O
ne thing was certain, that the white
kitten had had nothing to do with it—it was the black kitten’s fault entirely. For the white kitten had been having its face washed by the old cat for the last quarter of an hour (and bearing it pretty well, considering): so you see that it couldn’t
have had any hand in the mischief.
The way Dinah washed her children’s faces was this: first she held the poor thing down by its ear with one paw, and then with the other paw she rubbed its face all over, the wrong way, beginning at the nose: and just now, as I said, she was hard at work on the white kitten, which was lying quite still and trying to purr—no doubt feeling that it was all meant for its good.
But the black kitten had been finished with earlier in the afternoon, and so, while Alice was sitting curled up in a corner of the great arm-chair, half talking to herself and half asleep, the kitten had been having a grand game of romps with the ball of worsted Alice had been trying to wind up, and had been rolling it up and down till it had all come undone again; and there it
was, spread over the hearth-rug, all knots and tangles, with the kitten running after its own tail in the middle.
“Oh, you wicked wicked little thing!” cried Alice, catching up the kitten, and giving it a little kiss to make it understand that it was in disgrace. “Really, Dinah ought to have taught you better manners! You ought,
Dinah, you know you ought!” she added, looking reproachfully at the old cat, and speaking in as cross a voice as she could manage—and then she scrambled back into the arm-chair, taking the kitten and the worsted with her, and began winding up the ball again. But she didn’t get on very fast, as she was talking all the time, sometimes to the kitten, and sometimes to herself. Kitty sat very demurely on her knee, pretending to watch the progress of the winding, and now and then putting out one paw and gently touching the ball, as if it would be glad to help if it might.
“Do you know what to-morrow is, Kitty?” Alice began. “You’d have guessed if you’d been up in the window with me—only Dinah was making you tidy, so you couldn’t. I was watching the boys getting in sticks for the bonfire
1
—and it wants plenty of sticks, Kitty! Only it got so cold, and it snowed so, they had to leave off. Never mind, Kitty, we’ll go and see the bonfire to-morrow.” Here Alice wound two or three turns of the worsted round the kitten’s neck, just to see how it would look: this led to a scramble, in which the ball rolled down upon the floor, and yards and yards of it got unwound again.
“Do you know, I was so angry, Kitty,” Alice went on, as soon as they were comfortably settled again, “when I saw all the mischief you had been doing, I was very nearly opening the window, and putting you out into the snow! And you’d have deserved it, you little mischievous darling! What have you got to say for yourself? Now don’t interrupt me!” she went on, holding up one finger. “I’m going to tell you all your faults. Number one: you squeaked twice while Dinah was washing your face this morning. Now you ca’n’t deny it, Kitty: I heard you! What’s that you say?” (pretending that the kitten was speaking). “Her paw went into your eye? Well, that’s your
fault, for keeping your eyes open—if you’d shut them tight up, it wouldn’t have happened. Now don’t make any more excuses, but listen! Number two: you pulled Snowdrop
2
away by the tail just as I had put down the saucer of milk before her! What, you were thirsty, were you? How do you know she wasn’t thirsty too? Now for number three: you unwound every bit of the worsted while I wasn’t looking!
“That’s three faults, Kitty, and you’ve not been punished for any of them yet. You know I’m saving up all your punishments for Wednesday week
3
—Suppose they had saved up all my
punishments?” she went on, talking more to herself than the kitten. “What would
they do at the end of a year? I should be sent to prison, I suppose, when the day came. Or—let me see—
suppose each punishment was to be going without a dinner: then, when the miserable day came, I should have to go without fifty dinners at once! Well, I shouldn’t mind that
much! I’d far rather go without them than eat them!
“Do you hear the snow against the window-panes, Kitty? How nice and soft it sounds! Just as if some one was kissing the window all over outside. I wonder if the snow loves
the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says ‘Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.’ And when they wake up in the summer, Kitty, they dress themselves all in green, and dance about—whenever the wind blows—oh, that’s very pretty!” cried Alice, dropping the ball of worsted to clap her hands. “And I do so wish
it was true! I’m sure the woods look sleepy in the autumn, when the leaves are getting brown.
“Kitty, can you play chess? Now, don’t smile, my dear, I’m asking it seriously. Because, when we were playing just now, you watched just as if you understood it: and when I said ‘Check!’ you purred! Well, it was
a nice check, Kitty, and really I might have won, if it hadn’t been for that nasty Knight, that came wriggling
4
down among my pieces. Kitty, dear, let’s pretend—” And here I wish I could tell you half the things Alice used to say, beginning with her favourite phrase “Let’s pretend.” She had had quite a long argument with her sister only the day before—all because Alice had begun with “Let’s pretend we’re kings and queens”; and her sister, who liked being very exact, had argued that they couldn’t, because there were only two of them, and Alice had been reduced at last to say “Well, you
can be one of them, then, and I’ll
be all the rest.” And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyæna, and you’re a bone!”
But this is taking us away from Alice’s speech to the kitten. “Let’s pretend that you’re the Red Queen, Kitty! Do you know, I think if you sat up and folded your arms, you’d look exactly like her. Now do try, there’s a dear!” And Alice got the Red Queen off
the table, and set it up before the kitten as a model for it to imitate: however, the thing didn’t succeed, principally, Alice said, because the kitten wouldn’t fold its arms properly. So, to punish it, she held it up to the Looking-glass, that it might see how sulky it was, “—and if you’re not good directly,” she added, “I’ll put you through into Looking-glass House. How would you like that
?
“Now, if you’ll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I’ll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there’s the room you can see through the glass—that’s just the same as our drawing-room, only the things go the other way.
5
I can see all of it when I get upon a chair—all but the bit just behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see that
bit! I want so much to know whether they’ve a fire in the winter: you never can
tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too—but that may be only pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way: I know that,
because I’ve held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room.
“How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they’d give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink
6
—but oh, Kitty! now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep
of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through—” She was up on the chimney-piece
7
while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was
beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.
In another moment Alice was through the glass,
8
and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was to look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind. “So
I shall be as warm here as I was in the old room,” thought Alice: “warmer, in fact, because there’ll be no one here to scold me away from the fire. Oh, what fun it’ll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and ca’n’t get at me!”
Then she began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but that all the rest was as different as possible. For instance, the pictures on the wall next the fire seemed to be all alive, and the very clock on the chimney-piece (you know you can only see the back of it in the Looking-glass) had got the face of a little old man, and grinned at her.
“They don’t keep this room so tidy as the other,” Alice thought to herself, as she noticed several of the chessmen down in the hearth among the cinders; but in another moment, with a little “Oh!” of surprise, she was down on her hands and knees watching them. The chessmen were walking about, two and two!
“Here are the Red King and the Red Queen,” Alice said (in a whisper, for fear of frightening them), “and there are the White King and the White Queen sitting on the edge of the shovel—and here are two Castles walking arm in arm
9
—I don’t think they can hear me,” she went on, as she put her head closer down, “and I’m nearly sure they ca’n’t see me. I feel somehow as if I was getting invisible—”
Here something began squeaking on the table behind Alice, and made her turn her head just in time to see one of the White Pawns roll over and begin kicking: she watched it with great curiosity to see what would happen next.
“It is the voice of my child!” the White Queen cried out, as she rushed past the King, so violently that she knocked him over among the cinders. “My precious Lily! My imperial kitten!” and she began scrambling wildly up the side of the fender.
“Imperial fiddlestick!” said the King, rubbing his nose, which had been hurt by the fall. He had a right to be a little
annoyed with the Queen, for he was covered with ashes from head to foot.
Alice was very anxious to be of use, and, as the poor little Lily was nearly screaming herself into a fit, she hastily picked up the Queen and set her on the table by the side of her noisy little daughter.
The Queen gasped, and sat down: the rapid journey through
the air had quite taken away her breath, and for a minute or two she could do nothing but hug the little Lily in silence. As soon as she had recovered her breath a little, she called out to the White King, who was sitting sulkily among the ashes, “Mind the volcano!”
“What volcano?” said the King, looking up anxiously into the fire, as if he thought that was the most likely place to find one.
“Blew—me—up,” panted the Queen, who was still a little out of breath. “Mind you come up—the regular way—don’t get blown up!”
Alice watched the White King as he slowly struggled up from bar to bar,
10
till at last she said “Why, you’ll be hours and hours getting to the table, at that rate. I’d far better help you, hadn’t I?” But the King took no notice of the question: it was quite clear that he could neither hear her nor see her.
So Alice picked him up very gently, and lifted him across more slowly than she had lifted the Queen, that she mightn’t take his breath away; but, before she put him on the table, she thought she might as well dust him a little, he was so covered with ashes.
She said afterwards that she had never seen in all her life such a face as the King made, when he found himself held in the air by an invisible hand, and being dusted: he was far too much astonished to cry out, but his eyes and his mouth went on getting larger and larger, and rounder and rounder, till her hand shook so with laughing that she nearly let him drop upon the floor.
“Oh! please
don’t make such faces, my dear!” she cried out, quite forgetting that the King couldn’t hear her. “You make me laugh so that I can hardly hold you! And don’t keep your mouth so wide open! All the ashes will get into it—there, now I think you’re tidy enough!” she added, as she smoothed his hair, and set him upon the table near the Queen.
The King immediately fell flat on his back,
11
and lay perfectly
still; and Alice was a little alarmed at what she had done, and went round the room to see if she could find any water to throw over him. However, she could find nothing but a bottle of ink, and when she got back with it she found he had recovered, and he and the Queen were talking together in a frightened whisper—so low, that Alice could hardly hear what they said.
The King was saying “I assure you, my dear, I turned cold to the very ends of my whiskers!”
To which the Queen replied “You haven’t got any whiskers.”
12
“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never
forget!”
“You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”
Alice looked on with great interest as the King took an enormous memorandum-book out of his pocket, and began writing. A sudden thought struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some way over his shoulder, and began writing for him.
13
The poor King looked puzzled and unhappy, and struggled with the pencil for some time without saying anything; but Alice was too strong for him, and at last he panted out “My dear! I really must
get a thinner pencil. I ca’n’t manage this one a bit: it writes all manner of things that I don’t intend—”
“What manner of things?” said the Queen, looking over the book (in which Alice had put “The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He balances very badly
”.14
“That’s not a memorandum of your
feelings!”
There was a book lying near Alice on the table, and while she sat watching the White King (for she was still a little anxious about him, and had the ink all ready to throw over him, in case he fainted again), she turned over the leaves, to find some part that she could read, “—for it’s all in some language I don’t know,” she said to herself.
It was like this.
She puzzled over this for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her. “Why, it’s a Looking-glass book, of course! And, if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again.”
15
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather
hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody
killed something:
that’s clear, at any rate—”
42
“But oh!” thought Alice, suddenly jumping up, “if I don’t make haste, I shall have to go back through the Looking-glass, before I’ve seen what the rest of the house is like! Let’s have a
look at the garden first!” She was out of the room in a moment, and ran down stairs—or, at least, it wasn’t exactly running, but a new invention for getting down stairs quickly and easily, as Alice said to herself. She just kept the tips of her fingers on the hand-rail, and floated gently down without even touching the stairs with her feet: then she floated on through the hall, and would have gone straight out at the door in the same way, if she hadn’t caught hold of the door-post. She was getting a little giddy with so much floating in the air, and was rather glad to find herself walking again in the natural way.
This leaves open the question of whether the year is 1859 (when Alice actually was seven), 1860, 1861, or 1862 when Carroll told and wrote down the story of Alice’s first adventure. November 4, 1859, was a Friday. In 1860 it was Sunday, in 1861 Monday, and in 1862 Tuesday. The last date seems the most plausible in view of Alice’s remark to the kitten (in the next paragraph but one) that she is saving up her punishments until a week from Wednesday.
Mrs. Mavis Baitey, in her booklet Alice’s Adventures in Oxford
(A Pitkin Pictorial Guide, 1980), argues that the day was March 10, 1863, the wedding day of the Prince of Wales. The occasion was celebrated at Oxford with bonfires and fireworks, and in his diary
Carroll tells of taking Alice on an evening tour through the university: “It was delightful to see the thorough abandonment with which Alice enjoyed the whole thing.” However, Carroll’s diary for March 9 and 10 makes no mention of the snow Alice speaks of. However, Mrs. Baitey’s conjecture is supported by the fact that in England snow is very rare in early November and quite common in March.
Kitty and Snowdrop, the black and white kittens, reflect the chessboard’s black and white squares, and the red and white pieces of the book’s chess game.
As children, we lived in Onslow Square and used to play in the garden behind the houses. Charles Dodgson used to stay with an old uncle there, and walk up and down, his hands behind him, on the strip of lawn. One day, hearing my name, he called me to him saying, “So you are another Alice. I’m very fond of Alices. Would you like to come and see something which is rather puzzling?” We followed him into his house which opened, as ours
did, upon the garden, into a room full of furniture with a tall mirror standing across one corner.
“Now,” he said, giving me an orange, “first tell me which hand you have got that in.” “The right,” I said. “Now,” he said, “go and stand before that glass, and tell me which hand the little girl you see there has got it in.” After some perplexed contemplation, I said, “The left hand.” “Exactly,” he said, “and how do you explain that?” I couldn’t explain it, but seeing that some solution was expected, I ventured, “If I was on the other
side of the glass, wouldn’t the orange still be in my right hand?” I can remember his laugh. “Well done, little Alice,” he said. “The best answer I’ve had yet.”
I heard no more then, but in after years was told that he said that had given him his first idea for Through the Looking-Glass,
a copy of which, together with each of his other books, he regularly sent me.
In a mirror all asymmetrical objects (objects not superposable on their mirror images) “go the other way.” There are many references in the book to such left-right reversals. Tweedledee and Tweedledum are, as we shall see, mirror-image twins; the White Knight sings of squeezing a right foot into a left shoe; and it may not be accidental that there are several references to corkscrews, for the helix is an asymmetric structure with distinct right and left forms. If we extend the mirror-reflection theme to include the reversal of any asymmetric relation, we hit upon a note that dominates the entire story. It would take too much space to list here all the instances, but the following examples make the point. To approach the Red Queen, Alice walks backward; in the railway carriage the Guard tells her she is traveling the wrong way; the King has two messengers, “one to come, and one to go.” The White Queen explains the advantages of living backward in time; the looking-glass cake is handed around first, then sliced. Odd and even numbers, the combinatorial equivalent of left and right, are worked into the story at several points (e.g., the White Queen requests jam every other day). In a sense, nonsense itself is a sanity-insanity inversion. The ordinary world is turned upside down and backward; it becomes a world in which things go every way except the way they are supposed to.
Inversion themes occur, of course, throughout all of Carroll’s nonsense writing. In the first Alice
book Alice wonders if cats eat bats or bats eat cats, and she is told that to say what she means is not the same as meaning what she says. When she eats the left side of the
mushroom, she grows large; the right side has the reverse effect. These changes in size, which take place so often in the first book, are in themselves reversals (e.g., instead of a large girl and small puppy we have a large puppy and small girl). In Sylvie and Bruno
we learn about “imponderal,” an antigravity wool that can be stuffed into parcel-post packages to make them weigh less than nothing; a watch that reverses time; black light; Fortunatus’s purse, a projective plane with outside inside and inside outside. We learn that E-V-I-L is simply L-I-V-E backward.
In real life also Carroll milked the notion of inversion as much as he could to amuse his child-friends. One of his letters speaks of a doll whose right hand becomes “left” when the left hand drops off; another letter tells how he sometimes goes to bed so soon after getting up that he finds himself back in bed before
he gets up. He wrote letters in mirror writing that had to be held to a mirror to be read. He wrote letters that had to be read by starting at the last word and reading to the first. He had a collection of music boxes and one of his favorite stunts was to play them backward. He drew funny pictures that changed to different pictures when you turned them upside down.
Even in serious moments Carroll’s mind, like that of the White Knight, seemed to function best when he was seeing things upside down. He invented a new method of multiplication in which the multiplier is written backward and above
the multiplicand. The Hunting of the Snark,
he tells us, was actually composed backward. The final line, “For the Snark was
a Boojum, you see,” came into his head as a sudden inspiration, then he fashioned a stanza to fit the line and finally a poem to fit the stanza.
Closely related to Carroll’s inversion humor is his humor of logical contradiction. The Red Queen knows of a hill so large that, compared to it, this hill is a valley; dry biscuits are eaten to quench thirst; a messenger whispers by shouting; Alice runs as fast as she can to stay in the same place. It is not surprising to learn that Carroll was fond of the Irish bull, of which logical contradiction is the essence. He once wrote to his sister: “Please analyze logically the following piece of reasoning: Little Girl:
‘I’m so
glad I don’t like asparagus.’ Friend:
‘Why, my dear?’ Little Girl:
‘Because if I did
like it, I should have to eat it—and I can’t bear it!’ ” One of Carroll’s acquaintances recalled hearing him speak about a friend he knew whose feet were so big that he had to put his trousers on over his head.
Treating a “null class” (a set with no members) as though it were an existing thing is another rich source of Carrollian logical
nonsense. The March Hare offers Alice some nonexistent wine; Alice wonders where the flame of a candle is when the candle is not burning; the map in The Hunting of the Snark
is “a perfect and absolute blank”; the King of Hearts thinks it unusual to write letters to nobody, and the White King compliments Alice on having keen enough eyesight to see nobody at a great distance down the road.
Why was Carroll’s humor so interwoven with logical twists of these sorts? We shall not enter here into the question of whether Carroll’s interest in logic and mathematics is a sufficient explanation, or whether there were unconscious compulsions that made it necessary for him to be forever warping and stretching, compressing and inverting, reversing and distorting the familiar world. Surely the thesis advanced by Florence Becker Lennon in her otherwise admirable biography Victoria Through the Looking Glass
is hardly adequate. She argues that Carroll was born left-handed but forced to use his right hand, and that “he took his revenge by doing a little reversing himself.” Unfortunately there is only the flimsiest, most unconvincing evidence that Carroll was born left-handed. Even if true, it seems a woefully inadequate explanation for the origin of Carrollian nonsense.
R. B. Shaberman, writing on the influence of George MacDonald on Carroll (Jabberwocky,
Summer 1976), quotes the following passage from Chapter 13 of MacDonald’s 1858 novel, Phantastes
:
What a strange thing a mirror is! And what a wondrous affinity exists between it and a man’s imagination! For this room of mine, as I behold it in the glass, is the same and yet not the same. It is not the mere representation of the room I live in, but it looks just as if I were reading about it in a story I like. All its commonness has disappeared. The mirror has lifted it out of the region of fact into the realms of art. . . . I should like to live in that room if I could only get into it.
In this judgment on looking-glass milk only a reversal of the structure by which the milk’s atoms are linked to each other is considered. Of course a true mirror reflection of milk would also reverse the structure of the elementary particles themselves. In 1957 two Chinese-American physicists, Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, received the Nobel Prize for theoretical work that led to the “gay and wonderful discovery” (in Robert Oppenheimer’s happy phrase) that some elementary particles are asymmetric. It now appears likely that particles and their antiparticles (that is, identical particles with opposite charges) are, like stereoisomers, nothing more than mirror-image forms of the same structure. If this is true, then looking-glass milk would be composed of “anti-matter,” which would not even be drinkable by Alice; both milk and Alice would explode as soon as they came in contact. Of course an anti-Alice, on the other side of the looking-glass, would find anti-milk as tasty and nourishing as usual.
Readers who would like to learn more about the philosophical and scientific implications of left- and right-handedness are referred to Hermann Weyl’s delightful little book on Symmetry
(1952) and Philip Morrison’s article “The Overthrow of Parity,” in Scientific American
(April 1957). On the lighter side there is my discussion of left-right topics in the last chapter of The Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions
(1959) and my story “Left or Right?” in Esquire
(February 1951). The classic science-fiction tale involving left-right reversal is “The Plattner Story” by H. G. Wells. And one must not overlook The New Yorker
’s Department of Amplification, December 15, 1956, page 164, in which Dr. Edward Teller comments with Carrollian wit on a previously published New Yorker
poem (November 10, 1956, page 52) that describes the explosion that occurred when Dr. Teller shook hands with Dr. Edward Anti-Teller.
Recent nontechnical references on the symmetry and asymmetry of space and time include
Reality’s Mirror: Exploring the Mathematics of Symmetry,
by Bryan Bunch (Wiley, 1989); my New Ambidextrous Universe
(W. H. Freeman, 1990); and “The Handedness of the Universe,” by Roger Hegstrom and Dilip Kondepudi, in Scientific American
(January 1990).
There is considerable speculation among atomic scientists about the possibility of creating antimatter in the laboratory, keeping it suspended in space by magnetic forces, then combining it with matter to achieve a total conversion of nuclear mass into energy (in contrast to both fusion and fission in which only a small portion of mass is so converted). The road to ultimate nuclear power may, therefore, lie on the other side of the looking glass.
The pictures also show that Alice is not reversed on the other side of the glass. She continues to raise her right arm and to kneel on her right leg.
Note the name “Dalziel” at the bottom of both pictures, as well as on most of Tenniel’s illustrations in both Alice
books. The Dalziel brothers were the wood engravers for all of Tenniel’s drawings. Observe also that Tenniel has reversed his monogram in the second picture.
We are told later on that the pictures on the wall near the fire seem to be alive. Peter Newell indicated this in his illustration of Alice emerging from the mirror. In the 1933 Paramount motion picture the pictures on the wall come alive and talk to Alice.
In all standard editions, the two pictures are on opposite sides of a leaf, as if the leaf itself was the mirror Alice passed through. A Puffin edition (1948) puts the pictures on its front and back covers, making the book the mirror.
There are other reasons for assuming Alice was not mirror reflected. Many of Tenniel’s pictures in the first book show her right-handed, and she continues to be right-handed in his pictures for the second book. Peter Newell’s art is ambiguous on this point, though in Chapter 9 his Alice holds a scepter in her left hand, not in her right as Tenniel has it.
Alice has no difficulty reading the Wasp’s newspaper in the long-lost “Wasp in a Wig” episode, so presumably, unlike “Jabberwocky,” it was not reversed. Also unreversed are “DUM” and “DEE” on the collars of the Tweedle brothers, the label on the Mad Hatter’s top hat, and “Queen Alice” over the door in Chapter 9. Brian Kirshaw sent a detailed analysis of the left-right aspects of the book, all of which lead to the conclusion that neither Tenniel nor Carroll was consistent about who or what was mirror-reflected behind the looking glass.
Carroll then proceeds to interpret the words as follows:
BRYLLYG
(derived from the verb to BRYL
or BROIL
), “the time of broiling dinner, i.e. the close of the afternoon.”
SLYTHY
(compounded of SLIMY
and LITHE
). “Smooth and active.”
TOVE.
A species of Badger. They had smooth white hair, long hind legs, and short horns like a stag; lived chiefly on cheese.
GYRE,
verb (derived from GYAOUR
or GIAOUR,
“a dog”). To scratch like a dog.
GYMBLE
(whence GIMBLET
). “To screw out holes in anything.”
WABE
(derived from the verb to SWAB
or SOAK
). “The side of a hill” (from its being soaked
by the rain).
MIMSY
(whence MIMSERABLE
and MISERABLE
). “Unhappy.”
BOROGOVE.
An extinct kind of Parrot. They had no wings, beaks turned up, and made their nests under sundials: lived on veal.
MOME
(hence SOLEMOME, SOLEMONE,
and SOLEMN
). “Grave.”
RATH.
A species of land turtle. Head erect: mouth like a shark: forelegs curved out so that the animal walked on its knees: smooth green body: lived on swallows and oysters.
OUTGRABE,
past tense of the verb to OUTGRIBE.
(It is connected with old verb to GRIKE,
or SHRIKE,
from which are derived “shriek” and “creak”). “Squeaked.”
Hence the literal English of the passage is: “It was evening, and the smooth active badgers were scratching and boring holes in the hill-side; all unhappy were the parrots; and the grave turtles squeaked out.”
There were probably sundials on the top of the hill, and the “borogoves” were afraid that their nests would be undermined. The hill was probably full of the nests of “raths”, which ran out, squeaking with fear, on hearing the “toves” scratching outside. This is an obscure, but yet deeply-affecting, relic of ancient Poetry.
It is interesting to compare these explanations with those given by Humpty Dumpty in Chapter 6.
Few would dispute the fact that “Jabberwocky” is the greatest of all nonsense poems in English. It was so well known to English schoolboys in the late nineteenth century that five of its nonsense words appear casually in the conversation of students in Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co.
Alice herself, in the paragraph following the poem, puts her finger on the secret of the poem’s charm: “. . . it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t know exactly what they are.” Although the strange words have no precise meaning, they chime with subtle overtones.
There is an obvious similarity between nonsense verse of this sort and an abstract painting. The realistic artist is forced to copy nature, imposing on the copy as much as he can in the way of
pleasing forms and colors; but the abstract artist is free to romp with the paint as much as he pleases. In similar fashion the nonsense poet does not have to search for ingenious ways of combining pattern and sense; he simply adopts a policy that is the opposite of the advice given by the Duchess in the previous book (see Chapter 9, Note 6)—he takes care of the sounds and allows the sense to take care of itself. The words he uses may suggest vague meanings, like an eye here and a foot there in a Picasso abstraction, or they may have no meaning at all—just a play of pleasant sounds like the play of nonobjective colors on a canvas.
Carroll was not, of course, the first to use this technique of double-talk in humorous verse. He was preceded by Edward Lear, and it is a curious fact that nowhere in the writings or letters of these two undisputed leaders of English nonsense did either of them refer to the other, nor is there evidence that they ever met. Since the time of Lear and Carroll there have been attempts to produce a more serious poetry of this sort—poems by the Dadaists, the Italian futurists, and Gertrude Stein, for example—but somehow when the technique is taken too seriously the results seem tiresome. I have yet to meet someone who could recite one of Miss Stein’s poetic efforts, but I have known a good many Carrollians who found that they knew the “Jabberwocky” by heart without ever having made a conscious effort to memorize it. Ogden Nash produced a fine piece of nonsense in his poem “Geddondillo” (“The Sharrot scudders nights in the quastran now, / The dorlim slinks undeceded in the grost . . .”), but even here there seems to be a bit too much straining for effect, whereas “Jabberwocky” has a careless lilt and perfection that makes it the unique thing it is.
“Jabberwocky” was a favorite of the British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington and is alluded to several times in his writings. In New Pathways in Science
he likens the abstract syntactical structure of the poem to that modern branch of mathematics known as group theory. In The Nature of the Physical World
he points out that the physicist’s description of an elementary particle is really a kind of Jabberwocky; words applied to “something unknown” that is “doing we don’t know what.” Because the description contains numbers, science is able to impose a certain amount of order on the phenomena and to make successful predictions about them.
“By contemplating eight circulating electrons in one atom and seven circulating electrons in another,” Eddington writes,
we begin to realize the difference between oxygen and nitrogen.
Eight slithy toves gyre and gimble in the oxygen wabe; seven in nitrogen. By admitting a few numbers even “Jabberwocky” may become scientific. We can now venture on a prediction; if one of its toves escapes, oxygen will be masquerading in a garb properly belonging to nitrogen. In the stars and nebulae we do find such wolves in sheep’s clothing which might otherwise have startled us. It would not be a bad reminder of the essential unknownness of the fundamental entities of physics to translate it into “Jabberwocky”; provided all numbers—all metrical attributes—are unchanged, it does not suffer in the least.
“Jabberwocky” has been translated skillfully into several languages. There are two Latin versions. One by Augustus A. Vansittart, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, was issued as a pamphlet by the Oxford University Press in 1881 and will be found on page 144 of Stuart Collingwood’s biography of Carroll. The other version, by Carroll’s uncle, Hassard H. Dodgson, is in The Lewis Carroll Picture Book
on page 364. (The Gaberbocchus Press, a whimsical London publishing house, derives its name from Uncle Hassard’s Latin word for Jabberwock.)
The following French translation by Frank L. Warrin first appeared in The New Yorker
(January 10, 1931). (I quote from Mrs. Lennon’s book, where it is reprinted.)
Le Jaseroque
Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux
Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave,
Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux,
Et le mômerade horsgrave.
Garde-toi du Jaseroque, mon fils!
La gueule qui mord; la griffe qui prend!
Garde-toi de l’oiseau Jube, évite
Le frumieux Band-à-prend.
Son glaive vorpal en main il va-
T-à la recherche du fauve manscant;
Puis arrivé à l’arbre Té-Té,
Il y reste, réfléchissant.
Pendant qu’il pense, tout uffusé
Le Jaseroque, à l’œil flambant,
Vient siblant par le bois tullegeais,
Et burbule en venant.
Un deux, un deux, par le milieu,
Le glaive vorpal fait pat-à-pan!
La bête défaite, avec sa tête,
Il rentre gallomphant.
As-tu tué le Jaseroque?
Viens à mon cœur, fils rayonnais!
O jour frabbejeais! Calleau! Callai!
Il cortule dans sa joie.
Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux
Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave,
Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux,
Et le mômerade horsgrave.
A magnificent German translation was made by Robert Scott, an eminent Greek scholar who had collaborated with Dean Liddell (Alice’s father) on a Greek lexicon. It first appeared in an article, “The Jabberwock Traced to Its True Source,” Macmillan’s Magazine
(February 1872). Using the pseudonym of Thomas Chatterton, Scott tells of attending a séance at which the spirit of one Hermann von Schwindel insists that Carroll’s poem is simply an English translation of the following old German ballad:
Der Jammerwoch
Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven
Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben;
Und aller-mümsige Burggoven
Die mohmen Räth’ ausgraben.
Bewahre doch vor Jammerwoch!
Die Zähne knirschen, Krallen kratzen!
Bewahr’ vor Jubjub—Vogel, vor
Frumiösen Banderschnätzchen!
Er griff sein vorpals Schwertchen zu,
Er suchte lang das manchsam’ Ding;
Dann, stehend unten Tumtum Baum,
Er an-zu-denken-fing.
Als stand er tief in Andacht auf,
Des Jammerwochen’s Augen-feuer
Durch tulgen Wald mit wiffek kam
Ein burbelnd ungeheuer!
Eins, Zwei! Eins, Zwei!
Und durch und durch
Sein vorpals Schwert
zerschnifer-schnück,
Da blieb es todt! Er, Kopf in Hand,
Geläumfig zog zurück.
Und schlugst Du ja den Jammerwoch?
Umarme mich, mien Böhm’ sches Kind!
O Freuden-Tag! O Halloo-Schlag!
Er chortelt froh-gesinnt.
Es brillig war, &c.
New translations of the Alice
books keep appearing; there must be at least fifty different versions of “Jabberwocky” in fifty different languages. See my More Annotated Alice
for a second French translation, and versions in Latin, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Welsh.
Endless parodies of “Jabberwocky” have been attempted. Three of the best will be found on pages 36 and 37 of Carolyn Wells’s anthology, Such Nonsense
(1918): “Somewhere-in-Europe Wocky,” “Footballwocky,” and “The Jabberwocky of the Publishers” (“ ’Twas Harpers and the Little Browns / Did Houghton Mifflin the book . . .”). But I incline toward Chesterton’s dim view (expressed in his article on Carroll mentioned in the introduction) of all such efforts to do humorous imitations of something humorous.
In “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” one of the best-known science fiction tales by Lewis Padgett (pen name for the collaborated work of the late Henry Kuttner and his wife, Catherine L. More), the words of “Jabberwocky” are revealed as symbols from a future language. Rightly understood, they explain a technique for entering a four-dimensional continuum. A similar notion is found in Fredric Brown’s magnificently funny mystery novel, Night of the Jabberwock.
Brown’s narrator is an enthusiastic Carrollian. He learns from Yehudi Smith, apparently a member of a society of Carroll admirers called The Vorpal Blades, that Carroll’s fantasies are not fiction at all, but realistic reporting about another plane of existence. The
clues of the fantasies are cleverly concealed in Carroll’s mathematical treatises, especially Curiosa Mathematica,
and in his nonacrostic poems, which are really acrostics of a subtler kind. No Carrollian can afford to miss Night of the Jabberwock.
It is an outstanding work of fiction that has close ties to the Alice
books.
When a class in the Girls’ Latin School, Boston, asked Carroll’s permission to name their school magazine The Jabberwock,
he replied:
Mr. Lewis Carroll has much pleasure in giving to the editors of the proposed magazine permission to use the title they wish for. He finds that the Anglo-Saxon word “wocer” or “wocor” signifies “offspring” or “fruit.” Taking “jabber” in its ordinary acceptation of “excited and voluble discussion,” this would give the meaning of “the result of much excited discussion.” Whether this phrase will have any application to the projected periodical, it will be for the future historian of American literature to determine. Mr. Carroll wishes all success to the forthcoming magazine.
For instance, take the two words “fuming” and “furious.” Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first. Now open your mouth and speak. If your thoughts incline ever so little towards “fuming,” you will say “fuming-furious”; if they turn, by even a hair’s breadth, towards “furious,” you will say “furious-fuming”; but if you have that rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “fruminous.” Supposing that, when Pistol uttered the well-known words:
Under which king, Bezonian? Speak or die!
Justice Shallow had felt certain that it was either William or
Richard, but had not been able to settle which, so that he could not possibly say either name before the other, can it be doubted that, rather than die, he would have gasped out “Rilchiam!”?
I am sending you, with this, a print of the proposed frontispiece for Through the Looking-glass.
It has been suggested to me that it is too terrible a monster, and likely to alarm nervous and imaginative children; and that at any rate we had better begin the book with a pleasanter subject.
So I am submitting the question to a number of friends, for which purpose I have had copies of the frontispiece printed off.
We have three courses open to us:
(1)To retain it as the frontispiece.
(2)To transfer it to its proper place in the book (where the ballad occurs which it is intended to illustrate) and substitute a new frontispiece.
(3)To omit it altogether.
The last named course would be a great sacrifice of the time and trouble which the picture cost, and it would be a pity to adopt it unless it is really necessary.
I should be grateful to have your opinion, (tested by exhibiting the picture to any children you think fit) as to which of these courses is best.
Evidently most of the mothers favored the second course, for the
picture of the White Knight on horseback became the frontispiece.
Correspondent Mrs. Henry Morss, Jr., found a striking similarity between Tenniel’s Jabberwock and the dragon being slain by Saint George in a painting by Paolo Uccello, in London’s National Gallery. For other pictures of monsters that could have influenced Tenniel, see Chapter 8 of Michael Hancher’s The Tenniel Illustrations to the
“Alice
” Books.
More likely, as readers Albert L. Blackwell and Mrs. Carlton S. Hyman each point out, Carroll had in mind two forms of a Greek word, kalos,
meaning beautiful, good or fair. They would be pronounced as Carroll spells them, and would fit well the meaning of
the line.
In Useful and Instructive Poetry,
written by Carroll when he was thirteen (it was his first book), there is a parody of a passage from Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth, Second Part,
in which the Prince of Wales uses the word biggen.
In Carroll’s version he explains to the puzzled king that the word “means a kind of woolen nightcap.” Later he introduces the word rigol.
“What meaneth ‘rigol’?” asks the king.
“My liege, I know not,” the prince replies, “save that it doth enter most apt into the metre.”
“True, it doth,” the king agrees. “But wherefore use a word which hath no meaning?”
The prince’s answer has a prophetic reference to the nonsense words of “Jabberwocky”: “My lord, the word is said, for it hath passed my lips, and all the powers upon this earth cannot unsay it.”
For more on “Jabberwocky,” including how Carroll’s contemporaries responded to the poem and its influence on literature and the law, see Joseph Brabant’s Some Observations on Jabberwocky
(Cheshire Cat Press, 1997).
