Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [168]
7 practice in riding. The Liddell children had had riding lessons, as Carroll’s diary confirms: ‘Went over for the last time to Charlton Kings, and walked in to Cheltenham with Alice, Edith and Miss Prickett, and left them at the Riding School’ (7 April 1863, Diaries, vol I, p. 195).
8 like a sugar-loaf. Now unfamiliar, this was ‘a moulded conical mass of hard refined sugar’ (OED).
9 the name of the song is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes’. For a philosophical discussion of the issues of naming involved here, see Roger Holmes, ‘The Philosopher’s Alice in Wonderland’, Antioch Review, Summer 1959. For a discussion of literary titles based on the White Knight’s fastidious differentiations, see John Hollander, ‘“Haddocks’ Eyes” A Note on the Theory of Titles’, in Vision and Resonance,1975. Carroll has some remarks on names in book I chapter 4 of Symbolic Logic (1896) and as a professional logician shared some of the Knight’s pernickety rigour.
10 this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. This sudden time-shift to a mood of anticipated retrospection indicates that this incident has an exceptional status in the text. Alice’s final image of the Knight is consciously elegiac and ‘picturesque’ – it is ‘like a picture’ indeed – in a way almost nothing else in either book seems to be. The tonality is close to that of the introductory poem and the ‘picture’ is an instance of Victorian, even Pre-Raphaelite, medievalism. Tenniel’s frontispiece, a parody of Millais’s A Dream of the Past or Sir Isumbras at the Ford, is loosely based on this scene. Millais’s painting has a little girl sitting on the horse in front of the venerable knight.
11 ‘I give thee all, I can no more.’ The first line of ‘My Heart and Lute’ by Thomas Moore, a song set to music by Sir Henry Rowley Bishop and the metrical model of the White Knight’s poem. The first stanza reads:
I give thee all – I can give no more –
Though poor the offering be;
My heart and lute are all the store
That I can bring to thee.
A lute whose gentle song reveals
The soul of love full well;
And, better far, a heart that feels
Much more than lute could tell
The lyric which gives the poem its tune may not be the Knight’s ‘own invention’, as he claims, but its original words reveal ‘the soul of love’ far better than the Carrollian Knight’s nonsense lyric can tell.
12 I’ll tell thee everything I can. The poem is a revised and extended version of ‘Upon the Lonely Moor’, a poem Carroll had originally published anonymously in The Train in 1856 (The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, ed. Alexander Woollcott, London, 1939, pp. 72–30). If it takes its metre from Thomas Moore, it takes its parodic target from another Romantic poet, as he tells his uncle in a letter of 14 May 1872:
‘Sitting on a Gate’ is a parody, though not as to style or metre – but its plot is borrowed from Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence’, a poem that has always amused me a good deal (though it is by no means a comic poem) by the absurd way in which the poet goes on questioning the poor old leech-gatherer, making him tell his history over and over again, and never attending to ”what he says. Wordsworth ends ”with a moral – an example I have not followed. (Letter to Hassard Dodgson, Letters, vol 1, p. 177).
Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence’, first published in Poems (1807), is a poem dramatizing the poet’s encounter on a remote moor with an old leech-gatherer (‘The oldest man he seemed who ever