Definition of chessy cat
There is concrete poetry (a mouse’s “tale” is set in the shape of a “tail”), while a quiet voice is rendered as tiny text and the narrative is periodically interrupted mid-sentence by clouds of asterisks. We encounter this feeling in the Alice books, which, illustrated by Punch cartoonist Sir John Tenniel, are both fantastically visual things, though the illustrations are less radical than Carroll’s own textual approaches, the inventiveness of which has shades of Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy (1759–69). Text also came to seem unavoidably material. Texts no longer seemed so stable – just as Alice finds out, the written word can be fluid and often treacherous. “ Must a name mean something?” Alice asks Humpty Dumpty, only to get this answer: “When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”Īt the beginning of the 1960s artists started to become interested in similar ideas, which were sometimes transmitted via the newly translated writings of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and other European post-structuralists. Or read the essays of Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss father of structuralism who 100 years ago argued that a word’s meaning is grounded only in convention, and you may feel as though Carroll’s characters already covered a lot of the same territory. Look, for example, to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), and you will find coded allusions to Dodgson’s pen name – “Lewd’s carol”, “loose carollaries” – peppered throughout. Auden wrote of the two wildly popular books: “One of the most important and powerful characters is not a person but the English language.”Īlthough intended for the entertainment of Alice Liddell, the young daughter of the dean of Christ Church College, Oxford (where Carroll lectured in mathematics), several generations of writers and philosophers have taken the Alice books’ focus on language and perception extremely seriously. Alice, Carroll’s questing heroine, is continually coming up against the unpredictability of speech and text.
#Definition of chessy cat full#
Isn’t it fitting that the name on the cover of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) should conceal some kind of wordplay? Both books are full of jokes about naming and slippery identities – problems that are in each closely related. Lewis Carroll never intended for the Hatter’s riddle to have an answer.Charles Lutwidge Dodgson – a gifted logician, mathematician and amateur photographer – arrived at his nom de plume, Lewis Carroll, by reversing his two first names and translating them back into English from Latin. It is the Cheshire Cat who tells Alice that the March Hare and the Hatter are “both mad.” He is never actually called the Mad Hatter in Carroll’s text. The tag on the Hatter’s hat is a price tag, displaying the price: 10 shillings and 6 pence. John Tenniel may have based his illustration of the Hatter on an eccentric Oxford furniture dealer, Theophilus Carter, who always wore a top hat.
#Definition of chessy cat trial#
Rushing out of the courtroom without his shoes during the trial of the Knave of Hearts, trying to evade execution. Usually in the company of the March Hare and Dormouse. Frequently seen drinking tea and eating bread with butter. Frustrating tea party guests with his rudeness. Speaking nonsense and asking riddles which have no answer. “courteous to all, high or low, grand or grotesque, King or Caterpillar…trustful, ready to accept the wildest impossibilities with all that utter trust that only dreamers know…wildly curious…with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood.” Alice Liddell was also fond of her family’s two cats - one of which was named Dinah. In the story, Alice has a cat named Dinah. Alice Liddell had short, dark hair, and straight bangs. Tenniel’s drawings of Alice look nothing like Alice Liddell, on whom Carroll’s heroine is based. (Though she later finds herself in Looking-Glass Land.) Did You Know: Waking up from Wonderland to find herself in her sister’s lap. Size changes on occasion, generally when she eats or drinks something. Swimming in a pool of her own tears, getting stuck in the White Rabbit’s house, inviting herself to the Mad Tea Party, playing croquet with the Queen using flamingos and hedgehogs, and interrupting the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Following a White Rabbit and falling into Wonderland.