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Musical Notes to <i>The Annotated Alice</i>

1988; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chl.0.0597

1543-3374

Cecily Raysor Hancock,

Lexicography and Language Studies

Musical Notes to The Annotated Alice Cecily Raysor Hancock (bio) When Alice Liddell Hargreaves in old age described those summer boating expeditions of 1862 when she and her sisters were the first audience for the story that Lewis Carroll developed into Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she reported that they included music: "On our way back we generally sang songs popular at the time, such as 'Star of the evening, beautiful star,' and 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star,' and 'Will you walk into my parlour, said the spider to the fly,' all of which are parodied in the Alice" (Gray 276). The parodies mentioned by Mrs. Hargreaves are songs rather than poems, sung rather than read or recited in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; and the Liddell sisters were not the only audience to which these parodies of familiar songs would have suggested the tunes used by the fictional singers. The songs in Through the Looking-Glass also seem to carry musical indications to readers interested in such information. There have been many tunes composed especially for the songs of Alice, and some of them may be better tunes or more suited to the new words than the ones the author and his first audience had in mind; but they do not satisfy the curiosity excited by references to tunes known to Carroll. The annotators who have provided the original words parodied or references to them (Gardner; Gray; Green) have not included the tunes, though they have made it easier to find them. Some of these tunes are still familiar, though not necessarily to everyone who would be glad to know them; but a few are now obscure. The purpose of this article is to provide the tunes that Lewis Carroll knew and, to the original audience of the Alice books, suggested. Though for a general audience the practical purposes of my study have been provided for by Alexandre Reverend's cassette and pamphlet, Lewis Carroll and Music, its scholarly and hortatory ones have not.1 I wish to present the old tunes together with something of their background. Tunes as well as words have a place in cultural history. Lewis Carroll's own preference for the tunes he originally had in mind was expressed in several letters. When William Boyd, who [End Page 1] had composed new music for The Songs from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1870), asked permission to set music to the poems in the new Alice book, Carroll gave his permission but commented, "I am afraid, however, that you will find the same difficulty in your way as in the case of the former volume—namely, that all verses at all like songs have well-known tunes already" (Letters 168). In 1877 Carroll attempted to commission Arthur Sullivan (not yet of Gilbert and Sullivan) to write tunes for a possible dramatic production of Alice. He wrote, "I should very much like you to try one song in Alice—any that you prefer (except of course those that were written for existing tunes, such as 'Will you walk into my parlour?' and 'Beautiful Star')" (Letters 278). When Henry Savile Clarke was preparing the very successful Alice in Wonderland operetta with music by Walter Slaughter (it came out in 1886 and had London productions in twenty Christmas seasons between then and 1930 [Green 138]), Carroll specified several tunes: One thing more occurs to me to request. Several of the songs are parodies of old Nursery songs, that have their own tunes, as old as the songs probably. I would much prefer, if you introduce any of these, that the old air should be used. The whole of the poetry, in both books, has been already published, with music, many times: people are constantly applying for leave to do this: and they have simply spoiled such pieces as "Will you walk a little faster" by writing new airs. It would take a very good composer to write anything better than the sweet old air of "Will you walk into my parlour, said the Spider to the Fly." [Letters 637] In response to a letter from Savile Clarke, Carroll wrote more mildly, "As to retaining the tunes, it was hardly...