Charles Synyard (@CharlesSynyard)

5/9 “‘The first thing I've got to do,’ said Alice to herself, as she wandered about in the wood, ‘is to grow to my right size again; and the second thing is to find my way into that lovely garden. I think that will be the best plan.’” … “Once more she found herself in the long hall, and close to the little glass table. ‘Now, I'll manage better this time,’ she said to herself, and began by taking the little golden key, and unlocking the door that led into the garden. “Then she went to work nibbling at the mushroom (she had kept a piece of it in her pocket) ❏ ❏ ❏ ❏ ❏ ❏ ❏ ❏ ❏ ❏ ❏ till she was about a foot high: then she walked down the little passage: and then—she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flower-beds and the cool fountains.” Alice seeks and reaches her goal, the beautiful garden! If you pay attention in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by Lewis Carroll, you’ll notice that while the heroine may get confused and lost, she isn’t wandering aimlessly. When she get to the bottom of the rabbit hole, she finds herself in a hallway lined with doors on both sides, but they are all locked. “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. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted! “Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. 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 though the doorway; ‘and even if my head would go through,’ thought poor Alice, ‘it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only know how to begin.’ For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.” This is a determinative moment in the story. Alice longs to get into that garden, but she is too large! Though she has a Wonderland-prompted notion that she could become more compact like a telescope, and as we will find, that isn’t impossible there. In the 1982 Pennyroyal edition featuring woodcut prints by Barry Moser, entering the garden as Alice’s singular quest is nicely stressed by the repetition of the key motif, including a little golden key right alongside the passage above. Curiously, though, in Moser’s “A Note on the Prints”, he says, “The keys are, of course, variants on the Golden key (p. 42, which was engraved in type metal for the gold stamping). They are the keys to the Garden, which Alice pictures as a sane refuge in a wonderland of insanity. They are used, in mirrored pairs, as decorative devices.” Do you see what he did there? Moser, no doubt following Preface and Notes writer James R. Kincaid, whose misunderstandings I discussed in earlier posts, gave a different reason for Alice wanting to reach the garden than what we are directly told Alice was thinking! The narrator merely, and sufficiently, says it was “the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains…” The loveliness of the garden is a good reason in itself to seek it. It even prompts Alice to entertain unusual, normal laws of nature-bending thoughts about how she might get there. After looking around again, Alice finds the famous DRINK ME bottle on the same glass table, “(‘which certainly was not here before,’ said Alice)” to herself; we never learn whether it was placed there by someone else or appeared there on its own. After she, like the careful girl she is, makes sure it is not labeled poison, she downs it; it is multiflavoredly delectable. Sure enough, it is not bad for her: it makes her shrink, as desired. In the original Carroll marked some, but not all, of Alice’s size shifts with asterisks; a nice feature of the Pennyroyal edition is that the other ones are marked by squares. But then Alice runs into another problem: she can’t reach the key, and so can’t open the door! Which raises an important question: why is the door locked, when Alice had already opened it before? She does not remark on this as on the bottle appearing. At first, this seemed like a consistency error, noted neither by Kincaid nor in the Annotated Alice, which I checked on the Internet Archive. The only thing I can imagine is that, as a properly-mannered little girl, she relocked the door, and put the key back where she found it. Carroll thusly shows her moral goodness, though it necessitates many further adventures. Alice doesn’t give up on the lovely garden, even after, following a seemingly uncaused dreamlike shift, “everything seemed to have changed since her swim in the pool” after a few size changes, “and the great hall, with the glass table and the little door, had vanished completely.” She seeks a way in, and the first quote heading this post shows her resolution. Having learned that eating or drinking often leads to an increase or decrease in size in Wonderland, she seeks out victuals that will make her just right to both open the door, and then squeeze through. In the second image, we get a rare glimpse of Alice herself, in a mirror in the White Rabbit’s house, as she finds another bottle whose contents she hopes will make her grow; Moser consistently portrays Wonderland through Alice’s eyes. Which brings us to another famous scene, Alice and the Caterpillar smoking a hookah, which leads to some lazy misinterpretations of the whole work. When I mentioned to a pothead recently that I was rereading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, she commented that, of course, the adventures were all some experience from eating mushrooms. Way to trivialize and write off a great book! An insect using a hookah, atop a mushroom, you can see why people think psychoactive drugs… if they read carelessly. The Caterpillar acts exactly like someone using tobacco, not cannabis: for Wonderland, he has an uncommonly good memory, and we know nicotine can benefit memory and even ward off Alzheimer’s. When Alice tries to recite “You are Old, Father William” for him, he knows better than her that she got it completely wrong. He acts like a gruff old man reluctant to be bothered from his habit. But he helps Alice, by getting off the mushroom, and telling her that eating from one side will shrink her, while eating from the other will grow her. As the mushroom is perfectly round, Alice is puzzled: which is which? The minor point, though, underscores that while the mushroom’s power may be magical—it may even be determined by which sides Alice broke the pieces from—cause and effect are still, well, in effect. So Alice takes a bunch of pieces from both sides with her, and when she’s back to her normal height she exclaims, “Come, there's half my plan done now!… However, I've got back to my right size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden—how is that to be done, I wonder?” For all her intentionality, Alice does inexplicably lose sight of her goal when she runs into the Cheshire Cat. She has this exchange: “‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’ “‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat. “‘I don’t much care where—‘ said Alice. “‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat. “‘—so long as I get somewhere,’ added Alice as an explanation. “‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if you only walk long enough.’” But the tritely wise feline goofs up in his own reasoning right afterward. “‘In that direction,’ the Cat said, waving its right paw round, ‘lives a Hatter: and in that direction,’ waving the other paw, ‘lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.’ “‘But I don't want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked. “‘Oh, you can't help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’ “‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice. “‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’ “Alice didn’t think that proved it at all…” Alice and the Cheshire Cat both made logical mistakes concerning their premises, Alice by leaving out the need for a destination when asking directions, and the Cat by supposing that because all past visitors (to Wonderland, or to this particular crossraods?) are supposedly mad, that that is an innate quality bound up with stopping here. Perhaps this gentle hint helped Alice to refocus on her goal. Moser’s Cheshire Cat, by the way, is rather frightening for a big smiler, so it’s no wonder Alice wanted to move on. Thankfully, after Alice leaves the March Hare’s iconic Mad Tea-Party, she sees a door in a tree, which happens to lead to the hall with the door to the beautiful garden! At last entering, we get as her worthy reward a full two-page spread of the grounds, which Moser modeled off the topiary gardens of Levens Hall and Haseley Court (a very actively trimmed mass of shrubbery). Since there was room for an extra image, I’ve also included Arthur Rackham’s illustration of Alice and the Caterpillar. Next time, we will see Alice encountering, and often calling out some of Wonderland’s most offensive nonsense. #LewisCarroll #BarryMoser #AlicesAdventuresInWonderland #AliceInWonderland #PennyroyalPress #Pennyroyal #ArthurRackham #goal #destination #reason #causeandeffect #hookah #druguse #drugabuse #tobacco #beauty #gardens #garden #woodcutting #woodcut #engraving #illustration #art #dreams #fantasy #childrensliterature #childrensbooks #literature #books