part0017

F or a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood—(she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish)—and rapped loudly at the door with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round face, and large eyes like a frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen.

The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other, saying, in a solemn tone, “For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.” The Frog-Footman repeated, in the same solemn tone, only changing the order of the words a little, “From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play croquet.”

Alice laughed so much at this, that she had to run back into the wood for fear of their hearing her; and, when she next peeped out, the Fish-Footman was gone, and the other was sitting on the ground near the door, staring stupidly up into the sky.

“There’s no sort of use in knocking,” said the Footman, “and that for two reasons. First, because I’m on the same side of the door as you are: secondly, because they’re making such a noise inside, no one could possibly hear you.” And certainly there was a most extraordinary noise going on within—a constant howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a dish or kettle had been broken to pieces.

“There might be some sense in your knocking,” the Footman went on, without attending to her, “if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were inside, you might knock, and I could let you out, you know.” He was looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking, and this Alice thought decidedly uncivil. “But perhaps he ca’n’t help it,” she said to herself; “his eyes are so very nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might answer questions.—How am I to get in?” she repeated, aloud.

At this moment the door of the house opened, and a large plate came skimming out, straight at the Footman’s head: it just grazed his nose, and broke to pieces against one of the trees behind him.

It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. “It’s really dreadful,” she muttered to herself, “the way all the creatures argue. It’s enough to drive one crazy!”

The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end to the other: the Duchess 1 was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle, nursing a baby: the cook was leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron which seemed to be full of soup.

There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed occasionally; and as for the baby, it was sneezing and howling alternately without a moment’s pause. The only two creatures in the kitchen, that did not sneeze, were the cook, and a large cat, which was lying on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear.

“Please would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, for she was not quite sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, “why your cat grins like that?”

She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped; but she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the baby, and not to her, so she took courage, and went on again:—

Alice did not at all like the tone of this remark, and thought it would be as well to introduce some other subject of conversation. While she was trying to fix on one, the cook took the cauldron of soup off the fire, and at once set to work throwing everything within her reach at the Duchess and the baby—the fire-irons came first; then followed a shower of saucepans, plates, and dishes. The Duchess took no notice of them even when they hit her; and the baby was howling so much already, that it was quite impossible to say whether the blows hurt it or not.

“Oh, please mind what you’re doing!” cried Alice, jumping up and down in an agony of terror. “Oh, there goes his precious nose!”, as an unusually large saucepan flew close by it, and very nearly carried it off.

“Which would not be an advantage,” said Alice, who felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. “Just think what work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis—”

Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant to take the hint; but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and seemed not to be listening, so she went on again: “Twenty-four hours, I think ; or is it twelve? I—”

“Oh, don’t bother me !” said the Duchess. “I never could abide figures!” And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line:— 4

While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could hardly hear the words:—

“Here! You may nurse it a bit, if you like!” the Duchess said to Alice, flinging the baby at her as she spoke. “I must go and get ready to play croquet with the Queen,” and she hurried out of the room. The cook threw a frying-pan after her as she went, but it just missed her.

Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, “just like a star-fish,” thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.

As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it (which was to twist it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right ear and left foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself), she carried it out into the open air. “If I don’t take this child away with me,” thought Alice, “they’re sure to kill it in a day or two. Wouldn’t it be murder to leave it behind?” She said the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off sneezing by this time). “Don’t grunt,” said Alice; “that’s not at all a proper way of expressing yourself.”

The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a very turn-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose: also its eyes were getting extremely small for a baby: altogether Alice did not like the look of the thing at all. “But perhaps it was only sobbing,” she thought, and looked into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears.

No, there were no tears. “If you’re going to turn into a pig, my dear,” said Alice, seriously, “I’ll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!” The poor little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and they went on for some while in silence.

Alice was just beginning to think to herself, “Now, what am I to do with this creature, when I get it home?” when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it any further. 5

So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. “If it had grown up,” she said to herself, “it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.” And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself “if one only knew the right way to change them—” when she was a little startled by seeing the Chesire-Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off. 6

The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.

“Cheshire-Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. “Come, it’s pleased so far,” thought Alice, and she went on. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.” 8

“Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.”

Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so well used to queer things happening. While she was still looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly appeared again.

Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear, and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March Hare was said to live. “I’ve seen hatters before,” she said to herself: “the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps, as this is May, it wo’n’t be raving mad—at least not so mad as it was in March.” As she said this, she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree. 10

“All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house of the March Hare: she thought it must be the right house, because the chimneys were shaped like ears and the roof was thatched with fur. It was so large a house, that she did not like to go nearer till she had nibbled some more of the left-hand bit of mushroom, and raised herself to about two feet high: even then she walked up towards it rather timidly, saying to herself “Suppose it should be raving mad after all! I almost wish I’d gone to see the Hatter instead!”

The chin of Tenniel’s Duchess is not very little or sharp, but she is certainly ugly. It seems likely that he copied a painting attributed to the sixteenth-century Flemish artist Quentin Matsys (his name has variant spellings). The portrait is popularly regarded as one of the fourteenth-century duchess Margaret of Carinthia and Tyrol. She had the reputation of being the ugliest woman in history. (Her nickname, “Maultasche,” means “pocket-mouthed.”) Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel The Ugly Duchess is about her sad life. See also “A Portrait of the Ugliest Princess in History,” by W. A. Baillie-Grohman, Burlington Magazine (April 1921).

On the other hand, there are numerous engravings and drawings almost identical with Matsys’s painting, including a drawing by Francesco Melzi, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci. Part of the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace, it is said to be a copy of a lost original by da Vinci! For the confusing history of these pictures, which may have no connection whatever with Duchess Margaret, see Chapter 4 of Michael Hancher’s, The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books.

For Savile Clarke’s stage production of Alice, Carroll provided the following lines to be spoken by the cook while she stirs the soup: “There’s nothing like pepper, says I. . . . Not half enough yet. Nor a quarter enough.” The cook then recites, like a witch chanting a charm:

I quote from Charles C. Lovett’s valuable book Alice on Stage: A History of the Early Theatrical Productions of Alice in Wonderland (Meckler, 1990). The lines appeared both in the stage production and in the script’s published version.

David Greene sent me this quotation from an 1808 letter of Charles Lamb: “I made a pun the other day, and palmed it upon Holcroft, who grinned like a Cheshire cat. Why do cats grin in Cheshire? Because it was once a county palatine and the cats cannot help laughing whenever they think of it, though I see no great joke in it.”

Hans Haverman wrote to suggest that Carroll’s vanishing cat might derive from the waning of the moon—the moon has long been associated with lunacy—as it slowly turns into a fingernail crescent, resembling a grin, before it finally disappears.

Did T. S. Eliot have the Cheshire Cat in mind when he concluded “Morning at the Window” with this couplet?

A 1989 pamphlet published in Japan, Lewis Carroll and His World—Cheshire Cat, by Katsuko Kasai, quotes the following lines from Thackeray’s novel Newcomes (1855): “That woman grins like a Cheshire cat. . . . Who was the naturalist who first discovered that peculiarity of the cats in Cheshire?” Kasai also quotes from Captain Gosse’s A Dictionary of the Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence (1811): “He grins like a Cheshire cat; said of any one who shews his teeth and gums in laughing.” Other quotes and various theories about the phrase’s origin are discussed by Kasai. In a 1995 letter to me, Kasai makes an interesting conjecture. We know that Cheshire cheese was once sold in the shape of a grinning cat. One would tend to slice off the cheese at the cat’s tail end until finally only the grinning head would remain on the plate.

Knight Letter, the official organ of The Lewis Carroll Society of North America, published Joel Birenbaum’s article (Summer 1992), “Have We Finally Found the Cheshire Cat?” Birenbaum reports on his tour of St. Peter’s Church, in Croft-on-Tees, where Carroll’s father was rector. On the chancel’s east wall he noticed a stone carving of a cat’s head, floating in the air a few feet above the floor. When he got on his knees for closer inspection and looked up, the cat’s mouth appeared as a broad grin. His discovery made the front page of the Chicago Tribune (July 13, 1992).

Whoopi Goldberg was the Cheshire Cat in NBC’s undistinguished, boring television version of Alice in Wonderland that aired on February 28, 1999.

John M. Shaw, in The Parodies of Lewis Carroll and their Originals (the catalog and notes of an exhibition at the Florida State University Library, December 1960) reports that he was unsuccessful in his search for Langford’s version; in fact he failed to find Langford himself. Shaw did find the poem on page 15 of The Eolian, a book of verse published by Bates in 1849. Shaw points out that Bates’s son, in a preface to his father’s Poetical Works (1870) states that his father had indeed written this widely quoted poem.

The Langford family tradition is that George wrote the poem while visiting his birthplace in Ireland in 1845. All British printings of the poem prior to 1900 are either anonymous or credited to Langford. No known printing of the poem in England predates 1848.

Bates’s case was strongly boosted by the discovery in 1986 that the poem, signed “D.B.,” appeared on the second page of the Philadelphia Inquirer, July 15, 1845. Unless an earlier printing can be found in a British or Irish newspaper, it seems highly improbable that Langford could have written it, although a capital mystery remains. How did his name become so firmly attached to the poem in England?

For a detailed history of the controversy, see my essay “Speak Gently,” in Lewis Carroll Observed (Clarkson N. Potter, 1976), edited by Edward Guiliano, and reprinted with additions in my Order and Surprise.

Tenniel’s picture of Alice holding the pig-baby appears, with the baby redrawn as a human one, on the front of the envelope holding the Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case. This was a cardboard case designed to hold postage stamps, invented by Carroll and sold by a firm in Oxford. When you slip the case out of its envelope, you find on the front of it the same picture except that the baby has become a pig, as in Tenniel’s original drawing. The back of the envelope and case provide a similar transformation from Tenniel’s picture of the grinning Cheshire Cat to the picture in which the cat has mostly faded away. Slipped into the case was a tiny booklet titled Eight or Nine Words about Letter Writing. This delightfully written essay by Carroll opens as follows:

Some American writer has said “the snakes in this district may be divided into one species—the venomous.” The same principle applies here. Postage-Stamp-Cases may be divided into one species, the “Wonderland.” Imitations of it will soon appear, no doubt: but they cannot include the two Pictorial Surprises, which are copyright.

You don’t see why I call them ‘Surprises’? Well, take the Case in your left hand, and regard it attentively. You see Alice nursing the Duchess’s Baby? (An entirely new combination, by the way: it doesn’t occur in the book.) Now, with your right thumb and forefinger, lay hold of the little book, and suddenly pull it out. The Baby has turned into a Pig! If that doesn’t surprise you, why, I suppose you wouldn’t be surprised if your own Mother-in-law suddenly turned into a Gyroscope!

Frankie Morris, in Jabberwocky (Autumn 1985), suggests that the baby’s transformation into a pig may derive from a famous prank played on James I by the Countess of Buckingham. She arranged for His Majesty to witness the baptism of what he thought was an infant in arms but was actually a pig, an animal that James I particularly loathed.

John Kemeny places Alice’s question, and the Cat’s famous answer, at the head of his chapter on science and values in A Philosopher Looks at Science, 1959. In fact each chapter of Kemeny’s book is preceded by an appropriate quote from Alice. The Cat’s answer expresses very precisely the eternal cleavage between science and ethics. As Kemeny makes clear, science cannot tell us where to go, but after this decision is made on other grounds, it can tell us the best way to get there.

I am told there is a passage in the Talmud that says: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”

“Did the Mad Hatter Have Mercury Poisoning?” is the title of an article by H. A. Waldron in The British Medical Journal (December 24–31, 1983). Dr. Waldron argues that the Mad Hatter was not such a victim, but Dr. Selwyn Goodacre and two other physicians dispute this in the January 28, 1984, issue.

Two British scientists, Anthony Holley and Paul Greenwood, reported (in Nature, June 7, 1984) on extensive observations that fail to support a folk belief that male hares go into a frenzy during the March rutting season. The main behavior of hares throughout their entire eight-month breeding period consists in males chasing females, then getting into boxing matches with them. March is no different from any other month. It was Erasmus who wrote “Mad as a marsh hare.” The scientists think “marsh” got corrupted to “March” in later decades.

When Tenniel drew the March Hare he showed wisps of straw on the hare’s head. Carroll does not mention this, but at the time it was a symbol, both in art and on the stage, of madness. In The Nursery “Alice ” Carroll writes, “That’s the March Hare with the long ears, and straws mixed up with his hair. The straws showed he was mad—I don’t know why.” For more on this, see Michael Hancher’s chapter on straw as a sign of insanity in The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice ” Books. In Harry Furniss’s drawings of the Mad Gardener in Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno books you’ll see similar straw in the Gardener’s hair and clothing.

The Hatter and the Hare appear at least twice in Finnegans Wake : “Hatters hares” (page 83, line 1, of the Viking revised edition, 1959), and “hitters hairs” (page 84, line 28).

Query: when we are dreaming and, as often happens, have a dim consciousness of the fact and try to wake, do we not say and do things which in waking life would be insane? May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: “Sleep hath its own world,” and it is often as lifelike as the other.

THEAETETUS : I certainly cannot undertake to argue that madmen or dreamers think truly, when they imagine, some of them that they are gods, and others that they can fly, and are flying in their sleep.

SOCRATES : A question which I think that you must often have heard persons ask: how can you determine whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

THEAETETUS : Indeed, Socrates, I do not know how to prove the one any more than the other, for in both cases the facts precisely correspond; and there is no difficulty in supposing that during all this discussion we have been talking to one another in a dream; and when in a dream we seem to be narrating dreams, the resemblance of the two states is quite astonishing.

SOCRATES : You see, then, that a doubt about the reality of sense is easily raised, since there may even be a doubt whether we are awake or in a dream. And as our time is equally divided between sleeping and waking, in either sphere of existence the soul contends that the thoughts which are present to our minds at the time are true; and during one half of our lives we affirm the truth of the one, and, during the other half, of the other; and are equally confident of both.