«Alice in Wonderland», Lewis CarrollAlice changes size twelve times. Only once by herself

Twelve changes

Alice arrives in Wonderland at her usual size, and by the end of the book she has changed it twelve times: seven times smaller, five times larger. She is ten inches high, then more than nine feet, and once her chin strikes her own foot.

Nearly every time it is something that comes to hand: a bottle, a cake, the White Rabbit’s fan, a bit of mushroom. In chapter IV Alice works out the rule herself: “I know something interesting is sure to happen … whenever I eat or drink anything…”.

The rule holds eleven times out of twelve. The twelfth time is the exception, and I think the whole book is heading for it.

“DRINK ME”

Chapter I. Alice falls down the rabbit-hole into a hall full of doors. Behind a curtain there is a little door about fifteen inches high, a lovely garden beyond it, and the little golden key on the glass table fits it. Only Alice can’t get through. Then a little bottle turns up on the table, labelled “DRINK ME”.

Alice behaves like a good girl in an improving book: first she looks to see whether the bottle is marked “poison”. She has read stories about children who came to grief because they would not remember the simple rules. This bottle is not marked “poison”, and it tastes of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast.

Alice finishes it off and shrinks to ten inches, just right for the door. But the key is still on the table, and now she can’t reach it. The first change solves nothing, and it goes on like that all day: whatever turns up decides what size she is.

“Who are you?”

Chapter V. On top of a large mushroom sits the Caterpillar, smoking a hookah. The first thing it asks is “Who are you?” Alice answers honestly: she knows who she was when she got up this morning, “but I think I must have been changed several times since then”.

She can’t explain herself, “because I’m not myself, you see”, and she complains that being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing. “It isn’t,” says the Caterpillar. And when Alice sighs that three inches is such a wretched height to be, the Caterpillar takes offence: it is exactly three inches high.

A mushroom in her pocket

As it leaves, the Caterpillar remarks: “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.” Alice breaks off a bit from each side of the mushroom and tries the right-hand one. At once her chin strikes her foot. She barely manages a bite of the left-hand bit, and her neck shoots up above the trees, so that a Pigeon takes her for a serpent.

From then on, for the first time, her size does what she wants. Alice nibbles carefully, first at one and then at the other, and brings herself back to her usual height. After that the mushroom goes everywhere with her: nine inches so as not to frighten whoever lives in a little house, two feet to walk up to the March Hare’s, about a foot to get through the door.

At the door she tells herself, “Now, I’ll manage better this time”, takes the golden key first, and only then nibbles the piece she kept in her pocket. Her eleventh change takes her into the garden, and for three chapters in a row she doesn’t change at all.

Growing without a cake

Chapter XI, the trial of the Knave of Hearts, accused of stealing the tarts. A large dish of tarts stands in the middle of the court, and they make Alice so hungry that she wishes they’d get the trial done and hand round the refreshments. Nothing is handed round, and she eats nothing. And suddenly she feels that she is beginning to grow larger again.

She grows, and her nerve grows with her. To the Dormouse, who sits next to her and complains of the squeeze, Alice answers “very meekly”: “I can’t help it … I’m growing.” In her very next line it’s “more boldly”. By the next chapter she has grown so large that she “wasn’t a bit afraid of interrupting” the King himself.

The Queen shouts “Off with her head!”, and nobody moves. By now Alice has grown to her full size, and she answers: “Who cares for you? … You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” The cards rise into the air and fly down upon her, and Alice wakes up on the bank with her head in her sister’s lap.

Verdict

Read it. Not for the mad tea-party, which everyone remembers anyway, but for the way Alice grows. Eleven times she is changed by whatever comes to hand, and the twelfth time she grows by herself and stops being afraid.

Everyone calls it a book of nonsense. I think it’s the story of a girl who can’t tell a Caterpillar who she is, and by the end talks back to a whole court. One point off for the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle and his Lobster Quadrille: I heard it out to be polite.