Lewis Carroll, Introduction and Notes by Martin Gardner

The Annotated Alice

The Definitive Edition
Illustrations by John Tenniel

Notes to Chapter 1: Down the Rabbit Hole

1. Tenniel's pictures of Alice are not pictures of Alice Liddell, who had dark hair cut short with straight bangs across her forehead. Carroll sent Tenniel a photograph of Mary Hilton Badcock, another child-friend, recommending that he use her for a model, but whether Tenniel accepted this advice is a matter of dispute. That he did not is strongly suggested by these lines from a letter Carroll wrote some time after both Alice books had been published (the letter is quoted by Mrs. Lennon in her book on Carroll):

Mr. Tenniel is the only artist, who has drawn for me, who has resolutely refused to use a model, and declared he no more needed one than I should need a multiplication table to work a mathematical problem! I venture to think that he was mistaken and that for want of a model, he drew several pictures of "Alice" entirely out of proportion — head decidedly too large and feet decidedly too small.

In "Alice on the Stage," an article cited in the first note on the prefatory poem, Carroll gave the following description of his heroine's personality:

What wert thou, dream-Alice, in thy foster-father's eyes? How shall he picture thee? Loving, first, loving and gentle: loving as a dog (forgive the prosaic simile, but I know no earthly love so pure and perfect), and gentle as a fawn: then courteous — courteous to all, high or low, grand or grotesque, King or Caterpillar, even as though she were herself a King's daughter, and her clothing of wrought gold: then trustful, ready to accept the wildest impossibilities with all that utter trust that only dreamers know; and lastly, curious — wildly curious, and with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names — empty words signifying nothing!

I agree with correspondent Richard Hammerud that it was Carroll's intention to begin his fantasy with the word "Alice."

The symbol at the lower right corner, which you see on all of Tenniel's drawings, is a monogram of his initials, J. T.

2. Carroll was aware, of course, that in a normal state of free fall Alice could neither drop the jar (it would remain suspended in front of her) nor replace it on a shelf (her speed would be too great). It is interesting to note that in his novel Sylvie and Bruno, Chapter 8, Carroll describes the difficulty of having tea inside a falling house, as well as in a house being pulled downward at an even faster acceleration; anticipating in some respects the famous "thought experiment" in which Einstein used an imaginary falling elevator to explain certain aspects of relativity theory.

3. William Empson has pointed out (in the section on Lewis Carroll in his Some Versions of Pastoral) that this is the first death joke in the Alice books. There are many more to come.

4. In Carroll's day there was considerable popular speculation about what would happen if one fell through a hole that went straight through the center of the earth. Plutarch had asked the question and many famous thinkers, including Francis Bacon and Voltaire, had argued about it. Galileo (Dialogo dei Massimi Sistemi, Giornata Seconda, Florence edition of 1842, Vol. 1, pages 251–52), gave the correct answer: the object would fall with increasing speed but decreasing acceleration until it reached the center of the earth, at which spot its acceleration would be zero. Thereafter it would slow down in speed, with increasing deceleration, until it reached the opening at the other end. Then it would fall back again. By ignoring air resistance and the coriolis force resulting from the earth's rotation (unless the hole ran from pole to pole), the object would oscillate back and forth forever. Air resistance of course would eventually bring it to rest at the earth's center. The interested reader should consult "A Hole through the Earth," by the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, in The Strand Magazine, Vol. 38 (1909), page 348, if only to look at the lurid illustrations.

Carroll's interest in the matter is indicated by the fact that in Chapter 7 of his Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, there is described (in addition to a Mšbius strip, a projective plane, and other whimsical scientific and mathematical devices) a remarkable method of running trains with gravity as the sole power source. The track runs through a perfectly straight tunnel from one town to another. Since the middle of the tunnel is necessarily nearer the earth's center than its ends, the train runs downhill to the center, acquiring enough momentum to carry it up the other half of the tunnel. Curiously, such a train would make the trip (ignoring air resistance and friction of the wheels) in exactly the same time that it would take an object to fall through the center of the earth — a little more than forty-two minutes. This time is constant regardless of the tunnel's length.

The fall into the earth as a device for entering a wonderland has been used by many other writers of children's fantasy, notably by L. Frank Baum in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, and Ruth Plumly Thompson in The Royal Book of Oz. Baum also used the tube through the earth as an effective plot gimmick in Tik-Tok of Oz.

5. The Liddell sisters were fond of the family's two tabby cats, Dinah and Villikens, named after a popular song, "Villikens and His Dinah." Dinah and her two kittens, Kitty and Snowdrop, reappear in the first chapter of the second Alice book, and later, in Alice's dream, as the Red and White Queens.

6. A gold key that unlocked mysterious doors was a common object in Victorian fantasy. Here is the second stanza of Andrew Lang's "Ballade of the Bookworm":

One gift the fairies gave me (three
They commonly bestowed of yore):
The love of books, the golden key
That opens the enchanted door.

In his notes for an Oxford edition of the Alice books, Roger Green links this gold key to the magic key to Heaven in George MacDonald's famous fantasy tale "The Golden Key." The story first appeared in an 1867 book, Dealings with Fairies, two years after the publication of Alice in Wonderland, but Carroll and MacDonald were good friends and it is possible, Green writes, that Carroll saw the story in manuscript. MacDonald also wrote a poem titled "The Golden Key" that was published early enough (1861) for Carroll to have read it. The story is reprinted in Michael Hearn's splendid anthology The Victorian Fairy Tale Book (Pantheon, 1988).

7. T. S. Eliot revealed to the critic Louis L. Martz that he was thinking of this episode when he wrote the following lines for "Burnt Norton," the first poem in his Four Quartets:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future.
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

The little door to a secret garden also appears in Eliot's The Family Reunion. It was for him a metaphor for events that might have been, had one opened certain doors.

8. The Victorian medicine bottle had neither a screw top nor a label on the side. It was corked, with a paper label tied to the neck.

9. The "nice little stories," Charles Lovett reminds me, were not so nice. They were the traditional fairy tales, filled with episodes of horror and usually containing a pious moral. By doing away with morals, the Alice books opened up a new genre of fiction for children.

10. This is the first of twelve occasions in the book on which Alice alters in size. Richard Ellmann has suggested that Carroll may have been unconsciously symbolizing the great disparity between the small Alice whom he loved but could not marry and the large Alice she would soon become. See "On Alice's Changes in Size in Wonderland," by Selwyn Goodacre, in Jabberwocky (Winter 1977), for many discrepancies in Tenniel's pictures with respect to Alice's size.

11. Note Tweedledum's use of the same candle-flame metaphor in the fourth chapter of the second Alice book.

12. "alas for poor Alice!": Did Carroll intend a pun on "alas"? It is hard to be sure, but there is no question about the intent in Finnegans Wake (Viking revised edition, 1959, page 528) when James Joyce writes: "Alicious, twinstreams twinestraines, through alluring glass or alas in jumboland?" And again (page 270): "Though Wonderlawn's lost us for ever. Alis, alas, she broke the glass! Liddell lokker through the leafery, ours is mistery of pain."

For the hundreds of references to Dodgson and the Alice books in Finnegans Wake, see Ann McGarrity Buki's excellent paper "Lewis Carroll in Finnegans Wake," in Lewis Carroll: A Celebration (Clarkson N. Potter, 1982), edited by Edward Guiliano, and J. S. Atherton's earlier paper "Lewis Carroll and Finnegans Wake," in English Studies (February 1952). Most of the allusions are not in dispute, though what is one to make of such oddities as the identical initial letters of the names Alice Pleasance Liddell and Anna Livia Plurabelle? Is it a coincidence, like the correspondences in the names of Carroll and Alice (noticed by reader Dennis Green) with respect to word lengths, and the positions of vowels, consonants, and double letters in the last names?

ALICE LIDDELL
LEWIS CARROLL

More letterplay: Consider the initial consonants of "Dear Lewis Carroll." Backwards they are the initials of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

Of more serious interest is the fact that Alice had a son named Caryl Liddell Hargreaves. Another coincidence? Alice's one major romance, before she married Reginald Hargreaves, was with England's Prince Leopold. They met when he was a Christ Church undergraduate. Queen Victoria considered unthinkable his marrying anyone other than a princess, and Mrs. Liddell agreed. Alice wore a gift from the prince on her wedding gown, and she named her second son Leopold. A few weeks later, Prince Leopold, married to a princess, named a daughter Alice. It is hard to believe that when Alice called her third son Caryl she did not have her old mathematician friend in mind, but according to Anne Clark, in her marvelous book The Real Alice (Stein & Day, 1982), Alice always insisted that the name came from a novel. The novel's identity is unknown.

13. There is no evidence, Denis Crutch and R. B. Shaberman maintain in their booklet Under the Quizzing Glass (Magpie Press, 1972), that Alice Liddell liked to pretend she was two people. However, in keeping with their contention that Carroll injected much of himself into his fictional Alice, they remind us that Carroll was always careful to keep separate Charles Dodgson, the Oxford mathematician, and Lewis Carroll, writer of children's books and lover of little girls.

1999 / hardcover / ISBN 0-393-04847-0 / 7 1/2" X 9 1/4" / Line Drawings / 384 pages / LITERATURE