Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass - Lewis Carroll [3]
Both Alice books reflect Carroll’s interest in games. Among his dozens of privately printed pamphlets, many describe games he himself invented. They include variations of croquet, games played with pieces on a checkerboard, and a game he called “doublets” in which one tried in the fewest possible steps to change one word to another by altering one letter at a time, at each step forming a common word. In the first Alice book, playing cards provide the roles of courtiers, queens, kings, and laborers. In the sequel, cards are replaced by the kings, queens, and knights of chess. Each book is rich in word play, nonsense verse, mathematical whimsy, and logical paradoxes.
The Alice books swarm with sly implications that Victorian readers would grasp at once, but today have to be explained by footnotes such as you will find in the 1999 edition of my Annotated Alice. I will give only one amusing instance. When Humpty Dumpty shakes hands with Alice he extends only one finger. In Victorian days, when someone shook hands with a person of inferior social status, it was customary to extend only two fingers. Humpty, in the great pride that went before his fall, carries this ugly custom to its extreme.
Tenniel’s illustrations also have subtle features that are easily missed. Look carefully at the picture of Humpty seated on the wall. A cross section of the wall on the right reveals that the wall has a narrow ridge, like an inverted V. This of course renders the egg’s seat extremely precarious. In the picture of the Queen of Hearts asking Alice “What’s your name, child?” see if you can find the white rabbit. After Alice has gone through the looking-glass, note the grin on the back of the clock and the gargoyle face below the mantel. Tenniel slyly shaded the nose of the Jack of Hearts to suggest that he was a heavy drinker. For much more about Tenniel and his art see The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books, a delightful study by Michael Hancher (1985).
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published by London’s Macmillan in 1865. The covers are red cloth, with gold lettering on the spine. On the front cover is a picture of Alice holding a pig; on the back a picture of the Cheshire Cat. The print run was 2,000. Because Tenniel strongly objected to the quality of the printing of his pictures, Macmillan was forced at considerable expense to make a new printing. Copies of the first run were sold to an American publisher. The book was such a success that by 1899 there had been twenty-six new printings. Carroll continued to correct printer’s errors and make small changes in the text until the eighty-nine thousandth was issued in 1897, a year before his death.
Macmillan published Through the Looking-Glass in 1872. It, too, was bound in red cloth, with the Red Queen on the front cover and the White Queen on the back. It sold even faster than the first Alice book. Fifteen thousand copies were bought in the first seven weeks.
After Carroll’s death, at age sixty-five, new editions of his Alice books began to appear with illustrations by other artists. In 1901, Harper and Brothers published in America an edition of the first Alice book with pictures by the American artist Peter Newell. The following year it issued Newell’s illustrated edition of the second Alice book. His eighty full-page plates are reproduced in my More Annotated Alice (1990). Since then scores of artists, including the famous illustrator Arthur Rack-ham, have tried their hand on the Alice books. The Illustrators of Alice (1972), edited by Graham Overden, is devoted to the history of illustrated editions of Alice, with many handsome reproductions of their art. Some recent