Why is Alice seven and a half, exactly?
A study in hypothesis.
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Last month I was invited to join the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, a fact that initially baffled me (I have not specifically been a Carrollian, although I have taught Alice and dramatized it twice) until L said “of course they’d ask you, there is Alice stuff all over our house.”
Which is true.
Anyway, the following is my initial draft of an essay for the LCSNA magazine Knight Letter, assuming they’ll accept a text that has already been printed on the internet.
Suggestions welcomed.
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.
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.
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.
Let’s start with what we know — or what we thought we knew, before my hypothesis — about Alice’s age.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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; this is why we get a Duchess who cannot be more than ten or eleven inches high, for example, and a pig and a cat that are somehow smaller than a frog footman — and then, a few chapters later, a scene in which Alice shrinks herself down to a foot high (despite being nine inches high previously) so that she can pass through a door that had been described, in the first chapter, as 15 inches high and leading to a passage “not much larger than a rat-hole.” When she meets the Duchess again, 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.
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.
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 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.
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. 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 it plausible. But it’s much more probable than my original hypothesis — and, arguably, more interesting.
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.
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.
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. ❤️