Full text of "Knight Letter No. 89"

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KNIGHT LETTER

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The Lewis Carroll Society of North America

Winter 2012

Volume II Issue 1 9

Number 89

Knight Letter is the official magazine of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America.

It is published twice a year and is distributed free to all members.

Editorial correspondence should be sent to

the Editor in Chief at mahendra373@hotmail.com.

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions for The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch should be sent to

mahendra373@hotmail.com or pcolacino@austin.rr.com.

Submissions and suggestions for Serendipidity and Sic Sic Sic should be sent to

andrewogus@mindspring.com.

Submissions and suggestions for All Must Have Prizes should be sent to

joel@thebirenbaums.net.

Submissions and suggestions for From OurFar-Flung Correspondents should be sent to

FarFlungKnight@gmail.com.

Mahendra Singh, Editor in Chief
Patricia Colacino, Editor, Rectory Umbrella

Ann Buki, Editor, Carrollian Notes

Cindy Watter, Editor, Of Books and Things

James Welsch is^ Rachel Eley, Editors, From Our Far-Flung Correspondents

Mark Burstein, Production Editor

Andrew H. Ogus, Designer

THE LEWIS CARROLL SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA

President:
Mark Burstein, president@lewiscarroll.org

Vice-President:
Cindy Watter, hedgehogccw@sbcglobal.net

Secretary:
Clare Imholtz, secretary@lewiscarroll.org

www.LewisCarroll.org

Annual membership dues are U.S. $35 (regular),

$50 (international), and $100 (sustaining).

Subscriptions, correspondence, and inquiries should be addressed to:

Clare Imholtz, LCSNA Secretary

11935 Beltsville Dr.

Beltsville, Maryland 20705

Additional contributors to this issue:
Alan Tannenbaum, Mary DeYoung, and Clare Imholtz

On the cover: Thomas Perino, see p. 37.

The image of the Reverend Robinson Duckworth that appeared on the color insert

in our previous issue is © the National Portrait Gallery, London,

and was used with their kind permission.

KL regrets the oversight.

~^^^

CONTENTS

-J^

v^^

^^K

^:?^

THe ReCTORY UMBRBLLA

OF BOOKS AND THINGS

«»

Epic Fales

Oleg Lipchenko 's Snark

PATT GRIFFIN

DOUG HOWICK

From Under Ground to Wonderland Part II

The Mad Hattery

MATT DEMAKOS

RUTH BERMAN

An Early Alice in China

George WaZA^- 5 Wonderland

SEN WONG

ANDREW OGUS

The Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll:
Newly Discovered Additional Pieces

A Is for Alice 67'The Wonderland Alphabet

ANDREW OGUS

FRANCINE F. ABELES

New Russian Illustrated Editions

The Political Alice

ANDREW OGUS

JACK BRONSTON

Thomas Perino 's Pays de Merveilles

Future Meetings

ANDREW OGUS

Alice 150

Everything Alice

MISCHMASCH

"SI?

Evergreen

FROM OUR FAR-FLUNG
CORReSPONDSNTS

m
Leaves from the Deanery Garden
Sic Sic Sic — Serendipity

87
88

mi-
Art & Illustration — Articles & Academia — Books —

Ravings from the Writing Desk of
MARK BURSTEIN

Events, Exhibits, & Places — Internet & Technology —
Movies & Television — Music — Performing Arts — Things

CARROLLIAN NOTGS

1!^

Savile Clark &' Slaughter's Mice Revived in Japan 31

KIMI KUSUMOTO

Alice at the Tate Liverpool 32

AUGUSTA. IMHOLTZ,JR.

Lewis Carroll (poem) 33

JANE YOLEN

-sir

Sooner or later, anyone who's ever had to
navigate anything Carrollian through the
editorial process will be tempted to follow
the Bellman's example and simply tingle their bell.
Bell-tingling is a time-honored system of evading both
maritime and editorial responsibilities, and frankly,
it's far more melodious than clattering about with
computer keyboards.

Of course, logically speaking, a bell-tingled
Knight Letter would most probably resemble a perfect
and absolute blank, a thing of nonsensical perfection
but unlikely to impress even the most casual reader,
much less the eagle-eyed members of the LCSNA!
They are made of sterner stuff and demand genuine,
black-and-white substance to their nonsense.

Luckily for this editor, this issue of the Knight
Letter is satisfyingly nonblank, an accomplishment
that he has pulled off almost despite himself, as the
other staff members of this journal will grimly af-
firm. Thanks to our many talented and hardwork-

ing contributors, these pages' primal blankness has
been thoroughly expunged by an embarrassment of
Carrollian riches. We have the conclusion of Matt
Demakos's truly exhaustive statistical analysis of Un-
der Ground, a firsthand account of a Japanese revival
of Henry Savile Clark's Alice, some newly discovered
CLD logic pamphlets, and even a fascinating explana-
tion of the political implications of Lewis Carroll in
early twentieth-century China. And as an extra treat
for our by-now politically nauseated American read-
ers, we have an analysis of Alice written by a profes-
sional politician blessed with that rarest of political
talents: a genuine sense of humor.

Add to that all our usual news, reviews, and other
conventional signs and I think that even the most dis-
cerning members of the LCSNA will be much pleased
when they find this to be a Knight Letter they can un-
derstand.

MAHENDRA SINGH

THe ReCTORY UMBRBLLA

1^^

T5?r

l»IC FALiESi

PATT GRIFFIN

^T^^r^^> th^ sublime symmetry: The fall 2012 LC-
^^^\ SNA meeting was nothing if not a Carrol-
M. Vlian Homecoming Celebration set against a
most familiar backdrop — NYU's Fales Library, home
to the famed Berol Collection, the Society's archives,
and, as of September 29, eleven LCSNA meetings.

The traditional prequel to the meeting — the Max-
ine Schaefer Memorial Outreach Reading — was also
an encore, having taken place the day before at down-
town Manhattan's Earth School (where we had done
a reading in 2010) on the very soggy morning of Fri-
day the 28th. Rain notwithstanding, the assembled —
about 30 fourth graders and their teachers — proved
an avid audience for the "Mad Tea-Party" scene read
by Patt Griffin (as Alice and the Dormouse), Cindy
Watter (the Mad Hatter and March Hare), and Ella
Parry-Davies, one of this year's speakers, who lent her
lovely British accent to the role of Narrator. The kids,
who were completely engaged in the performance
(laughing in all the right places and enthusiastically
taking part in the post-reading Q&A — always a good
sign), had several additional comments and ques-
tions for the cast, who moved about the classroom
handing out copies of Wonderland to their new fans.
Autographs were requested and granted before the
students and presenters trotted off to lunch.

On Saturday the meeting got under way at 11:30
A.M., with President Mark Burstein welcoming all
and sundry, followed by a rundown of current Soci-

ety business, which included announcing tentative
plans for our next six meetings (p. 26); an update on
AlicelSO, 2015's NYC multi-venue extravaganza (p.
26); and publication plans (Volume 5 [Games] of the
Complete Pamphlets series, under the editorship of
Christopher Morgan; and a facsimile edition of Conn
6i IXapcmerb Jluea, the incredibly rare first Russian
translation [1879]).

Elections were then held. August Imholtz pro-
posed the slate (all incumbents, save for Sandra):

President
Vice President
Treasurer
Secretary
Directors

Patt Griffin

Mark Burstein
Cindy Watter
Fran Abeles
Clare Imholtz
Matt Demakos
Ellen Schaefer-Salins

Sandra Parker-Provenzano
James Welch

The slate was elected by vocal acclamation.

The first speaker to take the podium was Robin
Wilson, President of the British Society for the His-
tory of Mathematics; Emeritus Professor at the Open
University, Milton Keynes, and Gresham College,
London; and a Lecturer at Pembroke College, Ox-
ford. The author of several volumes on the popular-
ization and communication of mathematics and its
history, Robin entitled his talk "Lewis Carroll in Num-
berland" after his book of the same name.

Robin Wilson

Andrew Sawyer

Wilson first assured everyone in the audience
who might not be as mathematically savvy as he (or
Dodgson) that he would be approaching the topic "in
a nontechnical way." (Silent sighs of relief from the
numerically challenged.)

To ease the audience into the subject matter, he
opened with a discussion of the famous "Dear Mag-
gie" letter (January 30, 1868) with the self-portrait of
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson attempting to lecture with
his hand spread over his face, and his eyes peering in
alarm through his fingers. The missive ends with CLD
giving his love and best regards to Margaret and her
mother, and to her "small, fat impertinent brother
[his] hatred." Noted Robin, the letter illustrates two
aspects of Carroll: "a lover of children and a teacher
of mathematics."

Carroll was a mathematical prodigy, and the sub-
ject pervaded his life and works. As a child, he once
made a maze in the snow as intricate as the famous
maze at Hampton Court; he also made a three-dimen-
sional maze for his sisters. As a young boy he asked his
father to explain logarithms and, at age twelve, wrote
a complicated two-page document on how to trisect a
right angle.

Wilson showed rather a grim engraving of an
Oxford viva voce (oral) exam of the period, which
"looked like an exorcism," but Carroll, of course, did
fine. In his finals at Christ Church, he got the highest
marks in mathematics that year, but disappointingly
then failed to win the Senior Scholarship. He was
awarded a mathematical lectureship, however, and
his teaching career lay before him.

Geometry was Carroll's main mathematical en-
thusiasm — the actual geometry textbook he used as
a boy is here in the Berol Collection. Geometry was,

moreover, a Victorian enthusiasm: there were no few-
er than 200 editions of Euclid in nineteenth-century
England! Euclid was considered the best training
for the mind, and it was required background for a
career in the church or the army. Carroll was not a
particularly original geometer, but knew the subject
thoroughly, and wrote all sorts of pamphlets to ex-
plain Euclid to his students. However, there was in
genesis at the time a movement against Euclid and
toward a more practical, less stodgy course of study.
In response, Carroll, a traditionalist, wrote a very witty
play, Euclid and his Modern Rivals [an excerpt from which
was the text on the sphere in the very first Wikipedia logo in
2000! -Ed.].

Carroll often used wordplay and humor in his
mathematical writings, just as he used math in his
humorous and fantastical writings. He wrote a letter
to fourteen-year-old Wilton Rix proving that 2x2 =
5. Another humorous work, Dynamics of a Parti-cle, is
both a parody of Euclid and an argument for anti-
Gladstonian politics. An Elementary Treatise on Deter-
minants was his most original serious work. He also
developed an original method of condensation (a
method of computing the determinants of square ma-
trices), which is today recognized as very important.

Carroll hated unfairness and he used mathemat-
ics to brilliantly demonstrate what is wrong with vari-
ous voting methods. He did the same for tennis tour-
naments, coming up with a method (prior to the days
of seeding) that ensured that the best three players
would come out on top.

And, as we all know, mathematics pervades the
Alicehooks {e.g., when the Red and White Queens in-
terrogate Alice about addition and subtraction), the
Snark (e.g., when the Butcher demonstrates a diffi-

Andrew Saiuyer's Alice

Adam Gopnik

cult-sounding but actually simple arithmetic problem
to the Beaver), and Sylvie and Bruno (e.g., the making
of a Fortunatus's purse, also known as a Mobius strip,
out of handkerchiefs).

At one point Robin, in full professorial mode
(thanks to his British accent and tweedy ambience
he really did appear to have come straight from cen-
tral casting), made a geometry-inspired joke with the
punch line "Here's looking at Eu, did."

Many thanks to Robin Wilson for launching the
day's roster of lectures with humor, charm, and exper-
tise. Readers are referred to his highly recommended
book.

Andrew Sawyer (BFA in Graphic Design from
Rhode Island School of Design, currently working as
a freelance graphic designer in Oakland, California)
next took the podium. He is described on his website
as a "Graphic Designer/Problem Solver/Multimedia
Innovator," a trio of skills he incorporated into his
jaw-droppingly meticulous project, a typographic Al-
ice's Adventures in Wonderland.

This limited-edition artist's book reproducing
Carroll's text using only typographic symbols and
geometric elements shows off Andrew's affinity for
bookmaking and his ability to perceive Carroll's text
through a designer's kaleidoscope eyes. His compre-
hensive presentation — complete with images from
(a) his inspirations (a Tokyo restaurant called Alice
of Magic World; The Recombinant Alice, a sophisticated
mix-and-match flip book published in 1999; and the
Washington Ballet's typographically sassy ad for its re-
cent production of Alice in Wonderland); (b) his pro-
cess; and (c) the final product — was fascinating.

Sawyer offered a visually staggering look at the
diverse — often origami-like — pages that make up his

book, as well as the real deal: A copy of the hand-
stitched book (printed on graph paper, purple ve-
lum, and cardstock) was on display during the break
(much to the delight of both the collector contingent
and the certifiably "curiouser"), including Andrew's
custom-laser-cut birchwood slipcase offering a beauti-
fully simple rendering of the letters "AW."

Andrew's book can be viewed as a sort of graphic
doppelgdnger to Carroll's text. For example, his treat-
ment of the Cheshire Cat is both "cryptic and ghost-
ly," with dialogues printed so only half of each letter
(printed in purple) is seen on split pages, read easily
only when the two pages are overlapped.

The book uses just two typefaces, ITC Stone Serif
and ITC Lubalin Graph, because he "liked the qual-
ity of the very round O and very square X and how
they complemented each other; they reflect the sa-
tirical and playful qualities of the text." Typographic
symbols portray Wonderland denizens and resonate
vrith their character (a frenetic White Rabbit, for ex-
ample).

As Mark commented at the conclusion of An-
drew's talk, the book is "quite a treasure and unique
in the annals of Wonderland editions." It was printed
in an edition of ten; you can see it on andrewsawyer.
net — a few copies are still available.

Next, Adam Gopnik, the prominent critic, novel-
ist, raconteur, and staff writer for the Nezv Yorker, in
his third appearance before the Societ)', received a
warm welcome, for good reason: Repeated visits in
the Gopnikian sense instinctively trigger anticipation
for whatever subject he chooses — in this case "Syhie
and Bruno, Examined."

Adam began his talk with a nod to the two pre-
vious speakers, pointing out that Carroll was one of

Raymond Smullyan

the inventors of expressive typography, and adding
that he considers Carroll a "generative figure" inso-
far as "everything that came after him was affected by
him." He v^ent on to observe that Carroll was the J. K.
Rowling of his time and cited how S&B suffered criti-
cally when compared to Wonderiand and Looking-Glass,
much as Rowling's new adult-centric novel, The Casual
Vacancy, hasn't lived up to Harry Potter's, blockbuster
success.

Moving on to Sylvie and Bruno — an eristic enigma
at best to most lovers of the Alice books — ^Adam con-
ceded that while SisfB remains to most readers "a kind
of black hole of [Carroll's] works," being the "least
read, referred to, and most bewildering and puzzling,"
he himself not only found the S&'B books fascinating
but has, since he was a kid, read and reread them. He
even wrote a musical adaptation of "The Mad Garden-
er's Song" while in college at McGill.

Unlike most of us who find S&^B a challenge,
Gopnik being Gopnik — with his ability to see, ana-
lyze, and present lucent observations with the rum-
pled panache of a standup comic with a Mensa card
in his wallet — ^was able to make a persuasive argument
for taking the 56r'J5 plunge again, using his scrutiny of
the book as a road map.

Of the opinion that the chapters in Si^B were
written alternately by two people — Carroll and Dodg-
son ("both sides of his persona at the same time,
which is a remarkable thing") — Gopnik cut a wide in-
tellectual swath as he described why he felt the books
were both interesting and essential for Carrollians.
Further, although the S&B duad is far more self-con-
scious, "sentimental" (Adam noted this word is often
misused, as "overly tender in ways that challenge our

emotional defenses"), and drawn out than the Snark
and the Alice books, they do succeed in working on
five "sedimentary" levels:

■jir Fairyland and Oudand, a classic usurpation/res-
toration story;

•k a "realistic" Victorian romance, with a love
quadrangle (Lady Muriel, Arthur Forester, Eric
Linden, and the unnamed narrator) involving
a believer (Muriel), a disbeliever (Eric), respect
for convention (even though we are already in
the age of Oscar Wilde), and the ethical prob-
lems raised by Muriel and Eric's broken engage-
ment;

•k moral quarrels and reasoning, touching upon
religious concepts, the truth of Christian faith,
and other serious ethical questions, such as "can
inherited wealth be justified?" that Dodgson's
gifts as a logician attempted to answer;

•k Carrollian comedy: the three mad professors
who take ideas to their logical extremes, e.g.,
preventing drowning through selective breeding
to make people lighter than water, represent a
"sharp dig at Utopian/Spencerian thinking";
and

k comic verse that, rather than being produced by
comic characters, rises up unpredictably, such
as "The Mad Gardner's Song," which Gopnik
considers "the best verse Carroll ever produced,"
with its final stanza, "He thought he saw an Ar-
gument . . ." warranting recital.

The book's five levels operate simultaneously
and spontaneously, with the serious moral discourse
alternating with wild comedy. He called the comic
verse sublime, while the romantic, sentimental novel
about marriage is "kind of icky." He described Car-
roll's nonsense poetry as a "lightning bolt striking the
primordial soup of his imagination." Sylvie and Bruno
is, in a way, a model of a postmodern novel, with its
"interpenetration of the fabulous, fantastical, and the
real. . . . Carroll was the first author to pull this off."

Gopnik then discussed the glosses of two oppos-
ing commenters, W. H. Auden and William Empson,
Christian and atheist, on Carroll's work, noting that
religious doubt — overtly dramatized in S&B — ^was the
essential Victorian condition. Carroll welcomed the
rise of intellectualism during the period, yet he saw
its emotional limitations, and further, he believed he
would be able to resolve this very Victorian tension in
S&B. He failed. The Fairy Duet ("It Is Love") at the
close of Concluded, which Carroll believed his greatest
poem, unfortunately is irw/y sentimental, i.e., emotion
willed into being.

This account of Adam's talk can hardly do jus-
tice to his ability to weave massively complex ideas,
opinions (incidentally, his aversion list includes Harry
Furniss's S&'B illustrations) , and humor with barely a

note and nary a visual aid. Fortunately, Mr. Gopnik
has kindly promised to consider writing up his talk in
its entirety for our next issue.

A break ensued as we stretched our legs, caught
up, shopped, informally interrogated the speakers,
and prepared for the second half of a very full and
frabjous program.

Raymond Smullyan is a most delightfully eccentric
American Renaissance gentleman: mathematician,
concert pianist, logician, professor of philosophy,
and magician. The subject of a 2001 documentary.
This Film Needs No Title by Rao Ruspoli, Smullyan cel-
ebrated his 93rd birthday last May and lives a singu-
larly carpe diem lifestyle that has embraced a catalog
of two dozen books, including Alice in Puzzle-Land: A
Carrollian Tale, for Children Under Eighty, introduced by
Martin Gardner.

Smullyan, a natural performer with a penchant
for playing head games (of the nicest kind), dubbed
his lecture "Carrollian Logic and Other Matters" — a
title that allowed him to indulge his passion for pok-
ing at sense sans sensibility. His opening salvo, "Be-
fore I begin speaking, I have something to say ..."
was followed by a long pause, then audience laughter
as we "got" it. Ray was clearly in his element as he
launched into a puzzle-discussion of existence that
led into anecdotes (with illogical twists) about a bus
driver, a weatherman, and an art critic.

He then delivered a rather mind-blowing riff
on the difference between "sound" and "valid" syl-
logisms. In fact, keeping up with Smullyan, vrith his
puckish personality and tendency to keep his audi-
ence off-guard, was no easy feat — ^fun, but not easy.
For instance, he used the Tea Party scene in Wonder-
land for exploring "vacuous predication, a theorem
of logic"; played around a bit vrith the White Knight's
song in Looking-Glassr, and confessed to "feeling a little
bit ashamed" of himself when he took on the con-
voluted (albeit provable) subject of "true vs. false"
analyses.

Suffice to say Smullyan is a lovable, logical (or il-
logical, depending on his mood) force of nature who
entertained the socks off all us on everything from
No-Yes answers to Carroll as an ardent anti-vivisection-
ist — ^whether we could keep up or not. This is one lec-
ture — make that performance — we'll not soon forget.

When Ella Parry-Davies, a Master of Arts candi-
date in Performance Studies at Goldsmiths College,
University of London, replaced Mr. Smullyan at the
podium the difference between the two was strik-
ing: Smullyan looks like a mildly frenzied Dickensian
character in search of a novel, while Parry-Davies is
the essence of young, put-together, twenty-first-cen-
tury style and fashion-model good looks, all punctu-
ated by short cropped hair and the color pop of a red
necklace. The juxtaposition of these two speakers was
pure genius, especially when you add that her talk,

Ella Parry-Davies

"Alice Through the Iron Curtain: Illustration as an
Alternative Narrative in Russian Alices" proved to be
pretty much the polar opposite of Smullyan 's glee-
fully untethered presentation.

Parry-Davies, who is also a contributing edi-
tor for the online theatre publication Exeunt, began
her presentation by discussing the first translation
of Carroll's work into Russian, in 1879, which used
Tenniel's illustrations [a facsimile ofiuhich will soon be
in your hands] . She went on to explain how later Sta-
lin's dictatorship was marked by an unprecedented
level of control over every aspect of art production;
unofficial art circles were unable to engender either
published criticism or media attention until the mid-
1980s. Artists, Stalin said, were meant to be the "en-
gineers of human souls," i.e., ideologically useful. Of
course, Carroll's text was itself seditious. "The self-
reflexivity, then, of Nonsense, its recourse to fantasy
and imagination and its lack of engagement with the
'real world' concerns of labor and productivity made
Carroll's work at best useless and at worst highly sub-
versive within the Soviet regime."

Her discussion of formalism and its "defamiliar-
ization" began with the work of Franciszka Themer-
son, who was actually Polish, not Russian. Her world
is represented in the starkly contrasting aesthetics of
minimalist and schematic line drawings in red and
blue juxtaposed with her renditions of Tenniel's Al-
ice, who

thus becomes a symbol of a symbol; that famil-
iar character we know so well from Tenniel's
iconic images is defamiliarized. The reader is
suddenly asked to look at not who Alice is, but
at how she is pictured.

We come back to the distinction between
looking at and looking through. This distinc-
tion essentially sums up what formalism is:
The medium — whether that is visual art or
language — draws attention to itself, rather
than allowing us to look through it, to what it
represents.

Her sensitive criticism involved perspective, illu-
sion, style, insight, focus, technique, semiotics, con-
text, reception, and perception in the illustrations
of Andrei Martynov, Yuri Vashchenko, Julia Gukova,
Aleksandr Dodon, Tatiana lanovskaia, M. Svedanov
and S. Ivancheva, Valery Alfeevsky, and Mai Miturich.
She concluded:

For the child reader in particular, this dispar-
ity between verbal and visual narratives is im-
portant, helping him or her learn that stories
can be told from many perspectives, or as an
ideological critic may note, that no narrative
truth is absolute. In my mind, these Russian
artists are amongst the most successful of Car-
roll's illustrators, because they epitomize one
of the most important and characteristic qual-
ities of the illustrated work: the dynamic, pro-
gressive and exciting dialogue between words
and images.

Founding member and former president David
Schaefer's "A Newly Discovered 1928 Looking-Glass
Film Reel" was the next presentation of the afternoon.
An undisputed authority on the film adaptations of
the AlicehooV.%, David recendy was able to track down
a single reel of a vintage Looking-Glass film that had
long been considered lost or nonexistent.

David took a few minutes prior to showing his
newfound treasure to share some tantalizing nug-
gets, such as the fact that the original was printed on
celluloid film with four background colors (orange,

David Schaefer

green, red, and yellow) added by hand. The fore-
ground colors, applied either with a stencil or by the
Handschiegl process, have faded to near-invisibility
over time.

He also noted that the young lady playing Alice, \^-
ola Savoy, was fifteen, and that all the animal characters
in the movie were played by "littie people," or in the
vernacular of the early twentieth century, "midgets."

When did Alice first go through the Looking-
Glass in the movies? There is complete confu-
sion in the motion picture world. Was it 1915,
or was it 1927, or perhaps 1928? And who di-
rected a production entitled Alice Through a
Looking Glass, anyway, or was there ever such
a motion picture? Well, yes, there was such a
motion picture. I was able to purchase reel
five of this 'lost' movie. The location of the
other four reels is unknown.

The companion Alice in Wonderland film, also di-
rected by W. W. Young and starring Viola Savoy, is well
known; in fact, it is available in (almost) toto on DVD
(see p. 40). Images from it appear in a 1918 Grossett
and Dunlap publication of Wonderland. David made
the case that although Looking Glass was not released
until 1927 by Pathe, it was most probably filmed at
the same time (1915), although the inter-tities were
produced in the latter year.

We then watched the missing reel, which was
quite amiable, albeit it would have been nice to have
musical accompaniment, as was done in theaters at
the time. All in all, a grand retro adventure where
madness meets madcap. We applaud Dave for finding
this gem and sharing it with us.

The final presentation, "Thirty Years Later," was
an interview with founding member Morton Cohen
by founding member Edward Guiliano, three de-
cades after their ground-breaking interview was pub-
lished by the LCSNA in Soaring with the Dodo. [ This
"YouTube moment " was fully recorded in high-def video, and
is being considered for release it in its entirety in some yet-to-
be-determined venue. -Ed.]

Edward began the session by noting that Morton
was the first person in academia to study Carroll (in
1962), breaking all kinds of new ground in doing so.
He then asked Morton what changes he's observed
since those formative years, to which Morton respond-
ed, "a distinct and ever-growing interest in Carroll in
academe . . . like a rolling stone picking up moss."

The exchange moved on to how advances in com-
munication have expanded access to Carroll, with
Morton observing that journals have made it possible
for the nonacademic public to gain insight into liter-
ary figures. This morphed nicely into Edward's bring-
ing up the Internet and suggesting that perhaps the
Web is responsible for (my words, not Guiliano's) too

much of a muchness out there in cyberspace when it
comes to Carroll.

Morton disagreed, citing how valuable a role the
Internet plays in disseminating information that boosts
Carroll's profile with the general public. Morton sees
the Internet not only as an outlet where academics can
publish their works, but as a vast cultural oudet giv-
ing everyone with Wi-Fi and a dream instant access to
Alice-themed "plays, musicals, TV productions, ballets,
and symphonies."

Around this point, Edward turned the topic to
Browning and Dickens and how their "abundance in
language" and ability to create unforgettable charac-
ters ran parallel to Carroll's. "All three have a sense of
melodrama and the grotesque," said Edward. "Melo-
drama was very Victorian," Morton commented.

Acknowledging the common ground of "promo-
tional interest groups" such as the Browning, Dick-
ens, and Carroll Societies, Edward ushered Morton
to the subject of the founding of LCSNA, remarking
that the British Society had been founded just a few
years before.

Morton's pride in our Society came out most
strongly as he referenced the publicadons produced
over the decades, from the Knight Letter'?, stunning
evolution to the Mardn Gardner memorial book and
everything in between, calling it "an astonishing ac-
complishment."

The Society, Edward pointed out, is made up of
academics, collectors, ardsts, aficionados, and arm-
chair scholars, and Morton expressed his gratitude
to collectors: "I couldn't have done the work I did
without the collectors in the world," he said, referring
mainly to his acclaimed two-volume work The Letters of
Lewis Carroll (1979).

Then Guiliano upped the interview ante by
bringing up the endlessly debated topic of Carroll's
wanting to marry Alice. Morton said, "having read his
letters to her and having access to his diaries, I came
to the absolute conclusion he wanted marriage." He
went on to recount that, following the Sotheby's auc-
tion of Alice's effects several years ago, he was able to
study a letter to Alice from her sister Lorina, written
when they were quite elderly, which confirmed that
much of the ongoing speculation surrounding the
sudden rift between Carroll and Mrs. Liddell had its
link to some suggestion of marriage.

Asked about the possibility of more letters being
published as so many have surfaced in the past de-
cades, Morton recalled that while he was ensconced
in academia he had two secretaries to take care of his
calls. Xeroxing, and so forth. Now that he's retired he
has to do everything himself. Still, all hope need not
be abandoned. He's been gathering materials, and
stated outright, "There is more in the offing."

Edward Guiliano and Morton Cohen

The one-on-one concluded with Morton sharing
two quite "remarkable experiences" from his life:

I was invited to make an address at Oxford
Library and there I was with all the dons and
professors in their robes. First the Chancellor
got up and addressed the secretary regarding
funds, after which he sat down and then got
up again and said, "And now we have Mor-
ton Cohen," and sat down. At the reception
afterward someone said to me "You seemed
nonplussed when you got up to speak." I re-
sponded, a bit peevishly, "Well, one is usually
introduced." "Not at Oxford, Morton. If you
have to be introduced you wouldn't have been
asked here."

In 1996, 1 returned home after a trip to a large
brown envelope. Inside, the message read, "At
the pleasure of the Queen, we would like to
appoint you a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature." I thought it was a joke . . . they
didn't pick Americans! I found out later there
were one or two others.

The meeting adjourned around five P.M., and
the hungry majority walked to Monte's Trattoria, a
few blocks from NYU, where we had the upstairs to
ourselves. Taking full advantage of this quite wonder-
ful hobnobbing opportunity, we talked, laughed, ate,
and had a perfectly divine time, including entertain-
ment by a table-hopping sleight-of-hand magician/
stand-up comic named Ray Smullyan.

Afterwards, members of the group headed up-
town to Janet Jurist's flat for wine, snacks, and addi-
tional chitchat. We concluded the banquet by . . .

Th£ author would like to thank Cindy Watler, Clare Imholtz,
and David Schaeferfor their valuable contributions to this
article.

From Under Ground to Wonderland Part II

MATT DEMAKOS

Under Ground's chapter iv

The final chapter of Under Ground begins with Alice
encountering three gardeners (three spades from
a deck of cards), who are busily painting roses on a
white rose tree red. They quit bickering with each
other to offer a bow to Alice, who in turn inquires
about their present occupation. While Two explains.
Five calls, "the Queen! The Queen!" and they, along
with Seven, suddenly fall face down. A grand proces-
sion arrives (a full deck of cards) and pauses in front
of them. After asking Alice her name, the Queen
of Hearts demands to know who the gardeners are,
to which Alice replies rudely, causing the Queen to
threaten her with execution. The Queen discovers
the gardeners' mistake and declares, "Off with their
heads!" The procession moves on, and Alice secretes
the gardeners in her pocket. After the Queen invites
her to play croquet, Alice learns from the White Rab-
bit that the Marchioness and the Queen are one and
the same. Alice finds the game curious: The balls are
hedgehogs, the mallets ostriches, and the arches sol-
diers (the clubs).

The game ends with all those sentenced to ex-
ecution in custody, leaving only Alice and the royal
couple. The Queen asks if Alice has seen the Mock
Turtle and, as she answers in the negative, takes her
to a Gryphon, who is ordered to take her to the tur-
tle. The Turtle, sobbing all the while, slowly tells his
history. The two creatures scold Alice for asking why
they called an old master, who was a turtle, "Tortoise."
("Because he taught us.")

The Gryphon and the Mock Turtle describe the
Lobster Quadrille. The seals, turdes, salmon, "and so
on," with lobsters as partners, form two lines on the
shore, advance twice, change lobsters, retire, throw
lobsters as far into the sea as they can, swim after
them, turn a somersault in the sea, change lobsters,
and go back to land again. They demonstrate the first
figure to Alice while the Mock Turtle sings "Salmon
Come Up!":

"Beneath the waters of the sea
Are lobsters thick as thick can be —
They love to dance with you and me.
My own, my gentle Salmon!"

After the dance, the Mock Turde sings the verse
of "Beautiful Soup" and the chorus. After he asks the
Turtle to repeat the chorus, the Gryphon hears the
words "the trial's beginning." He takes Alice's hand
and they rush to the trial, leaving the melancholy
words of the song behind.

Alice finds the King and Queen on their thrones,
the Knave in custody, and the White Rabbit before
the King with a trumpet and scroll. After blowing
three blasts, the Rabbit reads the accusation, "The
Queen of Hearts she made some tarts. . . / The Knave
of Hearts he stole those tarts. . . ." The King calls for
the evidence then the sentence, and the Queen coun-
ters, "First the sentence, then the evidence!"

Alice declares this "Nonsense!" She refuses to
hold her tongue, and yells, 'You're nothing but
a pack of cards! Who cares for you?" The cards fly
up into the air, and as they fly down upon Alice, she
awakes from her dream, with her sister brushing off
the leaves that had fallen upon her. Before running
to have her tea, Alice tells her sister "her Adventures
Under Ground."'

As can be seen in Figure 1 (see KL 88: 17), the
chapter not only grows more significantly than other
chapters when brought into Wonderland, but, accord-
ingly, is divided into more chapters as well. One could
argue, for these reasons and others, that each succes-
sive chapter of Under Ground receives progressively
more alterations. To this point, and as can be seen as
well from Figure 1, unlike the previous chapter, the
growth here is not condensed into one major addi-
tion, but scattered and quite bewildering to detail.

The addidons are well known to readers of Won-
derland: the Cheshire Cat's appearance at the croquet
game; the Duchess's everything-has-a-moral walk with
Alice; the Gryphon and Mock Turtle's numerous
puns on his school days ("Drawling, Stretching, and
Faindng in Coils"); Alice's recitation for them of "'Tis
the Voice of the Sluggard"; Alice's recollection of how
courtrooms operate; The Hatter's, the Cook's, and
Alice's testimony; and the pronoun-confusing verses
used as evidence against the Knave of Hearts, the de-
fendant. It is often said that the additions to Wonder-
land are "A Mad Tea-Party" and the trial scene (and

sometimes "Pig and Pepper"). But the trial scene only
increases Chapter 4 of Under Groundhy 44 percent, and
thus is not even half the growth of the final chapter.

Of all these scenes, however, one has a character
that seems out of character: the Duchess. She appears
here to be pleasant and talkative with a propensity to
moralize, traits certainly not present before. "[P]er-
haps it was only the pepper," Alice theorized, "that
had made her so savage when they met in the kitch-
en." That Carroll had to place such an explanation on
Alice's lips hints — and this is the last hint — that Car-
roll may have initially kept the Under Ground concept
of the dual Queen/Marchioness tides intact during
the revision process.

There is another addition, which is actually a re-
placement, but with a much longer text. Instead of
"Salmon, Come Up," the Mock Turtle sings "Will You
Walk a Litde Faster." Unlike the replacement poem
for the earlier "Mouse's Tale," this replacement is
more suitable to the plot of the book.

Interestingly, only the new characters from "Pig
and Pepper" and "A Mad Tea-Party" are given major
roles in these expanded chapters. The characters
original to Under Ground that do appear are only given
minor roles, as inane jurymen, and some of them are
not even mentioned in the text, being only seen in
the illustrations. The first of the new characters to re-
turn is the Cheshire Cat, who makes an appearance at
the croquet grounds, a more spectacular appearance
than he let on he would make. Soon after, Carroll
brings back the Duchess, who teaches Alice a great
deal about morals. And further on in the story, in the
trial scene, he brings in the Hatter and the Cook to
give testimony. Either the new characters were fresh
in his mind or Carroll used them as assurance that
his new material would fit in with the old. If he had
brought in the Dodo and the Caterpillar to testify
instead of the Hatter and Cook, perhaps the added
chapters would not have felt to him braided enough
into the adventures.

As before, there are many minor additions as
well. Alice, when with the gardeners, wonders about
the rule when she first meets the Queen: "Alice was
rather doubtful whether she ought not to lie down on
her face like the three gardeners, but she could not
remember ever having heard of such a rule at proces-
sions." The Queen explains where mock turtie soup
comes from. As part of the rules for the Lobster Qua-
drille, Carroll adds that the jelly fish must be cleared
before beginning, and he also adds a second verse to
"Beautiful Soup," creating a favorite Carrollian rhyme
("Who would not give all else for two p / ennyworth
only of beautiful Soup?") Finally, Carroll adds anoth-
er "Off with her head!" as if you-know-who hadn't said
it enough, directed at Alice right before she accuses
them of being "nothing but a pack of cards!"

And as before, there are several minor differ-
ences worth noting. Alice hides the Gardeners, after
the Queen's threat, not in her pocket, but in a large
flower-pot. Being about a foot high at the time, she
would have found it difficult to place the cards in her
pocket, and Carroll probably realized that readers
would imagine her about the same size as the char-
acters anyway, given the text and other illustrations.
(Even in Carroll's illustration in Under Ground, Alice
is the same size as the cards.) Instead of the White
Rabbit explaining to Alice that the Queen is the Mar-
chioness, he explains that "She's under sentence of
execution" because "She boxed the Queen's ears."
And has been noted many times, the mallets are os-
triches in Under Ground and flamingoes in Wonder-
land. Of course, flamingoes, for many reasons, are a
more practical choice.

In Under Ground there is no mention of Alice
growdng at the end of the story, but in Wonderland it
is mentioned four times, effectively creating suspense
for the reader, who knows the end of the tale is fast
approaching. The first mention occurs in Chapter XI
when the Hatter is giving evidence. The other three
take place in the next chapter when Alice herself
gives evidence. Her height is even referenced in the
King's Rule Forty-Two: ''All persons more than a mile high
to leave the court."

To see how these major additions, minor addi-
tions, and various changes are placed within the con-
text of the plot, see Figure 5. It should be noted that
the figure does not include material unused from
Under Ground, as Carroll used everything. No sen-
tence or paragraph is thrown out, excepting a few mi-
nor words and phrases and the two major deletions
("Salmon, Come Up" and the White Rabbit's expla-
nation that the Queen and the Marchioness are one
and the same). As mentioned in the introduction, it
would seem only natural for an author who is revis-
ing his tale so drastically to begin fresh and not be
distracted by the old material. That Carroll used it all,
every sentence, hints that his changes were done spo-
radically, and that they "came of themselves" v«thout
any premeditated plan.

Under Ground's Epilogue

In the short epilogue, Alice's sister remains on the
bank, "thinking of litde Alice and her Adventures."
She begins to dream, "after a fashion," of an ancient
city on a river and "a boat with a merry party of chil-
dren." One of the children was named Alice and she
was listening to a story, the same as the dream her
own sister had told. After the boat drifts around a
bend, she imagines her sister, "in a dream within the
dream, as it were," as a woman, telling stories to chil-
dren, and how she would sympathize with their feel-

CHAPTER

SCENES

NOTABLE DIFFERENCES AND NONOR EXPANSIONS

The gardeners paint the rose bushes

The royal party enters

Alice speaks with the White Rabbit

Alice plays nonsense croquet
(w) Cheshire Cat appears
(w) Queen orders the Cat beheaded
(w) Alice has trouble with the game
(W) The Cat vanishes as Duchess appears

(w) [Alice wonders about the rule when Queen enters]
Alice hides Gardeners in pocket [in large flower-pot]
Queen is Marchioness [Duchess boxed Queen's ears]
The mallets are ostriches [flamingoes]

(w) Alice walks with a moralizing Duchess
(w) Queen threatens Duchess who runs off
(w) Queen takes Alice back to game

All sentenced but King, Queen and Alice
Queen takes Alice to the Gryphon
Gryphon takes Alice to the Mock Turde
The Mock Turde tells Alice his story
(w) Turde tells of, puns on, school classes

(w) [Queen explains what mock turde soup's made from]

Turde describes Lobster Quadrille
They dance without the lobsters
(w) They speak of whidng; her adventures
(w) Alice recites "Voice of the Sluggard"
Turtle sings "Beautiful Soup"
Gryphon hurries Alice to the trial

[Must clear jelly fish before beginning]
Turde sings "Salmon Come Up" ["Will you walk
a litde faster"]
(w) [The Turde adds a second verse
to "Beautiful Soup"]

King [wigged] and Queen on thrones
(w) Alice recalls knowledge of courtrooms
(w) Alice remarks "stupid things" of the jury
White Rabbit reads "tart" rhyme accusa-
tion
(w) The Hatter and Cook give testimony
(w) The next witness is announced: Alice

(w) Alice upsets jury box; King gets angry
(w) King makes up rule 42; asks for verdict
(w) Rabbit says more evidence, reads poem
(w) They discuss die importance of poem

King calls for the end of the trial

Queen corrects the King

Alice objects loudly

'You're nothing but a pack of cards!"

Alice awakes by her sister

King asks for evidence then sentence [asks just for the
verdict]

Queen says sentence then evidence [then verdict]
(w) [Queen shouts, "Off with her head!"]

(w) marks expansions in Wonderland ; text in brackets represents Wonderland

Figure 5. The expansion of Under Ground 's Chapter 4 into Wonderland 's last five chapters

ings, "remembering her own child-life, and the happy
summer days."

Carroll substitutes a different dream for Wonder-
land. It begins with the sister dreaming of Alice her-
self, "the bright eager eyes," the "tones of her voice,"
and the "queer litde toss of her head, to keep back
the wandering hair." Soon, however, the dream turns
into her little sister's dream of the White Rabbit, the
Mouse, the March Hare, the Queen, the pig-baby
and the Duchess, and all the others. She knows that
if she opened her eyes the dream would end, "and
the raiding teacups would change to tinkling sheep-
bells, and the Queen's shrill cries to the voice of the

shepherd boy." The last part of the dream, the image
of Alice as a grown woman, is the same as in Under
Ground, but wdth minor edits.

Jean Gattegno notes there "is far too direct a ref-
erence to Oxford" in the sister's dream ("an ancient
city, and a quiet river winding near it along the plain")
and suggests Carroll's need to delete the words. Keep
in mind, however, that Carroll crosses out the whole of
the sister's dream, and the reason for the whole being
deleted is what should be addressed. Also, the galley
sheet version of the dream (see Figure 3, KL 88: 19) is
quite different from the Under Ground version, yet the
Oxford allusion is in situ and unchanged. Carroll had

no qualms about the allusion. Nor did he likely feel
the need "to separate the story from the situation that
brought it into being"as Gattegno later claims — after
all, the material is used for the prefatory poem.- Nor
did Carroll likely care to excise "parochial allusions"as
Hudson claims.-^ In fact, one could argue that Carroll
made more parochial allusions. The treacle well, a
forty-minute walk from Carroll's rooms, is associated
with Frideswide, the patron saint of Oxford, who in
the late 1850s was depicted in stained glass in Christ
Church Cathedral itself. In Looking-Glass, Carroll al-
lowed Tenniel's depiction of the Sheep's shop to be
based on an Oxford store front, and Carroll included
an acrostic poem that spelled out the name of a Christ
Church resident: "Alice Pleasance Liddell."^

The Under Ground version of the sister's dream
wasn't really removed at all, but transferred and
revised for the prefatory poem:

All in the golden afternoon
Full leisurely we glide;

Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,
Beneath such dreamy weather.
To beg a tale of breath too weak

The dream-child moving through a land

Of wonders wild and new.
In friendly chat with bird or beast —

And half believe it true.

Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:

And now the tale is done,
And home we steer, a merry crew.
Beneath the setting sun.

The last stanza even reads as if it were adapted
from the last part of the sister's dream, where she
hopes Alice "would keep, through all her riper years,
the simple and loving heart of her childhood":

Alice! a childish story take.

And with gentle hand
Lay it where Childhood's dreams are twined

In Memory's mystic band,
Like pilgrim's withered wreath of flowers

Plucked in a far-off land.

The galley sheet also hints that he may have found
it awkward to have both the prefatory poem and the
dream in the same work. This is shown in the edits
themselves, several of which attempt to edit out some
of the words and phrases used in the new poetic ver-
sion. Thus "merry crew" from the poem and the origi-
nal dream becomes "happy crew" in the galley revision.
And "Full leisurely we glide" from the poem forces the
original prose version "went slowly gliding a boat" to
be edited out completely. The word "tale," used in the

poem four times, causes the word to be stricken from
the original, replaced twice by the word "story." Even
the word "beneath," used twice in the poem ("beneath
the dreamy weather" and "Beneath the setting sun"),
is edited out of the original prose version; "beneath
the bright summer day" becomes "under the bright
summer sky." It seems as if Carroll is attempting to
keep both by creating a gap between the two.

In the end, he gave the sister a new dream, likely
believing that the inclusion of both the sister's origi-
nal dream and the newly created prefatory poem
would have been awkward. He had no sense of fidel-
ity to the original material, either the boat tale or
the original manuscript. Despite what Alice Liddell
and Green claim, he had no restrictions on his "fresh
ideas," neither did they have to be connected to the
Liddell family or to some real event. In this case, for
whatever reason, he found a need to replace the sis-
ter's dream and rightfully did so, the book now being
more than twice as long, with a dream that reviews
young Alice's actual dream.

There are a few other concepts on the galley
sheet that need to be mentioned. He writes at the top
(the actual document is cut off) "new page," and it
is so in the first publication. He also notes for some
reader to "see M.S.," which refers not to a full "M.S."
but to a handwritten document attached to the gal-
ley. The major differences between the texts are the
addition of boats and the parenthetical explanation
as to how the sister knew the name of the child on
the boat, which, in truth, does need explaining. For
some reason, Carroll worked out the line breaks in
the last paragraph, not a task a writer needs to per-
form. Concern for the page breaks are seen with the
three slashes to the immediate left of the text, which
block out 22 lines, the exact number of lines per page
in the first edition of Wonderland.

CARROLL'S LAME MELODIES

Several scholars have written about the difference
between Alice's Adventures under Ground and Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland. Derek Hudson writes (in
part quoted above), "The general tendency in the al-
terations is away from parochial allusions and mere
child's play towards what Falconer Madan has called
'more advanced and reasoned ingenuity' — the result
being a book that has kept the affection of children
and won the admiration of adults."" "The earlier sto-
ry is far more dominated by Alice," Donald Thomas
observed in his biography of Carroll, citing, "There
is no Pig and Pepper, no Duchess, no Cheshire Cat,
no Mad Tea Party."'' Gattegno concludes that the first
version relates "adventures that happened <o Alice" and
the revised "takes Alice through a world where things
happen outside her." He also reasons that "the first
manuscript told the story of an adventure, the final
text is more the story oi a. journey.'

Wonderland's
CHAPTER TITLES

IN-JOKES

PUNS

WORDPLAY

PHYSICAL

PHILO-
SOPHIC

SURREAL

(u) (w)

[Dedication]

1 Down the Rabbit-Hole

2 The Pool of Tears

2
1

3 1

3 A Caucus-Race

4 The Rabbit Sends in a Bill

1 1

1
1

5 Advice from a Caterpillar

6 Pig and Pepper

7 A Mad Tea-Party

1
3

2 2
3

1
1

8 The Queen's Croquet-Ground

9 The Mock Turtle's Story

I o The Lobster Quadrille

I I Who Stole the Tarts?
12 Alice's Evidence

[Epilogue]

1 11

1
1

1 3

1
1

1
2

1
1

3
1 1

Totals

5 4

3 22

9 19

2 8

5 16

8 7

(u) Attribute originated in Under Ground; (w) Attribute originated in Wonderland

Figure 6. The effect of the edits on the humor in Alice's Adventures. All attributes originated in Under Ground were carried over to

Wonderland, except three in-jokes: Alice's cousins and the "pokey house" (from Chapter 2); the Duck's singing, Alice being like sisters with
the Lory, and the Dodo leading the way to the cottage (from Chapter 3); and the original sister's dream (from the Epilogue). Though there are
many separate references to the actual boat trip in the prefatory poem, it is counted as only one in-joke (as is the sister's original dream), but
with another point for the Liddell/ little pun. The names of the girls in the treacle well, all playing on the three Liddell sisters' names, and the
pun on Liddell/ little is counted as one in-joke. Puns built on common phrases, such as "Laughing and Grief, " are counted as one pun. (Readr
ers who wish to count them separately, can add six puns to chapter 9.)

One way to begin a discussion on the conse-
quences the edits had on the story is to begin with an
evaluation of how they affected the chief character-
istic oi Alice's Adventures, the humor. Figure 6 divides
the humor into six attributes, three lingual (invokes,
puns, and wordplay) and three nonlingual (philo-
sophic, physical, and surreal). Despite taking a wide
view of the term, the chart omits attributes of humor
(irony, exaggeration, and sarcasm, for example) that
are not major ingredients of Carroll's particular wit.

The first of the lingual set are the in-jokes. Of the
five in Under Ground, three were not brought over to
Wonderland (see the note at the bottom of the chart) .
As previously discussed, proof that Carroll did not
delete the in-jokes per se is evidenced by the added
invokes in Wonderland (namely, the Liddell/littie pun
in the prefatory poem, the references to the boat trip
in the poem itself, the story taking place on Alice Lid-
dell's birthday, and the word-playing on the names of
the girls in the treacle well, including the repeated
Liddell/littie pun).** Although there may be several
undetected invokes — owing to missing diaries and
unrecorded events — ^we can safely conclude that Car-
roll was indifferent to them when they had to be de-
leted for unrelated reasons. It must be admitted, how-
ever, that in the end there are fewer known in-jokes
per word in Wonderland than in Under (Jround.

Carroll shows no signs of being indifferent to the
puns, the next of the lingual set, which are more plen-

tiful in the expanded version of his tale, a fact that
has been mentioned by others. Carroll builds off his
initial pun in Under Ground — "We called him Tortoise
because he taught us" — ^with a whole slew of double
entendres, many as forced as the original. Carroll
puns on mathematical principles (Ambition, Distrac-
tion, Uglification, and Derision), scientific disciplines
(Mystery and Seaography), language studies (Laugh-
ing and Grief), artistic disciplines (Drawling, Stretch-
ing, Fainting in Coils), school lessons (lessen), and
on fish names (the use of whiting instead of blacking,
for shoes made of soles and eels).

The last of the three lingual sets is wordplay,
which, for this analysis, does not include invokes or
puns. Examples of this type of humor are the misuse
of the word "Antipathies," the poetic parodies (each
poem counted as one), "a drawing of a muchness,"
and the Latin play on "mouse." As the figure shows, it
increases twofold in the new material — Carroll's game
is wordplay, and he ups the ante for his new readers.

The first of the three attributes for the nonlin-
gual, the physical, shows a notable increase in Won-
derland, according to Figure 6. Most of the physical at-
tributes in the original tale took place when Alice was
trapped in the White Rabbit's house, which includes
Bill's sky-rocketing through the air, and the Gryphon
and the Mock Turtle's dancing the Lobster Quadrille,
"jumping about like mad things." Carroll bumps these

ideas up a notch in Wonderland with the addition of
the Caucus-race, the scene in the Duchess's home
(including the Cook's throwing of the fire-irons), the
scene at the March Hare's home (especially with the
placing of the Dormouse in the teapot) , and the trial
scene (including the suppressing of the guinea pigs,
the throwing of the Dormouse out of the court, and
the placing of the Lizard head downwards in the jury
box). This latter scene also includes Alice's growing
not at a "reasonable pace," as the Dormouse says, but
"in that ridiculous fashion." In Under Ground Alice
does not grow back to her normal size before the end
of her dream. When we include the new characters
in the mix, especially the Duchess, the Cook, and the
Hatter, we see a certain zaniness in Wonderland not
present in the original.

The second nonverbal attribute, the philosophic,
also shows a notable increase in Figure 6, and is fur-
ther detailed in Figure 7. Both figures take a restric-
tive view of the philosophical content, charting only
those moments that are directly philosophical, in oth-
er words, on the surface and obvious to the average
reader. The first of the five occurrences that appear
in Under Ground, all of which appear in Wonderland as
well, is atypical of Carroll's handling of philosophical
material. After Alice asks, "Do cats eat bats?" or "Do
bats eat cats?" Carroll uncharacteristically editorial-
izes: "as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't
much matter which way she put it." It would become
his practice to give such thoughts to Alice or to the
characters instead. It's our philosophical puppy, as
out of place as that all-too-realistic dog to come, and,
as would be expected, it appears early.

The main philosophical character is the Caterpil-
lar, of course, who asks, "Who are you?" with the ef-
fective emphasis "Who are you}" in Wonderland. The
question harks back to Alice's thought "if I'm not
the same, who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great
puzzle!" from an earlier chapter. The character of
the Caterpillar seems to have sparked a philosophical
growth in the story — fourteen of the sixteen philo-
sophical moments in Fig. 7 come after Alice's meet-
ing with him. The first is one of the most effective
edits in the book. Instead of having the caterpillar say
that the mushroom's "top will make you grow taller,
and the stalk will make you grow shorter," Carroll al-
ters it to: "One side will make you grow taller, and the
other side will make you grow shorter." This master-
fully gives Alice something to ponder about and to
eventually solve with a 180-degree reach. But it also,
philosophy aside, gives Alice a better reason to mis-
takenly choose the side that makes her shrink. In the
Under Ground version, Carroll weakly has to make her
forget what the Caterpillar says for a comic episode to
take place: her chin striking her feet. In Wonderland,
it's a probable outcome, albeit unwelcome, of trial-
and-error.

Five of the last six philosophical quotations chart-
ed in Figure 7 involve the King of Hearts, a character
who deserves more attention than he has received.
Perhaps his most notable moment occurs during the
trial, when he reasons, "If you didn't sign it," speak-
ing to the Knave, who denies even writing the verses,
"that only makes the matter worse. You must have
meant some mischief, or else you'd have signed your
name like an honest man." Peter Heath, in The Phi-
losopher's Alice, notes how the King reasons like a Baco-
nian who "supposes Bacon's failure to make mention
of Shakespeare's plays to be sure evidence that he
wrote them himself"'' It should be mentioned that,
even in Heath's more sensitive approach to the disci-
pline, which should flatten the disparity between the
two books, a majority of the annotations (84 of the
143) pertain to the Wbn^/an</ additions.'"

The last of the three nonlingual attributes of hu-
mor, the surreal (we did say this would take a wide
view of the term), shows that Carroll added surreal
details at the same rate as in the original recount-
ing. The first takes place in the White Rabbit's house,
when the pebbles thrown at Alice turn into little
cakes, which Alice eats to become small again. The
next two involve the Cheshire Cat, a surreal charac-
ter itself, when it vanishes slowly and when its head
appears during the croquet game. The sister's new
dream is also surreal, but it simply takes the place of
the original, surreal dream.

Taking all these attributes together, the humor
per word grows more than twofold in Wonderland.
If we take only the attributes that gained in number
(the puns, wordplay, the physical and philosophic),
the humor is even denser, more than threefold as
thick. In this regard. Wonderland is considerably more
entertaining to read than Under Ground.

The two books are differently proportioned. The
beginning of the story contains many references to
Alice becoming emotional — about being the wrong
size or missing her cat — ^which represents about 33
percent of Under Ground but only 20 percent of Won-
derland. The ending of the book, on the other hand,
where Alice meets the characters represented by the
playing cards, represents 23 percent of Under Ground
and 39 percent of Wonderland. The effect on the
reader of this is debatable, however. For example, the
reader will spend more lime, owing to the minor addi-
tions, with an emotional Alice when cuddling up with
Wonderland as opposed to Under Ground.

There are difficulties in drawing conclusions
about what Carroll specifically set out to accomplish
when deciding to publish Alice's Adventures. It is not
even certain that he at first intended to make the
story longer. Carroll initially slated Tenniel for twelve
pictures, which became twenty, then twent)'-four (evi-
denced from sample title pages), then thirt)'-four
(from his diary) before becoming the final forty-two."

BOOK

{V) (w)

CHAPTER

TEXT

•
•

"But do cats eat bats, I wonder?" And here Alice began to get ratlier sleepy, and kept on saying
to herself, in a dreamy sort of way "do cats eat bats? do cats eat bats?" and sometimes, "do bats eat cats?" for,
as she couldn't answer eitlier question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.

[S]he waited for a few minutes to see whether she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous
about this, "for it might end, you know," said Alice to herself, "in my going out altogether, like a candle,
and what should I be like then, 1 wonder?"

•

"1 think 1 remember feeling rather different. But if I'm not the same, who in the world am I?
All, that's the great puzzle!"

•

At last the Dodo said, "Ei'n-yhotly has won, and all nuist have prizes."

•

"If 1 eat one of these cakes," she thought, "it's sure to make some change in my size; and as it can't possibly
make me larger, it must make me smaller, I suppose."

•
•

"Wlio are you?" said the caterpillar. "I — I hardly know, sir, just at the present...."

"[W'lho are you?".... "I think you ought to tell me who you are, first."
"Wliy?" said the caterpillar.
Here was another puzzling question . . .

Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a miniue, trying to make out which were the
two sides of it; and, as it was perfectly roimd, she found this a very difficult question. However, at last she
stretched her arms round it as far as Uiey would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each hand.

"I have tasted eggs, certainly," said Alice . . . "but litUe girls eateggs quite as much as serpents

do, you know."
"I don't believe it," said the Pigeon; "but if they do, why tJien they're a kind of serpent,

that's all I can say."

This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a miniUe or two.

•
•

•

"If I don't take this child away with me," thought Alice, "they're sure to kill it in a day or two: wouldn't it be
murder to leave it behind?"

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where — " said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you walk," said the Cat.

"Well then," the Cat went on, "you see a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now /
growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad."

•
•

•

"Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why, you mighljust as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same
tiling as T eat what I see'!"

"Does your watch tell you what year it is?"

"Of course not," Alice replied very readily: "but that's because it stays the same year for such a long time
together."
"Which is just the case with mine," said the Hatter

"Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very eamesUy.

"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."

'You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing."

•

The executioner's argument was, that you couldn't cut off a head iniless there was a body to cut it off from .
. . The King's argument was, that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and that you weren't to talk
nonsense.

•

"Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everytliing's got a moral, if only you can find it." And she squeezed
herself up closer to Alice's side as she spoke, [etc.]

•

"Take off your hat,"llie King said to die Hatter.
"It isn't mine," said the Hatter.
"Stolen!" the King exclaimed.

•
•

•

riie \Miite Rabbit interrupted: "t/nimportant, your Majesty means, of course" . . . "Unimportant, of course,
I meant," the King hasuly said, and went on to himself in an undertone, "important — unimportant — unim-
portant — important — " as if he were trying which word sounded best.

"Please your Majesty," said the Knave, "I didn't write it, and they can't prove I did: there's no name signed at

the end."
"If you didn't sign it," said the King, "that only makes the matter worse. You must have meant some mischief,

or else you'd have signed your name like an honest man.

"If there's no meaning in it," said the King, "that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to
find any."

Figure 7. The major philosophical moments in Alice's Adventures. Text that originated in Under Ground is given
a bullet point in the (u) column, and text that originated in Wonderland a bullet in the (w) column.

This suggests that even the greater length of his story
simply "came of itself." It would be foolish to claim
that Carroll consciously decided to add a slew of puns
into the tale because the public thrives on them. They
"came of themselves." But did he specifically desire
to add more physical humor, more zaniness? Perhaps
so. Was the added philosophical content a conscious
decision as well? It may have suggested itself subcon-
sciously since his story was now going to be read by
adults, rather than by a single child and her friends.

The evidence shows that Carroll worked his tale,
backwards and forwards, rethinking this and that,
with himself, with his publisher, and with his illustra-
tor. Nothing was a foregone conclusion — he had no
specified template before him.

In a speech given in 2007, Robert Winter, a
Beethoven scholar, refuted the oft-told "bio-pic" no-
tion that genius is "dictation from God ... I got the
red phone, you don't." Some composers, Gustave
Mahler'- and even Beethoven himself, for example,
propagated the notion. Winter has a more down-to-
earth approach to genius, finding in it three main
components: tenacity, curiosity, and the "ability to
undertake trial-and-error," calling them "the heart of
art making." He demonstrated the last component
by playing Beethoven's early attempts at writing his
"Ode to Joy" theme for his Ninth Symphony. Indeed,
some of his melodic attempts are laughably unworthy
of such a giant of classical music. '^

Winter's Beethovenian scenario is mirrored in
Carrollian studies. Carroll's "bio-pic" contains Collin-
gwood's statement that his uncle had the heavenly
power to remember "word for word" almost all of his
oral tale. It contains Green's near-Biblical faith that all
of the episodes in Wonderland (not just Under Ground)
derived from the Deanery Garden of Eden, a faith up-
held by Lennon and even Alice Liddell herself.

But Carroll had his lame melodies. He hacked
out the first "Mouse's Tale" and "Salmon Come Up,"
and struck some sour notes with his word choices
now and then. Under Ground can be seen as a step in
Carroll's trial-and-error process that ended in Won-
derland. The evidence includes several sample title
pages, several sample text pages, and an edited gal-
ley sheet that implies the existence of a mass of ed-
ited galley sheets, which together show that Carroll
worked up and revised even the new material (Ten-
niel's letter regarding the missing pieces in "A Mad
Tea-Party"). Carroll rewrote the sister's dream in
rhyme, succeeded, and likely attempted to keep the
original dream after some editing, but failed. Carroll
used trial-and-error — and he had the curiosity to cre-
ate such a wildly imaginative book and the tenacity to
publish it for a mass audience.

' Under Ground, pp. &i-[9\].

^ Jean Gattegno, Lewis CarroU: Fragments, pp. 21-2.
Gattegno mentions the deletion of the single line in
the cottage scene that referred to the river at Oxford
("fringed with rushes and forget-me-nots"), failing,
however, to mention that the whole of the scene is
deleted.

^ Derek Hudson, Lewis Carroll: An Illustrated Biography (New
York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1977), p. 126.

^ Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice, pp. 200, 203, 273-4.
The similarities between Tenniel's depiction of the
Sheep's shop and the Oxford shop may not be striking to
some.

^ Ibid. Madan's comment refers specifically to the Gryphon
and Mock Turtle episode. See Sidney Herbert Williams,
Falconer Madan, et al.. The Lewis Carroll Handbook, rev. by
Roger Lancelyn Green, rev. by Denis Crutch (Hamden,
CN: Dawson, Archon Books), p. 146.

^ Donald Thomas, Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background
(London: John Murray, 1996), p. 155.

^ Fragments, pp. 22-3.

** Alice Liddell mentioned that Duckworth sang "Star of the
evening, beautiful star," "Twinkle, twinkle, litde star," and
"Will you walk into my parlour, said the spider to the fly."
The last two appear only in Wonderland and so could be
counted as in-jokes added in. He added a verse to the first,
thus expanding an in-joke. Alice and Caryl Hargreaves,
"Alice's Recollections of Carrollian Days" in The Comhill
Magazine, ]u\y, 1932.

^ Peter Heath, The Philosopher's Alice (New York: St. Martin's

Press, 1974), p. 115.
'" This is a rather important conclusion in this paper, so
it was thought only fair to include the data. Of course,
the matter is subjective, and readers may find a more
philosophical moment than one listed in Figure 7. The
real test, however, is if a complete list, created by one or
several readers, challenges the conclusion put forth here.
" For twelve illustrations, see Lewis Carroll to Tom Taylor,
December 20, 1863, Letters, p. 62; for twenty and twenty-
four illustrations, see Handbook, plate 2, op. p. 132; for
thirty-four illustrations, see October 12, 1864, Leivis
Carroll's Diaries: The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson, ed. Edward Wakeling, vol. 5 (Luton, Beds:
The Lewis Carroll Society, 1999), p. 16; for forty-two
illustrations, open the book!
^^ Mahler wrote of his Eighth Symphony, "On the threshold
of my old workshop the 'Spiritus Creator' took hold of
me and shook me and drove me on for the next eight
weeks until my greatest work was done." The overall
format of the piece was revised a couple of times before
the Spiritus Creator settled in on the final shape. Edward
Seckerson, Mahler: His Life and Times (New York: Midas
Books, 1982), p. 105.
'^ Robert Winter, speech given at the Beyond Belief:
Enlightenment 2.0 symposium. The Frederic de
Hoffmann Auditorium of the Salk Institute for Biological
Studies, November 1, 2007, available online: http://
thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-
enlightenment-2-O/robert-winter (accessed January
201 1). The remarks cited are found after 9:30 (minutes-
seconds), 34:15, and 40:38.

An Early Alice in China:
A Rumor and a Translation

SEN WONG

1. THE RUMOR

On the FAQ page of Lenny's Alice in Wonderland Site
(http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/), 11 questions
are listed. The 11th one asks whether it is true that
the AlicehooVs were banned in China and, if so, why?'
Lenny first gave a definite yes and recently changed
his yes to a more cautious answer. In either case,
Lenny's source of information seems to be a New York
Times report which relied on the 1978 publication
Banned Books, 387 B.C. to 1978 A.D., written by Anne
Lyon Haight and Chandler B. Grannis.

Lenny stated, "It is said that it happened in 1931
by the Governor of Hunan Province, General Ho
Chien, who found it an insult to humans to have ani-
mals acting in the same complex manner as a human,
like using human language. His fear was that children
would think humans and animals were equal and on
the same level, which was 'disastrous. '"-

The above description is actually true, except for
the second "it" in the quoted passage, if "it" refers to
the banning of the Alicehooks. No, there was no ban-
ning of the Alice books; and, yes, there was a related
controversy; but, no, the controversy didn't focus on
the Alice books. Let us then go back in time and have
a look of what in fact happened and in what social
climate such a controversy would have transpired.

On March 5, 1931, Shen Bao (a well-known news-
paper in China from 1872 to 1949) published an ar-
ticle titled "A Request to an Educational Reform of
School Syllabi." The article was written by Ho Chien,
the then Chairman of the Hunan Provincial Govern-
ment (in plain words, the Governor General of Hunan
under Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government).
In the article. Ho Chien accused the primary school
textbooks of his day of committing grave vulgarities
and absurdities by using expressions such as "the cat
said," "the duck said," "brother dog said," "grandpa
bull said," etc., turning animals into human-language-
speaking creatures and even giving animals respectful
forms of address.

That was only half of his criticism. The second
half was directed towards passages such as, "Papa,
you're building houses for other people every day, but
you don't even have one for yourself," which was for
Ho Chien an agitation for communism. It sounded

very much like the kind of political anxiety harbored
by the U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

General Ho Chien, who happened to be a
scholar of Chinese classics, was a very controversial
figure both within and outside politics. The act that
guaranteed him a place in history, however, was his
execution of Wu Ruolan, the pregnant wife of the
liberation army general Zhu De, in 1929 (he hung
her decapitated head at the entrance of Ganzhou
City of Jianxi Province to warn other communists and
would-be communists) and of Yang Kaihui, wife of
Mao Zedong.

Ho Chien 's extreme anticommunist sentiment
seem to have merged with his ultra-Confucianism,
although the two positions (communism and Confu-
cianism) do not necessarily contradict each other in
theory. But somehow, he got the idea that his ultra-
Confucianism was the solution to defeating commu-
nism, and the key was to educate young minds with
his own version of ultra-Confucian morality, which
bizarrely included a firm demarcation between hu-
man beings and animals.'^ Specifically, animals in
stories should not speak any human language. The
consequences of this policy would be unimaginable
because it would mean an uprooting of some of the
finest traditions of Chinese literature. Journey to the
West (seventeenth century CE) certainly features a
talking monkey and a talking pig, and the magnifi-
cent anthology of semi-horror and the surreal, Strange
Stories from the Lodge of Leisure (eighteenth century CE)
features not only talking foxes but also trees with a
thousand-year-old spirit that had mastered the human
language perfectly. This ignited the so-called "words
of the birds and the language of the beasts" debate.

From the May Fourth Movement of 1919 until
the Japanese invasion in 1937, Chinese children's lit-
erature prospered, with high hopes of liberating the
creativity of young minds after nearly three hundred
years of suffocating Manchurian rule. The desire to
liberate the minds of the Chinese people was an in-
tense one at that time for very specific historical and
political reasons.

The three hundred years of Manchurian rule
(the Qing Dynasty) was very detrimental to the Chi-
nese mind. First, it was during the era of Manchurian
rule that China was forced to isolate herself from the

world that she once freely explored. In order to rule
the Chinese people culturally as well as politically,
Manchurian aesthetics was imposed upon the Chi-
nese people by law to such a degree that all men had
to choose between being beheaded and shaving their
entire head except for an ugly Manchurian queue —
very much against the long-haired tradition of both
Confucianism and Daoism! The traditional bright-
colored Tang, Song, and Ming loose clothing styles
were banned and were replaced by, for example, a
skimpy black Mandarin jacket over a grey gown for
men. Guilt by association was widely practiced upon
intellectuals, thus preventing any creative develop-
ment in both the humanities and the sciences. This to
a certain extent answers Joseph Needham's question
of why scientific development in Europe around the
time of the Italian Renaissance started overtaking that
of China, which had led the world for approximately
2000 years.^ No wonder it was exactly during the late
Ming Dynasty (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries)
that science in Europe laid the groundwork for its fu-
ture edifice.

Further, the weak and corrupt latter years of the
Qing Dynasty happened to coincide with Western im-
perialist expansion in Asia. This coincidence pushed
China onto the brink of being partitioned by Western
powers. Indeed, this process of partition was under
way, but this grave crisis also invigorated the begin-
ning of a slow-moving Chinese renaissance that has
continued on and off into the twenty-first century,
notwithstanding political and social obstacles of vari-
ous kinds. Rescuing the country depended not only
on rebuilding the country's economic and military
might, but on liberating the minds of the people —
a prerequisite to a rebirth of culture and historical
identity.

Hence, in response to General Ho Chien's gro-
tesque accusation, leading intellectuals of his day
fought back. The first one was the great social critic,
novelist, and revolutionary Lu Xun. In his Editor's
Preface, dated April 1, 1931, to the Chinese transla-
tion of the Hungarian fairy-tale epic poem Jdnos Vi-
tez, written by the Hungarian poet and revolutionary
Sandor Petofi, Lu Xun counterattacked in his usual
pungent style: "Recently, regarding children's stories,
both civil and military officials are expressing their
brilliant ideas. Some say cats and dogs shouldn't talk,
and calling them mister is depriving human decency;
some say kings and emperors have no place in sto-
ries, for it violates the spirit of the Republic. None-
theless I believe it to be 'man of Qi fears the sky fall-
ing."' Seriously, it doesn't matter much, because the
minds of children differ from those of the civil and
military officials by having the ability to evolve. The
minds of children never stay in one spot. When they
come to grow a beard, they might still want to ride on
the shoulders of giants and become a king on a fairy

island. Later when they have learnt a bit of science,
they will come to know that giants and fairy islands
do not exist. If some still have such wishes, it can only
be evidence of a natural born mental defect, in which
case such persons would still be a good-for-nothing
even if they manage not to have read a fairy tale in
their entire lifetime."''

A wave of intellectual opinions ensued defending
the cultural significance of children's literature, and
the debate was humorously dubbed the "words of the
birds and the language of the beasts" debate.

All in all, no children's literature featuring talking
animals was banned. As far as evidence is concerned,
the Shen Bao Index 1931 recorded only Ho Chien's re-
quest for syllabus reform, on page 216.^ The oppos-
ing voices of leading intellectuals of the day made
it impossible for General Ho Chien to venture into
unknown, nonmilitary territory. The recently trans-
lated Alice's Adventures in Wonderland happened to be
around and was drawn into the dispute by Ho Chien's
blanket accusation. Why did I mention just Alice's Ad-
ventures in Wonderland? That's because following the
success oi Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, its Chinese
translator Chao Yuen-ren was set to start translating
Through the Looking-Glass. Chao worked on the man-
uscript, and its final proof was prepared as early as
1931 in Shanghai; unfortunately, the 1931 Japanese
bombing of Shanghai destroyed the final proof. It
was not published until 1968, when the first Chinese
translation of Through the Looking-Glass, also by Chao,
saw the light of day in the United States. Therefore,
the plural form of "the Alice books" in Lenny's ques-
tion isn't correct either, since only Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland had been published by 1931.

2. THE TRANSLATION

The May Fourth Movement mentioned above was
mainly an anti-imperialist political movement. But
the seeds of awakening were sowed in the mid-1910s
and -20s. This was called the New Culture Movement,
and it prepared the ground for the nationwide May
Fourth Movement. In the spirit of rescuing and re-
building the nation, the New Culture Movement was
arguably the most pluralistic and exciting period in
the intellectual history of modern China. Also, ironi-
cally, thanks to Ho Chien's article attacking children's
literature and the ensuing debate, the general public
came to better understand the nature of children's
literature, more authors tried their hands at writing
stories for children, and more intellectuals engaged
in investigating the theoretical basis of children's lit-
erature. It was during this time that children's books
sprang up like mushrooms in China.

Let us name some names. In 1923, Ye Shengtao
published The Strazvman, which was an anthology of
short stories. It is usually referred to as the first work
of children's literature in New China. Other well-

known writers of the time included Bing Xin {Letters
to Little Readers), Zhang Tianyi {Lin Senior and Lin Ju-
nior) , Chen Bochui {Miss Alice) , He Yi ( The Wild Brat) ,
Yan Wenjing {Winds of Four Seasons) , and Jin Jin {Red
Masks) , among others.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the literary scene in
China witnessed not only local writers (from all in-
tellectual camps) attempting fabulous stories, fables,
fairy tales, and allegories for children, but also trans-
lations of foreign works of children's literature. The
Shakespearean scholar Liang Shih-chiu translated Pe-
ter Pan into Chinese in 1927. The famous Hungarian
Jdnos Vitez'W2iS translated into Chinese in 1931, as was
already mentioned above. The Harvard scholar Chao
Yuen-ren translated Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
into Chinese at an incredible speed in 1921. It took
him only two seasons, namely spring and summer
of that year. Another famous writer, Shen Congwen,
wrote Alice's Travelogue in China in 1928 as a "Chinese
sequel" to the original Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
and had it published as a series of monthly install-
ments in New Moon Magazine (March issue-October
issue, 1928). You get the idea.

What might interest both Chinese and non-Chi-
nese CarroUians is Chao's 1921 translation. It has al-
ways been hailed as the first Chinese translation of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. There is an amusing
anecdote, however, that might take away the prize
from the hands of professor Chao.

Seemingly, the Scotsman Reginald F. Johnston,
who was the English language tutor of the Last Em-
peror of the Qing Dynasty, Aisin-Gioro Puyi, might
have verbally translated at least part of Alice's Adven-
tures in Wonderland into Chinese for Puyi when he was
fourteen years old — that is, in 1920, one year ahead
of the publication of Chao's translation.** In his mem-
oir, Puyi claimed that he "read" (the original Chinese
expression was ambiguous and didn't really mean
"read") Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when he was
fourteen. Butjohnston arrived in Beijing only in 1919
when Puyi was thirteen and didn't speak any English,
which means that Puyi couldn't have read Alice ziier
one year of learning English. The only possible sce-
nario would be that Johnston, who could speak Chi-
nese, retold the Alice story to Puyi in Chinese:^ In this
case, Johnston's verbal version could be the "first"
Chinese translation of Alice, which "beat" Chao's
hugely famous 1921 translation by one year!

A few words about Chao's translation are in or-
der, for it has been deemed as a classic in its own
right. Although Chao's classic translation is revered
by many, it has never stopped translators of later gen-
erations from re-translating Wonderland (and Through
the Looking-Glass) , because Chao's translation was in-
deed inadequate in many ways.

Chao had a natural talent for picking up vari-
ous dialects and different languages. It has been

circulated that he could speak over thirty Chinese
dialects, was fluent in English, German, and French,
and could handle Japanese, ancient Greek, Latin, and
Russian pretty well too. His forte nevertheless was also
his weakness. His talent for learning languages didn't
automatically make him a gifted linguist, contrary to
popular opinion. A brilliant language theorist he was
not; he was more like an empirical compiler of pho-
netic data. This lack of theoretical concern or ability
regretfully created serious defects in his translation of
Alice. Among all the available Chinese translations of
Alice, I must admit that Chao's version pleases me least.

Translating Alice into Chinese is extremely diffi-
cult. For very obvious reasons, the translator has to un-
derstand the formal structures of the various informal
arguments presented by Alice and some of the other
strange creatures in the story. A lax or too creatively
inclined translation could easily render a valid argu-
ment invalid or vice versa. Next to a little bit of formal
training in logic, the translator would require some
skill in practicing the philosophy of language, espe-
cially in theories of meaning and language-games.

Chao majored in mathematics and minored in
physics and music in his undergraduate years (1910-
1914) at Cornell University. Then he entered Har-
vard and earned a doctorate in philosophy. Yet one
can hardly blame Chao for missing all the logic and
the philosophy (of language) in Alice; the logic of
language, after all, was a rather new discipline in the
1910s. Whitehead and Russell's three-volume monu-
mental Principia Mathematica was only published in
1910, and Wittgenstein's misguided masterpiece Trac-
tatus Logico-Philosophicus wouldn't appear for another
eleven years, that is 1921, the same year that Chao's
translation of Alice wou\d appear.

Aside from all this, the real sin of Chao's trans-
lation consists in missing the humorous undertones
and foreignness of a rather British story. One exam-
ple of each should suffice to illustrate the point.

In the first case, Chao's translation attempted the
ridiculous by making Alice and all the litde creatures
down the rabbit-hole sound very childish by using a
lot of so-called final particles in the dialogue. Some
final particles in Chinese grammar are usually mean-
ingless characters attached as an appendix to the end
of a Chinese sentence for the purpose of expressing
the tone of that utterance. Children sometimes like
to overuse final particles, thus creating a kind of kid-
speak. But in Alice, Alice insists on talking solemnly
most of the time, and sometimes quite pensively. The
fun of reading really comes from hearing Alice try-
ing to talk and think like an adult. In Chao's transla-
tion, that whole aspect doesn't work anymore. Sadly,
even the very cool Caterpillar was made to sound a
little childish in Chinese. Obviously, Chao was pre-
occupied with the idea that Alice is a story book for
children, which led him to impose a childish tone on
many of the characters in the story.

In the second case, Chao's translation for some
reason imposed a Chineseness on Alice. Tiiat I think
is a serious violation of a translator's taboo. A major
part of the fun of reading translations of a foreign sto-
ry is exactly its foreignness: foreign locations, foreign
people, foreign behaviors, and foreign references.
The attraction stems from the reader's curiosity about
the beyond and the unfamiliar. In Chapter 3, "the
archbishop" was translated as "the great (Buddhist)
monk." Understandably, Chao was trying to make the
character intelligible for the Chinese children recent-
ly liberated from Manchurian isolation. Although
it doesn't work for my literary taste, there may still
be room to argue his case. But even worse is, for ex-
ample, chapter 9, where "tortoise" was translated as a
familiar Chinese nickname in order to recreate a pun
("old Wang" / being forgetful) that was not quite the
original pun of "tortoise" / taught us). But the trans-
lator's new pun has erased the cause of Alice's confu-
sion: there is a difference between something being a
turtle and calling (i.e., naming) that turtle "Tortoise,"
however strange it may sound

No offense is intended. I merely wish to put
Chao's translation in its rightful place in history.
Without a doubt, he accomplished many firsts in his
translation o( Alice. He was the first Chinese to notice
Carroll's great work and even compared it to Shake-
speare's dramas. I couldn't agree more. He was the
first to have translated Alice. He was the first to have
translated Aliceinto modern vernacular Chinese. The
list goes on. Chao's translation should be regarded
as an experiment in a time of political and cultural
chaos; it should be admired, not worshipped.

As stated above, it's not easy to translate the Al-
ic^ books into Chinese. Humor, jokes, and puns, etc.,
are very much language (and culture) dependent. All
jokes and puns written in a semi-inflectional language
like English are in general almost impossible to trans-
late into an analytic language like Chinese (and vice
versa). In addition, Carroll's meticulous construction
of arguments in informal language and his deliberate
couching of significant logical concepts in ordinary
language make it even more difficult for a Chinese

translation to carry forward both the humor and the
logic. I personally would never dare to even try. Chao
and many Chinese translators of later generations
have been courageous. Although so far no Chinese
translation in my opinion has come close to covering
both the humor and the logic of the Alice books, we
have time. We'll wait.

[Professor Chao graciously addressed the West Coast Chap-
ter of the LCSNA on this subject on May 4, 1 980. - Ed.]

' Lenny's Alice in Wonderland Site. URL: http://w\vw.alice-
in-wonderland.net/alicell.html. Accessed onjmie 30,
2012.

2 Ibid.

^ The ancient sage Zhuangzi, who advocated eqnalitv'
among all living beings, certainly would have disagreed
with Ho Chien's ultra-Confucian adrenal gland.

^ It is interesting to notice that the Four Great Inventions
of China entered Europe at the end of the Middle
Ages. Given the wave of Arab scholars teaching Indian
and Arab mathematics and ancient Greek philosophy
in European universities, it is safe to claim that the
Renaissance of the West was launched partly and
significantiy by the East.

^ This is a parable recorded in the ancient text Liezi
(fifth century BCE) in which a man from the state of
Qi worried all day long about the sky falling. It means
something like the English idiomatic expression "never
trouble trouble till trouble troubles you," but the subtext
of "man of Qi fears the sky falling" is richer and more
complex.

^ Editor's Preface to the Chinese translation of Sandor
Pet6fi'syano5 Vitez (translated by Sun Yong, and edited by
Lu Xun), published by Hufeng Books (Shanghai), 1931.

' Shen Boo Index 1931 (in Chinese), Shanghai Books. An
online version of the book can be accessed at http://
ishare.iask.sina.com.en/f/23615212.html.

* Aisin-Gioro Puyi, The First Half of My Life: From Emperor to
Citizen (in Chinese), Qunzhong Press, 2003. Reginald F.
Johnston, Twilight in the Forbidden City, Oxford University
Press, 1985.

^ Chao Yuen-ren supported this interpretation in his
preface to the Chinese translation oi Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland.

Lio MarkTatuUi

THE PAMPHLETS OF LEWIS CARROLL:
NEWLY DISCOVERED ADDITIONAL PIECES

FRANCINE F. ABELES

INTRODUCTION

The Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll — the immensely impor-
tant project undertaken by the LCSNA to publish six
volumes on six different subjects on which Charles L.
Dodgson wrote important works — has unexpectedly
turned up pieces that were unknown to the series edi-
tors and to the editor of three of the four published
volumes when those volumes were assembled. These
pieces offer an exceptional opportunity to add new
facts about, and insights into, Dodgson 's known work
in mathematics, political theory, and logic.

The Lewis Carroll Handbook (LCH) is the main bib-
liographic reference for the pamphlets series. In the
preface to the revised 1979 edition, the author, Denis
Crutch, writes, "This revision of the Handbook of 1962
attempts to complete the original plan of putting at
the reader's elbow a book that will be at once a biblio-
graphic account of Dodgson's writings and a history
of their composition and development." He goes on
to say that "[A] 11 the articles have been corrected and
updated, and new ones added . . . pieces by Dodgson
freshly brought to light, manuscripts and proofs of
work unpublished at the author's death . . ." [LCH,
xvi]. In the same spirit, the thirteen items reported
on here do not appear in the Handbook.

One additional piece, inexplicably not included in
Volume 2 of the pamphlets series, is listed in the LCH
as The Science of Betting, which was published in The Pall
Mall Gazette and The Times in November 1866.

The abbreviations that follow are references cit-
ed frequently in this article:

ET Mathematical problems and solutions section
of the Educational Times

LCH The Leivis Carroll Handbook

LCP Lewis Carroll and the Press: An Annotated Bibliogra-
phy of Charles Dodgson 's Contributions to Periodicals

MQS Mathematical Questions and Solutions from

the "Educational Times, " with Many Papers and
Solutions in Addition to Those Published in the
"Educational Times"

The collections in which the reported items and
related material were discovered are:

Alfred C. Berol Collection in the Fales Library/
Bobst Library at New York University

Joseph Brabant Collection in the Thomas Fisher
Rare Books Library at the University of Toronto

David and Denise Carlson, private collection

Dr. Selwyn H. Goodacre, private collection

Arthur P. Houghton Collection at the Morgan
Library in New York

Jon A. Lindseth, private collection

Charles Lovett, private collection

The Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian
Novelists at Princeton University

Jeffrey Stern, private collection

Warren Weaver Collection in the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center at the University
of Texas in Austin

VOLUME 2: THE MATHEMATICAL PAMPHLETS

Eight pieces included in this volume are not listed
in the LCH. Of these eight, three undated items — 23,
24, and 25 — are templates for examination questions,
tided: Arithmetic I, Arithmetic II, and Arithmetic.
Item 15, entitled Formulae and dated 1878, is a cy-
clostyled sheet of primarily trigonometric and loga-
rithmic formulas. These four items are in the Carlson
Collection.

A longer set of similar formulas constitutes the
undated item 6, dded: Formulae (Group C), which
was produced with an electric pen. This item is in the
Brabant Collection. Charlie Lovett established 1877
as the probable date of its creadon.

Item 8. "Proof Sheets: Propositions I, 11" is undated,
but probably from 1882. The galley proofs of these
two theorems in the Warren Weaver Collection were
intended for a book Dodgson planned on the topic
of circle-squaring. The statement of the first theorem
is: "The area of a Circle is less than four times, and
greater than twice, the Square on its radius." The
statement of the second theorem is: "The area of a
Circle is less than 3 and 1/3 times, and greater than 2
and 2/3, of the Square on its radius."

By ten years after the death of the eminent math-
ematician Augustus De Morgan in 1871, Dodgson
was growing tired of answering the many letters from
mathematical dilettantes who thought they had man-

aged to construct a circle whose area equaled that of
a given square. A proof that such a construction was
impossible was established in 1882, but would-be cir-
cle-squarers persisted well into the twentieth century.
It seems Dodgson wanted to refer them to his book,
rather than continue to answer their letters. The rea-
son that he did not publish his book is unknown.

Item 1 8. "Response to 'Infinitesimal or Zero,'" from
1886, is a letter by William John Clarke Miller, editor
of the mathematical problems and solutions section
of the ET, which was collected and reprinted, often
with additions and corrections, in two volumes per
year, as MQS. In his invaluable book LCP, in number
C.242, Charlie Lovett provides the citation from the
ET as V.38, 1 July 1885, p. 233.

For part of a sequence of questions and solu-
tions appearing in the mathematical problems and
solutions section of the ET and in MQS during the
period 1885 to 1889, Dodgson provided solutions to
two questions posed by others (numbers 7695 and
8200) and participated in published discussions,
when he disagreed with another mathematician's
solution to one of these questions. He also posed a
question of his own, number 9588. All of them deal
with probability and illustrate where Dodgson was
able to handle the material in the questions posed,
and where he was not.

Item 18 concerns Question 8200: "A random
point being taken on a given line, what is the chance
of its coinciding with a previously assigned point?" Eu-
gene Seneta writes that problems like this one, which
involve an uncountable sample space, were not set-
tled until it became possible to allocate the uniform
probability distribution to a line segment of length
1, in accordance with A. Kolmogorov's general prob-
ability axioms of 1933. Hence any such point can exist
with a probability of zero. Dodgson, however, could
not accept that a possible event can have zero prob-
ability. He wrote, " I re-affirm, as absolutely axiomatic,
that, when an event is possible, its chance of happen-
ing is not zero" [Seneta 1994, 218]. For him, an axiom
involves a person's belief system, which depends on
his informed intuition. So, for example, in geometry,
Dodgson could accept the possibility of two lines be-
ing parallel to a given line through a point not on
that line (hyperbolic geometry) because he was famil-
iar with asymptotic lines. But he could not accept the
idea of a geometry where no parallel lines exist (el-
liptic geometry).

Item 55. "Rule for Finding Easter-Day for any Date
till A.D. 2499" is undated, but we now know from a
letter dated 8 September 1897 that Dodgson wrote
to David Thomas, a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford,
that the date of the Rule is 1897. The galley pages
of the Rule are in the Jeffrey Stern and Selwyn Goo-

dacre Collections, and the letter was published in
Lindseth 1998, 52-53.

The problem Dodgson worked on is not a simple
one. The Christian Church, at the Nicene Council
in 324, decreed that Easter Sunday must fall on the
Sunday following the full moon in Rome assumed to
occur on the fourteenth day from the day of the pre-
ceding new moon, after the vernal equinox (taken to
be March 21). Hence Easter Sunday must fall before
April 25, but the full moon can occur more than 14
and 3/4 days after the preceding new moon, and the
vernal equinox sometimes falls slightiy before or after
March 21.

In his letter to Thomas, Dodgson mentions the
method he created ten years earlier for finding the
day of the week for any given date. Such a method,
together with a rule for finding Easter Sunday, is the
main ingredient of a mechanical perpetual calendar,
which first appeared early in the twentieth century.

ADDITIONAL PIECE

Additional Piece. The Science of Betting, numbers 55:1,
la, and 159a (1 and 2 in the LCH), published in The
Pall Mall Gazette on 19/20 November 1866 and re-
printed in The Times on 21 November, both with a
letter of correction of an error discovered by Dodg-
son's friend and colleague Vere Bayne. Dodgson's
betting rule is his version of pari-mutuel betting,
known in England as "betting round." He first wrote
about his discovery in a diary entry of 1 2 March 1856,
and sent a letter to the editor of Bell's Life in London
and Sporting Chronicle on 5 May 1857, signing it as
Mathematicus. Charlie Lovett includes all of this ma-
terial in numbers C. 44-47 of LCR For a complete
discussion of Dodgson's Rule and its connections
with his publications during the period 1882-1883
on lawn tennis tournaments, see Abeles, 2000.

VOLUME 3: THE POLITICAL PAMPHLETS

Item 29. A single piece, tided "Redistribution," went
unrecorded in the LCH. Appearing in the St. James's
Gazette on 22 October 1884, it is the final letter in a
long set of letters by Dodgson and several other writ-
ers of the time on the parliamentary representation
of voters, and the redistribution of seats in Parlia-
ment. These letters supply the background necessary
to understand Dodgson 's pamphlet The Principles of
Parliamentary Representation, his most important work
on election theory. The pamphlet appeared for pri-
vate distribution the very next day and publicly on 5
November. Dodgson hoped it would influence the
outcome of the Reform Bill (it passed), which extend-
ed the franchise to agricultural workers and farmers,
thereby increasing the electorate by two-thirds.

Roger L. Green included this letter on redistribu-
tion in his article "Lewis Carroll and the St. Jaynes's
Gazette'' in the 7 April 1945 issue of Notes and Queries.
Charlie Lovett lists it as number C.234 of LCR

VOLUME 4: THE LOGIC PAMPHLETS

In Volume 4 of the pamphlet series there are four
items that do not appear in the LCH. These are item
3, The Four Syllogisms, Analytical, and item 11, the
Table of Contents from Carroll's book Symbolic Logic,
Parti, both from the Berol Collection; item 7, Quadri-
lateral Diagram, from the Houghton Collection; and
item 13, Logic Problem Worksheet, from the Linds-
eth Collection.

Item 5. "The Four Syllogisms, Analytical" is an un-
published manuscript graph giving a visual proof of
two logical statements. Together with item 2, Seven
Diagrams, both of which carry the date 1887, they
provide evidence that Dodgson was an early unrec-
ognized contributor to a branch of mathematics later
called graph theory, which has its origins in work by
Leonhard Euler in the eighteenth century.

Item 7. In "Notes and Calculations on Problems in
Symbolic Logic" (September 1892?), an unpublished
manuscript, Dodgson pardy worked out a sorites prob-
lem involving four sets a, b, c, d, using a quadrilateral
diagram. The Parrish Collecdon has another of these
diagrams, but in his publications Dodgson did not use
diagrams for more than three sets to solve logic prob-
lems.

In the manuscript, the three premises are given
in subscript form. They are: abg, there is no a that is
b; c,b'j|, every c is b; and dja'^ , every d is a. The quad-
rilateral diagram he used to represent the premises
appears right.

Examining the six possible cases, i.e., the possible
relations for each pair: ab, ac, ad, be, bd, cd, Dodg-
son represented them with six diagrams, but his
treatment of them is incomplete, and he marked the

manuscript page "not to be used," suggesting that he
found his diagrammatic method wanting — a conclu-
sion borne out by his subsequent preference for his
tree method to handle sorites problems involving
more than three sets.

Amirouche Moktefi discovered this manuscript,
and, in his doctoral thesis, he completed the solu-
tion of the parts Dodgson presented, to yield: ajb^
and bja,, for the first case; ajC,, and Cja,, for the sec-
ond case; a',d|, and d,a'yfor the third case; Cjb'^and
b'jC^ for the fourth case; b|d„ and djb^ for the fifth
case; and c,d„ and d,c„ in the sixth case. Dodgson
gave these assignments for the letter terms: "ducks"
to a; "waltzers" to b; "officer" to c; and "my poultry"
to d [Moktefi 2007, 243-244].

In Symbolic Logic, Part I, this problem appears
as number 5 on p. 112, and its solution is on p. 158.
Dodgson wrote similar problems intended for part II
of his book on symbolic logic. They were formulated
in the period 1887-1894, and he set them up in 1896
in the same form as this problem. They appear in
Bardey's edition of Dodgson 's Symbolic Logic as num-
bers: 44-48 [Bardey 1977, 409-410].

Item II. The Table of Contents of Symbolic Logic, Part I,
from 1894(?), is the later of two versions of the table
of contents, both of which differ substantially from
the published version in his book published two years
later. These early galley pages indicate important in-
sights into Dodgson's thinking about logic, including
his definition of logic as " [T] he science of reasoning
rightly," and the inclusion of a monomial diagram
to depict "some" and "no" propositions. Neither of
these topics appeared in his later publications. Also,
he listed several additional topics that he planned to
include in his later symbolic logic books. These are:
alternation, i.e., the nonexclusive use of "or" relating
two or more propositions; the presence of superflu-
ous premises in arguments; and normal sequences of
propositions such as "if A then B." It seems he de-
cided to include these three topics in the never com-
pleted Part II of his Symbolic Logic.

mmm

_,l

MMMM

Item 73. Logic Problem Worksheet, 1885 (?), contains
a variant of a logic diagram for three sets that has
a small "+" representing a nonempty region, a sym-
bol John Venn sometimes used in his logic diagrams,
but not before the second 1894 revised edition of
his book on symbolic logic. This unpublished manu-
script shows that Dodgson, not Venn, introduced this
symbol. However, Dodgson did not use it in his pub-
lished work, preferring the symbol "1" instead.

CONCLUSION

The sixth and final volume of the pamphlets series
will include any additional pieces by Dodgson from
the last two volumes that are not listed in the LCH.
Alerting members of the research community cur-
rently working on Dodgson/Carroll's writings — and
there now are many more scholars since the pam-
phlets series was initiated! — to these newly discov-
ered pieces is this author's primary motivation for
presenting the information contained in this article.

REFERENCES

Abeles, Francine F, ed. The Mathematical Pamphlets of
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Related Pieces. Vol.
2 of The Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll. New York:
LCSNA, 1994.

The Political Pamphlets and Letters of Charles Lu-
twidge Dodgson and Related Pieces: A Mathematical
Approach. Vol. 3 of The Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll.
NewYork: LCSNA, 2001.

The Lo^c Pamphlets of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

and Related Pieces. Vol. 4 of The Pamphlets of Lewis
Carroll. NewYork: LCSNA, 2010.

Abeles, Frahcine F. "Betting Round aka Pari-Mutual
Betting: A Note on C. L. Dodgson." Proc. Canadi-
an Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics,
V. 12. J. H. Tattersall, ed. Providence, RI: Provi-
dence College, 2000, 176-183.

Bardey, William Warren, ed. Lewis Carroll's Symbolic
Logic, 2nd ed. NewYork: Clarkson N. Potter, 1986.

Green, Roger L. "Lewis Carroll and the St. James's
Gazette." Notes and Queries. 7 April 1945, 134-135.

Lindseth, Jon, ed. Yours Very Sincerely C. L. Dodgson
(alias "Lewis Carroll"): An Exhibition from the Jon A.
Lindseth Collection of C. L. Dodgson and Lewis Car-
roll. NewYork: The Grolier Club, 1998.

Lovett, Charles. Lewis Carroll and the Press: An An-
notated Bibliography of Charles Dodgson 's Contribu-
tions to Periodicals. New Castle, DE/London: Oak
Knoll Press/ British Library, 1999.

Moktefi, Amirouche. Deduire et Seduire: La

Logique Symbolique de Lewis Carroll. Doctoral
dissertation, Universite Louis-Pasteur, Stras-
bourg, 2007.

Seneta, Eugene. "Probability." In The Mathematical
Pamphlets.

Venn, John. Symbolic Lo^c. London: Macmillan, 1881.

Symbolic Logic, 2nd rev. ed. New York: Burt

Franklin, 1971. First published 1894.

Williams, Sidney Herbert; Madan, Falconer; Green,
Roger Lancelyn. The Leivis Carroll Handbook. Re-
vised edition by Denis Crutch. Folkestone, Kent,
England: Wm. Dawson & Sons, 1979.

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Ti^H^E Pi^O^L^I^T^I^C^A^L A^L^I^C^E

JACK BRONSTON

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In the endless commentaries on Alice, it is diffi-
cult to find a description of the political skills of
that little conniver who threads her way through
a rather inhospitable country armed with little more
than the political instincts of the Victorian colonial
power in which she was raised. Tiny Alice personi-
fies in many ways tiny England mastering the nine-
teenth-century globe with nothing more than lofty,
self-assured fortitude and, yes, more than a tiny bit
of political guile.

Wonderland is, of course, a Land, a polity. It is,
to be precise, a kingdom, ruled by an eccentric royal
family of the Lancastrian line (as one would guess
from the red painting of the roses). There is an
equally eccentric, somewhat unstructured aristocracy
represented by the ill-fated Duchess and Knave, and
there is some kind of political order in which proper-
ty rights, such as for the Rabbit's house, are respected
by the local citizenry, who, in that populist style so ab-
horrent to Carroll, are ready to burn it down in order
to get the intruder Alice out.

The Victorian England of Carroll's day was a set-
ting in which politics was knockabout give-and-take
featuring two of history's political heavyweights,
Disraeli and Gladstone, who make their thinly dis-
guised appearances in the Alice stories. Carroll, an
outspoken Tory, was not above depicting Disraeli as
Bill the Lizard, the consensus candidate of the local
crowd as their champion to evict Alice from the Rab-
bit's house. (Bill fails, just as — one suspects — Disraeli
himself failed, in Carroll's eyes, to restrain political
reform.)

But it is Alice herself who politically navigates
this bizarre and challenging country. She does so
vrith the coolness, self-discipline, and aplomb (and a
certain political adroitness) that have won over gen-
erations of children and adults for the century and
a half since her Adventures were first published. The
book and its Looking-Glass successor are full of politi-
cal allusions and examples of Alice's innate ability to
manipulate difficult challenges and irrational oppo-
sition through devices that a working politician can
only admire.

Indeed, at the very outset of Wonderland, Alice
feels called upon to organize the little creatures who

have been caught in her pool of tears. She takes charge
quickly and deftly, as any British colonial might; like
an instinctive ward-heeler, she "find[s] herself talking
familiarly with them, as if she had known them all her
life" and leads them out of the pool ("Alice led the
way and the whole party swam to the shore"), and fol-
lows the Dodo's aptly named Caucus Race. Like any
good colonial, she supplies the prizes, which go (in an
overly lavish but not uncommon political touch) to all
of the participants. She is ready, like too many mod-
ern politicians, to solve even nonexistent problems,
for example when the mouse says "not" which Alice
assumes is a "knot" to be untied — by her, of course.
And she quickly becomes aware of the frightened re-
action of the local mouse and bird population to any
mention of her beloved cat, just as any good British
colonial of the day would soon make himself aware of
local sensitivities in the Colonies.

And Alice can be politically artful when neces-
sary — when the Cat asks her opinion of the Queen
of Hearts, who is threatening to decapitate one
and all, Alice is as quick on her feet as the most
astute politician:

"How do you like the Queen?" said the Cat in
a low voice.

"Not at all, said Alice, "she's so extremely — "
Just then she noticed that the Queen was
close behind her, listening, so she went on,
" — likely to win that it's hardly worth while fin-
ishing the game."

The Queen smiled and passed on.

In her colloquy with the flowers in Looking Glass,
Alice seems instinctively to know how to disarm the
opposition, "hoping" as she believes, "to get [the Ti-
ger-Lily] into a better temper by a compliment."

Like many politicians, Alice gamely adapts to un-
expected changes in the rules — if she has to play cro-
quet with a restless flamingo as a mallet, she is ready
to go with the flow without complaint. But when the
time comes to abandon a prior commitment that
has turned out to be untimely or embarrassing, she
makes a quick switch characteristic of a seasoned poli-
tician. Thus, when the Duchess's baby, whom Alice
has bravely rescued, turns into a pig in her arms, she
abandons it without a qualm:

"If you're going to turn into a pig, my dear,"
said Alice seriously, "I'll have nothing more to
do with you. Mind now!"

Nevertheless, like the resourceful politician she
is, Alice is ready to take political advantage even from
this unexpected change. If the baby had grown up,
she reasons, "it would have made a dreadfully ugly
child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think,"
which turns Alice to "thinking over other children
she knew who might do very well as pigs." Politicians
would recognize this as an opportunistic attempt to
salvage advantage from an unfortunate and unfore-
seen turn of events.

The book of Alice's adventures, in fact, includes
a subde political aside that encapsulates England's
traditional ability to overcome its handicaps of size
and resources. Alice, in a moment of confusion in the
forest, asks the Cheshire Cat "which way I ought to
go from here," to which the Cat replies that "[Tjhat
depends a good deal on where you want to get to."
When Alice says that she wants to get ''somewhere,''' the
Cat answers:

"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if
only you walk long enough."

This advice seems to reflect the British knack,
so evident in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, for "muddling through" its difficulties to
the consternation of its Continental rivals. Let's just
keep walking, Carroll seems to say, and we will oudast
larger, more aggressive, or more diverse rivals.

But it is the larger political questions of Carroll's
day (and ours) that loom in Wonderland. The King
(to say nothing of the bloodthirsty Queen) is an auto-
cradc monarch with some serious personal problems;
he is clearly not very intelligent, and many of his pro-
nouncements cast clear doubt on his mental stabil-
ity. What are we to do, Carroll seems to ask, about
autocrats, dictators, monarchs, and other rulers who
acquire and maintain power but whose judgment may
be cHnically impaired? After all, within the century,
England was titularly ruled by an unstable king, and it
is not surprising that Alice voices her concern about
threatened political chaos in this picturesque but po-
lidcally off-center country:

"I don't think they play at all fairly," Alice
began in a rather complaining tone, "and they
all quarrel so dreadfully one can't hear one-
self speak — and they don't seem to have any
rules in pardcular; at least if there are, nobody
attends to them."

What graver threat have we today than the possi-
bility that some mad ruler will ignore the commonly
accepted rules of humanity and blow the planet to bits?

Finally,- a major political quesdon is raised at
AAFW^ climax, the trial of the Knave. The question
deals with two critical elements in Victorian political
life, order and fairness. In addition to its apparent re-
spect for property and privacy. Wonderland possesses
a jury system that gives its citizens the elementary
right to trial by jury. Although one might question
the jury selection system in place at the time of the
Knave's trial, it was the jury's verdict that was clearly
to be determinative of his guilt or innocence, despite
the fact that the King was presiding as both judge and
sovereign at the trial, a clear violation of England's
unwritten constitution (a violation to which Alice cu-
riously does not object, other than to note the King's
general ineptitude).

However, when the Queen insists on imposing
the sentence (no doubt "Off with his head!") before
the jury has rendered its verdict, Alice is finally moved
to open resistance to the dangerously dotty royal fam-
ily. She rises to her full height:

"Stuff and nonsense!" said Alice loudly. "The
idea of having the sentence first!"

And so, Victorian England has its constitutional
limitations expressed in high dudgeon by this other-
wise cool and reserved little politician. As Alice fights
off the courtroom occupants, the dream of Wonder-
land is shattered on a critical point of political prin-
ciple.

Carroll himself was not above the maneuvering
rampant in Oxford politics, writing occasional pam-
phlets opposing or supporting some policy or person.
The many priesthoods conferred by Oxford became
in fact "livings" doled out by the secular arm of Eng-
land, based, for the most part, upon secular political
considerations. One thinks of Trollope's outgoing
prime minister sifting through livings he can no lon-
ger grant and the wide repercussions of his erstwhile
power, and one can imagine the influence upon Car-
roll of Oxford's role in the hard-nosed politics of his
day, which manifests itself in the Alice books.

After all, when Alice's adventures are done, she
has survived her journey through Wonderland, not
v«th the intervention or miraculous help of some
fairy godmother, as happens to other children in oth-
er children's stories of the day, but through her own
political craft, skillfully adroit and artfully exercised.
Rule, Britannia!

Jack Bronston is a retired naval officer, laivyer, and politi-
cian who served in the New York State Senate for 19 years.

APRIL 19-21, 2013
in WINSTON- SALEM, NORTH CAROLINA (p. 30).

NOVEMBER 2 OR 9, 2013

sculptor Karen Mortillaro;

George 6^ Linda Cassady, who present

the annual Wonderland Awards at USC;

&" Dan Singer will host us in LOS angeles

SPRING 2014
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

(site of our founding 40 years ago)

or NEW YORK CITY
FALL 2014

Joint LCSNA/LCSCanada meeting in TORONTO

SPRING 2015

in conjunction with the grand opening

of the Center for the Study of Children's Literature

at SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY in California

OCTOBER 10-11, 2015: in NEW YORK

as part of the citywide celebrations of Alicel50

AI,ICE15

CELEBRATING WONDERLAND

AUCTION

An online auction will be held the first week of December, 2012; proceeds are targeted for
use by our Alicel50 committee. If you have spare Carrollian items in good condition, do
contact me. Visit our website in November for details, and please be generous with your
donations and bids.

VOLUNTEERS

This will be the largest outreach project in the Society's history. We are in need of volun-
teers, even now. Please consider donating a bit of your time for this outstanding endeavor.

ORIGINAL ART

For an exhibition at the Society of Illustrators in New York and a matching venue on the
West Coast (either the Charles Schulz Museum or the Museum of Cartoon Art) we are seek-
ing holders of original cartoon art who might be able to lend us pieces. We are also looking
for examples of great book illustration art (original art only, not posters or prints) for an-
other exhibition. Please let us know what you may be able to lend.

CONTACT

Joel Birenbaum

joel@thebirenbaums.net

(630) 637-8530

-^^

i&-

The Deaneny Ganden

Dear Editor,

An addendum to the amusing
"Age of Alice" article {KL 88:10-
12): In what is thought to be Al-
ice's first appearance on TV (Dec.
15, 1950) — the episode "Alice in
Wonderland" on the anthology
series The Ford Television Theatre —
Iris Mann, who was then eleven,
portrayed Alice.
Byron Sewell

Another: a few years after that, Kraft
Television Theatre 's "Alice in
Wonderland " show of May 5, 1 954,
featured Robin Morgan, twelve, in
the title role. She grew up to become
an extraordinary feminist activist,
scholar, author (her 1 970 anthology
Sisterhood Is Powerful has been
widely credited with helping to start the
women's movement in America), and
editor of Ms. - Mark Burstein

1f(k

Dear Editor,

Those members still unconvinced
by the hyphen detected and ex-
plained in my previous letter {KL
88:31) should be aware that the

highly symbolic use of color in
both books is also indicative of
their true authorship. We may
discount "orange" marmalade and
"brown" bread as descriptive of
foodstuffs, "white" as the normal
color of paper, and the "golden"
of the crown of TTLG as its manu-
facture.

However, in AAfW, the word
"golden," as in "the golden after-
noon" and the "golden scales "of
the crocodile, clearly represents
the Queen's happy life with Albert,
the last being a pun on the equal
weight of their love and happiness
together.

The White Rabbit, a model of
purity, a devoted servant to the
Queen of Hearts (and of his), is
Albert himself, and his frequently
mentioned white kid gloves are
obviously their children. The blue
caterpillar who leaves the heroine,
though not without a final bit of
advice, is the color of sadness. The
green leaves are the trap of life,
later to be mocked in song.

Although it is tempting to also
discount the red and white roses
as having inherent color, we must
accept them as another symbol of
Victoria's marriage. Her happy life
is gone, misplaced; it cannot be
repaired. Alas, the only expression
of her intensely crimson passion is
anger.

The tarnished silver laughter of
the introductory poem to TTLG is
a heightened result of the mixture
of white and black: a reference to
the Queen's black garments, even-
tually enlivened a bit with white.
This is quickly followed by the
trees "dressed in green," the life
she is forced to continue, though
hemmed in by the green hedges
of the chessboard.

The broken white ratde again
represents the purity of their bro-
ken love. Upon seeing it, Tweedle-
dum 's eyes turn yellow, a clear sign
of ill health, like Albert's. Its loss
is quickly followed by a reference
to the thick black cloud of her
depression. Green pigs are the

opposite of the pink pigs of nature;
everything is upside down and
backwards without her husband,
whose blue eyes appear in the mel-
ancholy, loving figure of the White
Knight, soon to be swallowed up
by the black shadows of the Forest.
The last color to be mentioned is
the yellow livery of the Frog, now

at last a cheerful reminder of the
optimism Victoria felt about her
potential reunion with Albert after
her own death.

Dr. Bernard Femly Bowers, BA,
BFA, MA, MFA. PhD, DDS, MD,
DVM, DoD, LLD, etc.

Thank you, Dr. Boiuers. The chromatic
nuances of your Byzantine Wonderland
are a cautionary reminder to all Car-

rollians that fresh air and plenty of
sunshine are a poor substitute for ex-
pert medical care. Prince Albert's own
untimely demise is a salutary example
of the dangers of spending too much
time indoors reading literature, even
nonsense literature.

— The Editor

Like a modern-day White Rabbit,
he was wearing an enormous
orange watch, but didn't seem to
be in any particular hurry.
Alexandra facobs, "Critical
Shopper, "The New York Times,
June 21, 2012.

Under the rule of despots like
the Red Queen, we are forced to
play mad games with inadequate

instruments — balls that roll away
like hedgehogs and sticks that twist
and turn like live flamingoes —

and when we don't succeed in
following the instructions, we
are threatened with having our
heads chopped off. . . . When the
Red Queen demands that the
court should give the sentence
first — "verdict afterwards" Alice
quite rightly answers "Stuff and
nonsense!"

Alberto Manguel, in his
introduction to AAIW, with
engravings by George A. Walker
[see page 35]

Campion "felt that, intellectually
speaking, he was having a
conversation with someone at the
other end of a circular tunnel, and
was in fact standing directly back to
back with her. On the other hand,
of course, it was possible that he
had become Alice in Wonderland."
Margery Allingham, More Work
for the Undertaker, 1949.

1!^

The wide garage door in the
eight foot high stucco wall had
now opened, revealing not the
interior of a garage but a sunny
jungle, crowded tropical trees
and shrubbery through which
a blacktop drive meandered,
disappearing toward unimaginable
splendor. It was like a scene
in a children's book — Alice in
Wonderland, perhaps — in which

^eMD\^

the opening in the wall leads to a
completely different world. . . .
The limousine nosed along the
drive into the jungle lushness,
and the broad wooden door slid
downward again, snicking shut.
"Drink me," Mike muttered.

Donald Westlake, The Comedy Is
Finished, Titan Books, London,
2012. Published posthumously.

By the time Lewis Carroll wrote
Through the Looking-Glass, in 1871 —
140 years ago this month — Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
was already a beloved book. So

the pressure was on; Carroll feced
a real "follow-that problem." His
difficulty was increased because of
his estrangement fi-om Alice Lid-
dell's family, and anyway, the "real"
Alice was six years older, had grovm
up. The Alice of the books is such
an individual girl — opinionated,
bossy, always telling people off, even
though she's in a world she doesn't
understand, in which she doesn't
even know what size she is — that it's
hard not to believe she was modeled
on a real girl, but now that model
was gone and Carroll had only his
memory of that lost original. "Still
she haunts me, phantomwise," he
wrote in the book's epilogue, and
thank goodness she did, because
Through the Looking-Glass was any-
thing but an anticlimax, giving us
the Jabberwock, Tweedledum and
Tweedledee, and the Walrus and the
Carpenter to add to Carroll's pan-

theon of magnificently nonsensical
immortals.

I thought about Lewis Carroll
when I began writing my second
children's book, Luka and the Fire
of Life, twenty years after the ear-
lier Haroun and the Sea of Stones. I
was worried about the "follow-that
problem" too, and it comforted me
that a writer I admired so greatly
overcame his (far greater) problem
with such brilliant flair.

Salman Rushdie, "Flashback,"
Vanity Fair, January 2012.

The Cheshire Cat could evanesce
by leaving just a smile, so
maybe I can avoid attention by
disappearing away from my laugh?
Garry Wills, " Why Is This Man
LaughingT, The New York
Review of Books, /Mn^2i, 2072.

This flat is full of sound. There is
a squeaky baby I have not yet seen,
who cries like a toy being pressed.
His mother croons and sounds like
the Duchess in Alice.

Mavis Gallant, "The Hunger
Diaries, "The New Yorker,
July 9 &' 16, 2012.

Such a statement, made to Lord
Uffenham in other circumstances,
would have plunged him into
abstruse speculation as to how
mad hens were, when wet — how
you detected this dementia — and
where such birds might be held to
rank in eccentricity of outlook as
compared, say, with hatters.
P. G. Wodehouse, Money in the
Bank, Herbert Jenkins, London,
1946.

Nobody loves hats more than Miss
Manners, except possibly the Mad
Hatter, but even she acknowledges
that human beings outrank them.

Miss Manners, The Washington

Post, August 20, 2012.

J» •

TO CHANGE THE COLOUR
OF A ROSE

Hold a red rose over the blue
flame of a common match, and the
colour will be discharged wherever
the fume touches the leaves of the
flower, so as to render it beautifully
variegated, or entirely white.
If it then be dipped into water,
the redness after a time, vnW be
restored.

Godey's Lady's Book, May 1841.

As I stood there wondering
what to do with the hog — the
method favored by Lewis Carroll's
Queen of Hearts, using as a ball
in a croquet game, was not an
immediate option —

Sarah Lyall, The Anglo Files:
A Field Guide to the British,
W. W. Norton and Company, New
York, 2008.

Could be it was off-with-his-head

time.

Reginald Hill, Killing All the
Lawyers, St. Martin 's Press,
New York, 1997.

She looked over the glass at him,
her expression wry. "Would moles
make any sense?"

Now Chee laughed. This conver-
sation, more and more, reminded
him of his very favorite tale from the
white culture, Alice in Wonderland.

Tony Hillerman, People of

Darkness, Harper &' Row,

New York, 1980.

Listening for worms seems like
something that would fit right in
with citizen science, or "Alice in
Wonderland."

James Gorman, "Books on Science,
The New York T'ime%, June 12,
2012.

A brilliant illustrator can
transform any story, revealing
its possible meanings and
sometimes changing them. Alice
in Wonderland and Through the
Looking-Glass would be less scary
without John Tenniel's drawings
(especially those of the Duchess
and thejabberwocky), and
Winnie-the-Pooh less lovable
without the help of Ernest
Shepard.

Alison Lurie, "Something

Wonderful Out of Almost

Nothing, "The New York Review

of Books, July 12, 2012.

"So, Mr Clibtree," you say sourly,
"as assistant secretary in charge
of Snarks and Boojums in the
Ministry of Jabber-wocky, you are
entirely opposed to this scheme,
are you?"

J.B. Priestley, Delight, Harper &'

Brothers, 1949.

"Listen!" I barked, suddenly. "Did
you know that even when it isn't
brillig I can produce slithy toves?
Did you happen to know that the
mome rath never lived that could
outgrabe me?"

James Thurber, "The Black Magic
of Barney Haller, " in The New
Yorker, August 27, 1932.

"The man who wrote the story,
Lewis Carroll, made it all up. The
whole thing."

Charlotte's eyes grew big, then
she shook her head. "Even Alice?"

"Including Alice."

"No," Charlotte said with ab-
solute certainty. "That's silly. It's
Alice's story."

Deborah Cromble, No Mark

Upon Her, William Morris, New

York, 2012.

•^ ^^ILK^D ^f^ OF MARK BURSTEIN

First, of course, kudos and props to those
who made the fall New York meeting such
a runaway success, Marvin Taylor to begin
with (in absentia, regrettably). Marvin, the director
of the Fales Library at NYU, and his associate Brent
Phillips ensured that all went very smoothly indeed.
A toast to our visitors from afar: Kazuhiro Yoshimoto
of the LCSJapan and Tatiana lanovskaia from Toron-
to, to name a few. I have to add my mother, Esther,
who is formally known as Mrs. Louis Carroll English
(really!!), attending an ^.T^'wrnKKaBaet^K^BJU^';!'^
LCSNA gathering for
the first time. And to
the brilliant speakers:
Robin Wilson, Andrew
Sawyer, Adam Gopnik,
Raymond Smullyan,
EUa Parry-Davies, Da-
vid Schaefer, Morton
Cohen, and Edward
Guiliano. And to the
remarkable Patt Grif-
fin, who gave the Max-
ine Schaefer reading
along with Cindy Wat-
ter and Ella Parry-Da-
vies and acted as Lois
Lane (well, more like

Superwoman) in reporting Saturday's meeting And
to Janet Jurist and Ellie Heller for their generous hos-
pitality to our out-of-town guests.

This past July 4th marked the sesquicenTenniel
(150th anniversary) of a certain boat trip up the Isis
on which a certain Tale was Told. Although Alice fa-
mously "gave herself very good advice (though she
very seldom followed it)," I actually obeyed my own
counsel of the last two "Ravings" and sat down that
day on a riverbank with my children Martin, ten, and
Sonja, six, and read them several chapters of Alice's
Adventures under Ground.

I'm very excited about our next meeting, which
will be April 19-21, 2013. Stephanie Lovett and Char-
lie and Janice Lovett will be our hosts in Winston-Sa-
lem, North Carolina, for a very full, multiple-venue
three days. Tentative plans include a talk by Charlie;
a reading/ performance of Dan Singer's new play, A
Perfect Likeness, about a meeting between Dodgson
and Dickens; a chamber music concert featuring
some of Carroll's favorite tunes; a talk by Jett Jackson
about her Alice paintings; a Victorian Choral Even-
song service featuring
a sermon by Mark Goo-
dacre based on an out-
line by Rev. Dodgson,
and "other surprises."
Handouts will include
a catalogue of exhibits,
an updated version of
Charlie's article about
Carroll's typewriter
(with text actually
typed on the machine
and laid into every
copy!), and more. By
all means, make plans
to be there!

Alice had got so much into the way of
expecting nothing but out-of-the-
things to happen, that it
seemed quite
dull and
stupid for life
to go on in the
common way.

HENRY SAVILE CLARK
&• WALTER slaughter's
ALICE REVIVED IN JAPAN

Kimie Kusumoto

Before the curtain went up on this
Japanese performance of Henry
Savile Clark's Alice, I had a chance
to address the audience. As a ref)-
resentative of the Lewis Carroll
Society of Japan (LCSJ), I gave a
short congratulatory message to
the performers of the Alice musi-
cal, the Yotsukaido Boys and Girls
Chorus Group. Because of the tsu-
nami disaster that devastated the
northern part of the main island
of Japan, they had to wait one year
to put it on stage. They had not
suffered directly from the tsunami,
but at that time most such events
were automatically canceled.

This chorus group consists of
children aged 2 to 18, all amateurs
who love singing. They have to
leave the group when they be-
come 18 years old, so the 2011
performance was the last chance
for the oldest children to perform
on the stage, but as it was such a
special occasion, four members
were allowed to play their roles as
ex-members for this year's perfor-
mance. I am sure it was their assis-
tance that made the musical such
a success. Carroll said the play
couldn't make enough of an im-
pression without the help of adult

Canollmn Notes

actors or actresses, and I think in
this performance the ex-members
confirmed Carroll's strong belief.
As I have abruptly cited Carroll,
you might wonder why. Well, this
performance, which was held in
Japan on March 18, 2012, was a
revival of the musical that Car-
roll worked on with Henry Savile
Clarke, the librettist and director.
It was completed in four months
and performed in the Prince of
Wales Theatre in London in 1886.
We know that Carroll was very
pleased to have realized his long-
time dream.

I wrote a book whose title
translates to Encounters with Alice
(Michitani, 2007), which was
mainly about Sir John Tenniel and
Henry Savile Clarke. These two
people met Carroll and worked
together v«th him to send Alice to
the world. I owed a lot to Charles

C. Lovett's wonderful book Alice on
Stage, as well as to Edward Wakel-
ing's collection, access to which
he offered to me so generously. A
young Japanese translator, Mr. Yuu
Okubo, read my book and was in-
spired by it. He found the libretto
mentioned, translated it into Japa-
nese, and posted the translation
on his website. The director of
the Yotsukaido chorus group, Mrs.
Masako Oki, read it and thought it
fit to be played by her members.

Mrs. Oki said they had a hard
time finding Walter Slaughter's
music and gaining permission
to use it, but finally the way was
cleared. Along the way, I heard,
they found out that the original
manuscript of the music is now in
Australia. When Mrs. Oki played
the original music of Walter
Slaughter, she found it monoto-
nous and lacking in a rhythm that
attracts children's interest, so
she had to change it a lot. On
the other hand, she appreciated
the libretto, which expressed the
unique characters so well and also
included various duets, which
children love so much.

Savile Clarke's original musi-
cal play consisted of two parts,
but on this occasion only the first
part was given. Still, it was quite
satisfactory, and the audience of
about 500 — half of them were
children — ^seemed well satisfied.
This abridgment also reminded
me of Carroll's comment that he
was reluctant to put the two Alice
books in one play.

Alice was played by two girls,
which didn't cause any confusion;
both acted beautifully. The impor-
tant supporting roles of the play,
the Caterpillar, Hatter, Cheshire
Cat, and Queen of Hearts, were
played by ex-members. They were
marvelous — especially the Hat-
ter! I have never seen the Hatter
performed more brilliandy. I think
it must be that because the actors
were forced to wait to perform for
such a long time, their roles were
more deeply fixed in their minds,
and each person understood his

or her role better. And I find once
more that the attractiveness of the
staging of Alice lies in the unique
characters of Wonderland, so the
supporting players' acting has a
strong influence upon the success
of the play.

And I wondered all the time
what Carroll would have written
down in his diary if he had sat by
me and seen this musical play, re-
vived after 125 years in the Far East!

iSR

ALICE AT THE TATE
LIVERPOOL

August A. Imholtz, Jr.

From Nov. 4, 2011, through Jan.
25, 2012, the Tate Liverpool
mounted what surely will prove to
have been one of the most com-
prehensive Alice exhibitions in
the long run-up to the Wonderland
sesquicentennial and the many
exhibitions now being planned
for 2015. We arrived Merseyside
on a bright cool morning in late
January and, never having been to
Liverpool, we did not know what
to expect beyond Beatles. We were
pleasantly surprised not only by the
Tate but by the city itself.

This northern outpost of
London's Tate Galleries is in a
refurbished warehouse complex
on the city's Albert Dock, which
dates from Liverpool's important
commercial shipping past. "Albert
Dock," according to a website de-
scription, "was opened in 1846,
and was the first structure in
Britain to be built from cast iron,
brick, and stone, with no structural
wood. As a result, it was the first
non-combustible warehouse system
in the world." In addition to hous-
ing the Tate, Albert Dock is home
to the Beades Story museum, the
Merseyside Maritime Museum, and
the International Slavery Museum.
From the Tate's entrance, one
looks across the water to the mod-
ern Museum of Liverpool, and in
the distance the skyline of the city's
art deco buildings can be seen.

We were fortunate enough on
that day to be visiting Alice in Won-
derland Through the Visual Arts, as
the exhibition was called, in com-
pany with a number of other Car-
rollians, including Edward Wakel-
ing — who is so knowledgeable that
as soon as he happened to answer
a question posed by a puzzled
onlooker, a group of twenty to
thirty people gathered around
him, hanging onto every word of
this quiet-spoken and generous
cicerone.

The Alice exhibition occupied
several galleries of the upper part
of the building. As one entered the
galleries, one saw, in a kind of vesti-
bule, George Dunlop Leslie's mar-
velous 1879 painting Alice in Won-
derland [KL 76:36] in which a litde
girl stares longingly straight out-
ward (into Wonderland, one might
wonder) . She is nestled against the
breast of her mother, who is read-
ing from a book that looks for all
the world like not only a red cloth
six-shilling A&^but — and it cannot
really be — the facsimile edition of
Alice's Adventures Under Ground. It is
a perfect prelude to the rest of the
show and, I think, the themes it
sought to evoke.

The central treasure on display
was the fair-copy manuscript of
Alice's Adventures Under Ground on
loan from its home in the British
Library in London, where it has

been since 1948 when a group of
American well-wishers bought it at
auction and anonymously donated
it to the British people. Filled with
Lewis Carroll's own illustrations —
some of which, like the shrunken
Alice in Chapter III, are really
quite charming and very amus-
ing — the Under Ground manuscript
is of course the proper place to
begin an exploration of Alice and
the visual arts.

Carroll's photography, both
famous (5^ George and the Dragon)
and less well-known examples of
his work ( The Dream — a haunting
piece) , his wet collodion photo-
graphic apparatus, the early H.
Savile Clarke play text and promo-
tional materials, and many items
on loan from private collections
filled the cases and, in few in-
stances, adorned the walls of the
main room. The breadth of Car-
roll's creative range clearly took
shape as one moved from vitrine
to vitrine: from the famous Alice
biscuit tin (a landmark in product
marketing that even an organiza-
tion as sharp as Disney would have
been proud to have conceived) to
his drafts of his original drawings,
to the Wonderland Postage-Stamp
Case, and more.

A goal of the exhibition was to
document the influence of Alice
on the art of the last 150 years — a
tall order, and one frankly impos-

sible to fulfill, even in an exhibi-
tion space as massive as that of the
Tate Liverpool. The continental
surrealists, who in many ways ad-
opted Carroll in advance of most
British and Americans, were on
display in the middle room. Espe-
cially prominent were the illustra-
tions of Max Ernst for Alice and the
Snark and the dozen Salvador Dali
Alices (rope-skipping girl and all).
Even Oskar Kokoschka's politically
disturbing 1941 painting Anschluss
-Alice in Wonderland wsls there. All
of those works are a world away
from the Pre-Raphaelite works of
William Holman Hunt, Arthur
Hughes, and Sir John Everett Mil-
lais that had so captivated Carroll
and were also on view. There is
a lot separating Tenniel's classic
Alice swimming in the pool of
tears from Kiki Smith's several
interpretations of that scene, but
there is still some continuity, if only
through the prominence of littie

Alice among the collective animal
kingdom.

A number of the contemporary
avant-garde works, such as Pierre
Huyghe's 2002 A Smile without a Cat,
were a littie hard to grasp, showing
far less continuity with Tenniel (or
Carroll, for that matter), including
some of the X-rated works.

If one did not look from pre-
cisely the right angle at Tim Rol-
lins's White Alice III (in which a
barely transparent white paper was
superimposed over a set of blown
up pages from Alice) one could
not read the text at all. A. A. Bron-
son's set of framed mirrors (two
rows of six, presumably a motif
for the twelve chapters of Looking-
Glass}) was very hard to make
out. Likewise, I fear, with some of
the sculpture: Rodney Graham's
People's Edition of Alice in a large
wooden joiner's box-like case was
difficult to appreciate, although
Bill Woodrow's towering Humpty
above a set of precisely angled and

balanced crates, his Humpty F —
Dumpty, was marvelous.

And some paintings had but
the most tenuous relationship, in
a few cases barely even a nominal
one, to things Alice. One more
criticism could be made of this
otherwise very intriguing exhibi-
tion: The cards in the exhibit
cases seldom gave sufficient infor-
mation on the objects displayed,
their importance, and why they
had been selected.

The catalog produced to ac-
company the exhibition deserves
a review of its own. The number
of visitors to the Alice exhibition
amounted to some 27,375 and
thereby set a record for atten-
dance at a Tate Liverpool show;
in fact the figure was four times
what they usually draw. Alice was
clearly alive and well during her
brief Liverpudlian sojourn.

[The catalogue is available from shop.
tate.org.uk. The exhibition moved to
the Hamburger Kunsthalle from June
22 to September 30.]

Lewis Carroll

Jane Yolen

Down and

Down

And

T>ovm

He fell

Into a life

Of writing

Well.

His books

And mathe-

Matics

Bred

Upside-

Down

Inside

His head.

Till wonder

Dazzles

Every child

And

Puzzle

Solvers

Are beguiled.

Was he a sinner?
Are we
Astonished?
Are his puzzles
All too
Donnish?
Did he speak
In Jabberwocky?
Are his wonder
Books
Too talky?
Even critics
Disagree.
But all his books
Agree
With me.

Copyright 2012 by Jane Yolen. From
the May/June 2012 issue q/"The
Horn Book Magazine. Reprinted by
permission of the author.

oV^ """"^ ^^

The Hunting of the Snark

Illustrated by Oleg Lipchenko

Limited Edition, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-9783613-2-7

Published by Treasure Studio,

Toronto, Canada

$100 -$150

Trade Edition, 2012

Tundra Books

ISBN 978-1770494077

Hardcover, $17.95

Doug Howick

Oleg Lipchenko's Snark is a mas-
terly creation and an absolute joy
to read, reread, peruse, explore,
share in, become a part of, partici-
pate in, visit with, embrace, and
experience.

The details of the full-page
cover illustration, with the crew
gathered in front of a trophy wall,
give a warning of the surprising
pleasures that lie within. In
the Limited Edition, a by-line
beneath the illustration heralds
"Oleg Lipchenko's thoughtful
and meticulous visualisation
handiwork" — and it certainly is!

Under the artist's hand, all
members of the Bellman's crew —
including the Bellman himself —
have become personalities in
their own right. This reviewer is
privileged to have one of the first
ten copies, purchase of which
entitled me to a "hand drawn

additional personage on the
copyright page." It happens that I
requested the Broker, not because
I've ever had any particular regard
for him but because Lipchenko
had mentioned that he saw him
as "a young Oxford or Cambridge
graduate, busy in the financial
field just enough to spend most
of his time in fields of tennis
and cricket." As a cricket-loving
Australian, whom else would I
select? Thus, my personal copy
has an exclusive illustration of the
Broker as a varsity cricketer!

If Carroll's Snark is an enigma,
then Lipchenko's version is
a conundrum, challenging
the Snarkophile to explore its
mysteries. Just as an example, on
the front cover, one of the hunting
trophies on the wall behind the
assembled crew is the mounted
head of a stag/moose/ram/
goat with glorious curled horns/
antlers, whereas on the back
endpaper denoting "The End?"
we see that same wall without the

crew and the trophy depicted with
its left ander truncated so that it
resembles a thimble.

This is a hardcover book wixh a
dust jacket, with 48 (unnumbered)
pages fully illustrated in a unique
and glorious manner. It is a
profound, illustrative study of
Lewis Carroll's poem. In fact,
readers who are familiar with
the words do not need to read
them at all, because once you
have identified each of the
crew members, you can follow
the entire story through the
illustrations.

As the Limited Edition was
restricted to only 100 copies, I am
certain that each one is already
a valuable item, as well as an
enjoyable one.

The Mad Mattery

Marge Simon (poems)

&' Sandy DeLuca (art)

Elektrik Milk Bath Press, 2011

ISBN 978-0-9828554-1-6

$16.00

Ruth Berman

An unusual item for CarroUians,
The Mad Mattery began when
Marge Simon had a get-together
with her friend Sandy DeLuca,
and it occurred to them that it
would be fun to do some kind of
collaboration. Simon found her-
self especially taken vnth DeLuca's
paintings of "strange women in
weird hats ... all shapes, types,
and sizes, some funny, some scary,
and most of them wicked in one
way or another" and started vmt-
ing poems to go with the hatted
images. In looking for a theme to
tie together the images and the re-
sulting poems, it occurred to them
that they were clearly talking about
a Mad Mattery. Simon and DeLuca
created four Carrollian like-
nesses to occupy the core of the
50 paired poems and paintings:
"The Mad Hatter's Portrait," "Red
Queen," "In the Presence of the

Surf's up for the Bellman and company in
this dramatic rendering by Oleg Lipchenko.

White Queen," and "Go Ask Alice."
Although the fourth poem is addi-
tionally a reference to the Jefferson
Airplane song "White Rabbit," and
to Beatrice Sparks's anti-drug novel
Go Ask Alice, the poem is not par-
ticularly about drugs, but about the
speaker's fear of "that girl from the
/ singles bar you met / yesternights
ago," a girl who invades the speak-
er's home with her "Cheshire style"
and her "clock on time / with your
worst nightmare." The references,
as in the preceding three poems,
refer more directly to Carroll than
to Slick or Sparks, and the narrator
seems to be experiencing a fear of
and fascination with the extraor-
dinary upending an ordinary life,
rather than expressing a specific
fear of drugs. The accompanying
painting shows a girl in a green
hat (suitably tagged with a white
sales label), surrounded by cards, a
watch, and a gleefully belligerent-
looking Cheshire Cat head. The
confident, or perhaps ominous,
sales tag says, "Bloody Good."

There is also a brief Wonder-
land reference in the painting of
"Strange Ladies," when a sardonic
cat head makes an appearance in
one corner (balanced in the other
corner by a teacup) . As they "dis-
solve into the late / afternoon shad-
ows," the poem comments, "The
city is a Cheshire cat, / sharpening
its claws / on the warm cement."

The fascination with the invasion
of the ordinary by the wonderful
leads to references to a variety of
mythologies, in addition to the core
Wonderland references, such as J.
M. Barrie's Neverland ("The Leafy
Hat"), voodoo ("My New Voodoo
Doll," "Voodoo Queen"), Buddhism
("Best Dressed Buddha," "Blue Rose
Buddha"), the Aztec Quetzalcoad
("Marina"), and H. P. Lovecraft
("Lovecraft's Wife"), all, of course,
proudly be-hatted.

Elektrik Milk Bath Press

PO Box 833223,

Richardson, TX 75083;

elektrikmilkbathpress.com

■^

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Introduction by Alberto Manguel

Wood engravings by

George A. Walker

The Porcupine's Quill,

Ontario, Canada
ISBN 978-0-88984-339-4

Andrew Ogus

George A. Walker has repurposed
the woodcuts in his deluxe
Cheshire Cat edition of Wonderland
(AX 55:4, 58:18) for an elegandy
produced trade edition and an
alphabet book (below). ^N^\ker
continues the tradition of
Tenniel's wood engravings, though
without the expert hands of the
Dalziels. Rather than meticulous
illustrations of complete situations,
his own small spot engravings
fall, like Tenniel's, in a variety of
positions. The trim size is a slightiy
unconventional but very appealing
5'/4 X 8% inches. The type is well
chosen and laid out, satisfying to
read. A fascinating but sometimes
inaccurate (see "Sic, Sic, Sic," p. 28)
introduction by Alberto Manguel
completes the book.

A Is for Alice
George A. Walker

The Porcupine's Quill,
Ontario, Canada

ISBN 978-0-88984-323-3

The Wonderland Alphabet: Alice's

Adventures Through the ABCs and

What She Found There

Alethea Kontis

Illustrations by Janet K, Lee

Archaia, 2012

ISBN 978-1-936393-86-2

Andrew Ogus

The first task in writing an
alphabet book is to define one's
parameters: animal, vegetable, or
mineral. Or source: almost all the
examples come from Wonderland,
with a smattering of references
to the Looking-Glass world ("K"
is for Knitdng in Walker's; "J" for
Jabberwocky in Kontis's)? Both
understandably use the subde

"Axes" for "X" and "Snooze" or
"Snoring" for the elusive "Z";
otherwise there is relatively little
overlap.

George Walker cleverly pres-
ents relevant quotes from the
book(s) on left pages facing one
of his wood engravings on the
right. This interesting limitation
of working backwards from exist-
ing art sometimes bends the tra-
ditional rules a bit ("I" is for the
Duchess in Jail). Matched with
the format, second color, and
nicely textured paper of his trade
edition of Wonderland, it makes an
attractive pairing.

Alethea Kontis's contrived
poems have none of the flavor of
Carroll. Janet K. Lee's lavish il-
lustrations are as confused as the
fussy, precious typography that
wraps up and down and around
the pages, with an annoying dis-
connect between the funny and
lively cartoonish Alice on the
cover and the saccharine pictures
inside. And what is the use of the
board-book format? I can't imag-
ine a toddler being interested; an
older child would find it insult-
ing, and a discerning adult unin-
teresting.

Walker's Tea Party; the Hatter giins
without a cat

npuK/iWHenufi Amicbi

6 Cmpane Hydec

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Translated and introduced

by Boris Zakhoder

ISBN 978-5-99-02284-8-1

Aaucu 6 SaaepKaAbe

Through the Looking-Glass

and What Alice Found There

Translated and introduced

by Vladimir Orel

ISBN 978-5-9902284-5-0

Both illustrated by

Gennady Kalinovski

Studio 4 + 4, 2012

Anuca e Cmpane Hydec

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Translated by Boris Zakhoder

Illustrated by Vladimir

Klaviho-Telepnev

Slovo, 2010

ISBN 978-5-387-00123-9

Andreiv Ogus

Looking at editions of Carroll's
familiar text in an unfamiliar
alphabet is a fascinating and
unsettling experience. Is this what
it means to be illiterate? Well, not
quite. Even though both sounds
and sense are lost, at least a bit
of the latter can be guessed at
by recognizing the situations
illustrated and their sequence.

Gennady Kalinovski's versions
were originally published by Dets-

Kalinovski's Alice arrives at the tea party in
a party dress. Also see inside back cover.

kaya Literatura in 1977 and 1980
(reused in a color edition they
published in 1988) in a smaller
format. Now these lovely art edi-
tions effectively use the classic
combination of red ink, black ink,
and white paper in this beauti-
fully laid-out text. Perhaps it is
the somewhat elongated trim size
(8V4 X 13 inches) that is somehow
reminiscent of Barry Moser's Pen-
nyroyal editions, but Kalinovski's
style certainly is not. While there
are echoes of other linear artists,
such as Ralph Steadman, Ronald
Searle, and Saul Steinberg, this is a
calligraphic style all his own.

Startling and imaginative spot
red or black illustrations of various
sizes break gendy into or follow
the text, or fall gracefully into the
margins, somedmes with tantaliz-
ing captions. The pictures capture
the feeling of the dreamlike text in
both books: Alice is, briefly, beauti-
fully dressed for the tea party; the
Duchess walks with a mincing step;
the lion and unicorn go through
many variations in their chapter,
each delightful and effective. An
overdressed White Rabbit and the
wild dance of the Gryphon and
the lobster-like Mock Turtle in-
voked out-loud laughter.

Looking-glass opens with a help-
ful chessboard (though I couldn't
find Alice in her square) and an
intriguing, bewildering rebus.
Chapter-opening spreads are red
on the left pages — textured and
linear in Wonderland, smoky and
atmospheric in Looking-Glass — the
facing right-page chapter tides
made of Victorian poster type
gone mad. An exquisite portrait of
Alice follows what appears to be an
exuberant double-page explication
of the chess moves, calming the
reader for what is to come. Mir-
ror imaging appears throughout,
in subtie ways. The picture of the
White Knight in a moonlike land-
scape is tender and moving.

Throughout, Kalinovski chooses
unusual incidents to illustrate: the
pomp of the Hearts' court cards'
procession is enlivened by demonic

cupids; a long beak protrudes mys-
teriously from Alice's castle door.
Another sensitive portrait faces the
closing poem. Both books reward
careful scrutiny and return visits.
Highly recommended.

Thf.se inexpensive but elegant volumes
can be ordered directly from the editor,
Elena Borisova, ivho speaks excellent
English, for $20 each, plus postage, at
lborisava@rambler.ru. The books can
be mailed anywhere on Earth; however,
they can take up to three months to be
delivered, given the state of the Russian
Post. Be patient; it's worth waiting for.

Vladimir Klaviho-Telepnev takes
a virtually opposite approach to
Kalinovski's. Here the pictures
are atmospheric photographs that
evoke both the work of Victorian
pioneers and Jonathan Miller's
twentieth-century film.

A combination of metallic gold
and black inks makes lovely duo-
tones. The beautiful Alice (sadly
sophisticated and overly made up
in a peculiarly Russian style) falls
down the rabbit hole in a three-
page sequence and then interacts
convincingly with masked figures
and models (where did he get
that Dodo?) or wanders through
mysterious landscapes. Though
the poses are occasionally a bit
precious and suggest a fashion
magazine more than Wonderland,

Klaviho-Telepnev 's tea party, with a very
Russian Alice

and there is some inexplicable
repetition, overall this is a lovely
and fascinating production.

Alice au pays des merveilles

Translated and illustrated

by Thomas Perino

Seuil Jeunesse, 2008

ISBN 978-2020979672

Andrew Ogus

Here's an interesting spot to check
in French translations: What is the
Lizard's name? In Sophie Koechlin's
translation {KL 87: 51) he remained
true to himself as "Bill." Thomas
Perino has called him "Pierre"
rather than Guillion, a diminutive
of Guillaume. The familiar ubiquity
of the name takes care of the sense,
trumping its sound.

But let me concentrate yet again
on pictures rather than the conver-
sations in a barely familiar tongue.

Once more a brilliant red for the
chapter tides enhances an attrac-
tive, legible, and lively design. The
pictures vary wildly in size, some
marginal images falling into the
text, some leaping across the pages
as, Alice-like, the text lines shrink
to accommodate them. Yet these
alterations are never disconcerting.
Perino's skillful wood engravings
make excellent use of the elegant
patterning and flat shapes endemic
to this technique, particularly in the
controlled chaos of Alice's fall.

His imagination is enchanting.
In a charming reversal, when Alice
regards the beautiful garden for
the first time, we see her enormous
eye peering through the flower-
framed door, as if we are enjoying
the garden ourselves. The Hatter's
folded paper-boat hat obscures
half his face. The brilliant scene
of cat, queen, king, and headless
executioner (see cover) subdy
arms the last-named with a sword
rather than an axe, reminiscent of
Anne Boleyn's request for a French
executioner who would wield a
sword. The sour-faced Queen of
Hearts waves a rose like a weapon;
an enormous, cheerful "griffon"
slumbers across most of the spread.

in which the reader is invited to
''regardez I'image." In a spirit of inclu-
sion, the Mouse's tale is reversed
to white out of the silhouette of
a black cat. Alice herself is a bit
ambiguous: Her oversize head
suggests a small child, but her body
seems a bit older. Except for the
post-mushroom bite, she seems to
have no neck. These are the most
minor of complaints; M. Perino's
work is a welcome addition to the
Alice canon, in any language.

Everything Alice: The Wonderland

Book of Makes &' Bakes

Hannah Read-Baldrey

6^ Christine Leech

North Light Books, 2011

ISBN 978-1-4403-1440-7

In this DIY age, it seems inevitable
that such a compendium be made.
Full of how-tos and lovely photo-
graphs of the finished products —
as well as decorative matter such
as an amusing page advertising the
Tweedles as family lawyers — this
project, written by two English-
women who work for Hobbyycraft
magazine, abounds with love,
familiarity, and enthusiasm for
Carroll's work. Plans for dolls,
samplers, costumes, clothes, orna-
ments, tea cozies, and the like,
plus lots of recipes, abound.

A detail of Thomas Perino 's tea party:
patterning and a paper hat

EVERGREEN

Since our last issue, the tides
released by the inexhaustible
Evertype include L'Travers du
Mitheux et chein qu Alice y demuchit,
a Looking-Glass translation by
Geraintjennings intojerriais, a
form of the Norman language
spoken in Jersey, in the Channel
Islands, off the coast of France
(ISBN 978-1-904808-96-1); Trans
la Spegulo kaj kion Alico trovis tie,
a Looking-Glass translation by
the late Donald Broadribb into
Esperanto (ISBN 978-1-78201-
001-2); Snarkmaster: A Destiny in
Eight Fits, a mystical prequel to
the Snark, written and illustrated
by Byron W. Sewell (ISBN 978-
1-78201-002-9); Alice Through
the Needle's Eye, a republishing
of Gilbert Adair's 1984 sequel,
with the original illustrations
by Jenny Thorne (ISBN 978-1-
7820 1 -000-5 ) ; The Haunting of
the Snarkasbord, a "dark parody"
by Alison Tannenbaum, Byron
W. Sewell, Charlie Lovett, and
August A. Imholtz,Jr., illustrated
by Byron W. Sewell (ISBN 978-1-
904808-98-5) ; Les-aviretes da Alice
6 payis des merveyes. Wonderland
translated by Jean-Luc Fauconnier
into Walloon, a regional language
of the Walloon community of
Belgium and France (ISBN 978-1-
78201-005-0); Laureen Johnson's
translation into Shetland Scots,
Alice's Adventirs in Wonderlaand
(ISBN 978-1-78201-008-1); Moray
Watson's into Scottish Gaelic,
Eachdraidh Ealasaid ann an Tir
nan longantas (ISBN 978-1-78201-
015-9); and Alice's Adventures in an
Appalachian Wonderland, translated
into Appalachian English by Byron
W. and Victoria J. Sewell (ISBN
978-1-78201-010-4), a sample of
which goes: "'Up the crick,' the
Bobcat says, wavin hits right paw
roun, 'lives an ol bar what thinks
he's Chief Cornstalk: an down the
crick,' wavin t'other paw, 'lives a
Civil War Vetran who fitt on both
sides, agin hissef Visit whichever
you like: they's both tetched.'"

ART 6^" ILLUSTRATION

2008 was a bad year in
Australia for depictions of
naked children in art. Po-
lixeni Papapetrou's pho-
tograph of her six-year-old
daughter caused a scandal,
even being denounced by
the prime minister. Papa-
petrou {KL 72:43-46) has
responded to the scandals
by channeling Lewis Car-
roll and a simpler time
when pre-pubescent beau-
ties could be depicted in art with-
out the authorities being called.
Her kids once again pose for her
in The Dreamcatchers, a 2012 exhibi-
tion at the Nellie Castan Gallery in
South Yarra, but this time they are
clothed, masked, and posing in
tributes to Carroll's photographs.
(Her 2003 portrait of her daugh-
ter is called "Olympia as Lewis
Carroll's Beatrice Hatch before
White Cliffs.") "He was a roman-
tic," she told The Age. "He thought
that young girls were made in the
image of God, that they were per-
fect. He thought they were abso-
lutely beautiful — and they are."

"Alice as a Beggar Maid" is one of
the best-known portraits Dodgson
made of Alice Liddell; a print was
on display at the Carnegie Mu-
seum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA, last
summer, eventually to become
part of the permanent collection.
The 1858 albumen print, along
with the 1860 glass negative of
"Alice with Garland" and works by
other pioneering photographers,
has been promised to the museum
by William Talbott Hillman, a New
York art collector.

A small gallery in Oxford, Eng-
land, staged a cosmopolitan show
in honor of this year's milestone
Alice Day. The 03 Gallery, which
is located within Oxford Castle,
hosted works by international
contemporary women artists,
including Adriana Peliano and
Katarzyna Widmanska, and videos

from the USC's Wonderland
Awards. The exhibition ran from
July 7 to August 5.

A Spanish artist using the online
moniker "Kodomos" created sev-
eral eerie black-and-white "Alice in
Wonderland" illustrations. "The
artist uses creative mark-making
and layering to craft the dreamlike
illustrations," writes Adriana
Peliano on her alicenations blog.
"In Kodomos's world the White
Rabbit is monstrously large, and
shadowy landscapes reveal an even
more surreal and nightmarish side
of the fantasy story."

Move over. Sergeant Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band. Discuss-
ing the Divine Comedy luith Dante is a
spectacular, gigantic painting by
the Chinese ardsts Dai Dudu, Li
Tiezi, and Zhang An (2006, oil on
canvas) . The original is an impres-
sive 20' X 8.5' (6m X 2.6m). There
are hundreds of famous and influ-
ential people depicted, from Dar-

All Far-Flung items and
their Hnks, implicit or

explicit, are from www.
lewiscarroll.org/blog

and can be accessed by
using its search box.

win to Jack Kevorkian.
Finding Carroll is harder
than finding Waldo: He's
hiding under a tablecloth
between Vladimir Putin
and Shirley Temple, hold-
ing a sack of animals.

ARTICLES (fJr'ACADEMIA

The medical and psychi-
atric communiues could
be said to have a few is-
sues concerning the Alice
books, and these were
entertainingly, if briefly, reviewed
on the Oxford University Press
blog on July 4, 2012, by Edward
Shorter and Susan Belanger. Most
tantalizing was the account of an
ardcle from 2000 that appeared in
the journal Respiratory Physiology,
in which authors Whitelaw and
Black of the University of Calgary,
not altogether seriously perhaps,
interpret the Dormouse's "severe
daydme somnolence" as "a cardi-
nal symptom of obstructive sleep
apnea," and observe that in Ten-
niel's illustration "the teapot fits
tightly around [the Dormouse's]
neck, thus compressing the air in
the pot and producing continuous
positive airway pressure, which is
the best treatment for obstructive
sleep apnea."

In the regular New York Times travel
column "36 Hours," Seth Kugel
demonstrated admirable priorities
when he made Christ Church the
first stop on his weekend tour of
Oxford, England. He was also
ready to admit that the draw of the
place has a lot more to do with
Charles Dodgson — and the fact it
was the location of some film
about wizards — than its status as a
hallowed hall of learning.

History Today once again cele-
brated today's history on July 4,
2012, with a full-page piece called
"The Alice in Wonderland Story
First Told," by Richard Cavendish.
The article faithfully recounts the
day in question, 150 years earlier.

when there was a certain boat trip
on the river Isis. At theAtlantic.
com, author Maria Popova (of
Brain Pickings) also celebrated the
anniversary, with an article called
"Meet the Girl Who Inspired 'Alice
in Wonderland,'" recounting the
events surrounding the inspiration
and creation of the book.

Several conferences in 2013 may
be of interest to our readers: The
44th Annual Northeast MLA Con-
vention will be held in Boston, MA,
from March 21 to 24, with the
theme "Romanticism and Chil-
dren's Literature." Further afield,
the Society for the History of Chil-
dren and Youth will hold a confer-
ence titled "Space and Childhood
in History" at the University of
Nottingham in England from June
25 to 27. Further afield still is "Re-
translating Children's Literature,"
to be held at the University of
Rouen in France from February 8
to 9. And finally, if your wanderlust
is really strong, head to Maastricht
University in the Netherlands,
August 10 to 14, for the 21st Bien-
nual IRSCL Conference, which will
have as its theme "Children's Lit-
erature and Media Cultures."

BOOKS

DA TOP Books is a publishing
house more accustomed to deal-
ing with "mature content" than
children's stories, yet they pub-
lished three new Alice-ish books
intended for the under-eights in
the past year — and very strange
books they are, too. The first, Alice
in Fairyland, is described as "an
experimental rendition of the
world-known masterpiece." Writ-
ten by John Prost and illustrated by
fantasy artist Alex Yat, it starts out
along familiar lines — "Alice was be-
ginning to get very tired of sitting
by her sister on the bank . . ." — but
soon Alice meets a giant thorn-cov-
ered grasshopper with "Eat me or
I'll eat you" etched on its body, and
things take a novel turn. The sec-
ond title, Alice, The White Rabbit and
The Curious Creatures, is illustrated
by Prost and described as a "clas-

sical rendition" of the aforemen-
tioned "world-known masterpiece,"
although, as it seems to contain
only the first five chapters of AATW,
it must be considered an abridged
classic. The third title puts us back
on more familiar ground, with
AATWnewly illustrated by Kathy
Neste in dense black-and-white
scenes placed within incongruous
photo-montaged covers.

Adriana Peliano's facsimile version
of Alice's Adventures under Ground,
Aventuras de Alice no Subterrdneo
(Editora Scipione) won third place
in the Projeto Grafico (Graphic
Design) category of the 54th an-
nual Jabuti ("Tortoise") awards of
the Camara Brasileira do Livro
(Brazilian Book Guild). Adriana is
also the President and founder of
the LCS of Brazil and more infor-
mation about her AAUG can be
seen in KL 85:22.

Alice Illustrated: 1 20 Images from the
Classic Tales of Lewis Carroll (Dover,
2012), edited by Jeff Menges, is a
journey through the varied works
of dozens of illustrators who have
brought the Alicehooks to life. The
images in this large art book are
complemented with an essay on
the artists by Menges, and "a bib-
liophile's perspective" by our own
President Burstein.

LCSNA member and artist Tatiana
lanovskaia, has illustrated and self
published The Hunting of the Snark
in a black and white edition (Tania
Press, 2012). It's available for $30
US, postage not included. Her
lovely Wonderland playing card
decks and her colored and black
and white versions of AAIW, TTLG,
and The Mad Gardener's Songnre
also available. She can be con-
tacted at tianovskaia@yahoo.ca.

Alice in Deadland, Through the Killing
Glass, and Off With Their Heads are
an independently published trilogy
of post-apocalyptic adventure nov-
els by Mainak Dhar. For those who
like their Alices world-weary and
armed to the teeth, the premise
sounds promising: "Fifteen year-

old Alice has spent her entire life
in the Deadland, her education
consisting of how best to use guns
and knives in the ongoing war for
survival against the Biters. One
day, Alice spots a Biter disappear-
ing into a hole in the ground and
follows it, in search of fabled
underground Biter bases." Dhar's
books are available in various
formats.

Into an already overstimulated
market of tributes and parodies
come 50 Shades of Wonderland and
50 Shades of Alice Through the Look-
ing-Glass by Melinda DuChamp.
Online reviewers consistently
praise both books for their mo-
ments of comedy and — we are
serious — their cover art. Available
for Kindle only.

EVENTS, EXHIBITS, PLACES

The London 2012 Olympic open-
ing ceremony was a quirky cel-
ebration of the United Kingdom's
proudest achievements that de-
lighted viewers around the world,
many of whom had no idea what
was going on. In a scene that paid
joint tribute to British children's
authors and to the National
Health Service, the Red Queen,
Cruella deVille, and Voldemort
loomed over children's hospital
beds only to be driven back by a
flock of Mary Poppinses and an
army of aproned nurses.

The Liddell family, with young
Alice in tow, regularly vacationed
in the Welsh seaside town of Llan-
dudno, but local pride in this
association suffered a blow in
recent years when the Wonder-
land-themed visitor centre was
forced to close, and the house in
which the family stayed was de-
molished. Now, in an effort to
reestablish the connection, local
authorities have given the go-
ahead to the construction of an
Alice-themed sculpture trail
around the town, and this year
hosted a grand 2012 Alice Day
party on the town pier, at which
900 Llandudno schoolchildren

set a new world record for number
of jam tarts consumed in an
hour — 1,716, to be precise.

A columnist at the San Francisco
Chronicle, Jon Carroll, is publishing
the text of AAIW one sentence at a
time at the end of his column,
having previously published King
Lear in the same way. He began
AA/Won July 25 this year; check in
tomorrow for the latest gripping
installment. As of November 8, he's
up to "To be sure, this is what gen-
erally happens when one eats
cake."

The "skeleton and fiber" of Car-
roll's classic tales, along with many
of the major characters, take a
startling new transformation in
RabbitHole, V.J. Waks's dark,
twisted fantasy, a book of "adven-
ture, magic, and sorcery."
Bergerac, 2012; $17; ISBN 978-
0988305823.

INTERNET 6^ TECHNOLOGY

The Internet is full of websites with
party-planning advice, but only one
of them is run by Matt James, Eng-
lish entrepreneur and architect of
Elton John's first annual "White
Tie and Tiara Ball." Under "Party
Themes" James provides a small
dissertation on the many elements
that could make up an Alice in
Wonderland-themed event — from
invitations to decorations to minia-
ture doors constructed out of read-
ily available household supplies,
he's got it covered.

The popular tech blog io9.com
had several Alice-related articles
this year. In "A Math-Free Guide to
the Math in Alice in Wonderland,"
the blogger eases into the numbers
by beginning: "It's a strange story
that seems to be the result of a
drug trip, but is actually a scathing
satire of the new-fangled math that
the professor was seeing invade his
area of study." They also posted a
fresh review of Jan Svankmajer's
Alice called "The Weirdest Alice in
Wonderland Movie Ever Made."

C. M. Rubin continues to be the
resident Alice expert at the Huff-
ington Post's Books department,
with a slew of new articles. Just this
summer, she posted "Alice - Mark
It With A Water Stone" (July 18),
"Alice — Join the Race!" (June 11),
"Alice: Why July 7, 2012?" (June 3),
"Alice — In Germany" (July 26),
and "Alice — True Or Not True?"
(June 19), the latter about a cer-
tain Carroll myth.

There's an group art exhibition
with several LCSNA members par-
ticipating in Ontario. "Alice
in Sunderland" will run from Octo-
ber 13 till February, 2013 at the Law
Office Art Gallery (85 River Street,
Sunderland, ON). The works of
Andy Malcolm, George Walker,
Oleg Lipchenko and Tatiana
lanovskaia will be exhibited. The
show is curated by Cria Pettingill.

MOVIES (&= TELEVISION

PBS's popular Antiques Roadshow
featured some lovely Alice in
Wonderland carved doorstops,
appraised at $10,000-$ 15,000, on
an episode which aired May 14.
The appraiser, Noel Barrett, said,
"Alice in Wonderland is so much a
part of our culture. And this imag-
ery is just ingrained. And what to
me is really exciting is, in carved
wood, whoever created these did a
masterful job of adding dimension
to the wonderful Tenniel illustra-
tions, which of course are touch-
stone imagery of Alice." The guest
originally paid $100 for them at an
estate sale.

BBC's Inspector Leivis, on Masterpiece
Mystery (also on PBS in America)
had an episode in Season V called
"The Soul of Genius." The dead
body in this whodunit was a profes-
sor obsessed with The Hunting of the
Snark, and of course the Inspector
has to delve into the poem to search
for clues, i.e. a "legendary riddle
hidden in Carroll's philosophical
story of an impossible quest for the
unknowable." Oxford's Botanical
Gardens are also visited.

Over on basic cable, Syfy's Ware-
house 13 told a creepy tale involv-
ing Lewis Carroll's mirror, which
aired on August 27. In the epi-
sode, a U.S. secret service agent
finds the looking-glass in the
warehouse, and accidentally un-
leashes an evil spirit from the
other side, namely the "murder-
ous" ghost of Alice Liddell. The
mirror enjoyed a call-back to the
series after successful appear-
ances in two episodes during
Season One (iO. 83:48).

Alice has become a recurring
spokescat for Purina's Friskies,
having many thirty-second adven-
tures, if not quite to Wonderland
then at least "into the nutritious,
delicious world of Friskies® Plus!"
In one advertisement, she jumps
through a looking-glass into a
brightly-colored flowery world,
visiting a tea party attended by
the chickens she's presumably
about to eat.

On KL 88:48, we joked about how
Raven Gregory's graphic novel
prequel to Return to Wonderland
was to be called Alice in Wonder-
land. Indeed, the books have
been among the top ten indepen-
dent comics of the past few years.
Now, the news from Comic-Con
is that the television rights for
the whole Zenescope series were
won by Lionsgate, apparently
following a "six-studio bidding
war." Look for Alice Liddell's
busty ass-kicking daughter to
enter a mad Wonderland on a
major network sometime in the
next few years.

If (big if) you're into what Alex
(A Clochvork Orange) would call "a
bit of the old ultra-violence," I
suppose you'll want to know
about Alice in Murderland from
Brain Damage Films (2011) and,
to a lesser extent. Malice in Won-
derland (Magnolia/Magnet, 2010)
both available on DVD.

On the bright side. The Alice in
Wonderland Classic Film Collection
contains a lovely 52-minute,

nearly complete print (David
Schaefer's collection includes some
scenes that are not included here,
such as the Tea-Party) of the
charming but once-feared-lost
Viola Savoy film, directed by W. W.
Young, with a sweet, period-sound-
ing soundtrack; two Virginia Da\is
Alice in Cartoonland shorts from
Disney (1925), Alice in the Jungle
and Alice Rattled by Rats; Gene De-
itch's Alice in Paris (1966) "intro-
ducing stories by Ludwig Bemel-
mans, Lewis Carroll, Crockett
Johnson, James Thurber, and Eve
Titus," and featuring the vocal
talents of Carl Reiner and Howard
Morris; and the full British 1972
musical adaptation with Peter Sell-
ers, Dudley Moore, and Fiona
Fullerton in its usual bargain-base-
ment-quality-transfer glory. Quite a
deal for around $10, all in all.

Alice in Wonderland: A XXX Anima-
tion Parody from Adult Source
Media, 60 minutes of X-rated "3-D"
CGI. Watch the trailer on YouTube
before deciding whether to spend
your $30 on this piece of hentai.

MUSIC

German-based South Korean com-
poser Unsuk Chin finished her first
opera, Alice in Wonderland, in 2007,
and it opened that year in Munich,
where it was voted "Premiere of the
Year" by Opemwelt. ]une 2012 saw
its North American premiere at the
Opera Theater of St. Louis, alter-
nately delighting and confounding
the critics. Scott Cantrell of the
Dallas Morning News called it "the
most 'out there' work I've seen in
22 years of coming here." Appar-
ently, the caterpillar is played by a
clarinetist with a children's chorus
as its body. The libretto is by David
Henry Hwang, and this production
was directed by James Robinson. If
you'd like to hear it, Achim Frey-
er's original "radical" 2007 produc-
tion is available on DVD, as well as
an audio recording, conducted by
Kent Nagano.

Rap Genius, the excellent website
of hip-hop annotations, does not

have an entry for "Alice in Wonder-
land," a song from producer Gensu
Dean's debut album, Lo-Fi Fingahz
(Mellow Music Group, released
February 28, 2012). That leaves us
alone in the wilderness to tran-
scribe and interpret just what fea-
tured rapper David Banner is talk-
ing about, and why. Over a funky
beat created by Dean on the classic
SP-1200 drum machine. Banner
chants the chorus: "Baby, you Cin-
derella / And would probably be /
I stuck in the dungeon / [some-
thing something] motions may be
/ But you can live in my palace /
Alice in Wonderland / Alice in
Wonderland." In the two verses, he
tells the story of a broken girl with
sexual baggage, and the music
video shows a pill-popping Alice in
a downward spiral. "Alice in Won-
derland, Alice in Wonderland,"
Banner repeats at least twenty
times like a machine-gun mantra.
"Sometimes your dreams don't
come true," Gensu Dean adds as a
palinode at the track's flickering
twilight. "Because God knew they'd
be a nightmare."

PERFORMING ARTS

Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw are
to star in a new play on London's
West End. Peter and Alice vnW portray
a fictional encounter between Alice
Liddell and Peter Llewelyn Davies
(who inspired J. M. Barrie's Peter
Pan) and will premier in March
next year. The play has been writ-
ten by John Logan, who previously
won an Academy Award for the
screenplay of Gladiator, a movie

remembered for its epic fight
scenes. Can we expect a no-holds-
barred showdown between Alice
and Peter? If so, my money is on
Alice. [In real life, Alice met Peter
Davies at the Bumpus Bookshop in
London on June 26, 1932, Britain's
answer to America's centenary celebra-
tions. She was 80, he 65 - Ed.]

A rather different encounter
vrill be depicted in Kara Lee
Corthron's play AliceGraceAnon,
which premiered at the Iron-
dale Center in New York on
October 18. Alice (of Wonder-
land, not Alice Liddell), Jeffer-
son Airplane singer Grace Slick,
and the anonymous diarist in
the 1971 novel Go Ask Alice are
the culturally connected, if
anachronistically united, pro-
tagonists. Under the direction
of Kara-Lynn Vaeni, the three
shared the stage with live video
and soundscapes, as well as the
10-member Spectacle Brigade
chorus, a live band playing the
role of Jefferson Airplane.

In October this year, a former
hospital in the Williamsburg
neighborhood of Brooklyn be-
came the setting for an immersive
theatrical experience inspired by
AATW. In Then She Fell the perfor-
mance group Third Rail Projects
guided audiences of just 15 peo-
ple per show into the hospital
basements for an individualized
and rather creepy-sounding tour
of Wonderland.

Tempest Productions put on an
"Alice in Wonderland Journey"
on the Hoboken waterfront in
June. "Participants can follow
Alice, the White Rabbit, and
other characters from the Lewis
Carroll classic as they journey
through Sinatra Park searching
for 'six impossible things,' before
ending with a Mad Hatter Tea
Party," reported Hoboken Now.

This August saw the 16th New
York International Fringe Festival
and with it Alice and the Bunny
Hole, a new "sex comedy" written

by Alex DeFazio and performed by
Elixir Productions, a group dedi-
cated to "plays and performances
about gender, sexuality, and the
impact of sexual identity on society,
human relationships, and the self."
The premise: "Alice thought she'd
calculated the perfect life — until
she discovers a wonderland of
fools, go-go boys, and one Black
Bunny that scrambles her formu-
las."

A new adaptation of AA7W was
performed in Serenbe Playhouse,
part of the 1000-acre Serenbe com-
munity outside of Atlanta, GA,
from June 1 to July 28. According
to promotional materials, play-
wright Rachael Teagle may have
attempted the impossible by pre-
senting "an introverted Alice,
closed off from the world, her
imagination, and, most tragically,
her ability to dream." Luckily, we
have some faith in believing in
impossible things.

What if correspondence between
Lewis Carroll and the young Alice
Austen had inspired the latter's
career as a pioneering Staten Is-
land photographer? What if history
was malleable and most of what we
take as fact was simply made up at

some point in time and repeated
over generations? Historian Ed
Weiss asked these questions and
more in "The Forgotten History of
Staten Island," a series of installa-
tions and outdoor readings around
Staten Island between September
and December 2011. The enter-
taining story of "Alice Austen's
Amazing Adventures in The Won-
derland of Staten Island," written
by the chimerical historian Dr. D.
I. Kniebocker, can still be read
online.

Shoppers at Burjuman, an 800,000-
square-foot mall in Dubai in the
United Arab Emirates were recently
treated to an "Alice in Wonderland
Cirque Stage Show." The 30-minute
show featuring contortionist rabbits
and a live playing-card band was
produced by CMart Worldwide and
performed twice daily from June 21
to 30.

THINGS

Earlier this year, rumors flickered
through Fashion Land that eccen-
tric designer and editor-at-large
for Vogue Anm. Dello Russo was
creating a range of Alica-inspired
accessories for the retailer H&M.
Previews of the range are now
appearing ahead of an October
launch, and the look is definitely
"Victorian Bling": equal parts
AAIW and King Solomon 's Mines.

For a slighdy more laid-back
Alice look, a Hawaiian boutique
called Alice in Hulaland sells its
own range of colorful hula-Alice
t-shirts for men, women, and
children. Visit them online or in
Maui, you choose.

An Alice Tea Party Pillowcase Set
from Urban Outfitters ($34)
gives you the choice of reclining
on Tenniel's tea-table or on the
side of the Cheshire cat. Just
hope he doesn't disappear on
you halfway through the night.

Kindle owners who want to caf)-
ture some of that old-fashioned
book-reading experience can
now do so literally: Kindle cases
made from the original covers of
the 1943 Macmillan edition of
AA/W using traditional book-
binding techniques can be pur-
chased from signals.com for
around $50. If after a few months
your fellow commuters start
looking at you suspiciously, you
could always switch to a Dracula
case, made by the same company.

Wonderland Sticky Notes ("While
you were down the rabbit hole
. . .") from the Unemployed
Philosophers Guild, $6.50.

^ST^A

Above, Kalinovski's Alice. Opposite, the Red Knight gallops off {see page 36).

>«:^