Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [171]
11 it isn’t etiquette to cut any one. The Red Queen, like the author, is a stickler for etiquette throughout (as we see from her earlier reference to ‘lessons in manners’). This cutting joke depends on the pun on ‘cut’ meaning ‘to affect not to see or know (a person) on meeting or passing him’ (OED). As a campaigning anti-vivisectionist, Carroll was particularly concerned about ‘cutting’ live creatures.
12 First, the fish must be caught. The answer to the Queen’s ‘lovely riddle’ is ‘An oyster’. In 1878 the magazine Fun published an answer to the riddle written in the same metre that had been submitted to Carroll and polished up by him. It went: ‘Get an oyster-knife strong/Insert it ’twixt cover and dish in the middle;/Then you shall before long/Un-dish-cover the OYSTERS – dish-cover the riddle!’ Oysters had figured prominently in the earlier, equally fishy The Walrus and the Carpenter’.
13 like extinguishers. Conical candle extinguishers.
14 I can’t stand this any longer. Alice’s cry of exasperation mirrors that at the equally anarchic close of AAIW: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of cards’ (chapter 12). Tenniel’s illustration faithfully records the ‘dreadful confusion’ described in the text. In one image he captures Alice’s decisive gesture of dismissal, the final metamorphoses of the chess pieces – the White Queen disappearing into the tureen, for example – and the phantasmagoric dissolution of the banquet.
The bottles with wings of plates look like chess pawns, the upended pudding like a bishop, the tureen like a Queen, and Alice herself like a chess piece.
15 turning fiercely upon the Red Queen. The Red Queen represents the most powerful of the opposing forces in the game of chess (she is the most aggressive in character). At this point Alice takes the Red Queen and simultaneously checkmates the Red King, who has succeeded in sleeping throughout the entire game without moving. In the Preface to the Sixty-First Thousand Carroll notes that the ‘final “checkmate” of the Red King will be found to be strictly in accordance with the laws of the game’ (see Appendix II). Alice has made her winning move and brought the game to an end.
CHAPTER XII: WHICH DREAMED IT?
1 such a nice dream. The book’s dream structure mirrors that of AAIW. As the earlier story comes full circle, so this one ends where it began in chapter 1 with Alice talking to her cat Dinah and the two kittens, Kitty and Snowdrop.
2 all about fishes. There’s something fishy about Alice’s recollection of the poetry she’s heard. Of the poems in AAIW, one concerns a crocodile that eats fishes, another a mock turtle (an artificial marine reptile), and another a lobster; of those in TLG,‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ figures oysters and Humpty Dumpty’s song does mention fishes, but, though the White Knight’s ballad is mysteriously named ‘Haddocks’ Eyes’, it isn’t ‘about fishes’ in any obvious sense and neither are ‘Jabberwocky’ or the final drinking-song ‘Queen Alice’.
3 Which do you think it was? This direct address to the reader shifts the narrative direction, ending the book with an unexpected questioning note, comparable to that at the close of Keats’s ‘To the Nightingale’ (‘Do I wake or sleep?’). Alice’s question (‘who do you think dreamed it all?’) refers back to Tweedle-dee’s contemptuous remark, ‘why you’re only a sort of thing in his [the Red King’s] dream’ (chapter 4).
4 A boat, beneath a sunny sky. The final poem is an acrostic; the initial letters of each line spell out Alice’s full name, ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL. It returns to the ‘golden afternoon’ of the introductory poem of AAIW a nd the genesis of the original narrative, now viewed through the perspective of old age and passing time, in tone with the more sombre key of this second book.
5 Still she haunts me, phantomwise. If this was the case in 1871 when TLG was published, it remained so till the end of Carroll’s life (see, for example, the account in ‘“Alice” on the Stage’, pp. 293–5). When he met Alice’s husband for the first time in 1888, he noted: