian believes’ (Letters, vol 2, p. 618). Tertullian of course had asserted of Christian belief certum est quia impossible est,‘it is certain because it is impossible’ (De Carne Christi). To Daniel Biddle, Carroll wrote on 16 July 1885: ‘We cannot conceive how a point, moving from “ ” to “1”, through this infinite series of steps, ever reaches “1”: but a thing