Of course, everything was done under his eye, and he wrote an extra song for the ghosts of the Oysters, who had been eaten by the Walrus and the Carpenter; he also finished that poetic gem, “’Tis the Voice of the Lobster.”
“’Tis the voice of the Lobster,” I heard him declare,
“You baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.”
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose,
Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.
When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark
And talks with the utmost contempt of a shark;
But when the tide rises and sharks are around,
His words have a timid and tremulous sound.
I passed by his garden, and marked with one eye
How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie:
The Panther took pie, crust and gravy and meat,
While the Owl had the dish, for his share of the treat.
When the pie was all finished, the Owl—as a boon
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon;
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
And concluded the banquet——
That is how the poem originally ended, but musically that would never do, so the last two lines were altered in this fashion:
“But the Panther obtained both the fork and the knife,
So when he lost his temper, the Owl lost his life,”
and a rousing little song it made.
The play was produced at the Prince of Wales’ Theater, during Christmas week of 1886, where it was a great success. Lewis Carroll himself specially praises the Wonderland act, notably the Mad Tea Party. The Hatter was finely done by Mr. Sidney Harcourt, the Dormouse by little Dorothy d’Alcourt, aged six-and-a-half, and Phœbe Carlo, he tells us, was a “splendid Alice.”
He went many times to see his “dream child” on the stage, and was always very kind to the little actresses, whose dainty work made his work such a success. Phœbe Carlo became a very privileged young person and enjoyed many treats of his giving, to say nothing of a personal gift of a copy of “Alice” from the delighted author.
After the London season, the play was taken through the English provinces and was much appreciated wherever it went. On one occasion a company gave a week’s performance at Brighton, and Lewis Carroll happening to be there one afternoon, came across three of the small actresses down on the beach and spent several hours with them. “Happy, healthy little girls” he called them, and no doubt that beautiful afternoon they had the time of their lives.
These children, he found—and he had made the subject quite a study—had been acting every day in the week, and twice on the day before he met them, and yet were energetic enough to get up each morning at seven for a sea bath, to run races on the pier, and to be quite ready for another performance that night.
On December 26, 1888, there was an elaborate revival of “Alice” at the Royal Globe Theater. In the London Times the next morning appeared this notice: