Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [36]
Through the Looking-Glass was first published in December 1871, with the title page dated 1872, and was not fully revised until the sixty-first thousand. This was published in December 1896 but dated 1897, and was effectively, as Denis Crutch notes, its second edition.4 Until that date, with the exception of alterations to the preliminary and end matter, the text was to all intents identical, being printed from electrotypes made in 1871.
In September 1896, Carroll borrowed a bound-up copy of the two Alice books (Wonderland, 1882; Looking-Glass, 1880) from a former child friend May Barber (later Mrs Stretton) and made manuscript corrections and amendments for the editions of 1897, when the books were wholly reset in new type with a special preface dated Christmas 1896. The scale and importance of the 1897 revisions of Carroll’s two classic texts were first documented by Stanley Godman in the late 1950s.5 Godman’s article records Carroll’s corrections in detail and notes that ‘a study of a representative selection of the editions which have appeared since his death shows… that the author’s final intentions, as represented by the corrections in Mrs Stretton’s copies and the 1897 editions based on them, have rarely been respected in their entirety’. More recently, Selwyn Goodacre has provided a more complete record of the extensive alterations to the 1897 text of Wonderland.6
The 1897 revisions are generally along the same lines as the earlier revisions – adjustments to punctuation or spelling or hyphenation rather than additions or excisions of textual material. He changed ‘can’t’ and ‘won’t’ to the more laboriously accurate ‘ca’n’t’ and ‘wo’n’t’ throughout, and multiplied the already multiple instances of hyphenation that occur in each revision. So he gave instructions not only to convert a ‘schoolroom’ into a ‘school-room’ and ‘kidgloves’ into ‘kid-gloves’, which seem unexceptionable, but ‘Cheshire Puss’ into ‘Cheshire-Puss’, ‘Multiplication Table’ into ‘Multiplication-Table’ and even ‘shepherd boy’ into ‘shepherd-boy’, which seem almost bizarre in their pursuit of correctness. Carroll was obviously offended by nouns acting as adjectival qualifiers of other nouns, so committed himself to further oddities such as ‘winter-day’ and ‘railway-station’ too. He also at this stage came to insist that an exclamation mark finishes a sentence, so that ‘Hush! hush!’ became ‘Hush! Hush!’ and ‘Alas! it was too late’ became ‘Alas! It was too late’. Some of the gendered terms that are applied to the creatures also got altered in this revision – so that the mouse’s tail is changed from ‘his tail’ to ‘its tail’, the Dodo referred to as a ‘he’ rather than an ‘it’, and the dormouse changed from ‘he’ to ‘it’ throughout the tea-party (though he survives as a male in the trial scene). As to spelling, ‘toffee’ reverts back to the ‘toffy’ of the original manuscript.
Apart from this characteristic punctuational fidgeting towards correctness and consistency – never fully realized, since certain inconsistencies remained despite his best efforts – Carroll made a number of tiny additions to the narrative in this edition. Shakespeare is said to have ‘stood’ rather than ‘sat’ in the pictures of him, for example! The most significant changes are a few minute but telling touches added to the dialogue and stage directions of the trial scene in Wonderland. They include changing ‘These were the verses the White Rabbit read:—’ to ‘There was dead silence in the court, whilst the White Rabbit read out these verses:—’ and adding a couple of further interpretations of the evidence by the