I recently had the opportunity to watch The Great Debate: Wonderland vs Looking-Glass — I’m Team Looking-Glass, as evidenced below — and as I was listening to the presenters debate the relative merits of each text, a quantitative data point leapt out of the otherwise qualitative conversation:

Through the Looking-Glass was published seven years after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Okay. This is a terrible opening paragraph. The first five words are boring and skippable, the bit about the “quantitative data point leaping out of the otherwise qualitative conversation” is overwrit, and the reference to the YouTube video leaves out any reader who doesn’t immediately know what I’m referencing.

An opening paragraph needs to give the reader a reason to keep reading. This paragraph says “Look at me! I looked at you, after all! You were clever! I am also clever, despite the extremely tedious way I opened this essay!”

I should have known this already, or something close to it; I was already familiar with the Mary Hilton Badcock theory (debunked beautifully by Mark Burstein in “That Badcock Girl,” Knight Letter 86, 2011) and the idea that Tenniel had used the six-year-old Badcock as his model for AAIW and the twelve-year-old Badcock for TTLG.

Fun fact: I can’t find the source of my idea that Tenniel drew six-year-old Badcock for AAIW and twelve-year-old Badcock for TTLG. There are many Alice analyses that indicate Tenniel was shown a photo of Badcock (which may have been true, but he did not use the photo as inspiration for “Alice”), and a few texts that suggest he went to draw Badcock from life (also not true). But I can’t find the book I’m thinking of, the one that includes the ages six and twelve and — if my memory serves — the sentence “and the drawings show her just that much older!”

Unless I find this text somewhere, this will all need to be cut.

But when I heard seven years after, I thought of Alice’s statement to the White Queen:

“I’m seven and a half, exactly.”

Did Carroll mean for Alice to refer to her canonical age, or did he intend this as a kind of meta-reference — Alice stating her age as “seven and a half” because “Alice,” the character/concept/narrative/novel, was also just over seven years old?

As far as I could tell, this was a previously un-dish-covered aspect of Carrollian scholarship — and to find it immediately after joining the LCSNA! If I were right, they’d have to update the Annotated Alice yet again, this time with my name in it!

But first, I had to prove that it was true.

I actually like this bit, including the un-dish-covered pun. It sets up the pride that goeth before my fall, as it were. Also the main thrust of the essay: can I prove this hypothesis?

I wonder if that means I should begin the piece with something about how hypotheses are created or how hypotheses can get mistaken for ideas. The latter is more interesting, because I think fewer people may have thought of it. Of course then I have to break down the difference between them: ideas are linked to action and hypotheses are linked to verification. This may not be the best way to go, but it is tied into THE LARGER PROJECT that I hinted at last week, which means I could incorporate some of it into the project at some point.

Let’s start with what we know — or what we thought we knew, before my hypothesis — about Alice’s age.

This sentence works if you assume that Knight Letter readers don’t know all of this already. I hedge around the fact that I am about to restate a bunch of Wikipedia-level information by using the phrase “what we know,” hooray, we all know this together, feel free to skim I guess?

It’s difficult to write a piece for a group of readers who know a text and its associated scholarship as well as (if not better than) you do. What do I actually have to say that hasn’t already been said?

Alice Pleasance Liddell was born on May 4, 1852. On July 4, 1862 — the date on which Carroll began telling the story that would become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the three Liddell sisters (and his friend and fellow Robinson Duckworth) — Alice was ten years old.

This has definitely already been said.

Was the Alice of that first extemporaneous narrative seven years old? Did Carroll have a younger Alice in mind, as he shaped his story for an older one? It would seem an odd choice, as children seldom want to be perceived as younger than they are — but that’s conjecture, and I would prefer to work with fact.

Introducing the reader to “conjecture” is deliberate, as it comes back later — but this paragraph feels like a tangent. What I’m really asking, at this point in the essay, is whether AAIW and TTLG were published, final-drafted, first-drafted or otherwise evenly separated by seven years and six months. I’m not asking whether Carroll had a seven-year-old Alice in mind as he told his story to the ten-year-old one.

So here are the facts, as far as I can find them out:

While much has been made of Carroll’s decision to write down his aural narrative as soon as he returned home — the wisdom to preserve his wit, as it were — it’s clear that Carroll continued the narrative on subsequent visits. A diary entry from August 6, 1963 reads in part as follows: Harcourt and I took the three Liddells up to Godstow, where we had tea: we tried the game of “the Ural Mountains” on the way, but it did not prove very successful, and I had to go on with my interminable fairy-tale “Alice’s Adventures.”

The interminable fairy-tale became a terminable (though not yet terminated) text on September 13, 1864; Carroll presented a bound copy, then titled Alice’s Adventures Underground, to Alice Liddell on November 26, 1864.

At that time, Alice was twelve years old.

“Aural narrative” is a deep-cut pun and could be scrapped. Readers will either assume I meant “oral narrative” and misspelled, or keep reading without considering the difference between the two. “Wisdom to preserve his wit” is well-crafted but unoriginal.

“The interminable fairy-tale became a terminable (though not yet terminated) text” is the only part that I like. That is actual cleverness. The action of being clever, not some kind of fake-simile that makes readers think about the concept of wordplay without getting the taste.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, including much of the text in Underground as well as the additional chapters “Pig and Pepper” and “A Mad Tea-Party”, was initially published on July 4, 1865. Those initial volumes, as we know, were considered dissatisfactory; a reprint was ordered and published as the official first edition of the novel. This reprint went to publication on either November 18 or November 26, 1865 (sources differ on the exact date) but the edition itself was labeled 1866.

I feel like this has to be included in the piece, even though it’s information that could be found in any encyclopedia (and that many Knight Letter readers already know). Once again, I use the words “as we know” to both highlight and gloss over this.

Through the Looking-Glass published on December 27, 1871 in an edition labeled 1872 — and at this point I should triumphantly announce “a date that is exactly seven and one half years after Wonderland’s original publication,” except the math doesn’t work.

The math may not work, but this paragraph does.

If you count from July 4, 1865 to December 27, 1871, you get 6 years, 5 months, and 24 days. Start from the November 1865 date and “Alice’s” age gets shorter; start from the November 26, 1864 presentation of Underground and you get 7 years, 1 month, and 2 days.

We could start our count on September 13, 1864, when Carroll finished the Underground manuscript, but then we’d have to end it when he finished the Looking-Glass manuscript (January 4, 1871, according to his diaries) and that only gives you 6 years, 3 months and 23 days.

You could argue that Carroll was fudging the numbers, or that he wasn’t quite sure when Through the Looking-Glass would be published. The latter has the advantage of being true, as an August 29, 1871 diary entry suggests he had originally hoped to get Looking-Glass out by September of that year: Wrote to Tenniel, accepting the melancholy, but unalterable fact that we cannot get Through the Looking-Glass out by Michaelmas. After all it must come out as a Christmas book.

But it’s still no good; my nice knock-down argument has, in fact, been knocked down. “Alice” (as a concept), is not seven and a half years old when Alice (as a character) tells the White Queen how old she is, no matter when you start counting.

Which means that there must be another reason why Alice (the character) makes that particular statement.

This all works except for the lead-in to the penultimate paragraph. “But it’s still no good” is a filler phrase; I could substitute with “But there’s no glory for me” if we wanted to be referential about it, but what’s really going on is a structural issue. I go from “The latter has the advantage of being true” to “the hypothesis is false,” which is extremely jarring.

This could be solved by putting parentheses around “The latter has the advantage of being true” and the diary entry, but I don’t like using parentheses unless I can use them as a throughline textual element. I’d be using them in this case as a brace, to hold my piece up against the weak spot in its structure.

As noted above, Alice Pleasance Liddell’s birthday is May 4. Carroll makes it clear in an 1871 diary entry that “Alice’s” birthday is May 4 as well: On this day, “Alice’s” birthday, I sit down to record the events of the day...

The chapters “Pig and Pepper” and “A Mad Tea-Party,” both added to the Alice narrative as it expanded from Underground to Wonderland, suggest that the events of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland also take place on May 4.

In “Pig and Pepper”:

“I’ve seen hatters before,” she said to herself; “the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it won’t be raving mad—at least not so mad as it was in March.”

In “A Mad-Tea Party”:

The Hatter was the first to break the silence. “What day of the month is it?” he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.

Alice considered a little, and then said “The fourth.”

Everyone who reads the Knight Letter probably knows this by heart already.

It might be considered unusual for Alice to have to “consider a little” before remembering that it is her birthday, but Carroll has already established (most clearly in “Advice from a Caterpillar”) that Alice no longer feels quite like herself.

It might also be considered unusual for a May afternoon in the 1860s to be so warm that it would make the young Alice feel “sleepy and stupid,” but you could argue that away by suggesting that it is summer in the real world and spring in Alice’s dream. There is snow on the ground at the beginning of Looking-Glass, after all — it’s (assumedly) the day before Guy Fawkes Day, as Alice notes the preparations for a bonfire — and no snow in Alice’s (or the Red King’s) dream.

This is interesting only because I had never thought of it before. The weather in Looking-Glass World is nothing like the winter weather Alice was previously experiencing, so why do we assume the weather in Wonderland has to be a hot summer day?

However, I suggest the most likely explanation is also the most obvious one: Carroll had no idea what he was doing. I mean that in the most literal sense; when he published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, he had no idea that he was creating a text that people were going to analyze, word by word, for centuries to come. Continuity errors are present in the text simply because he didn’t think to check for them.

I would stake money on the idea that Carroll didn’t know what he was creating. I’d need to read the complete diaries (and, probably, the extant letters) to stake additional money on the idea that he didn’t think to check for continuity errors.

Immediately before “Pig and Pepper,” for example, Alice shrinks herself down to nine inches high and neglects to increase her height afterwards; this means that our Duchess, in addition to being ugly, cannot be more than ten or eleven inches high. It also means that the Cheshire cat and the pig-baby are much smaller than the casual reader might anticipate — smaller than a frog footman, for starters — as are the characters of the Mad Tea-Party.  

Following the tea party, the still-nine-inch Alice opens the door in the tree, returning to the Long Hall (which has been adjusted to accommodate her current dimensions) and shrinks herself again, this time to 12 inches high (that is, taller than her previously stated height), so that she can pass through a door that had previously been described as as 15 inches high and leading to a passage “not much larger than a rat-hole.” When she meets the Duchess on the Queen’s croquet grounds, the latter has grown to whatever height makes her tall enough to dig her chin into Alice’s shoulder; the playing cards, meanwhile, are presented as taller than Alice, even though finding a playing card that is more than 12 inches in length is extremely rare.

When I sent the first draft of this piece to Mark Burstein for review he hinted that there had already been plenty of scholarship on Alice’s height, which means that I probably need to quote it directly and not explain it like I’m presenting the information for the first time.

This is all to say that we should not rely on any of the figures presented in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, even if we try to make the math work by starting in base 18.

I get to keep the “try to make the math work by starting in base 18” joke.

However, Carroll had a much better sense of what he was creating by the time he set out to write Through the Looking-Glass. This makes his decision to have Alice announce her age as “seven and a half, exactly” a bit more deliberate.

What, exactly, was he deliberating on?

The implication behind my choice of words (that Carroll was thinking specifically about the seven-year-old Alice Liddell as he wrote TTLG) only reveals itself if you read to the end of the piece. That said, it works even without its contextual context.

The simplest answer is that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland takes place on May 4 (Alice’s birthday) and Through the Looking-Glass takes place on November 4 (my birthday, though I doubt Carroll had that in mind), and since the two days are exactly six months apart, Alice is seven and a half exactly.

But why is Alice suddenly seven years old, when there is no indication that Carroll meant for her to be seven in his original aural narrative — or, for that matter, in the subsequently published book?

The answer, once again, comes from Lewis Carroll’s diaries.

It may come from the diaries, since I reveal a few paragraphs down that it is nothing more than conjecture.

Nov. 1, 1888: Skene brought, as his guest, Mr. Hargreaves, (the husband of “Alice”)...It was not easy to link in one’s mind...the stranger with the once-so-intimately known and loved “Alice,” whom I shall always remember best as an entirely fascinating little 7 year-old maiden.

That’s the key, and it fits perfectly into the little door.

That sentence works, but it’s just a little pandery — it’s not referencing anything specific about Alice scholarship (the way the base 18 joke references A. L. Taylor’s The White Knight), it’s only saying “we both read this book, and we remember there was a key and a door in it!” Whoop-de-hoo, let’s do better together.

Both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There were written from memory, but the former was the memory of a story he had just finished telling to a ten-year-old girl who had been sitting directly across from him, and the latter was the memory of the girl herself, now grown up and gone away — literally, as 19-year-old Alice Liddell departed on a Grand Tour of Europe the same month that Through the Looking-Glass was published.

In 1862, Lewis Carroll created “Alice.”

In 1871, he made “Alice” seven years old, the age at which he remembered Alice Liddell best.

And then he fixed the dates to make his Looking-Glass “Alice” seven and a half exactly.

I don’t know any of this for sure, of course. It’s still conjecture, with just enough facts injected to make not impossible to believe before breakfast. But it’s much more probable than my original hypothesis — and, arguably, more interesting.

All of this works, including the assonance with “conjecture” and “injected” and the White Queen reference. If there’s anything I would change, it’s the part in the first paragraph where I suggest that Alice Liddell was sitting across from him (conjecture on top of conjecture) — although in strict geometrical terms, it’s true no matter where they were positioned in the boat.

It’s also worth noting, since you’ve read all of this already and probably have enough stamina for a few more paragraphs, that one of the reasons it was always difficult for me to see the Looking-Glass Alice as seven years old was because she appeared taller, in proportion to the characters around her, than a seven-year-old ought to be.

Why is this here, Nicole? It does not need to be here.

This, however, is because Carroll and Tenniel both knew what they were doing when Looking-Glass was published; when Carroll stated that the Red Queen was “half a head taller” than Alice, Tenniel drew the characters in precisely those proportions.

You put it here because you didn’t notice this until you read TTLG last week. This isn’t scholarship, it’s errata.

In fact, the only continuity error I’ve been able to find in TTLG — besides the problems with the chess problem, which Carroll acknowledges in his introduction — comes in “Wool and Water”:

And then the little sleeves were carefully rolled up, and the little arms were plunged in elbow-deep to get the rushes a good long way down before breaking them off—and for a while Alice forgot all about the Sheep and the knitting, as she bent over the side of the boat, with just the ends of her tangled hair dipping into the water—while with bright eager eyes she caught at one bunch after another of the darling scented rushes.

When you figure it out, let me know. ❤️

That’s a toweringly presumptuous, show-offy statement on which to end the piece — that there’s only one continuity error in TTLG and that readers will have to guess what it is. The reason I put it into the essay was that I had just discovered it myself and was delighted at my own powers of noticing what length Alice’s sleeves were. That’s ego, and it’ll come across as off-putting even if I am correct.

The next draft will need to be topped and tailed, but there’s some good writing in this muddle — and the parts that aren’t good are the parts where I say “look at me” (the clever writer) or “look at you” (the reader who remembers basic details from the Alice novels) instead of “look at us, looking at this thing we love a little more carefully than we did yesterday.”

Which is to say: look at us, looking at reality.

Or, as L would put it, what-it-is-ism. 🖤