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which was incorporated into the University of London in 1869, the year the University of Cambridge instituted a Higher Local examination for women over eighteen years (just before TLG). There were no degrees open to women as yet, but in the coming years Newnham College, Cambridge (1875), and Somerville College and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (1879), were opened. Writing in the 1890s about the issue of ‘granting university degrees to women’, Dodgson opposed there being ‘resident women-students’ at Oxford University and argued instead for a separate ‘Women’s University’ (‘Resident Women Students’, The Complete Works, pp. 1068–9). In the pages that follow here the Red Queen submits Alice to a prolonged travesty of an academic examination, comparable to the travesty of school education in the Mock Turtle’s story (AAIW, chapter 9).

4 Fiddle-de-dee’s not English. It is, however, found in English dictionaries as an interjection meaning ‘nonsense’ and a noun meaning ‘an absurdity’. OED quotes an earlier lexicographer, Dr Johnson, exclaiming ‘All he said was “Fiddle-de-dee, my dear”’ (Boswell, Life of Johnson,1784). It also forms the first line of a nursery rhyme included in Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes of England,‘Fiddle-de-dee, fiddle-de-dee,/The fly shall marry the bumble-bee’. The recent French translation of Alice does not really resolve the Queen’s difficult translation question. It translates the question itself as ‘“Comment dit-on ‘turlututu en javanais?”’ and gives Alice’s answer as ‘“Turlututu n’est pas anglais”’ (Lewis Carroll, Oeuvres,1, p. 350).

5 I know what he came for. Alice knows because she remembers Humpty Dumpty’s song from chapter 6, ‘In winter, when the fields are white’ (also a ‘riddle with no answer’). The corkscrew, door and fish are all alluded to there (in fact Humpty Dumpty has twice already been associated with corkscrews, see chapter 6, note 12).

6 Hush-a-by-lady. A play on the nursery rhyme ‘Hush-a-bye baby on the tree top’, in Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes of England, one of the best-known lullabies in England and America. The Queen’s lullaby for her fellow Queen infantilizes Alice’s new queenly status but is notably gentler than the virulent lullaby sung by the Duchess in AAIW, chapter 6 (‘Speak roughly to your little boy’).

7 not in all the History of England. Alice here adopts Humpty Dumpty’s grand historical scale (‘That’s what you call a History of England, that is’, chapter 6) and reverts to the ‘dry’ matter of national history recalled in the Mouse’s reading in AAIW, chapter 3. Tenniel’s illustration gives the door marked ‘Queen Alice’ an appropriate historical aura – a Norman archway, Gothic lettering – identifying Alice with that history too. In a preliminary pencil sketch for it Tenniel gave Queen Alice a balloon-crinoline dress, but Carroll objected.

8 No admittance till the week after next. Rude this may be, but it may also be an index of Looking-Glass time, as defined by the White Queen earlier (chapter 5). Asked by Alice ‘“What sort of things do you remember best?”’ she replied, ‘“Oh, things that happened the week after next”’.

9 Wexes it. Cockney, ‘vexes it’. Earlier the Frog equally demotically says, ‘“I speaks English, doesn’t I?”’ recalling Alice’s forgetting how to speak ‘good English’ earlier in her dream adventures (see AAIW, chapter 2, note 1) and her concern as to whether ‘iddle-de-dee’ is or is not English in this chapter.

10 To the Looking-Glass world it was Alice that said. A burlesque of Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Bonny Dundee’ which begins: ‘To the Lords of Convention, ’twas Claver’se who spoke./“Ere the King’s crown shall fall there are crowns to be broke;/So let each Cavalier who loves honour and me,/Come follow the bonnet of Bonny Dundee”’. The chorus goes: ‘Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can,/Come saddle your horses, and call up your men;/Come open the West Port, and let me gang free,/And it’s room for the bonnets of Bonny Dundee!’. As with the ‘Lion and the Unicorn’ and the rhyme of the battling brothers Tweedle, the echo of Scott’s poem conjures up an earlier fight