“It was much pleasanter at home,” thought poor Alice, “when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits.”
A TEMPLE TO SCIENCE Alice again encounters the White Rabbit—but a White Rabbit who is no longer timid and does not flee from her. Formerly a magician’s foil, the White Rabbit now seems to have assumed the authority of a magician himself. He doesn’t live in a hole like a wild rabbit or in a hat like a magician’s pet. He lives in a proper house with a brass plaque on the door. It reads: “W. RABBIT.” This is the timid rabbit’s double who has assumed an entirely different temperament.
The White Rabbit orders Alice around as if she were his housemaid—or perhaps a magician’s assistant. He commands her to retrieve a couple of his magician’s props: his white gloves and his fan. In fact, this whole scene and Alice’s actions once she enters the house suggest Carroll has adopted the motif of the sorcerer’s apprentice.
It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, and looking anxiously about as it went, as if it had lost something; and she heard it muttering to itself, “The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers! She’ll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets! Where can I have dropped them, I wonder?” Alice guessed in a moment that it was looking for the fan and the pair of white kid gloves, and she very good-naturedly began hunting about for them, but they were nowhere to be seen—everything seemed to have changed since her swim in the pool, and the great hall, with the glass table and the little door, had vanished completely.
Carroll knew Goethe’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
That tale was originally recorded in a collection entitled Philopseudes (Lover of Lies) by the second-century Greek author Lucian of Samosata. It was adapted by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1797 into what became one of his most famous ballads, “Der Zauberlehrling,” or “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” It was widely known throughout Europe during the nineteenth century, and Carroll’s library included both Goethe’s poem and Lucian’s tale. Today, the story is best known in its adaption in the Disney film Fantasia.
In this tale, the apprentice is told to do chores in the sorcerer’s house. Once alone, he decides to experiment with his master’s wands and spells. The results nearly wreck the house. The moral, of course, is that you shouldn’t meddle with things you don’t understand.
Alice enters the White Rabbit’s house on her errand to retrieve the gloves and fan, but then spots a little bottle next to a looking glass on the table. Like the apprentice, she decides to experiment without really understanding what she is doing—again with disastrous results. Once she drinks from the bottle, she grows so rapidly that she discovers her head pressing against the ceiling. In a couple more minutes she fills the entire room, and her every move threatens to wreck the house.
Throughout the episode, a very surprised Alice finds herself following the White Rabbit’s orders, and fearing him when he commands her, even when she is “a thousand times as large as the Rabbit.” She appears to have lost her identity and her place in the world as she contemplates the absurd idea of taking orders from her cat.
There is a clue to what is going on in Alice’s search for her place in the natural order of things. As we have established the real-life identity of the White Rabbit as the Liddell family physician and Oxford’s Regius Professor of Medicine Dr. Henry Wentworth Acland, it is reasonable to assume that the above-ground White Rabbit’s house might be the newly constructed Oxford University Museum of Natural History—which was the target of at least two of Lewis Carroll’s satirical political pamphlets.
Dr. Acland was the curator of the new museum, a pet project of his that was all about establishing the natural order of all life forms. An enthusiastic amateur naturalist, Acland oversaw the museum’s construction and the assemblage of its collection from 1855 to 1860. The building was Oxford University’s remarkable new neo-Gothic temple to science.
In 1858, in the partially completed museum galleries, Dr. Acland gave a public lecture advocating the study of natural history as a means to understanding the designs of “the Supreme Master-Worker.” Sidestepping the hot topic of evolution, Acland took the view that the study of nature was the study of “the Second Book of God.”
Some hutch: The Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
This was probably a judicious way of describing natural history, as the construction of this new temple to science had largely been financed by the Oxford University Press’s sales of “the First Book of God,” the Oxford Bible.
The museum was also the first major building project undertaken by Dean Liddell in an ambitious plan for the architectural expansion and transformation of the University of Oxford. With Dean Liddell and Canon Arthur Stanley’s recommendation, Dr. Acland was advised concerning the museum’s architectural design and decor by John Ruskin, the high priest of the then fashionable neo-Gothic architecture.
Carroll gives a clue to the identity of the White Rabbit’s house when Alice hears “a crash of broken glass.” Alice, we are told, assumes the White Rabbit has fallen through “a cucumber-frame, or something of the sort.” After a few other crashes, she thinks: “What a number of cucumber frames there must be!”
To solve this riddle, we must look to popular key phrases of the time. “Cucumber frame” was the Victorian term for a glass greenhouse. One of the great events of this era was the 1851 Great Exhibition in the spectacular exhibition halls of the Crystal Palace, in London’s Hyde Park. It was a building enthusiastically described in a letter by Carroll to his sister Elizabeth as a “fairyland.” The Crystal Palace was the world’s first massive prefabricated glass-and-iron structure. Although it proved to be a great success, its initial detractors in the press frequently quoted John Ruskin’s opinion that it was essentially “a cucumber frame between two chimneys.”
The Natural History Museum’s architects attempted to integrate this new technology into their High Gothic Revival structure by installing an iron-and-glass roof that would allow natural light into its central exhibition hall. However, the builders’ expertise with this new technology was not on par with that of the Crystal Palace engineers, and the roof collapsed. At considerable cost, it had to be rebuilt. This explains Alice’s remark: “I wonder what they will do next! If they had any sense, they’d take the roof off.”
A decade later, Lewis Carroll wrote a satirical squib entitled “The Blank Cheque” that reflects on the construction of the “High Art” Gothic Natural History Museum. Besides its “cucumber frames,” the White Rabbit’s house appears to have a great number of windows and chimneys in common with the neo-Gothic museum.
In “The Blank Cheque,” a thinly veiled characterization of Dean Liddell’s wife describes the construction of “houses that were all windows and chimneys—what they call ‘High Art,’ I believe. We tried a conservatory once on the High-Art principle, and (would you believe it?) the man stuck the roof up on a lot of rods like so many knitting needles! Of course it soon came down about our ears, and we had to do it all over again.” The conservatory would have been understood by all to be Oxford’s Natural History Museum.
Elias Ashmole was the model for the theosophical White Rabbit.
ROSICRUCIAN RABBIT HOUSE The natural history collection of the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum (including its unique dodo specimen) formed the basis of the new Oxford University Museum of Natural History. The founder and curator of the Ashmolean was the model for Carroll’s theosophical White Rabbit, ELIAS ASHMOLE (1617–1692), who was also a physician, antiquary, astrologer, alchemist, Freemason and member of the Royal Society. Furthermore, he was the adopted son of William Backhouse, a Fellow of Carroll’s own Christ Church and a celebrated early Rosicrucian alchemist.
Just as the Wonderland White Rabbit was a herald to the King of Hearts, so Elias Ashmole was appointed Windsor Herald—an officer of the College of Arms—to King James I. And like the White Rabbit in Wonderland’s royal court, Elias Ashmole became an authority on court protocol and ceremony.
Ashmole is also easily linked to the mythological White Rabbit through his coat of arms, which is surmounted by the figure of the Greco-Roman god Hermes, or Mercury, the herald to the Olympian gods. Like the White Rabbit, Mercury was a psychopomp. He was the underworld guide for both dreamers and the dead. The White Rabbit guided Alice down into the underground world of Wonderland; Mercury guided Persephone from Hades back to the living world.
In the Hermetic alchemical tradition, Mercury was the Medieval Latin Mercurius, who was also the Greco-Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus: the father of alchemy and the supposed author of the sacred ancient alchemical text the Emerald Tablet. Curiously, the introductory engraving of Ashmole’s most important alchemical work, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652), displays an emblematic border with rabbits feeding in a garden.
Ashmole’s coat of arms contains a clue to his other identity.
Like the White Rabbit, Mercury was a psychopomp, or “guide of souls.”
The title of this chapter, “The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill,” is also directly related to the construction of the Museum of Natural History. Given that the Oxford White Rabbit, Dr. Acland, had to submit Dean Liddell’s expenditure bill to the Congregation—the university’s parliament of senior members—for payment (and keeping in mind that Liddell rhymes with “fiddle” and sounds like “little”) the title can be translated to read, “Dr. Acland Sends in a Liddell Bill.”
“Liddell Bill” it may have been, but it certainly wasn’t little. It was an enormous one that had to be reduced and redrafted. Carroll opposed the bill and wanted to know who was going to pay, and consequently allowed Alice to provide the indignant answer. Rather than footing the bill, she discovers she “can kick a little,” and soundly boots the unfortunate little lizard Bill—or “Liddell Bill”—out of the house.
An interesting aside to the disputes over the Liddell Bill suggests that the White Rabbit’s Pat the gardener was the Museum’s Irish stonemason JAMES O’SHEA. Under the direction of John Ruskin, O’Shea was charged with creating a “stone garden” in the form of decorative carvings of plants and animals throughout the museum. When funds ran low, the Congregation refused to pay for any further work. A vengeful O’Shea proceeded—without pay—to carve caricatures of college authorities on the faces of parrots and owls around the entrance to the building. Humourless Congregationalists had to pay to have the creatures’ faces removed.
James O’Shea: Revenge by gargoyle.
The identity of Bill the Lizard gives this episode another level of interpretation—and we discover that we must also deal with another bill and another house entirely. On the level of national politics, Bill the Lizard was meant to be BENJAMIN DISRAELI (1804–1881), who became prime minister in 1874. The transformation of Benjamin Disraeli into Bill the Lizard can be achieved by taking the letters in “B. Lizard” and rearranging them to give us “B. Dzrali,” a phonetic anagram for “B. Disraeli.”
Disraeli: Finance minister and future PM.
Gladstone: Brawls with Disraeli in Looking-Glass.
The anagram is even more appropriate given that “Dizzy” was the nickname given him by the popular press. In one famous Punch cartoon, Dizzy is a circus entertainer climbing what he called “the greasy pole” of politics; in Wonderland, he is the Lizard climbing on ladders up onto the roof, then down a chimney. In Through the Looking-Glass, Disraeli is caricatured twice, once as the man in the paper hat on the train with Alice, and in the second case as the Unicorn in a brawl with his great opponent the Lion—that other great Victorian prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone.
Illustration for The Hunting of the Snark—with lizard suggested by Carroll—by Henry Holiday (1839–1927).
Aside from anagrams and climbing skills, there is one other reason that Disraeli is portrayed as the Lizard. Just as Bill the Lizard was kicked out of the Wonderland house, in 1852 Disraeli was the chancellor of the exchequer—finance minister—who first introduced what is now the modern form of income tax—that is, a variable income-based taxation system. The income tax bill became law, but it caused such a furor that Dizzy was kicked out of the House as chancellor, and his party ended up in the opposition benches.
Further confirmation that Disraeli is the Lizard comes in Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876). There we find an illustration with a little pickpocket lizard at work with his hand in someone’s pocket. He is obviously a tax-collecting lizard, as we can clearly see a paper labelled “income tax” protruding from his own pocket. It appears Carroll continued to blame Disraeli for the institution of the income-based taxation system. In another poem, Carroll carps that “the worst of human ills … are ‘little bills’!” This also goes some way toward explaining Alice’s comment, “Why, they seem to put everything upon Bill!”
Like the sorcerer who returns to the chaos brought about by his apprentice, the White Rabbit tries to find a way to stop Alice from destroying his house. After many attempts, he finally orders delivery of a “barrowful” of white pebbles that transform into little cakes. When Alice eats one, she becomes small enough to escape through the door. Once outside, she flees from a mob of animals and runs off into a wood.
She finds, though, that her predicament is worse than ever. She has shrunk down to three inches and is almost trampled by an over-friendly giant puppy.
The above-ground identity of the “enormous puppy” has always been something of a puzzle. A clue, though, may be in its habitat: the grounds of the Natural History Museum. The most celebrated event to take place in the newly constructed museum was the 1860 debate between Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford, over Darwin’s new theory of evolution.
As the critic William Empson observes, Darwinian ideas permeate Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This is especially evident in the Pool of Tears and, as we shall see, in the Duchess’s kitchen. There must have been some reason for Carroll to illustrate apes with dodos and other animals emerging from the salty primeval waters of the Pool of Tears (in both the Under Ground and Wonderland versions).
Charles Darwin: His ideas permeate Wonderland.
We do know that in the years before and during the composition of Wonderland, Carroll took considerable notice of the dispute over Darwin’s 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, and that Carroll’s library contained twenty books on Darwinian evolution. Indeed, one of these—an argument for what is now called creation science and intelligent design—was entitled Paley’s Evidence of Christianity, which might have suggested the title of Wonderland’s final chapter: “Alice’s Evidence.”
With all this in mind, it has been suggested that the “enormous puppy” was meant to be CHARLES DARWIN (1809–1882). The puppy in Carroll’s mind (but not in that of his illustrator, John Tenniel) may have been a beagle, and consequently could have been an allusion both to Darwin’s ship the Beagle and to his book (owned by Carroll) The Voyage of the Beagle.
PEBBLES AND CALCULUS What is being suggested by these “little pebbles” and their magical power to transform? The Latin for “pebble” is calculus, which is also the name of a branch of mathematics that concerns itself with change, and the manipulation of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. Notable as well is the delivery of a “barrowful” of pebbles: it was Isaac Barrow, in tandem with Isaac Newton, who discovered the formulation of infinitesimal calculus—a subject about which Alice has “not the smallest idea.”
Why do the pebbles become cakes? The subject of Lewis Carroll’s essay “Feeding the Mind” (1884) suggests they may be metaphorically food for thought, an idea that relates to Plato’s observation that theorems “are to be enjoyed as much as possible, as if they were ambrosia and nectar.” Cakes are also treats, or in mathematical terminology, “treatments,” meaning experiments. This interpretation perhaps explains why the first cake eaten by Alice in the great hall had no effect until she decided to “set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.”
An alternative suggestion is that the enormous puppy was meant to be THOMAS HUXLEY (1825–1895), who—as the quintessential defender of the theory of evolution—became known as “Darwin’s Bulldog.”
Whether these allusions were intended or not, Lewis Carroll during the Wonderland years was very familiar with the issues and personalities involved in the debate over evolution. What’s more, he photographed Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce along with virtually every significant participant and member of the audience at that famous debate in the White Rabbit’s house: the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
Also, rather remarkably given that he was very much a skeptic about evolution, Carroll had previously written to Charles Darwin to offer his services as a photographer for a physiological study of apes and humans.
Thomas Huxley: Did he evolve into a puppy?
