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plain, and up the stream went slowly gliding a boat with a merry party of children on board—she could hear their voices and laughter like music over the water—and among them was another little Alice, who sat listening with bright eager eyes to a tale that was being told, and she listened for the words of the tale, and lo! it was the dream of her own little sister. So the boat wound slowly along, beneath the bright summer-day, with its merry crew and its music of voices and laughter, till it passed round one of the many turnings of the stream, and she saw it no more.

Then she thought, (in a dream within the dream, as it were,) how this same little Alice would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman: and how she would keep, through her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather around her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a wonderful tale, perhaps even with these very adventures of the little Alice of long-ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.

THE END.

PART VII

REFLECTIONS ON THE UNDER GROUND

By Kent David Kelly

Overview

ALICE’S ADVENTURES UNDER GROUND, as mentioned prior, was illustrated by Lewis Carroll himself. The Alice we see here is not the blond cherub who the world has come to know and love. Instead, she has long dark hair, and appears more as an idealized Pre-Raphaelite vision of Alice Liddell herself. The text is odd as well, particularly in choices of capitalization. For example, Carroll used underlines throughout the manuscript text; in the published edition, these would become italicized.

Despite curiosities in word choice and formatting and Carroll’s charming diction, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is primarily of interest to us because of the changes which occurred when Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was being prepared for publication. Some of these “secrets” are explored here.

The Preface

The grim, divine, hopeful and nostalgic tone of Carroll’s 1886 preface seems odd and out of place, until we recall that he had written letters to his aged child-friend, Alice Liddell, and was publishing this manuscript after seeing it for the first time in twenty years.

The initial question in the preface, “Who will Riddle me the How and the Why?” comes from the poem “The How and the Why,” published in Poems Chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (who Carroll met and greatly admired). We will glimpse more of Tennyson in The Hunting of the Snark.

Mention of the Missing

The following characters and episodes were specifically written for the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and do not appear in Alice’s Adventures Under Ground: the caucus-race; Fury (the tormentor of the Mouse); the Duchess and her retinue (the Fish-Footman, Frog-Footman, Cook, Pig-Baby and the Cheshire-Cat); the Mad Tea-Party (with the March Hare, the Dormouse and the Hatter); the Executioner; the explanation of the Underwater School; the songs of the Mock Turtle; the extended court scene with the jurors and recurrence of many characters; and the Carrollian poem “She’s All My Fancy Painted Him.”

Chapter I

The Secret Mouse Who Watches Over Her: When Alice—thwarted in her first attempts to get through the garden door—sits down and cries, there is an interesting illustration by Carroll, which shows the Mouse standing directly in front of her (on dry land) as he regards the curious child. Alice never knew he was there, and since this illustration was not recreated in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the reader never knew either!

The White Rabbit’s Flowers: In this original version, the White Rabbit carries a nosegay, or bouquet of flowers, instead of the Duchess’s fan. Alice shrinks not by fanning herself, but by smelling the flowers. The nosegay is inherently more comedic, since rabbits of course love to eat flowers; however, Carroll may have decided that the fan was more appropriate, because