Complete Alice in Wonderland - L. Carroll [2]
On July 4, Carroll made the following entry in his diary:
“Duckworth and I made an expedition up the river to Godstow with the 3 Liddells: we had tea on the bank there, and did not reach Christ Church again till 1/2 past 8, when we took them on to my rooms to see my collection of micro-photographs, and restored them to the Deanery [their home], just before 9.”
Robinson Duckworth’s own reminiscences of that fateful day were as follows:
“I was very closely associated with him [Lewis Carroll] in the production and publication of Alice in Wonderland. I rowed stroke and he rowed bow in the famous Long Vacation voyage to Godstow, when the three Miss Liddells were our passengers, and the story was actually composed and spoken over my shoulder for the benefit of Alice Liddell, who was acting as ‘cox’ of our gig. I remember turning round and saying, ‘Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, I’m inventing as we go along.’ I also well remember how, when we had conducted the three children back to the Deanery, Alice said, as she bade us good-night, ‘Oh, Mr. Dodgson, I wish you would write out Alice’s adventures for me.’ He said he should try, and he afterwards told me that he sat up nearly the whole night, committing to a MS. book his recollections of the drolleries with which he had enlivened the afternoon. He added illustrations of his own, and presented the volume, which used often to be seen on the drawing-room table at the Deanery.”
In retrospect, Alice’s memories of those golden summer days may be the most important of all. Later in life, she explained the secret of her stories in this way:
“Most of Mr. Dodgson’s stories were told to us on river expeditions to Nuneham or Godstow, near Oxford. My eldest sister, now Mrs. Skene, was ‘Prima,’ [Latin, roughly translated as ‘first daughter,’ or ‘eldest’] I was ‘Secunda,’ [‘second’] and ‘Tertia’ [‘third’] was my sister Edith. I believe the beginning of Alice was told one summer afternoon when the sun was so burning that we had landed in the meadows down [sic] the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a new-made hayrick. Here from all three came the old petition of ‘tell us a story,’ and so began the ever-delightful tale.
“Sometimes to tease us—and perhaps being really tired—Mr. Dodgson would stop suddenly and say, ‘And that’s all till next time.’ ‘Ah, but it is next time,’ would be the exclamation from all three; and after some persuasion the story would start afresh.
“Another day, perhaps the story would begin in the boat, and Mr. Dodgson, in the middle of telling a thrilling adventure, would pretend to go fast asleep, to our great dismay.”
Carroll, we know now, was indeed growing weary of the endless storytelling, as he wrote this aside in his diary on August 6, 1862: “... Had to go on with my interminable fairy-tale of ‘Alice’s Adventures.’” We are fortunate that he did so, and that Alice persisted in asking for more stories!
Surely, the tale would have died if Alice had not insisted on its immortality. Captain Caryl Hargreaves (Alice’s son), sharing his mother’s memoirs with the world in 1932, revealed the following additional secrets which bring us fuller understanding:
“Nearly all of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground [the first draft of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland] was told on that blazing summer afternoon with the heat haze shimmering over the meadows where the party landed to shelter for a while in the shadow cast by the haycocks near Godstow. I [Alice] think the stories he told us that afternoon must have been better than usual, because I have such a distinct recollection of the expedition, and also, on the next day I started to pester him to write down the story for me, which I had never done before. It was due to my ‘going on, going on’ and importunity that, after saying he would think about it, he eventually gave the hesitating promise which started him writing it down