Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [166]
12 In winter, when the fields are white. An instance of a Carrollian lyric without a known parodic model or source. The poem, though as equally resistant to ‘sensible’ explanation as ‘Jabberwocky’, is quite unlike it; its vocabulary is pellucid, only its reference is comparably problematic. Humpty Dumpty finds a corkscrew in both.
13I tried to turn the handle but—. Humpty earlier claims to have no problems with adjectives and to be proud of his skills in mastering otherwise fractious verbs, but the difficulties of his poem turn upon conjunctions – such as that final ‘but’.
14 She never finished the sentence. In this respect, she repeats the ‘unsatisfactory’ structure of Humpty’s poem, which is also marked by unfinished sentences.
CHAPTER VII: THE LION AND THE UNICORN
1 busily writing in his memorandum-book. As in chapter 1, note 8. The Knight in chapter 1 ‘balances very badly’ as do all the knights in this scene (and later the White Knight); the world of the chivalrous Middle Ages is constantly spoofed. Tenniel’s illustration evokes Uccello’s Battle of San Romano in the National Gallery, London.
2 two of them are wanted in the game. A reference to the two horses needed for the two white knights in the game of chess.
3 Anglo-Saxon attitudes.‘Jabberwocky’ was originally satirically introduced as a ‘Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’, and this too plays on the academic interest in the Anglo-Saxons in the later nineteenth century – punningly identifying their cultural and racial ‘attitudes’ with physical postures such as those adopted by the wriggling Messenger.
4 Haigha. A pseudo-Anglo-Saxon spelling of ‘Hare’; from Tenniel’s illustration he is clearly identifiable as the March Hare of AAIW.
5 I love my love with an H. Alice slips into the popular Victorian alphabetical game ‘I love my love with an A’. In The Nursery Rhymes of England (1846) J. O. Halliwell classifies this as a ‘scholastic’ rhyme and gives the following sample for A’: ‘I love my love with an A, because he’s Agreeable;/I hate him because he’s Avaricious./He took me to the sign of the Acorn,/And treated me with Apples./His name’s Andrew/And he lives in Arlington’. See Edward Lear’s Nonsense Alphabets for comparable contemporary alphabetical nonsense.
6 Hatta. A pseudo-Anglo-Saxon spelling of ‘Hatter’; from the illustration later in the chapter (and the earlier one of the imprisoned messenger in chapter 5) he is clearly the Mad Hatter from AAIW. Apart from Alice herself, the hare and hatter are the only survivors or interlopers from the earlier book.
7 Hay, then. The ‘ham sandwich’ and ‘hay’ the King prescribes continue the sequence of H’s set off by Alice’s rhyme. On 2 September 1885, Carroll wrote: ‘One of the deepest motives (as you are aware) in the human breast (so deep that many have failed to detect it) is Alliteration’ (Letters, vol I, p. 601).
8 the words of the old song. First recorded in Useful Transactions in Philosophy (1708–10) and included in Halliwell’s The Nursery Rhymes of England. In this case, the rhyme is precisely in Humpty Dumpty’s sense a ‘History of England’ (p. 183). According to the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ may refer to the amalgamation of the royal arms of Scotland with those of England when James VI of Scotland was crowned James I of England; at that time one of the unicorns of the Scottish coat of arms was crowned and combined with the British lion. After the Hanoverian succession the unicorn’s crown was removed and ‘strife between England and Scotland resumed’. The royal rhyme fits cleverly into the chess context elaborated by Carroll, since chess too is based around the conflict for a crown.
9 a Bandersnatch. See chapter 1, note 19. The King must be familiar with the creature from his reading of ‘Jabberwocky’.
10 oyster-shells. A strange reminiscence of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ (pp. 159–63).
11 How fast those