5/16/2023 0 Comments Twinkle twinkle little bat![]() ![]() Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door– “You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before, “In my youth,” father William replied to his son,īut now that I’m perfectly sure I have none, “You are old, father William,” the young man said,Īnd yet you incessantly stand on your head– The phrase ‘Be off, or I’ll kick you down stairs’ may refer to Jowett’s triumph over the High Church faction.Ĭarroll’s earlier scetches for Alice’s Adventures Underground show the young man with a haircut looking like a drawing Carroll made of himself as a mad student with his hair in a gale. ‘Suet’ and ‘do it’ apprear to be rhymes on Jowett or ‘Juet’. Also, Tenniel’s illustrations may caricature Jowett. They see in the references to his standing on his head and turning backward somersaults the repetition of Carroll’s view that Jowett was turning Oxford on its head. Francis Gladstone ( Jones and Gladstone) argue that Carroll’s poem is also a parody on the Oxford professor and reformer Dr. “I’ll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death.”‘ With no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath.” “Let us both go to law: I will prosecute YOU.įor really this morning I’ve nothing to do.” The Mouse’s tale (Carroll in the later version of the book) Only the Books of Wonder editions seem to have adopted this change, for unknown reasons (Schaefer). This revision was never actually implemented. “I’ll try the whole cause, and condemn you to die.” With no jury or judge, would be tedious and dry.” It is called a ‘tail-rhyme’ because the longer line under the two shorter lines looks like a tail on a mouse ( Maiden, Graham and Fox)!Ĭarroll once proposed an additional change in the poem’s final quatrain. His later poem is in the structure of what is actually called a ‘tail-rhyme’, which is defined as “the measure associated in particular with a group of Middle English romances in which a pair of rhyming lines is followed by a single line of different length and the three‐line pattern is repeated to make up a six‐line stanza.”. He thought very high of it in his sleep, but completely forgot it when he awoke ( Gardner, “The Annotated Alice” 50).Ĭarroll’s original poem in “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground” was very different from the one that was eventually published, which makes the Mouse’s promise to explain why he dislikes cats and dogs a little strange, as there is no mention of cats in the poem, and only an obscure reference to a dog: Fury was the name of a fox terrier, owned by Carroll’s child-friend Eveline Hull. Tennyson told Carroll that he had had a dream about a lengthy poem about fairies, wich began with very long lines, then the lines got shorter and shorter until the poem ended with fifty or sixty lines of two syllables each. The collection contained a poem called “A Tale of a Tail”, about a dog with an extremely long tail, acompanied by his own drawing of it, which shows that the pun about tail/tale was something he had made in his childhood already, and was re-used for the ‘Alice’ books.Ĭarroll might have gotten the idea for the shape of this Mouse tale from the poet Tennyson. ![]() In 1845 Carroll had made a collection of booklets for his younger brother and sister, which he called “Useful and Instructive Poetry”. Against Idleness and Mischief (Isaac Watts) ![]()
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