The Tape Measure
Alice changes size twelve times in Wonderland, and eleven of those times she is eating, drinking or holding something. The twelfth happens with nothing in her hands, and it is the one that gets her in trouble.
Full spoilers, ending included, though the whole book is only about twenty-six thousand words. We read Project Gutenberg ebook number eleven, called the Millennium Fulcrum Edition, with twelve chapters. I count each time Alice’s height changes, and I count the nibbling back and forth in chapter five as one. Six times she shrinks, five times she grows, and once she does both. Let’s measure.
Changes One and Two: The Little Door
Alice is bored by the riverbank when a White Rabbit with a waistcoat pocket and a watch runs past. She follows it down a rabbit hole, falls past cupboards and an empty jar of marmalade, and wonders about her cat Dinah. She also does sums on the way down: four thousand miles to the centre of the earth, she thinks, and she may come out among people who walk with their heads downward. In New Zealand or Australia, she wonders. Then she lands in a long hall of locked doors.
On a glass table she finds a tiny golden key. It fits a door about fifteen inches high, and behind it is a garden she cannot get through. So she tries a bottle labelled drink me. Change one: she shrinks to ten inches high, the right size for the door, but she has left the key on the table.
She eats a cake marked eat me. At first nothing happens. In my count, that is the only dud in the whole book. Then, change two: she grows to more than nine feet high, so tall she cries, and her tears make a pool about four inches deep.
Change Three: The Fan
The Rabbit hurries back, drops a pair of white kid gloves and a fan, and runs. Alice picks up the fan, and she starts asking herself who she is. She tries her times table, and gets four times five is twelve. She tries to say a poem about a crocodile, and it comes out wrong. She decides she must have been changed for a girl named Mabel.
Then she notices she is wearing one of the Rabbit’s gloves. The fan is shrinking her. Change three: she is about two feet high, and shrinking fast, when she drops the fan just in time to avoid shrinking away altogether. Then she slips and falls into her own pool of tears.
She swims with a Mouse, a Dodo, a Duck and other animals. The Dodo organizes a caucus race, with no start and no finish, and announces that everybody has won and all must have prizes. Alice has a box of comfits, one apiece, and her own prize is her own thimble. Then she mentions Dinah, who is so good at catching birds, and nearly everyone hurries home. Alice is left alone and in tears again.
Changes Four and Five: The Rabbit’s House
The Rabbit mistakes Alice for his housemaid, Mary Ann, and sends her to fetch his gloves and fan. In his house she drinks from a bottle with no label, and change four is, in my reading, the funniest scene in the book. She grows until her head is against the ceiling, one arm is out of the window and one foot is up the chimney. She is, she notices, about a thousand times as large as the Rabbit.
The Rabbit sends in Pat, then a lizard called Bill down the chimney, and Alice kicks Bill into the sky. The crowd throws pebbles, and the pebbles turn into little cakes. Change five: she eats one and shrinks, runs out, and meets an enormous puppy in a wood.
Changes Six to Eight: The Caterpillar
A blue Caterpillar on a mushroom asks the question the whole book hangs on: who are you? Alice says she hardly knows, because she has been changed several times since morning. The Caterpillar is exactly three inches high, and Alice says three inches is a wretched height. In my reading, that is the cruellest joke in the chapter: the size she complains about is the size of the creature giving her advice.
The Caterpillar asks her to recite, you are old, Father William, and she gets it wrong from beginning to end. It tells her one side of the mushroom makes her taller and the other shorter. Change six: she bites the right-hand bit and her chin hits her foot. Change seven: the left-hand bit shoots her neck up above the trees, and a Pigeon screams, serpent. Change eight is the careful nibbling back and forth, which brings her to her usual height.
Changes Nine and Ten: Pig and Pepper
Alice sees a four-foot house, so she nibbles the right-hand bit down to nine inches, thinking she should not frighten whoever lives there. That is change nine. A Frog-Footman tells her there is no use in knocking, and inside, the Duchess nurses a baby in a smoky kitchen, while the cook throws things and puts too much pepper in the soup.
The Duchess sings a lullaby that is mostly about beating a baby, then flings it at Alice and goes off to play croquet. The baby grunts, its nose turns up, and it turns into a pig. Alice sets it down and watches it trot away. The Duchess’s favorite saying is that everything has a moral, if you can find it. Then a Cheshire Cat appears on a bough, grinning. It says, we’re all mad here, and it fades away until only the grin is left.
The March Hare’s house is so large that she does not like to go nearer at nine inches, so she nibbles the left-hand bit to about two feet high. That is change ten.
Change Eleven: The Tea Party and the Garden
At the tea party the Hatter, the March Hare and a sleepy Dormouse crowd into one corner of a big table. The Hatter’s watch tells the day of the month, and it is two days wrong. He has quarrelled with Time, he says, so it is always six o’clock and always tea. He asks, why is a raven like a writing desk, and he admits he has no answer. The Dormouse tells a story about three sisters in a treacle well, and Alice leaves in disgust.
She finds a door in a tree, and walks back into the long hall. This time she does better. She takes the golden key, unlocks the little door, and nibbles the mushroom until she is about a foot high. That is change eleven, and she walks into the garden at last, among the flower beds and the cool fountains.
Who the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse actually are, and who serves the Queen, is in our guide to the Alice in Wonderland characters.
Change Twelve: The Trial
The garden belongs to the Queen of Hearts, who shouts, off with her head, about once a minute. Three card gardeners paint the white roses red, the croquet balls are hedgehogs, and the mallets are flamingoes. A Gryphon takes Alice to the Mock Turtle, who says his lessons were ten hours the first day and nine the next, which is why they are called lessons: they lessen from day to day.
Then the Knave of Hearts is tried for stealing the Queen’s tarts. The Hatter is the first witness, and the jury adds up three different dates and reduces the answer to shillings and pence. Then comes the cook, whose answer to what tarts are made of is pepper.
And here is change twelve. Nobody gives Alice anything. She feels a curious sensation, and she is beginning to grow larger again. The Dormouse says she has no right to grow there.
Then the White Rabbit reads out the next witness: Alice. She jumps up so fast that her skirt tips over the jury box, and she puts the Lizard back head downwards. The King reads rule forty-two: all persons more than a mile high must leave the court. Alice says she is not a mile high, and that the rule was invented just now. The King says it is the oldest rule in the book, and the Queen says Alice is nearly two miles high.
The Queen then asks for sentence first, verdict afterwards. Alice, grown to her full size, shouts the line the book was building to: you’re nothing but a pack of cards. The whole pack flies up at her.
The Ledger Closes
Alice wakes with her head on her sister’s lap, while her sister brushes dead leaves from her face. She says she had a curious dream, runs in to tea, and her sister sits dreaming of Wonderland, hearing in her mind the rattle of the teacups and the Mock Turtle’s sobs, and knowing they are really sheep bells and cattle. The book ends with her picturing little Alice as a grown woman, gathering children around her and telling them, perhaps, the dream of Wonderland of long ago.
So here is the ledger. Six shrinks, five growths, one mix, twelve in all. Eleven were caused by food, drink or a fan. The last was Alice herself, and it ended the dream. My question: which size was the hardest for Alice, the ten inches, the nine feet or the nearly two miles the Queen claims? Tell me in the comments. Subscribe for more books, one clear angle at a time, and tap like if the tape measure helped. For every creature Alice meets, chapter by chapter, see Alice in Wonderland characters: who is who.
