The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Lewis Carroll · a tale in twelve chapters, with a prefatory poem · Macmillan, London, 1865 · scored on Carroll’s English as published in 1865, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Nonsense tale for children; dream narrative, verse parody and satire of adult authority in one comic prose
Mythos
A descent through the earth into an underworld of trials and examinations, a queen with the power of death, and a return; the garden longed for through a door and found to be a tyrant’s ground; growth as metamorphosis
Phase
One summer afternoon on a riverbank, and one dream inside it, from the fall down the rabbit-hole to the trial and the waking
Presentation
Fiction; twelve chapters under a prefatory poem, with about ten set pieces of verse inside the narrative, most of them parodies; told in the third person by a dry narrating voice, framed by the riverbank at both ends
Register
Plain, quick narrative prose against a dialogue of interruption, non sequitur and words taken at their letter; the metres of improving verse kept and their lessons turned
Scale
One child among talking animals, a household, a court and a deck of cards; the rules of the adult world taken at their word
Governing Proposition
A child bored on a riverbank follows a rabbit down a hole, changes size until she cannot say who she is, is ordered, examined and corrected by creatures who are all mad, finds the garden she longed for to be a tyrant’s croquet ground, and wakes when she tells the court that sentences her that it is nothing but a pack of cards. The wager of the book is that a dream in which events follow words can show a child’s sane mind among adults whose rules are words obeyed as if they were things, and that it can do so with no moral at all.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Alice is sitting on a riverbank beside her sister, who is reading, and she has peeped into her sister’s book and found it “without pictures or conversations”. She is drowsy in the heat and wondering whether a daisy-chain is worth the trouble when a White Rabbit runs past, takes a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and hurries on. She runs after it and goes down the rabbit-hole without once considering how she will get out again. The book that follows is almost all conversation. Before its first chapter stands a poem recalling the afternoon of 4 July 1862, when three sisters, the Liddell children, were rowed up the Thames and the story was first told to them.
It was told aloud that afternoon, written out as Alice’s Adventures Under Ground and given to Alice Liddell in November 1864, and expanded for publication. Macmillan published it in London in 1865 under the name Lewis Carroll; the author was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford. The unit here is that text, the twelve chapters and the prefatory poem as Carroll published them. John Tenniel’s forty-two drawings are context, not the work, and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) is a separate book. The dream runs in one continuous line: two runs of size change (chapters I to IV and V to VII) and the arc of the Queen’s court (VIII to XII), with the riverbank opening it and closing it.
The fall is slow. Alice has time to look about her, to take down a jar from one of the shelves that line the well and find it empty, to wonder whether she will come out where people walk with their heads downward, and to talk to herself about her cat Dinah. She lands on a heap of sticks and dry leaves, unhurt, in a long low hall lined with locked doors. A little golden key opens the smallest, and through it she sees the loveliest garden she has ever seen; she cannot get even her head through the doorway. A bottle on a table tells her to drink it, and she shrinks to the right size, having left the key on the table above her. The book’s first problem is set: the garden can be seen and cannot be reached.
Movement II
A cake makes her grow until her head strikes the roof of the hall, more than nine feet tall, and she cries until her tears make a pool. The Rabbit runs through and drops his fan and gloves, and fanning herself she shrinks again. She wonders whether she has been changed in the night for another girl, and tests herself on her multiplication, her geography and her verses. The verses come out wrong: the improving lines on the busy bee come out as a crocodile, welcoming little fishes into its smiling jaws. “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” (chapter II). Then she slips and is up to her chin in salt water, swimming in her own tears with a Mouse.
The pool fills with creatures, and the shore is wet. The Mouse’s remedy is the driest thing he knows, a history lesson on William the Conqueror, and when that fails the Dodo proposes a Caucus-Race, in which everyone runs round a ring as they please, everyone has won, and Alice hands out the prizes, receiving her own thimble back as hers (chapter III). The Mouse tells his long and sad tale, which she hears as a tail and which is set on the page in that shape. In the Rabbit’s house, taken for his housemaid and sent for his gloves, she drinks again and grows until she fills the room, one arm out of the window and one foot up the chimney; Bill the Lizard is sent down, and she kicks him out again; pebbles thrown in at the window turn into cakes, and she eats one, shrinks, and escapes a giant puppy (chapter IV).
On top of a mushroom sits a Caterpillar smoking a hookah. “Who are you?” (chapter V), it asks, and she cannot tell it, since she has changed so many times since morning. Asked to recite, she gives the verses on Father William, and they too come out wrong from beginning to end. One side of the mushroom makes her grow and the other shrink; her neck stretches up above the trees, and a Pigeon takes her for a serpent. By now the shape of the first half is clear. The body is too large for the house and too small for the door, never the right size for where it is, and the question of who she is goes on being put to her by creatures who are quite sure who they are, and are none of them sane.
Movement III
At the Duchess’s house a Fish-Footman hands a Frog-Footman an invitation from the Queen to play croquet, and inside the kitchen is full of pepper. The cook throws pans and dishes, the Duchess nurses a sneezing baby and sings it a lullaby whose advice is to speak roughly to a little boy and beat him when he sneezes, and then flings the baby to Alice (chapter VI). Out of doors it grunts, and she looks into its face and sees it has become a pig; she sets it down and it trots away into the wood. The household is a parody of the nursery: the moral of the sentimental songs turned inside out, and a child given charge of a baby by an adult who wants rid of it.
In a tree sits the Cheshire Cat, grinning. Alice asks which way she ought to go, and is told that it depends on where she wants to get to: one way lives a Hatter, the other a March Hare, and both are mad. She does not want to go among mad people. “We’re all mad here” (chapter VI), the Cat answers, and she must be mad too, or she would not have come. Then it vanishes slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, until only the grin is left, some while after the rest of it has gone: “a grin without a cat!” It is the book’s purest instance of its law, a figure of speech made into an event.
At the March Hare’s house the table is set for many, and the three at it, the Hare, the Hatter and a sleeping Dormouse, are crowded at one corner crying that there is no room (chapter VII). The Hatter asks “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” and, when Alice gives up, admits he has no idea himself. His watch tells the day of the month. He has quarrelled with Time: singing “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat” at the Queen’s concert, he was accused of murdering the time, and ever since it has been six o’clock, always tea-time, so that they move round the table to the clean places. The Dormouse tells of three sisters who lived at the bottom of a treacle-well. Alice leaves in disgust, finds a door in a tree, comes into the long hall again, manages the key and the mushroom, and at the close of the chapter is in the garden at last.
Movement IV
The garden is the Queen’s croquet ground. At its entrance three gardeners, who are playing cards, are painting a white rose-tree red, because it should have been a red one and the Queen would have their heads for the mistake (chapter VIII). The procession of the court comes in, soldiers, courtiers, the royal children, the King and Queen of Hearts, and the game is played with live flamingos for mallets and hedgehogs for balls, the soldiers bent double for hoops, while the Queen orders one head off after another. When the Cheshire Cat’s head appears in the air, the King wants it removed, and the executioner, the King and the Queen argue whether a head can be cut off when there is no body to cut it from. The Eden seen from the dark hall in the first chapter is a tyrant’s ground, and its flowers are painted out of fear.
The Duchess reappears, amiable now, and finds a moral in everything Alice says: “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it” (chapter IX). One of them is a proverb turned on itself: “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.” The Queen sends Alice off with a Gryphon to hear the story of the Mock Turtle, who sobs out his schooling under the sea, where the curriculum began with Reeling and Writhing and the lessons lessened from day to day; the Gryphon assures her that the Queen’s executions never happen. The two of them dance the Lobster Quadrille for her, Alice is made to recite and the verses come out as the voice of the Lobster, and the Mock Turtle sings of Beautiful Soup (chapter X), until a cry goes up that the trial is beginning.
Most of the verse in the book stands on verse a Victorian child learned by heart: Watts’s busy bee and his sluggard, Southey’s poem of the old man’s comforts, Jane Taylor’s star, Mary Howitt’s spider and the fly, and a sentimental song about speaking gently. Each parody keeps the metre and the turn of its original and changes the lesson, so that the wrong version tells what the right one hid. That is the book’s quarrel with its inheritance, the English children’s book built to instruct, and it is carried on in the inheritance’s own forms. The ground was not wholly unbroken: Lear’s Book of Nonsense (1846) had opened nonsense verse, and Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) the fantastic children’s book, though Kingsley still moralised. What came under the name of an Oxford mathematician was a book with no instruction in it, whose only moralist is the Duchess.
Movement V
The Knave of Hearts is tried for stealing the tarts (chapter XI). The King sits as judge with his crown over his wig; the jurors, small creatures, write their names on slates for fear of forgetting them before the end; the Hatter comes in as a witness with a teacup in one hand and bread-and-butter in the other. Alice begins to grow. Called as a witness in her turn, she upsets the jury box (chapter XII). A set of unsigned verses is brought in as evidence, and when the White Rabbit asks where to begin, the King tells him: “Begin at the beginning … and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” The verses mean nothing, and the King reads them as proof. The Queen will have the sentence first and the verdict afterwards. Alice, grown to her full size, answers her: “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” The whole pack rises into the air and comes flying down upon her.
She wakes on the bank with her head in her sister’s lap, and her sister is brushing away some dead leaves that have fluttered down onto her face. Alice tells her dream and runs off to tea. The sister sits on, and dreams the dream after her, half believing herself in Wonderland, though she knows that if she opened her eyes each sound of it would turn back into a plain one: the rustling grass into wind, the rattling teacups into sheep-bells, the Queen’s shrill voice into a shepherd boy’s, the sneeze of the baby and the shriek of the Gryphon into the clamour of a farmyard, the Mock Turtle’s sobs into the lowing of cattle in the distance. Last, she pictures Alice grown a woman, keeping the simple, loving heart of her childhood, and telling other children strange tales, this dream among them. The book that began with a child bored by a book without conversations ends by showing what its dream was made of.
The return to the book has not stopped. William Empson read it as pastoral in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935); Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice (1960) made it a field of annotation; the Surrealists claimed Carroll as a precursor, André Breton gave him a place in the Anthologie de l’humour noir (1940), Joyce worked him into Finnegans Wake, Nabokov translated the book into Russian (1923), and Gilles Deleuze built Logique du sens (1969) on his nonsense. Logicians and philosophers of language take its exchanges as examples, and its phrases have passed into common speech. What it holds is held lightly, by design. No one is harmed in it, the executions are never carried out, and the court that threatens the child is dissolved by her waking. The book discloses the condition of a child among adults and declines to make it weigh, and that refusal is both its charm and its limit.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites harder than the book’s fame suggests. It is episodic by construction: a child passes through encounters, each a closed scene, and several could go without the line breaking. The Caucus-Race and the Mouse’s tale (chapter III), the Lobster Quadrille (X) and much of the Mock Turtle’s schooling (IX) could be removed, and the book would lose jokes, not knowledge. Its own record says the same: the story told on the river in 1862 and written out as Alice’s Adventures Under Ground was expanded for publication, so the frame admitted parts rather than required them. Two spines bear load and hold the figure near eight: the size changes, which carry the question of who Alice is, and the garden glimpsed through the little door in chapter I and found in chapter VIII to be a tyrant’s croquet ground.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. First, the child among adults: every creature speaks with authority, corrects her, orders and examines her, and none is sane, and the one sane mind in the book is treated as a nuisance. Second, the arbitrariness of the rules children are taught, shown by parody: the moral verses she recites come out wrong, and the wrong versions tell the truth the right ones hid, as the busy bee becomes a crocodile welcoming little fishes in (chapter II). Third, identity under growth, put plainly in the Caterpillar’s “Who are you?” (chapter V). Fourth, that law without sense is power: the Queen will have the sentence before the verdict (chapter XII). Held short of the top because the book carries all of this as play and presses none of it to its consequence: the executions never happen, and the waking dissolves the threat.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation here is wonder, and it comes often but low. The fall down the well is slow enough for Alice to take a jar from a shelf and wonder whether she will come out among the Antipodes (chapter I); the loveliest garden is seen through a door too small to enter; the Cat fades until only the grin is left, “a grin without a cat!” (chapter VI); the pack of cards rises into the air as she wakes (chapter XII). The prefatory poem and the sister’s reverie reach for a different height, the elegiac, and the closing paragraph, imagining the grown woman who keeps her childhood’s heart, is the book’s one long-held lyrical note. Wonder counts as elevation. What holds the figure below eight is the register: comic throughout, it refuses transport whenever transport threatens, and the fall ends in a heap of sticks and dry leaves.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is a descent into an underworld through a hole in the earth, a series of trials by riddle and examination, the court of a queen with the power of death, and a return. None of it is borrowed as allusion; the book wears no classical names. The garden bears the load: an Eden seen and longed for from a dark hall in chapter I, reached at last, and found to be a place where gardeners paint white roses red for fear of beheading (chapter VIII). Growth as metamorphosis, the body too large for the house and too small for the door, drives the plot as the passage of childhood into something else. The particular stays particular: a Victorian child with a cat called Dinah and her lessons half remembered. The figures the book made have since become archetypes; that is reach, and it is not counted here.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the English children’s book of the first half of the century, built to instruct: the moral tale, the improving verse, the cautionary story. The book turns against it on its own ground, parodying the very verses children were made to learn by heart, and it gives its child no moral to carry home. The Duchess satirises the habit: “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it” (chapter IX), and her morals are nonsense. The turn is formal too, a narrative whose logic is the literal application of language. The stake was real: an Oxford lecturer in mathematics, under a pseudonym, publishing a book with no instruction in it. Held below the top because the ground was partly broken: Lear’s Book of Nonsense (1846) had opened nonsense verse, and Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) the fantastic children’s book, though one that still moralised.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and most of the knowledge goes. The dream is the instrument: it licenses the absence of cause, so that the logic of words governs events, and the book’s knowledge, that language rules sense and that adults’ rules are words obeyed as if they were things, is shown only because events follow words. The frame works: the book opens on a child bored by a book “without pictures or conversations” and is itself almost all conversation, and it closes with the sister translating each noise of the dream back into the farmyard, which tells what the dream was made of without explaining it. The parodies need verse, since the joke is the deviation from a remembered metre. Held off the top by the episodic middle, whose order could change in places without the form saying anything different, and by a coda that is form as frame more than form as knowledge.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise, and the evidence is broad: a century and a half of return by readers who are not children. William Empson’s essay “The Child as Swain” in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935); Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice (1960) and its later editions, which made the book a field of annotation; logicians and philosophers of language who take its exchanges as examples, among them the Duchess’s “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves” (chapter IX); Gilles Deleuze’s Logique du sens (1969), built on Carroll’s nonsense, with Through the Looking-Glass weighed as heavily; psychoanalytic and historical readings without end. It yields formally too: the trial reprises the cast, and the Queen’s court answers the Duchess’s kitchen. Held below nine because part of the yield is a puzzle’s, and a puzzle solved stays solved: some of the logic games are exhausted on understanding.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is English literature of the nineteenth century, and the book entered it through its literature for children. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a book for children could be: freed from instruction, it made play, nonsense and a child’s sceptical intelligence its matter, and it made nonsense a narrative form rather than a verse game. It is held at nine, short of the summit works, because it moved a branch of the field and fed the rest without reorganising the novel or the poem, and because its widest reach came seventy years on, credited and discounted for the delay. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line of English and American fantasy for children runs through it, it is among the most quoted books in English, and its reach left the children’s shelf. The Surrealists claimed Carroll as a precursor, and André Breton gave him a place in the Anthologie de l’humour noir (1940); Joyce worked him into Finnegans Wake; Nabokov translated the book into Russian (1923); and logicians took it up as a common stock of examples.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole, as Carroll published it and corrected it in his lifetime; nothing is lost, and the manuscript of 1864 adds to the record without dividing the work. The presence has been continuous since 1865: in print without a break, read in every generation, translated very widely, taught, adapted for the stage and for film in nearly every decade since the medium began, and its phrases have passed into common speech in English and beyond. It is as wide a presence as a work of its span can have. The fabric is fixed to its moment in one respect: the verses it parodies are forgotten, and the joke of deviation is lost on most readers. But the parodies stand as poems in their own right, and the book has outlived its targets. A century and a half does not stand level with millennia.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Command of the medium is close to complete at this scale. The prose is plain, quick and exact, in a dry narrating voice that keeps its distance from Alice and from the creatures alike. The comic timing bears load: the Tea-Party runs on interruption, non sequitur and the question refused, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”, never answered (chapter VII); the trial runs on legal forms misapplied, down to the King’s “Begin at the beginning … and go on till you come to the end: then stop” (chapter XII). The parodies keep the metre and turn of their originals exactly, which is where their force lies: “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! / How I wonder what you’re at!” (chapter VII). The Mouse’s tale is set on the page in the shape it puns on. Held a tenth below nine by the second half: the Mock Turtle and Gryphon chapters lean harder on the pun and run longer than their invention.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One physics governs the dream: words are taken at their letter, events follow from what is said rather than what is meant, and authority is absolute and groundless. The two most distant elements are the Caucus-Race (chapter III), a pure game of animals running in a ring, and the trial (chapters XI and XII), a satire on a court of law. The same law runs both: in each the forms of an adult practice, a race and a verdict, are enacted without their sense, and everyone gets a prize or a sentence alike. The size changes keep a rule of their own, eat, drink or fan, and keep it. The riverbank belongs to waking, a different law by design, and the book marks the boundary. Held below nine because the range is wide in tone and narrow in kind: everything is one mode of play, and the law is never asked to govern grief or desire. Narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Many orders are present, held as satire, through one child’s dream, at the scale of a short book. The self, in identity under growth, said outright. Education, in lessons recited wrong and the Mock Turtle’s curriculum of Reeling and Writhing. The household, in the Duchess’s kitchen, the cook throwing pans and the baby that becomes a pig. Class and service, in the Rabbit’s servants, the gardeners and the footmen. The state and the law, in the Queen’s executions and the King’s court. Language and logic throughout. One law governs them all, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve is depth: none of these orders is held for long, and the state is a deck of cards. The natural order appears only as talking animals, history only as a dry lecture on William the Conqueror, and the sacred not at all. A small form describes itself here.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Made at 8.9. A book in print without a break since 1865, read in every generation and passed into common speech; a reorganisation of what a book for children could be, whose reach left the children’s shelf for the Surrealists, Joyce, Nabokov and the philosophers of language; and plain, quick prose whose comic timing and exact parody carry the meaning.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: the self, the school, the household, class, the state and language held under one law, but none for long, at the scale of a short book whose state is a deck of cards. Next above it, The Inevitable and The Sublime at 7.8: an episodic dream from which several chapters could go with the loss of jokes rather than knowledge, and a wonder that comes often but low in a register that refuses transport.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. The aggregate, 8.5, would hold the work in Tier IV even were the Gate met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Lewis Carroll’s (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, scored as the text published by Macmillan in London in 1865: twelve chapters (I Down the Rabbit-Hole; II The Pool of Tears; III A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale; IV The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill; V Advice from a Caterpillar; VI Pig and Pepper; VII A Mad Tea-Party; VIII The Queen’s Croquet-Ground; IX The Mock Turtle’s Story; X The Lobster Quadrille; XI Who Stole the Tarts?; XII Alice’s Evidence) under the prefatory poem. John Tenniel’s forty-two drawings are context, not the work, and are neither credited nor charged. Through the Looking-Glass (1871) is a separate work and is not scored; the manuscript Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1864) is named only as evidence of how the book was made. No text of the book was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is the original, so no translation stands between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the length in words, the share of dialogue, which episodes the expansion of 1864 to 1865 added, the circumstances and cost of the first printing, the dates of the first translations, and the source of one parodied song. Citations are by chapter, numbered I to XII.