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By Root 538 0

‘It was not easy to link in one’s mind the new face with the older memory – the stranger with the so intimately known and loved “Alice”, whom I shall always remember as an entirely fascinating seven-year-old maiden’ (Diaries, vol 2, p. 465). Inviting her to tea in 1891, he wrote to her as ‘one I can scarcely picture to myself, even now, as more than seven years old’ (Letters, vol 2, p. 465). To Mrs Liddell he wrote the same year: ‘It seems but yesterday when the Dean and you arrived: yet I was hardly more than a boy, then; and many of the pleasantest memories of those early years – that foolish time when it seemed as if it would last for ever – are bound up with the names of yourself and your children’ (Letters, vol 2, p. 870). In the two Alice books, as in some of his early photos, she does indeed ‘last for ever’ as a phantom of that ‘seven-year-old maiden’.

6 Life, what is it but a dream? The final line is a variant of a familiar literary and philosophical trope. Compare Shakespeare, ‘We are such stuff/As dreams are made on’ (The Tempest, iv. 1. 146); Shelley, ‘He is awakened from the dream of life’ (Adonais,1. 344); Tennyson, ‘Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?’ (The Higher Pantheism,4). The rhyme of ‘dream’ and ‘gleam’, like the ‘summer glory’ of the opening poem, also echoes Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’: ‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’

APPENDIX I: Preface to the Eighty-sixth Thousand of the 6/- Edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter’s riddle (see p. 60) can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz. “Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!” This, however, is merely an after-thought: the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.

For this eighty-sixth thousand, fresh electrotypes have been taken from the wood-blocks (which, never having been used for printing from, are in as good condition as when first cut in 1865), and the whole book has been set up afresh with new type. If the artistic qualities of this re-issue fall short, in any particular, of those possessed by the original issue, it will not be for want of painstaking on the part of author, publisher or printer.

I take this opportunity of announcing that the Nursery “Alice,” hitherto priced at four shillings, net, is now to be had on the same terms as the ordinary shilling picture-books—although I feel sure that it is, in every quality (except the text itself, on which I am not qualified to pronounce), greatly superior to them. Four shillings was a perfectly reasonable price to charge, considering the very heavy initial outlay I had incurred: still, as the Public have practically said “We will not give more than a shilling for a picture-book, however artistically got-up”, I am content to reckon my outlay on the book as so much dead loss, and, rather than let the little ones, for whom it was written, go without it, I am selling it at a price which is, to me, much the same thing as giving it away.

Christmas, 1896.

APPENDIX II: Preface to the Sixty-first Thousand Edition of Through the Looking-Glass

As the chess-problem, given on a previous page, has puzzled some of my readers, it may be well to explain that it is correctly worked out, so far as the moves are concerned. The alternation of Red and White is perhaps not so strictly observed as it might be, and the “castling” of the three Queens is merely a way of saying that they entered the palace: but the “check” of the White King at move 6, the capture of the Red Knight at move 7, and the final “checkmate” of the Red King, will be found, by any one who will take the trouble to set the pieces and play the moves as directed, to be strictly in accordance with the laws of the game.

The new words, in the poem “Jabberwocky” (see p. 132), have given rise to some differences of opinion as to