Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [35]
The textual history has been exhaustively dealt with by Selwyn Goodacre – and others. In a series of articles in Jabberwocky (the journal of the Lewis Carroll Society) and elsewhere, Selwyn Goodacre has itemized and analysed the numerous changes and typographical errors corrected and introduced in the various editions supervised by Carroll during his lifetime. In general, when Carroll revised his text – in 1866, and in 1897, in particular – he left the details and phraseology of the story almost wholly intact, but fiddled with its punctuation and presentation. In revising the published texts, he seems almost exclusively concerned with the placing of dots, dashes and commas; he was not interested in improving or reshaping the literary material itself, only with polishing its presentation and buttoning up his already fastidious conventions regarding quotation, italicization and hyphenation. Carroll was always fussy about the representation of speech in the texts – as in the stage versions – and much of his worrying about punctuation stems from this. His particular bugbear concerned the punctuation of the sentences in inverted commas quoted within the text – where to put the stops and commas – and the fidgeting over italics is related to this concern with the relationship between the textual and the oral, the written and the spoken text. Hyphenation was a particular hobbyhorse of his. Though the latest text of the books is probably the fussiest as regards punctuation, Carroll was always one of the prissiest of all English writers and the pedantic elaboration of his textual presentation contributes to his peculiar brand of impeccable and deadpan surrealism.
Lewis Carroll rejected the first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 in large part because of Tenniel’s dissatisfaction with the quality of the printed illustrations. Having withdrawn the edition from circulation, he brought out a second edition the following year in 1866. In his account of the reasons for this drastic action, W. H. Bond records that ‘a collation of the text shows seventy points of difference, most of them relatively insignificant’, of which fifty-nine ‘may represent the author’s revisions’.1 Putting the question of the illustrations aside, there is only ‘one instance of real verbal revision’, as Bond notes: in the incident where Alice is left holding the baby which turns into a pig; her remark that ‘it would have been a dreadfully ugly child’ becomes ‘it would have made a dreadfully ugly child’. That apart, Carroll used the opportunity of another edition to tidy up the text here and there – adding and deleting commas, adding hyphens (‘seashore’ becomes ‘seashore’, flowerbeds’ ‘lower-beds’), and correcting the odd misprint (bringing the ‘twinkle’ back to ‘twinkl’, for example). Despite the drastic decision to recall that first 1865 book, there are very few obvious differences between it and the second edition.2
The popularity of Alice was such that in November 1866 Macmillan issued another 3,000 copies in a slightly smaller size, and for this reissue, as Selwyn Goodacre has documented, Carroll again revised the text.3 This was another small-scale revision which was almost entirely confined to punctuation. As Goodacre notes, it showed ‘the gradual implementation of the Carrollian fondness for hyphenated words’ (the hole-in-one ‘mousehole’ for example, becomes a two-stroke ‘mouse-hole’) and ‘the liberal addition of commas’. There are some spelling changes (such as ‘toffy’ to ‘tofee’, a change Carroll was to reverse in 1897) and a couple of grammatical twitches: ‘She felt it ought to be treated with respect’ becomes the more grammatically respectable ‘she felt that it ought to be treated with respect’, and the Hatter’s rather knottedly colloquial ‘I hadn’t but just begun