Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [167]
12 It’s as large as life, and twice as natural. A play on the phrase, usually used about representation in art, ‘as large as life and quite as natural’. The OED gives a contemporary example from C. Bede’s Verdant Green (1853): An imposing-looking Don, as large as life and quite as natural’. When he saw W. B. Richmond’s painting of the Liddell children, The Sisters, in 1865, Carroll thought ‘Alice very lovely, but not quite natural’ (Diaries, vol I, p. 228). Carroll’s version has subsequently become a catch-phrase.
13 I always thought they were fabulous monsters! The Unicorn, as a fabulous monster himself, sees the human child as one – one of the most beautiful of the looking-glass’s inversions.
14 The Lion had joined them. Tenniel’s illustration bears a resemblance to a cartoon drawn for Punch twenty years earlier, also showing the Lion (complete with spectacles) and the Unicorn (though without his goatee beard) confronting each other; it accompanied a letter from ‘The British Lion’ to the lord responsible for the royal coat of arms remonstrating about the Scottish unicorn (Punch, Jan–June 1853). See Hancher, ‘Punch and Alice’ in Lewis Carroll:
A Celebration, ed. E. Guiliano, New York, 1982. Since Tenniel was the quasi-official political cartoonist of Punch, contemporaries saw in Tenniel’s Looking-Glass illustration of the Lion and Unicorn an allusion to the two great prime-ministerial rivals of the time – the leonine Gladstone (who represented Oxford as MP for eighteen years) and the dapperly bearded Disraeli. Carroll produced a satirical anagram of ‘William Ewart Gladstone’ – ‘Wild agitator, Means well’ – but thought Disraeli ‘the greatest statesman of our time’ (Letters, vol 1, p. 423). They too were perpetually fighting for power.
15 the Lion twice as much as me. Presumably an allusion to the proverbial phrase ‘the lion’s share’.
16 she… sprang across the little brook in her terror. Alice moves on to Q7. The terrifying drums are the aural equivalent of the comparably rhyme-derived shadow of the ‘monstrous crow’ in chapter 4 and the crash of Humpty Dumpty in chapter 6. Alice’s progress is shadowed by violent forces, and during these episodes she experiences ‘terror’, ‘alarm’ and ‘anxiety’. Tenniel’s empty plate and knife, the drums and drumsticks without drummers capture this brilliantly.
CHAPTER VIII: “IT’S MY OWN INVENTION”
1 Only I do hope it’s my dream, and not the Red King’s. Alice is still preoccupied by the Tweedle brothers’ claims in chapter 4 (see p. 165). Whether Through the Looking-Glass is her dream alone or ‘another person’s dream’ (her author’s, for example) is a moot point.
2 a Knight, dressed in crimson armour, came galloping. The Red Knight moves to K2, checking the White King and attacking the White Queen.
3 This time it was a White Knight. The White Knight moves to the square occupied by the Red Knight (next to Alice) and hence (after the battle) ‘takes’ him. His initial cry of ‘Check’ is quite inappropriate, since he would be checking only his own King, not the opposing Red King. This is a travesty of chess – and of Spenserean romance. The White Knight’s peculiar status is reflected in his appearance in the frontispiece to the story.
4 It was a glorious victory, wasn’t it? Compare Southey’s The Battle of Blenheim (1798): ‘“And everybody praised the Duke,/Who this great fight did win”/ “But what good came of it at last?”/Quoth little Peterkin./“Why that I cannot tell,” said he/“But ’twas a famous victory”’.
5 when you’ve crossed the next brook. On her next move in the chess game (to Q8), Alice, still a mere pawn, will automatically become a Queen.
6 It’s my own invention. Many readers have seen in this gentle and eccentric inventor a self-portrait of Carroll (though Tenniel’s amiable buffer with a walrus-moustache appears to be a self-portrait of Tenniel). Carroll was, like the Knight,