The prompts that accompanied these magic lantern slides borrow heavily from Lewis Carroll’s text, just as the slides closely echo Tenniel’s original designs
“Off with their heads!” cried the Queen, when she found out what the three gardeners had been doing, but Alice saved them by putting them into a large flower-pot that stood near, and where the soldiers could not see them. “Can you play croquet?” the Queen asked Alice. Alice replied, “Yes.” “Come on, then,” said the Queen, and the procession moved on to the croquet ground. It was the most curious game that Alice had ever played: the ground was all ridges and furrows, the balls were live hedge-hogs, the mallets live flamingos, and the soldiers doubled themselves up and stood upon their hands and feet to make the arches. Alice found a great difficulty in managing her flamingo; it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression, that she could not help laughing, whilst the hedge-hogs crawled away just when she wanted to hit them, and the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground. It was a very difficult game indeed. Presently she noticed a curious appearance in the air. It puzzled her at first, but soon she made it out to be a grin, and she said to herself, “It’s the Cheshire Cat: now I shall have somebody to talk to.”
Image Caption:
W. Butcher & Sons
Alice in Wonderland
Magic lantern slides issued in the Primus junior lecturers' series, number 778d
London, 1905-1908
The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. Gift of Arthur A. Houghton, Jr., 1987, PML 352354.1-7.
Photography by Graham S. Haber, 2015.