The Red Queen instructing Alice — Illustrations for Through the Looking Glass by John Tenniel

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The Red Queen instructing Alice

Sir John Tenniel

1871

Wood-engraving by Dalziel

Illustration for the second chapter of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass

"'Curtsey while you're thinking what to say . . . open your mouth a little wider when you speak, and always say 'your Majesty.'" [For commentary, see below; mouse over the text for links.]

In 2000 student assistants from the University Scholars Program, National University of Singapore, scanned this image and added text under the supervision of George P. Landow.

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Commentary by Ray Dyer

The Red Queen is very stern with Alice. She is the epitome of the childhood disciplinary figure, whether that be the mother or the primary school teacher: "Where do you come from?" said the Red Queen. "And where are you going? Look up, speak nicely, and don't twiddle your fingers all the time." What price there the popular reputation of Lewis Carroll as the writer of nonsense, and not of moral tales, for childhood? A recent Annotated Scholar's Edition of Carroll's later fairy story Sylvie and Bruno Concluded offered the following partial explanation:

"Moral poems," moral fairy stories, Moral Tales and the like - and not forgetting Church hymns and Sunday school - were strongly typical of children's literature in the century c.1750-c.1850, from authors such as Mrs. Sarah Trimmer, The Robins, 1786; the cautionary tales of author Dr. Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter, 1847, English edition Shock-Headed Peter, which included "Harriet" who plays with matches and is burnt to a crisp; and many others made popular, even in outlying rural areas, by the wandering "chapbook" salesmen with their penny pamphlets (see Carpenter and Prichard 105-7). Carroll had famously superseded this style of children's story with his earlier Alice books, though by later years he had apparently decided that morals are best not entirely excluded from life and upbringing - a chaste return to the Greek Ideal of the Middle Way. Cautionary Tales are therefore everywhere in the Sylvie and Bruno story. [Dyer 2: 363-64]

Later in the same work Bruno tells a story in which a "silly little Lamb" is told to "go home to your mother, and never listen to old Foxes again. And be very good and obedient." The relevant note sought to explain this as follows:

"be very good and obedient": a decided return to an earlier, pre-Victorian and very explicit moral code for children, one which Lewis Carroll had supposedly eschewed with his innovative Alice books ... some three decades previously ...It should not be thought that Carroll had entirely removed childhood morality from his early books. Rather it was the rules-based ethos of "'Do's and Don'ts" ingrained in him in his own typical childhood, from parents and from books such as Pretty Lessons for Good Children (1834), by Sara Coleridge (1802-1852). His dealings and further correspondence with the children of author George MacDonald (1824-1905) are here instructive ... on 5 January 1867, he wrote to Lily MacDonald, b.1852, regarding another book, The Fountain of Youth which he was sending: here he noted that this book "has got a moral - so I need hardly say it is not by Lewis Carroll" (Letters I: 95). When we turn to Alice's Adventures Underground and the related Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, we find that the heroine Alice is in fact never very far from moral good sense: immediately in Ch.1 of both texts, she is "the wise little Alice," who knows not to drink from a bottle labelled "DRINK ME," as she had read "several nice little stories about children who had got burnt ... and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them." The morals of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are more subtle, but decidedly present ... morality for childhood behaviour ... [subject to a didactic moral upbringing. [Dyer 2: 456-57]

Related Material

Children's Literature — sitemap

Bibliography

Carpenter, Humphrey and Mari Prichard. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Carroll, Lewis. The Letters of Lewis Carroll. 2 vols. Ed. M. N. Cohen and R. L. Green. London: Macmillan, 1979.

_____. Sylvie and Bruno. London: Macmillan, 1889.

_____. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. London: Macmillan, 1893.

Dyer, Ray. Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno with Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. Annotated Scholar's Edition. 2 vols. bound as 1. Leicester: Troubador, 2015.

Last modified 22 April 2021