Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass ( PDFDrive )

296 e x p la nat o ry n o t e s

To the Lords of Convention ’twas Claver’se [Claverhouse] who spoke,
‘Ere the King’s crown shall fall there are crowns to be broke;
So let each Cavalier who loves honour and me,
Come follow the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.

Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can.
Come saddle your horses and call up your men;
Come open the West Port, and let me gang free,
And it’s room for the bonnets of Bonny Dundee!’

(RLG)

233 thirty-times-three: Bryan Talbot suggests (Alice in Sunderland, 166)
that Dodgson, who often visited Sunderland, may be recalling a verse
on a Sunderland souvenir bowl (c.1835) depicting Thomas Paine’s
iron bridge (1796) over the River Wear:

Then fill up the bumper, Britannia appears . . .
King William we hail with three times three cheers.

234 walked up the large hall: Alice castles.

Mutton——Alice: one of Dodgson’s distant relatives was Sir Richard
Houghton, at whose table ‘King James I is supposed to have solemnly
“knighted” the loin of beef ’. Derek Hudson (Lewis Carroll: An
Illustrated Biography, 34) suggests that this legendary incident may
have inspired Alice’s introduction to the leg of mutton.

236 and then guess: the answer to the riddle is ‘an oyster’.

extinguishers: candle extinguishers, cups made of metal or porcelain,
often conical. The Royal Worcester company started making
extinguishers in the 1850s.

237 from the soup-tureen: White Queen to QR6.

239 shake you into a kitten: MG (p. 266) suggests that ‘this is
Alice’s capture of the Red Queen. It results in a legitimate checkmate
of the Red King, who has slept throughout the entire chess problem
without moving.’

240 with all her might: Alice takes Red Queen and wins.

245 a b oat, beneath a sunny sky: an acrostic poem, the first letters of each
line spelling Alice Pleasance Liddell. It has echoes of Wordsworth’s
‘Lines written near Richmond, upon the Thames, at Evening’
(Lyrical Ballads, 1798):

How rich the wave in front, impressed
With evening twilight’s summer hues,
While, facing this the crimson west,
The boat her silent path pursues!

(1–4)

explanatory notes 297

Life, what is it but a dream?: many critics have noted an echo of the
English nursery rhyme. However, the most commonly quoted version
of the lyrics (‘Row, row, row your boat | Gently down the stream. |
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily | Life is but a dream) are attributed
to Eliphalet Oram Lyte (1842–1913) who set them to music (The
Franklin Square Song Collection, New York, 1881). The epigraph to
chapter XXV of MacDonald’s Phantastes is from Novalis: ‘Our life is
no dream, but it ought to become one, and perhaps will.’