Alice meets Humpty Dumpty — Illustrations for Through the Looking Glass by John Tenniel

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Alice meets Humpty Dumpty

Sir John Tenniel

Wood-engraving by Dalziel

Illustration for the sixth chapter of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1871)

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall:
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King's horses and all the
King's men
Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty in
his place again."

For commentary, see below.

In 2000 student assistants from the University Scholars Program, National University of Singapore, scanned this image and added text under the supervision of George P. Landow.

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Commentary by Ray Dyer

As with the other childhood favourites, Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Chapter 4, the Humpty Dumpty character was popularised by Carroll and his artist Tenniel, but not entirely invented by them. It had appeared first in nursery rhymes, those much-used social and educational aids in pre-Victorian and Victorian times. Carroll's position in his large family of siblings would have given him a good deal of exposure to such early learning materials, both from home schooling (see the Carroll Chronology for 1837) with his mother, Aunt Lucy and two older sisters, and from contact with his own three younger brothers and five sisters. The scope for Carroll to make youthful, enduring and creative variations was therefore indeed plentiful.

The version of the traditional rhyme here given, and "softly repeated to herself" by the young heroine, was flawed by the excessively long final line as noted by Alice herself: "That last line is much too long for the poetry," she added, in a comment which also must disclose Carroll's own contrarian view on one amongst many givens of his own childhood. Perhaps for such reasons, an alternative popular version - to which the present writer was accustomed from his own childhood - declares that "All the King's horses and all the King's men/ Couldn't put Humpty together again." This not only reduces the lengthy metre from twelve beats to ten, but also introduces the key question of the fragility of Humpty as a large egg. "'And how exactly like an egg he is!' she said aloud, standing with her hands ready to catch him…." Not all Victorian illustrators subscribed to the egg version of Humpty Dumpty, as witness the depiction by Walter Crane in his Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes of 1877, where the character is shown as a rustic country boy seated on a wall.

Lewis Carroll seems to have had a long-standing interest in eggs, because it often spills over into his creative writings - a later occurrence would be in Sylvia and Bruno Concluded (Ch. XII, "What Tottles Meant"). This strengthens the suggestion of a strongly autobiographical source. A case can also be made for such a source to be linked to Carroll's professed favourite or "lucky" day of Tuesday (see Dyer, 2015, Vol. 1: 179-180, n.11, Diaries: 4: 321, 359 (1864) & 7: 28 (1877) amongst many others). This may well have sprung from the celebration of Shrove Tuesday, on which the eggs remaining in pantries are traditionally beaten into pancakes, to be consumed by happy children on their favourite "Pancake Day" just before Lent. Could he have been the responsible child sent to the local shop or farm to buy his egg, as here Alice wishes to do? Did he ever paint his own hard-boiled egg as a Humpty Dumpty, for the popular downhill egg-rolling game?

Bibliography

Carroll, Lewis. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. London: Macmillan, 1893.

_____. Lewis Carroll's Diaries. The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Vol. 4 & 7. Ed. Edward Wakeling. England. Lewis Carroll Society, 1997, 2003.

Dyer, Ray. Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno, With Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. The Neglected Victorian Fairytale Annotated and Re-Presented.. Leicester: Troubador, 2015.

Last modified 2 June 2021 (commentary added)