“She wants for to know your history, she do.”
RUSKIN AND THE GRYPHON The Ugly Duchess greets Alice in the Queen’s croquet ground by tucking “her arm affectionately into Alice’s,” and then agreeing with everything she has to say. Alice finds this (rather forced) affection perplexing and blames the Duchess’s former bad temper on the fact that her kitchen was filled with pepper. Alice then attempts to construct “a new kind of rule” for determining temperament. She concludes that pepper makes people hot-tempered, vinegar makes them sour, camomile makes them bitter and barley-sugar makes them sweet-tempered.
Alice has essentially re-invented the ancient theory of the four humours—the four types of human temperament: sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic. The ancient Greek school of Hippocrates, the father of medicine, held that all illness was the result of an imbalance in the body of the four humours, fluids that in health were naturally equal in proportion. The four humours were believed to be blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. An imbalance (dyscrasia, or “bad mixture”) made a person ill. Hippocratic therapy was directed toward restoring balance. For example, citrus was thought to be beneficial when phlegm was overabundant. Or in Alice’s comic version, barley-sugar should make one “sweet-tempered.”
“You can’t think how glad I am to see you again, you dear old thing!” said the Duchess, as she tucked her arm affectionately into Alice’s, and they walked off together.
We still use the terminology of humours to describe psychological aspects of the human character. Individuals with sanguine temperaments are extroverted and social; choleric people have energy, passion and charisma; phlegmatic temperaments are characterized by dependability, gentility and affection; and melancholics are creative, kind and considerate.
The four humours as emblematic themes have been adapted many times in art and literature. Carroll himself wrote a satirical poem, “Melancholetta,” about a muse-like figure who appears to be a comic take on Dürer’s famous meditative and highly symbolic alchemical engraving Melencolia I.
We might conclude that in Carroll’s view, the behaviour of the real-life Duchess, the “Holy Terror” Bishop Wilberforce, depended more on context than temperament. On his own ground in the great kitchen, Wilberforce could be confident, intimidating and argumentative. But on entering the garden of the Christ Church Deanery, painfully aware he was there by invitation only, he became fawning, agreeable to all and subservient to the authority of the dean’s wife, who on a whim might arbitrarily banish him from Oxford society.
The Duchess falls over herself with inventing absurd reasons for being agreeable. Clearly this is a parody of some of the Victorian parlour games familiar to Alice and her sisters. The Duchess recites puns, malapropisms and muddled clichés, and then attempts to extract morals from them (as in a popular parlour game called Proverbs). When the Duchess proposes the nonsensical moral “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves,” she is reciting a warped version of the proverb “Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves.”
Alice tries to apply logical categories to the Duchess’s nonsensical sayings—“It’s a mineral, I think”; “It’s a vegetable”—and in so doing reinvents another well-known parlour game, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. In this, a player must guess what thing the other has in mind by asking up to twenty yes-or-no questions, starting with “Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?”
After enduring the cloying presence of the Duchess for some time, Alice witnesses the arrival of the Queen of Hearts, who disposes of the Duchess “in about half no time.” The Queen then removes Alice from her croquet ground and leaves her in the care and domain of two monsters.
The Queen’s action is made clear within the context of Greek mythology. The Greek underworld—like Wonderland’s royal garden—was divided into discrete regions. Beyond the Garden of Elysium, where those judged to be the blessed played at games, there was another realm, in which the souls of the damned were tortured and set upon by monsters. This Greek hell was known as Tartarus.
In the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, in Theodore C. Williams’s translation, the Sibyl guides the Trojan hero Aeneus in his descent into the underworld: “Here comes the place where cleaves our way in twain. Thy road, the right, toward Pluto’s dwelling goes, And leads us to Elysium. But the left Speeds sinful souls to doom, and is their path To Tartarus th’accurst.”
Not wishing to unduly frighten children, Carroll made the punishments in Wonderland’s Tartarus somewhat milder and its monsters less ferocious. Consequently, Alice moves from the Elysium-like croquet lawns where games go on forever to a region where a child must endure for eternity the torture of school lessons.
For a child, what could be more like paradise than eternal games? What could be more like hell than eternal school lessons? What could be more comically monstrous than the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, Carroll’s two ridiculous parodies of pedantic schoolmasters who relentlessly torment Alice by engaging her in a barrage of never-ending lessons?
The Queen turns Alice over to the care of these two grotesque monsters. We first encounter the Gryphon, but the Queen appears more concerned that Alice be introduced to the Mock Turtle. And we find, in the original Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, that the Queen is given the second title of Marchioness of Mock Turtles.
The Mock Turtle is a composite creature with the shell and front flippers of a turtle and the head, hind hooves and tail of a calf. In Wonderland, the Mock Turtle exists because of a pseudo-logical joke: if turtle soup is made from turtles, then mock turtle soup must be made from mock turtles. Except mock turtle soup is actually made with veal, which explains why Tenniel’s illustration gives the creature a calf’s head, hooves and tail.
As for the Mock Turtle’s real-life identity, Carroll himself confirmed that it was his friend and colleague the Reverend HENRY PARRY LIDDON (1829–1890). In this, Carroll again indulges his fondness for appallingly bad puns: a turtle is an animal with a lid on. In “The New Belfry of Christ Church,” Carroll makes use of this same pun. In reference to the rumour attributing the cubic design of the wooden belfry to Liddon, Carroll asks: “Was it a Professor who designed this box, which, whether with a lid on or not, equally offends the eye?”
Henry Liddon was Lewis Carroll’s travelling companion when he visited Russia and the continent in 1867, his only voyage abroad. And as the biographer and disciple of Edward Bouverie Pusey (the Oxford Cheshire Cat), Liddon also appears in two of Carroll’s squibs. In “The New Method of Evaluation, as Applied to π,” Liddon and Pusey appear as geometric coordinates: “It was now necessary to investigate the locus of EBP [Edward Bouverie Pusey]: this was found to be a species of Catenary.… The locus of HPL [Henry Parry Liddon] will be found almost entirely to coincide with this.” In “The Blank Cheque,” Henry Liddon appears as a lad called Harry-Parry, of whom we are told “Harry’s very fond of Pussy”—Pusey—who is the “much-enduring parlour-cat.”
Henry Liddon: Name was a gift to the pun-loving Carroll.
The Rev. Liddon: Caricatured as “High Church” in Vanity Fair.
For twenty years Liddon was the resident canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where by means of his charismatic and emotive oration he attracted a vast congregation of three to four thousand. His sermons were so emotive, he frequently moved his parishioners to tears. In Wonderland, however, the Mock Turtle seems capable of moving only himself to tears. It must have amused the stuttering Dodo Dodgson to portray the great orator Henry Parry Liddon as a literary trope—a creature that exists only as a figure of speech.
PLATO’S TURTLE AND ARISTOTLE’S GRYPHON Lewis Carroll shared Plato’s addiction to puns. Translator Trevor J. Saunders observes that in Plato’s The Laws the dialogue is full of “elephantine punning and other kinds of word-play, usually impossible to reproduce in English.” Peter Heath, in his Philosopher’s Alice, directly links Plato to the mock turtle and the Gryphon passages of Wonderland, in which Carroll makes “what is probably the direst collection of bad puns and false etymologies since Plato’s Cratylus.”
Furthermore, the mock turtle and the Gryphon of Wonderland are comparable to the guardians of Plato’s Republic. PLATO (427–347 BC) and ARISTOTLE (384–322 BC) were the masters of the two great schools of philosophy in Athens, the Academy and the Lyceum, respectively. Like the mock turtle and the Gryphon, they were in the employ of royalty: Plato in the court of Dion of Syracuse, Aristotle in the court of Alexander the Great of Macedonia.
Given that Carroll himself outed the Oxford mock turtle as the Reverend Liddon with that “lid on” pun about the creature’s shell, we can be forgiven for searching for the philosophic mock turtle’s identity by means of an equally appalling pun. So let us suggest that the mock turtle is Plato because a turtle is an animal shaped both like a plate and an O.
Taking another clue from the punning explanation by the mock turtle that the Old Turtle was called a tortoise because he “taught us,” we may also conclude that in Wonderland, “turtle” implies teacher or philosopher. Consequently, we have another possible Carrollian pun on the name of Aristotle: Aris-turtle—aris in Greek means “top,” “best” or “first,” thus “best teacher” or “first philosopher.” Certainly, there was competition between Plato and Aristotle over who was ranked the top philosopher.
Also, the Gryphon’s lecturing style is similar to that of Aristotle who is believed to have walked as he lectured to his students. He lectured on the grounds of the Lyceum in Athens which became known as the Peripatetic school of philosophy. Furthermore, this (possibly mistaken) belief in Aristotle’s approach to teaching was consciously adopted by the Oxford Gryphon, John Ruskin, in his famous long outdoor walking-tour lectures.
Plato and Aristotle: Turtle and tortoise.
Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car, by William Blake, circa 1825.
The Gryphon too is an imaginary beast, found only in heraldry and literature—notably the underworlds of the Aeneid and The Divine Comedy. It is a monster with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. Its name is most commonly spelled griffin, but Carroll chose the spelling used by Lucius Apuleius, the Roman author of The Golden Ass. This may be because that book’s gryphon is directly linked to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Described as the “Hyperborean gryphon,” it is one of the creatures in the grand procession in Lucius’s account of the Mysteries of the Great Goddess. Furthermore, Lucius Apuleius was the author of a famous lost text entitled Liber ludicorum et gryphorum, a title usually translated as “The Book of Enigmas.”
Certainly, the Gryphon is an enigma who is partnered with an even greater enigma in the form of the absurd logic-chopping monster that is the Mock Turtle. There is little doubt that the real-life Oxford Gryphon was JOHN RUSKIN (1819–1900), the greatest art critic and philosopher of art history of his time. The hugely popular author of The Stones of Venice was an honorary Fellow of Christ Church and the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford.
Ruskin had been an undergraduate at Oxford’s Trinity College, where the griffin appears on the college’s coat of arms and main gate. Furthermore, a well-known passage in Ruskin’s Modern Painters favourably compares Gothic sculptures of “true” griffins, with the classically conceived “false” griffin sculptures of ancient Rome. Ruskin’s mentor as an undergraduate had been the future dean of Christ Church—and future father of Alice Liddell. Dean Henry Liddell and Ruskin remained lifelong friends and colleagues. For a time, Ruskin was Alice’s drawing teacher. As such, he also served as the model for Wonderland’s “old conger-eel” who “used to come once a week” to the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle’s school to teach “Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils” (drawing, sketching and painting in oils).
John Ruskin: The great critic had been mentored by Alice’s father.
Like Carroll, Ruskin had an obsession with young girls. And like Carroll, he wrote a fairy tale (The King of the Golden River) for a twelve-year-old child. Five years later, that child, Euphemia (Effie) Gray, would become Ruskin’s wife. However, the marriage was not a success, and after another five years, it was annulled on the grounds of non-consummation. Shortly thereafter, in 1855, Effie married Ruskin’s protégé, the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais. Ruskin—again like Carroll—was to remain a virgin all his life.
TWO PRIM MISSES Although many aspects of Wonderland are parodies of Plato’s Republic, the logician Charles Dodgson was a champion of Aristotle. If any single discipline dominated Dodgson’s life, it was Aristotelian, or syllogistic, logic—although it was often at odds with the more mystical aspects of Platonic thought.
Dodgson’s Symbolic Logic was dedicated “to the memory of Aristotle.” And in the introduction to that book, he wrote: “Since Aristotle, logicians have tried to formulate those rules underlying arguments which, when followed, will ensure that only true conclusions are drawn from true premises. These are called the rules of true argument.” It is in the manipulation of these rules of true argument that Lewis Carroll has great sport in Wonderland.
Aristotle’s first book, Categories, which established the rank and order of things as genus, species and attributes, was Dodgson’s logician’s bible. The philosopher’s second book, Prior Analytics—the first treatise ever written on formal logic—was his user’s handbook. Aristotle’s system of logic provided the standard model of logic right up until Carroll’s day, when new algebraic tools began to transform it.
Syllogistic logic is based on the idea that the conclusion to a valid argument is reached by way of two or more premises, or statements of fact. Or, as a character in Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno explains to a young lady, a “Sillygism” is that in which “two prim Misses” produce a “Delusion.” In fact, Carroll’s description of a “Sillygism” goes a long way toward explaining one aspect of his humour. It is a trick Carroll used in all of his writings to confuse and amuse. The result inevitably was dialogues that sound sensible because they appear to be logically constructed. However, as Carroll wrote in his Curiosa Mathematica, “the validity of a Syllogism is quite independent of the truth of its Premisses.”
When Carroll brings the grammar and vocabulary of formal logic into ordinary language, he actually does create a “delusion”—that is, something that in formal language is logically correct but in ordinary language is patently not true. The usual result is a statement both absurd and comic.
In 1855—the same year Carroll first caught sight of Alice Liddell—the wealthy Irish La Touche family asked Ruskin to give drawing lessons to their ten-year-old daughter, Rose. Ruskin appears to have promptly fallen in love with Rose La Touche, but patiently waited until she was eighteen (and he was forty-seven) before making an unsuccessful proposal of marriage. Nonetheless, he remained infatuated, and after her early death at the age of twenty-seven, the bereft Ruskin spent years attempting to psychically communicate with her departed spirit.
There are other obscure puns here, one in Greek. When Alice first meets the Mock Turtle she hears him “sighing as if his heart would break.” She sympathetically asks: “What is his sorrow?” In reply, the Gryphon explains, “It’s all his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow, you know.”
Here is a bilingual pun that also crosses over with the language of classical logic: it isn’t sorrow the Turtle hasn’t got but soro, the Greek for “a heap” and the root of sorites, a chain of syllogisms, the conclusion of each forming a premise of the next. In the formal language of logic, a heap is a quantity of similar things placed together. But the Mock Turtle has no heap; he has no quantity, no material existence, whatever.
This explains the chapter’s title, “The Mock Turtle’s Story.” It is another of Carroll’s dire puns: the Mock Turtle’s story is no story at all. It is an “M.T.” story, or “empty” story. The Mock Turtle is a nonentity and a category without content. He is what logicians know as a “null class,” which explains why his classes were lessons that “lessen from day to day” until nothing remains.
Everything about this strange school “in the sea” is a scrambled version of subjects taught in terrestrial schools. Students were taught “Reeling and Writhing” (reading and writing), “Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision” (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), “Mystery” and “Seaography” (history and geography), “Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils” (which we met earlier) and “Laughing and Grief” (a double pun that combines Latin and Greek with comedy and tragedy).
The British public school system is not the only target of Carroll’s satire here. The Wonderland Gryphon also attacks the real-life Oxford Gryphon John Ruskin’s great theme of beautification by transforming it into a gospel of “Uglification.” In the opinion of the reactionary conservative Lewis Carroll, the liberalizing changes being forced on the ancient and hallowed institutions of learning at Oxford were like those described by the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon—empty and ugly. Carroll’s conservative politics appear to have quite blinded him to the immense good work Ruskin did by inspiring appreciation of the arts and broadening the availability of education at all levels.
Ruskin’s influence on art, architecture, literature and social change was remarkable. He was the inspiration for and champion of the Pre-Raphaelites, Christian Socialists, Working Men’s Colleges and the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as the advancement of education of working-class children, women and men.
