Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [165]
3 What tremendously easy riddles you ask. Humpty Dumpty owes his existence to a riddle, so his taste for riddles – a taste he shares with his creator – is ironically appropriate.
4 a History of England. Collectors such as Halliwell (who classified some nursery rhymes such as ‘Old King Cole’ as ‘Historical’) thought of nursery rhymes as ‘popular remnants of the ancient Scandinavian nursery literature’ (Preface to the fifth edn, 1853). Dickens had written A Child’s History of England (1851– 3). Humpty snobbishly prefers history to nursery rhymes and dwells on his associations with kings rather than vulnerable children and eggs. The poems of TLG evoke monarchs, battles, falls and quarrels quite as much as histories of England do.
5 Seven years and six months. See chapter 1, note 1.
6 Too proud? His constant harping on ‘pride’ in his precarious situation suggests the proverbial ‘pride comes before a fall’.
7 but two can. The pun introduces a murderous innuendo, one of the darkest of the book’s jokes about death. It also reverts to the play on ‘one’ and ‘two’ eggs in the previous chapter (p. 179).
8 that seems to be done right. Elizabeth Sewell in The Field of Nonsense comments that ‘it is important to Nonsense that numbers and arithmetic should work properly’. Compare chapter 3, where Alice thinks to herself, ‘Thirty times three makes ninety. I wonder if anyone’s counting’.
9 it means just what I choose it to mean. Gardner points out the affinity between Humpty Dumpty’s nominalist philosophy of language and Carroll’s Symbolic Logic (1896) in which the author outlines his opposition to the conventional position adopted by writers and editors of ‘Logical text-books’:
They speak of the Copula of a Proposition ‘with bated breath’, almost as if it were a living, conscious Entity, capable of declaring for itself what it chose to mean, and that we, poor human creatures, had nothing to do but to ascertain what was its sovereign will and pleasure, and submit to it.
In opposition to this view, I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to a word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, ‘Let it be understood that by the word “black” I shall always mean “white”, and by the word “white” I shall always mean “black”, I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I think it” (Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic, ed. William Warren Bartley, III, Brighton, 1977, p. 232).
The OED’s primary (though obsolete) definition of ‘glory’ is peculiarly appropriate to Humpty Dumpty: ‘glory’ is ‘the disposition to claim honour for oneself; boastful spirit’. In a letter of 21 June 1876, touching on the death of two children (one of whom was Alice’s sister Edith), Dodgson used the word in one of its more usual honorific and religious senses: ‘the world, even at its brightest, is not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall be revealed’ (Letters, vol 1, p. 254). It is one of the key terms in Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality’ (‘trailing clouds of glory’, ‘where is it now the glory and the dream?’), a poem that profoundly influenced Carroll’s vision of lost childhood innocence. Humpty’s reductively anti-Romantic definition corresponds to his argumentative and downright character, as well as anticipating his eventual ‘knock-me-down’ fate.
10 Jabberwocky’. The first piece of language she encounters beyond the looking-glass in chapter 1 (see note 11, chapter 1). Humpty Dumpty treats it, like everything else, as a kind of riddle. Though his subsequent ‘explanation’ of the poem is often linguistically extremely plausible, both his highly arbitrary attitude towards language and his intellectual over-confidence may make him a suspect guide to its meaning.
11 it’s like a portmanteau. In the preface to The Hunting of the Snark Carroll says of his nonsense coinages that ‘Humpty Dumpty’s theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all’. ‘Portmanteau word’ has now become