Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [164]
7 as she crossed the little brook after the Queen. The White Queen has moved one square forward to QB5 while Alice advances to Q5 beside her.
8 The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things. Tenniel’s illustration of the shop appears to be based on an Oxford grocery shop of the time at 83 St Aldate’s Street (Williams and Madan, Handbook of the Literature of the Rev. C. L. Dodgson,1931). In a letter of 22 December 1887 Carroll compares Memory to a world of shelves: ‘What an odd thing Memory is! It consists… of odd corners and shelves, which are apt to get out of sight; and on one of these shelves (just getting a little dusty from neglect) I observe the name of a little girl I used to meet up and down Eastbourne in the Middle Ages’ (Letters, vol 2, p. 688). Memory is very much at issue with the White Queen around.
9 Things flow about so here. Alice’s words recall the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus’ panta rei,‘everything flows’. Almost everything in this chapter turns upon an almost vertiginous fluidity.
10 a teetotum. A popular traditional toy or spinning top, originally square and with letters on its four sides; Defoe speaks of a ‘T totum, as children call it’, the name combining the initial letter and then the Latin word totum meaning all the whole’. It can also mean a tiny person or something very unsteady.
11 Feather. A technical rowing term, meaning turning the oar as it leaves the water at the end of a stroke, so that it passes through the air edgeways. This rowing scene is reminiscent of Carroll’s various river-trips with Alice and her sisters, such as the one on which the ‘Alice’ story was first conceived, recalled in the opening poem with its reference to ‘The rhythm of our rowing’.
12 You’ll be catching a crab directly. Another ambiguous rowing term. It means ‘making a faulty stroke in rowing whereby the oar becomes jammed in the water’. The OED suggests ‘the phrase probably originated in the humorous suggestion that the rower had caught a crab, which was holding his oar down under the water’.
13 the darling scented rushes. This is a rare instance of Carroll’s Pre-Raphaelite pictorial taste shaping the narrative, and framing his heroine as viewed from outside (‘the little sleeves were rolled up’, etc.).
14 The prettiest are always further! Alice’s remark recalls such proverbial expressions as ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’ and ‘distance lends enchantment to the view’. This is a chapter of visual tantalizations.
15 The oars, and the boat, and the river, had vanished… the little dark shop. Tenniel’s illustration captures the elided moment of metamorphosis from boat to shop, as Alice ‘half astonished and half frightened’ rows back to the scene of the previous illustration.
16 set the egg upright on the shelf. This sets the scene for the following chapter, which features a famously precarious egg.
17 So she went on. The asterisks indicate Alice has crossed the brook and moved to Q6 – after the Sheep, who has ‘gone off to the other end of the shop’, has moved to KB8.
CHAPTER VI: HUMPTY DUMPTY
1 HUMPTY DUMPTY himself. The nursery rhyme of Humpty Dumpty is not, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (ODNR), recorded until Mother Goose’s Melody in 1803 and in full printed form until Gammer Gurton’s Garland (1810). Nevertheless folklorists believe that the riddle rhyme, which is found in different forms in most European countries, probably goes back into the remote past. In Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes of England (1846), it is classed as a ‘riddle’ meaning an ‘egg’.
2 Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. The last line of Carroll’s version differs from the most familiar modern form of the rhyme (‘Couldn’t put Humpty together again’) and also from the two variants in Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes of England. Pre-Carrollian versions of ‘Humpty Dumpty’ recorded in ODNR all differ and Carroll’s is probably from oral memory – though Alice claims to have