- Sun-Times Print Collection
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, chapter one
The New York Times reported the other day that 2015 is the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Americans are celebrating too. The president of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America said the Alice books—Lewis Carroll published Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There six years later—are “likely the most frequently quoted works of fiction in the English-speaking world,” rivaled only by Shakespeare.
“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.
There’s a passage in Looking Glass that made me laugh until I sneezed. And unlike the best lines of Waugh and Wilde, I didn’t forget it as soon as I turned the page. It took root. Alice is dining with the Red and White queens.
“May I give you a slice?” she said, taking up the knife and fork, and looking from one Queen to the other.
“Certainly not,” the Red Queen said, very decidedly: “it isn’t etiquette to cut anyone you’ve been introduced to. Remove the joint!” And the waiters carried it off, and brought a large plum-pudding in its place.
“I won’t be introduced to the pudding, please,” Alice said, rather hastily, “or we shall get no dinner at all. May I give you some?”
But the Red Queen looked sulky, and growled “Pudding—Alice: Alice—Pudding. Remove the pudding!”
I looked at the cartoon and laughed. I put the magazine back in the rack and then took it out again and turned to the cartoon and laughed uncontrollably some more. At one point I dropped my hand and turned my head so I could laugh at the memory of the cartoon; then I studied it anew and laughed afresh.
