Mr Dodgson
I started re-reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland last night (for the 5th time? 10th? 20th? I don’t know). Kept shrieking with laughter at the language jokes.
Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice’s first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them.
…
How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; “and even if my head would go through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my shoulders.”
…
There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes.
…
…round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “DRINK ME,” beautifully printed on it in large letters.
It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not”
Well done Alice! If it’s not marked poison it can’t possibly be poison.
However, this bottle was not marked “poison,” so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.
I’m pretty sure I missed the hilarity of that one the first x times I read. I’m not entirely sure I didn’t miss the hilarity of all of them.
First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if 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. I wonder what I should be like then?” And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.
Not so much hilarity as…what to call it…I guess inquiring.
…sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.
…She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, “Which way? Which way?”, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing…
That got a real, noisy explosion of hilarity. I swear, I have not paid close enough attention to the jokes in this book in the past. I suppose I read it for the story, like a fool.
“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); “now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!” (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off). “Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure I shan’t be able! I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best way you can;—but I must be kind to them,” thought Alice, “or perhaps they won’t walk the way I want to go! Let me see: I’ll give them a new pair of boots every Christmas.”
…
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Alice, “a great girl like you,” (she might well say this), “to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!” But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall…As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she was up to her chin in salt water. Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, “and in that case I can go back by railway,” she said to herself.
…
“Ugh!” said the Lory, with a shiver.
“I beg your pardon!” said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely: “Did you speak?”
“Not I!” said the Lory hastily.
“I thought you did,” said the Mouse. “—I proceed. ‘Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable—’”
“Found what?” said the Duck.
“Found it,” the Mouse replied rather crossly: “of course you know what ‘it’ means.”
“I know what ‘it’ means well enough, when I find a thing,” said the Duck: “it’s generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?”
Genius.
Don’t forget the Humpty Dumpty scene from Through the Looking Glass:
The relevance to the Gender Wars couldn’t be more on the nose.
Oh I’m not forgetting, I’m just starting at the beginning and proceeding to the end. Humpty Dumpty comes in much later.
“There’s glory for you” is one of my favorite catchphrases. I’m pretty sure I have written something about the Humpty Dumpty rule here…well I can just do a search, can’t I.
Ten posts. The earliest is from 2003.
For a starters’ guide to Humpty Dumptyism may I recommend the conversation I’ve been having over at Mano Singham’s blog, where my objection to one commenter’s use of ‘pregnant people’ led to a definition of misogyny of which I was hitherto unaware? You see, it is an act of misogyny to refer to pregnant women rather than pregnant people, because saying ‘pregnant women’ is dehumanising as it denies women personhood! And I won’t even begin to get into the commenter whose son could get pregnant, or another who swears that women can get testicular cancer.
Oh, and also that underage girls can get pregnant, so the statement that only women can get pregnant assumes that little girls are women and therefore is a paedophilic statement. I would have said that you can’t make this shit up, but somehow they continually manage to do exactly that.
Damn you, Humpty Dumpty!
https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2024/03/09/the-gop-ties-itself-up-in-knots-over-alabama-ivf-ruling/#more-73245
Hoooooooboy – I found it. Comment #25 – by the one and only Silent Bob.
You may need a subscription to access it, but this article from New Scientist a few years ago was very illuminating on what is – for my money – the second-greatest literary work* humanity has ever produced.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427391-600-alices-adventures-in-algebra-wonderland-solved/
*I’m counting Wonder-Land and Looking-Glass as one work.
Martin Gardner’s annotated Alice is also wonderful.
I used to have it but I don’t think I do any longer. Time for a library summons.
Enzyme – thank you; interesting.
This is the part of the conversation with Humpty Dumpty that I (being a person with a rather bitter sense of humour) like best:
‘Seven years and six months!’ Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully. ‘An uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you’d asked my advice, I’d have said “Leave off at seven” — but it’s too late now.’
‘I never ask advice about growing,’ Alice said indignantly.
‘Too proud?’ the other enquired.
Alice felt even more indignant at this suggestion. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that one ca’n’t help growing older.’
‘One can’t, perhaps,’ said Humpty Dumpty; ‘but two can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven.’
***
I think this should be shown to all the local chapters of Moms for Liberty. Perhaps they assist each other – though that would probably leave one Mom at the end…
Perhaps they COULD assist each other.
But would one Mom for Liberty be left at the end? They are all, I suspect, gun-owners, so unless there are no bulltets left, the last Mom could assist herself, or call on her husband…
Ach that punchline. Yet another I smiled at but didn’t pause to admire the genius of.
I think that if Moms for Liberty were able to understand Carroll’s jokes, the Alice books would be be banned from every school in the country.
And probably burned as well.
I was on an airplane and reading something new seemed too challenging, so I started rereading William Gibson, Pattern Recognition.
I’ve read—and reread—it before, but this time I found myself focused on the texture of the words and the density of the cultural references. It was a different experience…
I love it when that happens. Starry night kind of thrilling.