Complete Alice in Wonderland - L. Carroll [49]
Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?: This is one of the first questions routinely asked in the parlor game which is known to us now as “Twenty Questions.”
A Brief History of Mock Turtle Soup: In Victorian times, turtle soup was an expensive delicacy. The middle class—following the “noble” recipe in all other particulars—substituted veal for the meat of the green sea turtle. The resulting dish was called mock turtle soup. Seeing an absurdity he could not resist making fun of, Carroll decided that such meat came from Mock Turtles, complete with calves’ heads! (Of course, this makes the Mock Turtle a symbol of the upward middle class and its students, just as his friend the Gryphon represents the upper class students of Oxford.)
The Gryphon and the Mock Turtle: These two characters are affectionate parodies of students who never made anything of themselves after leaving college. The Gryphon sleeps all day and has poor grammar. The Mock Turtle, in a far worse state, feels exceedingly sorry for himself and laments not only the things he did, but also the things he never got around to doing. They are an interesting pair because they are both hybrid creatures, made up of mixtures of animal parts that are purely fantastical in nature. Perhaps they have no future because they can only exist in the impossibility of Wonderland.
The Gryphon of the Underwater School: The coat of arms for Trinity College, Oxford, features a gryphon prominently. As such, the Gryphon of Wonderland could be seen as the heraldic symbol of the Underwater School. It may be that Carroll was poking fun at students who pride themselves on representing the school and its history, yet care little for their own studies.
The Origin of the Mock Turtle?: There is an entry in Carroll’s diary for May 9, 1861 which may have served as a partial inspiration for the overly earnest Mock Turtle: “… The former gave an amusing account of having seen Oliver Wendell Holmes in a fishmonger’s, lecturing extempore on the head of a freshly killed turtle, whose eyes and jaws still showed muscular action: the lecture of course being all ‘cram,’ but accepted as sober earnest by the mob outside.”
Reeling, Writhing…: The courses taught in the Underwater School are idle puns on the lessons taught in every school (“Reeling” instead of “reading,” “Writhing” instead of “writing” and so forth). To children such as Alice, of course, such lessons could easily be regarding as nonsense!
The Nature of the Conger Eel: From the description of the artistic courses provided (“Drawling” instead of “drawing,” “Stretching” instead of “sketching,” and “Fainting in Coils” instead of “painting in oils”), we know that the Conger Eel is probably a caricature of the Liddells’ tutor of the arts, John Ruskin. Ruskin was quite the famous (and eccentric!) artist of the age. When Carroll first met Ruskin, however, he was not impressed. He wrote on October 27, 1857, “At Common Room breakfast met, for the first time, John Ruskin. I had a little conversation with him, but not enough to bring out anything characteristic or striking in him. His appearance was rather disappointing—a general feebleness of expression, with no commanding air, or any external signs of deep thought, as one would have expected to see in such a man.” It is interesting to think that this bland impression may have immortalized Ruskin as an eel with a fixed expression!
The Old Crab: As hinted earlier, the particular crabby classics master in question is none other than Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church and Alice’s father. He is probably related by marriage to the old female Crab which Alice met at the Pool of Tears!
Chapter X
The Challenge of the Quadrille: The quadrille is an exacting formal dance, in which