T
hey were standing under a tree, each with an arm round the other’s neck, and Alice knew which was which in a moment, because one of them had “DUM” embroidered on his collar, and the other “DEE.” “I suppose they’ve each got ‘TWEEDLE’ round at the back of the collar,” she said to herself.
They stood so still that she quite forgot they were alive, and she was just going round to see if the word “TWEEDLE” was written at the back of each collar, when she was startled by a voice coming from the one marked “DUM.”
“If you think we’re wax-works,” he said, “you ought to pay, you know. Wax-works weren’t made to be looked at for nothing. Nohow!”
“Contrariwise,” added the one marked “DEE,” “if you think we’re alive, you ought to speak.”
“I’m sure I’m very sorry,” was all Alice could say; for the words of the old song kept ringing through her head like the ticking of a clock, and she could hardly help saying them out loud:—
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“Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.
Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel.”
“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum; “but it isn’t so, nohow.”
“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
“I was thinking,” Alice said very politely, “which is the best way out of this wood: it’s getting so dark. Would you tell me, please?”
But the fat little men only looked at each other and grinned.
They looked so exactly like a couple of great schoolboys, that Alice couldn’t help pointing her finger at Tweedledum, and saying “First Boy!”
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“Nohow!” Tweedledum cried out briskly, and shut his mouth up again with a snap.
“Next Boy!” said Alice, passing on to Tweedledee, though she felt quite certain he would only shout out “Contrariwise!” and so he did.
“You’ve begun wrong!” cried Tweedledum. “The first thing in a visit is to say ‘How d’ye do?’ and shake hands!” And here the two brothers gave each other a hug, and then they held out the two hands that were free, to shake hands with her.
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Alice did not like shaking hands with either of them first, for fear of hurting the other one’s feelings; so, as the best way out of the difficulty, she took hold of both hands at once: the next moment they were dancing round in a ring. This seemed quite
natural (she remembered afterwards), and she was not even surprised to hear music playing: it seemed to come from the tree under which they were dancing, and it was done (as well as she could make it out) by the branches rubbing one across the other, like fiddles and fiddle-sticks.
“But it certainly was
funny,” (Alice said afterwards, when she was telling her sister the history of all this,) “to find myself singing ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush.’
I don’t know when I began it, but somehow I felt as if I’d been singing it a long long time!”
The other two dancers were fat, and very soon out of breath. “Four times round is enough for one dance,” Tweedledum panted out, and they left off dancing as suddenly as they had begun: the music stopped at the same moment.
Then they let go of Alice’s hands, and stood looking at her for a minute: there was a rather awkward pause, as Alice didn’t know how to begin a conversation with people she had just been dancing with. “It would never do to say ‘How d’ye do?’ now,
” she said to herself: “we seem to have got beyond that, somehow!”
“I hope you’re not much tired?” she said at last.
“Nohow. And thank you very
much for asking,” said Tweedledum.
“So much
obliged!” added Tweedledee. “You like poetry?”
“Ye-es, pretty well—some
poetry,” Alice said doubtfully. “Would you tell me which road leads out of the wood?”
“What shall I repeat to her?” said Tweedledee, looking round at Tweedledum with great solemn eyes, and not noticing Alice’s question.
“ ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’
is the longest,” Tweedledum replied, giving his brother an affectionate hug.
Tweedledee began instantly:
“The sun was shining—”
Here Alice ventured to interrupt him. “If it’s very
long,” she said, as politely as she could, “would you please tell me first
which road—”
“I like the Walrus best,” said Alice: “because he was a little
sorry for the poor oysters.”
“He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee. “You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn’t count how many he took: contrariwise.”
“That was mean!” Alice said indignantly. “Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn’t eat so many as the Walrus.”
“But he ate as many as he could get,” said Tweedledum.
This was a puzzler.
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After a pause, Alice began, “Well! They were both
very unpleasant characters—” Here she checked herself in some alarm, at hearing something that sounded to her like the puffing of a large steam-engine in the wood near them, though she feared it was more likely to be a wild beast. “Are there any lions or tigers about here?” she asked timidly.
“It’s only the Red King snoring,” said Tweedledee.
“Come and look at him!” the brothers cried, and they each took one of Alice’s hands, and led her up to where the King was sleeping.
“Isn’t he a lovely
sight?” said Tweedledum.
Alice couldn’t say honestly that he was. He had a tall red night-cap on, with a tassel, and he was lying crumpled up into a sort of untidy heap, and snoring loud—“fit to snore his head off!” as Tweedledum remarked.
“I’m afraid he’ll catch cold with lying on the damp grass,” said Alice, who was a very thoughtful little girl.
“He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?”
Alice said “Nobody can guess that.”
“Why, about you
!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”
“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.
“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”
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“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”
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“I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’m
only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you,
I should like to know?”
He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying “Hush! You’ll be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.”
“Well, it’s no use your
talking about waking him,” said Tweedledum, “when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.”
“I am
real!” said Alice, and began to cry.
“You wo’n’t make yourself a bit realler by crying,” Tweedledee remarked: “there’s nothing to cry about.”
“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous—“I shouldn’t be able to cry.”
“I hope you don’t suppose those are real
tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
“I know they’re talking nonsense,” Alice thought to herself: “and it’s foolish to cry about it.” So she brushed away her tears, and went on, as cheerfully as she could, “At any rate I’d better be getting out of the wood, for really it’s coming on very dark. Do you think it’s going to rain?”
Tweedledum spread a large umbrella over himself and his brother, and looked up into it. “No, I don’t think it is,” he said: “at least—not under here.
Nohow.”
“But it may rain outside
?”
“It may—if it chooses,” said Tweedledee: “we’ve no objection. Contrariwise.”
“Selfish things!” thought Alice, and she was just going to say “Good-night” and leave them, when Tweedledum sprang out from under the umbrella, and seized her by the wrist.
“Do you see that
?” he said, in a voice choking with passion, and his eyes grew large and yellow all in a moment, as he pointed with a trembling finger at a small white thing lying under the tree.
“It’s only a rattle,” Alice said, after a careful examination of the little white thing. “Not a rattle-snake,
you know,” she added hastily, thinking that he was frightened: “only an old rattle—quite old and broken.”
“I knew it was!” cried Tweedledum, beginning to stamp about wildly and tear his hair. “It’s spoilt, of course!” Here he looked at Tweedledee, who immediately sat down on the ground, and tried to hide himself under the umbrella.
Alice laid her hand upon his arm, and said, in a soothing tone, “You needn’t be so angry about an old rattle.”
“But it isn’t
old!” Tweedledum cried, in a greater fury than ever. “It’s new,
I tell you—I bought it yesterday—my nice NEW
RATTLE!”
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and his voice rose to a perfect scream.
All this time Tweedledee was trying his best to fold up the umbrella, with himself in it: which was such an extraordinary thing to do, that it quite took off Alice’s attention from the angry brother. But he couldn’t quite succeed, and it ended in his rolling over, bundled up in the umbrella, with only his head out: and there he lay, opening and shutting his mouth and his large eyes—“looking more like a fish than anything else,” Alice thought.
“Of course you agree to have a battle?” Tweedledum said in a calmer tone.
“I suppose so,” the other sulkily replied, as he crawled out of the umbrella: “only she
must help us to dress up, you know.”
So the two brothers went off hand-in-hand into the wood, and returned in a minute with their arms full of things—such as bolsters, blankets, hearth-rugs, table-cloths, dish-covers, and coal-scuttles. “I hope you’re a good hand at pinning and tying strings?” Tweedledum remarked. “Every one of these things has got to go on, somehow or other.”
Alice said afterwards she had never seen such a fuss made about anything in all her life—the way those two bustled about—and the quantity of things they put on—and the trouble they gave her in tying strings and fastening buttons—“Really they’ll be more like bundles of old clothes than anything else, by the time they’re ready!” she said to herself, as she arranged a bolster round the neck of Tweedledee, “to keep his head from being cut off,”
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as he said.
“You know,” he added very gravely, “it’s one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle—to get one’s head cut off.”
Alice laughed loud: but she managed to turn it into a cough, for fear of hurting his feelings.
“Do I look very pale?” said Tweedledum, coming up to have his helmet tied on. (He called
it a helmet, though it certainly looked much more like a saucepan.)
“Well—yes—a little,
” Alice replied gently.
“I’m very brave, generally,” he went on in a low voice: “only to-day I happen to have a headache.”
“And I’ve
got a toothache!” said Tweedledee, who had overheard the remark. “I’m far worse than you!”
“Then you’d better not fight to-day,” said Alice, thinking it a good opportunity to make peace.
“We must
have a bit of a fight, but I don’t care about going on long,” said Tweedledum. “What’s the time now?”
Tweedledee looked at his watch, and said “Half-past four.”
“Let’s fight till six, and then have dinner,” said Tweedledum.
“Very well,” the other said, rather sadly: “and she
can watch us—only you’d better not come very
close,” he added: “I generally hit every thing I can see—when I get really excited.”
“And I
hit every thing within reach,” cried Tweedledum, “whether I can see it or not!”
Alice laughed. “You must hit the trees
pretty often, I should think,” she said.
Tweedledum looked round him with a satisfied smile. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “there’ll be a tree left standing, for ever so far round, by the time we’ve finished!”
“And all about a rattle!” said Alice, still hoping to make them a little
ashamed of fighting for such a trifle.
“I shouldn’t have minded it so much,” said Tweedledum, “if it hadn’t been a new one.”
“I wish the monstrous crow would come!” thought Alice.
“There’s only one sword, you know,” Tweedledum said to his brother: “but you
can have the umbrella—it’s quite as sharp. Only we must begin quick. It’s getting as dark as it can.”
“And darker,” said Tweedledee.
It was getting dark so suddenly that Alice thought there must be a thunderstorm coming on. “What a thick black cloud that is!” she said. “And how fast it comes! Why, I do believe it’s got wings!”
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“It’s the crow!” Tweedledum cried out in a shrill voice of alarm; and the two brothers took to their heels and were out of sight in a moment.
Alice ran a little way into the wood, and stopped under a large tree. “It can never get at me here,
” she thought: “it’s far too large to squeeze itself in among the trees. But I wish it wouldn’t flap its wings so—it makes quite a hurricane in the wood—here’s somebody’s shawl being blown away!”
Some say, compared to Bononcini
That Mynheer Handel’s but a ninny;
Others aver that he to Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a candle;
Strange all this difference should be
Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.
No one knows whether the nursery rhyme about the Tweedle brothers originally had reference to this famous musical battle, or whether it was an older rhyme from which Byrom borrowed in the last line of his doggerel. (See the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes,
1952, edited by Iona and Peter Opie, page 418.)
“First Boy,” Everett Bleiler writes in a letter, was a term used in British schools for the brightest boy in a class, or an older boy who served as a sort of class monitor.
The Tweedle brothers are mentioned in Finnegans Wake
(Viking, 1959) on page 258.
As a check against the tendency to find too much intended symbolism in the Alice
books it is well to remember that, when Carroll gave the manuscript of this poem to Tenniel for illustrating, he offered the artist a choice of drawing a carpenter, butterfly, or baronet. Each word fitted the rhyme scheme, and Carroll had no preference so far as the nonsense was concerned. Tenniel chose the carpenter.
The boxlike paper hat that Tenniel placed on the carpenter’s head is no longer folded by carpenters. However, these hats are still widely used by operators of newspaper printing presses; they fold them from blank sheets of newsprint and wear them to keep the ink out of their hair. J. B. Priestley has written an amusing article on “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (New Statesman,
August 10, 1957, p. 168) in which he interprets the two figures as archetypes of two kinds of politicians.
Jane O’Connor Creed wrote to point out how Carroll’s lines echo the following portion of King Richard’s speech in Shakespeare’s Richard the Second,
Act 3, Scene 2:
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
The Carpenter he ceased to sob;
The Walrus ceased to weep;
They’d finished all the oysters;
And they laid them down to sleep—
And of their craft and cruelty
The punishment to reap.
After the Walrus and Carpenter have gone to sleep, the ghosts of two oysters appear on the stage to sing and dance and punish the sleepers by stamping on their chests. Carroll felt, and apparently audiences agreed with him, that this provided a more effective ending for the episode and also somewhat mollified oyster sympathizers among the spectators.
The ghost of the first oyster dances a mazurka and sings:
The Carpenter is sleeping, the butter’s on his face,
The vinegar and pepper are all about the place!
Let oysters rock your cradle and lull you into rest;
And if that will not do it, we’ll sit upon your chest!
We’ll sit upon your chest! We’ll sit upon your chest!
The simplest way to do it is to sit upon your chest!
The ghost of the second oyster dances a horn-pipe and sings:
O woeful, weeping Walrus, your tears are all a sham!
You’re greedier for Oysters than children are for jam.
You like to have an Oyster to give the meal a zest—
Excuse me, wicked Walrus, for stamping on your chest!
For stamping on your chest!
For stamping on your chest!
Excuse me, wicked Walrus, for stamping on your chest!
(All the above stanzas are quoted from Roger Green’s notes to The Diaries of Lewis Carroll,
Vol. II, pages 446–47.)
The Berkeleyan theme troubled Carroll as it troubles all Platonists. Both Alice
adventures are dreams, and in Sylvie and Bruno
the narrator shuttles back and forth mysteriously between real and dream worlds. “So, either I’ve been dreaming about Sylvie,” he says to himself early in the novel, “and this is the reality. Or else I’ve really been with Sylvie, and this is a dream! Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?” In Through the Looking-Glass
Carroll returns to the question in the first paragraph of Chapter 8, in the closing lines of the book, and in the last line of the book’s terminal poem.
An odd sort of infinite regress is involved here in the parallel dreams of Alice and the Red King. Alice dreams of the King, who is dreaming of Alice, who is dreaming of the King, and so on, like two mirrors facing each other, or that preposterous cartoon of Saul Steinberg’s in which a fat lady paints a picture of a thin lady who is painting a picture of the fat lady who is painting a picture of the thin lady, and so on deeper into the two canvases.
James Branch Cabell, in Smire,
the last novel of his Smirt, Smith, Smire
trilogy, introduces the same circular paradox of two persons, each dreaming the other. Smire and Smike confront one another in Chapter 9, each claiming to be asleep and dreaming the other. In a preface to his trilogy, Cabell described it as a “full-length dream story” that attempts “to extend the naturalism of Lewis Carroll.”
The Red King sleeps throughout the entire narrative until he is checkmated at the close of Chapter 9 by Queen Alice when she captures the Red Queen. No chess player needs reminding that kings tend to sleep throughout most chess games, sometimes not moving after castling. Tournament games are occasionally played in which a king remains on its starting square throughout the entire game.
In those days a watchman’s rattle consisted of a thin wooden strip that vibrated against the teeth of a ratchet wheel when the rattle was whirled, producing a loud clacking noise that sounded an alarm. They are sold today mainly as party noisemakers. As reader H. P. Young pointed out in a letter, they are fragile and easily broken.
In a shrewd analysis of the objects attached to the White Knight’s horse in Chapter 8, Janis Lull identifies a large watchman’s rattle at the front of the horse. It is visible in three pictures, as well as in the book’s frontispiece. Tenniel had earlier drawn such a rattle in the Punch
cartoon (January 19, 1856) shown below.
