The Complete Alice in Wonderland (41 page)

“One of the Knights Will Show You the Way”:
Ominously, the Red Queen is implying that she knows that
two
chivalrous Knights, White and Red, will fight over Alice. By saying that one of the Knights will show Alice the way to the palace, she means either that the White Knight will win, and guide Alice onward; or, the Red Knight will be victorious, and Alice will be taken before the Red Queen as a fairly-earned prisoner of war.

“She Can Run Very Fast”:
In chess, the Queens are the most powerful and mobile pieces in the game, being able to move an unlimited number of squares in any of the eight directions.

Chapter III

Alice on the Train:
This clever illustration is a reference to the Millais painting, “My First Sermon,” which shows a young child in Alice’s pose, caught in another (very uncomfortable) adult situation. The background of the carriage is from August Leopold Egg’s painting, “The Travelling Companions.”

“Tickets, Please!”:
As an astute reader of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
will remember, the three lines of asterisks denote those moments when Alice becomes disoriented, or her body’s shape is changing. Here, there is a change that occurs when she leaps over the brook. She has just crossed from one chessboard square into the next, and in so doing has vanished and appeared on a Looking-Glass train heading north. Her first encounter is with the Guard, a conductor responsible for ticket checking.

“A Thousand Pounds a Minute”:
As we have seen through Alice’s encounter with the Red Queen, Looking-Glass Land is certainly a place where people are obsessed with haste, rushing and progress. The unified voices in the railway carriage represent “the people,” caught up in the rush of technological Victorian life. But where the Queen was concerned with time, these people are simply obsessed with money.

“You’re Travelling the Wrong Way”:
After the Guard scrutinizes Alice, he tells her that she is moving in the wrong direction. This is actually quite disconcerting, when we consider that Alice is a White Pawn in the chess game, and can only move in a single direction! The Guard has probably sensed that Alice is (unknowingly) serving the purposes of the manipulative Red Queen, instead of the White.

The Gentleman in the Papers:
The illustrated man is Benjamin Disraeli, the famous politician who was
certainly
in the newspapers!

The Passengers on the Train:
As the train is filled with various and sundry creatures going about their business, the identities of those sharing Alice’s railway carriage (Man, Goat, Beetle, Horse and Gnat) tell us much about the nature of Looking-Glass Land. In Wonderland, sentient animals lived side by side with humans. Insects, however, were not to be found. In Looking-Glass Land, these industrious creatures are everywhere. As we will see, they are quite concerned with issues concerning work, sorrow and death … no doubt as a result of their own fleeting and difficult lives.

An Extremely Small Voice:
It should be noted that in the original text, the words spoken by the gnat are in a smaller font. Due to the difficulties this causes for adjustable text on the Kindle, I have opted not to include this original formatting.

“She’s Got a Head on Her”:
In Carroll’s day, postage stamps featured the profile portrait of Queen Victoria. Since Alice is the only human girl in the carriage (and perhaps even the only one in Looking-Glass Land!), the people have mistaken her rushing head for a postage mark.

“I Know You Are a Friend”:
The Gnat’s speech here is quite mysterious. He may be implying that he knows Alice is a friend, because anyone
else
would have swatted him by now. He may also regard Alice as an
old
friend, simply because his own life is so short and he has now known her for several minutes.

The Goat’s Beard:
Alice first vanished and appeared on the train by jumping over the brook. Now that the
train
is jumping over another brook, she vanishes again and appears back in the forest (although in another square).

Looking-Glass Insects:
The nature of Looking-Glass Insects is curious—all of the ones pointed out by the Gnat seem to be artificially created, awkward and doomed to failure (and death). They may represent the lower class, or even the untouchables, of Looking-Glass Land society.

“It Always Happens”:
This grim, touching line underscores the nature of being … not only for the insects of Looking-Glass Land, but for all mortal creatures.

The Nameless Wood:
After the conversation Alice had with the Gnat concerning names as indicators of identity, it seems that Alice (having regarded names as not being important to insects themselves, if insects are inferior) has begun to lose her identity. This disconcerting effect is brought on by the primeval, non-sentient nature of the forest itself.

“I Know It Begins With L”:
Alice may either be struggling to remember her last name (Liddell), or she may be confusing herself with her elder sister (Lorina). She may also be remembering the other White Pawn (Lily).

A Curious End:
This chapter ends as an incomplete sentence, with the continuation, “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” being the title of the following chapter.

Chapter IV

Tweedledum and Tweedledee:
These twins, derived from a well-known nursery rhyme, receive their most in-depth characterization here in Carroll’s work. They are forever at odds, contradicting one another’s ambitions as if battling each other to lay claim to a single identity. To “tweedle” means to twist, or contort.

The Overgrown Schoolboys:
In his illustrations of the twins, Tenniel clearly drew on the inspiration of his prior pictures of John Bull, the epitome (in cartoon form) of the everyday Englishman. The “Tweedles,” in the same manner as Bull, wear the classic skeleton suit of 19th-century schoolboys. They are also dull, plucky, straightforward, stubborn and full of heart!

“First Boy,” “Next Boy”:
Alice is jesting with them because they are wearing skeleton suits, the traditional wear of English schoolboys. “First Boy” was a titular honor given to the smartest boy who knew all the answers, while “Next Boy” (contrariwise!) would indicate his slight inferior.

The Carpenter’s Hard Times:
In the illustrations, the Carpenter appears wearing the classic paper cap of the lower-class Victorian laborer. If he is wandering at the seashore of Looking-Glass Land, he may be an out-of-work shipbuilder. (He may also be responsible for working on the woodwork of the Ship of Fools, which we will see in
The Hunting of the Snark
.)

The Walrus and the Carpenter:
Unlike most of the poems in the Alice works, this one is unique to Carroll and not a parody of an existing work. There are hints of the superstitions of mariners, such as the midnight sun and the boiling sea. As we will see later in
The Hunting of the Snark
, such warnings are prevalent on the approach to Jabberwock Isle. The warning nature of the poem becomes more apparent when we consider that Carroll once (in the earlier editions) cited Tweedledum and Tweedledee as White Castles (Rooks), the Carpenter as a Red Knight, and the Walrus as a Red Bishop. In other words, the white chessmen are warning the new White Pawn (Alice) about the predatory nature of the red chessmen. The Oysters are innocents, and their lack of care among the red pieces leads to their grisly end.

This Was a Puzzler:
For the first time in her life, Alice is forced to contemplate the moral conundrum posed by determining the lesser of two evils.

The Sleeping King:
As opposed to the Queens in chess, the Kings move very slowly. In fact, it is often considered tactically unsound to move the King unless absolutely necessary, since doing so wastes a turn that could be spent moving a stronger (and less crucial) piece into place.

The Dream of the Red King:
The nature of the Red King’s dream emphasizes the darker, deadlier nature of Looking-Glass Land. In
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, we learned that Alice fell into Wonderland when she fell asleep, and left it when she woke. In Looking-Glass Land, however, she learns that she is not dreaming. Instead, she is being
dreamt of
. This chilling revelation makes her escape from Looking-Glass Land all the more urgent (which fits in again with the theme of rushing time).

“I Bought It Yesterday”:
The only real shop in Looking-Glass Land, it seems, is the Sheep Shop, where the White Queen (Sheep) sells objects of desire. If this is where Tweedledum bought his rattle, it also brings up another question: Are those brothers the
sons
of the White Queen? They serve in the game as chessmen (like Lily, the White Pawn and Queen’s daughter); they are rather dull; and in the absence of their mother, they tell Alice that they will need her help in getting dressed.

The Monstrous Crow:
The crow is featured in the original nursery rhyme, but it is also a bird symbolic of death. Rather grim, but quite in keeping with Looking-Glass Land!

Chapter V

The White Queen:
Carroll (in “‘Alice’ on the Stage”) described her thusly: “Lastly, the White Queen seemed, to my dreaming fancy, gentle, stupid, fat and pale; helpless as an infant; and with a slow, maundering, bewildered air about her just
suggesting
imbecility, but never quite passing into it; that would be, I think, fatal to any comic effect she might otherwise produce. There is a character strangely like her in Wilkie Collins’ novel ‘No Name’: by two different converging paths we have somehow reached the same ideal, and Mrs. Wragg and the White Queen might have been twin-sisters.”

“Am I A-Dressing …”:
A quick Victorian pun, born of misunderstanding. Alice is asking if she is speaking to royalty; the White Queen is responding that yes, you’re putting my shawl back on, so I suppose you are indeed a-dressing me.

Caring for the White Queen:
Alice’s careful and compassionate rituals over the White Queen—dressing her, fixing her hair, asking after her—comprise one of her first experiences in role reversal. In a way, this is Alice’s first moment of proving her worth as a future Queen.

“The Effect of Living Backwards”:
Whereas the Red Queen has proven herself as a mistress in control of time, the poor doddering White Queen is quite swept up in the opposite direction. She still has the powers of a Looking-Glass Queen, but the powers are beginning to rule
her
, as opposed to the other way around.

“The Trial Doesn’t Even Begin”:
The King’s Messenger in question is certainly the Hatter, that unlucky exile from Wonderland. The prescient White Queen tells us that something will happen (perhaps the Hatter will earn the White King’s ire, as he did that of the Queen of Hearts), and he’ll be thrown into prison once again. Or, she is actually (considering the illustration) referring to the trial that already happened in Wonderland, which has not yet happened in Looking-Glass Land due to the confounding effects of living backwards!

“Seven and a Half, Exactly”:
It is six months to the day after Alice’s seventh birthday, when she adventured in Wonderland.

“Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast”:
This part of the conversation is interesting, because of Alice’s declaration that she can’t believe in impossible things. In other words, she sincerely believes in everything that is happening to her, in both Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land. It is this conviction that makes her the
only
young girl who is capable of exploring these realms of unreality and getting back out again. The White Queen, meanwhile, believes impossible things every day. And well she might, as the sovereign of a land filled with impossibilities! Impossibility is all she has ever known.

She Crossed the Little Brook:
As we have seen twice before, whenever Alice jumps over a Looking-Glass Brook, some strange shift in perspective always occurs. The first time was when she vanished and appeared on the train; the second was when the train leaped and she vanished off of it again. Now, since the White Queen leapt first (and Alice followed), the transformation happens to the Queen, and Alice is carried along.

The Sheep:
In entering Looking-Glass Land, Alice has probably fallen asleep in her favorite arm-chair, back in the Deanery’s drawing-room. Sheep (of the counted variety) have long been associated with pleasant dreams. Also, Alice goes on a journey up the river of dreams, which is certainly the River Isis near where she fell asleep (to the bleating of sheep again!) and fell into Wonderland. As in all the best dreams, Alice goes quietly along with the lovely insanity that is now enfolding her.

The Old Sheep Shop:
This store, as illustrated, was an actual candy shop which Alice frequented while living in Oxford. These days, it remains as a souvenir shop selling Alice keepsakes and other mementoes. For those who wish to visit, it is located at 83 Saint Aldgate’s Street. Enjoy!

The Empty Shelves:
Alice is experiencing the effects of a mirage, or a trick of light in the corner of the eye. Peripheral vision shows there is something there, but looking directly shows nothing at all. Carroll is also alluding to the untouchable, fog-like nature of desired things in beautiful dreams.