Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [169]
13 Rowland’s Macassar-Oil. The most popular and widely advertised hair-oil of the nineteenth century. Compare Byron, Don Juan, Canto 1, stanza 17: ‘In virtues nothing earthly could surpass her,/Save thine “incomparable oil,” Macassar!’
14 the Menai bridge. Telford’s iron suspension bridge, completed in 1826, joining Anglesey and North Wales.
15 I weep, for it reminds me so. A parody of Wordsworth’s poetry of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, as embodied in the close of ‘Resolution and Independence’ (‘“God”, said I, “be my help and stay secure;/I’ll think of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor”’) and ‘Tintern Abbey’.
16 till he was out of sight. The White Knight returns to KB5, as before he met Alice.
17 the edge of the brook. It may have been at this point that the omitted ‘The Wasp in a Wig’ episode, mentioned in Collingwood’s Life (p. 146), was to be inserted. What purported to be the cancelled galley proofs of the missing chapter were sold in London in 1974 and published as The Wasp in a Wig: A ‘Suppressed’ Episode of Through the Looking-Glass, with a Preface, Introduction and Notes by Martin Gardner in 1977. That edition notionally inserts the four or so galley pages of the episode between these two sentences, so that ‘A very few steps brought her to the edge of the brook’ is immediately followed by ‘… and she was just going to spring over, when she heard a deep sigh, which seemed to come from the wood behind her.’ The authenticity of the cancelled ‘Wasp in a Wig’ episode is questionable: for further details, see special issue of Jabber-wocky, vol 7, no. 3, Summer 1978.
18 The Eighth Square at last. In the chess g am e Alice has moved to Q8 and thus become a Queen. In Tenniel’s illustration her crown, with its characteristic bobble in the middle, is unmistakably a chess crown.
CHAPTER IX: QUEEN ALICE
1 Queens have to be dignified, you know. In his influential ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ (1864) in Sesame and Lilies (1865) John Ruskin, at one time Alice’s drawing-master and a man whom Dodgson described as ‘numbering among my friends’ (Letters, vol I, p. 326), enjoined queenliness (which he called ‘the highest dignity’) on all women: ‘Queens you must always be: queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and will for ever bow, before the myrtle crown and the stainless sceptre of womanhood’. Though Alice has earlier said she would like ‘to be a Queen best’, her brief reign as a chess queen is taken up with a tedious conversation with two other Queens and a very frustrating banquet. However ‘dignified’ it may be, her experience doesn’t make Ruskin’s contemporary mythologization of femininity, also written ‘to please one girl’ (as he wrote in his 1871 Preface), a very appealing prospect for a girl like Alice (Ruskin incidentally makes a glancing allusion to the ‘Dean of Christ Church’, Alice’s father, in the same lecture).
2 one on each side. The Red Queen has moved to K1 beside Alice, who is herself beside the White Queen. As Gardner points out, ‘the White King is placed in check by this move, but neither side seems to notice it’. Alice had last met the Red Queen in chapter 2 where, amid a torrent of other advice, the Queen had explained the rules of chess to her.
3 the proper examination. The education of women was very much a live issue at this time; in 1847 Tennyson identified ‘the higher education of women’ as one of the major issues of the day and explored it in The Princess, while Ruskin discussed it in his 1864 lecture ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ (see note 1 above). The first college for women, significantly called Queen’s College, was founded in 1848, to be followed by Bedford College,