I, Lobster by Nancy Frazier

Author:Nancy Frazier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Hampshire Press

Sir John Tenniel, a lobster primping for the lobster quadrille, illustration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865.

’Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare,

“You have 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.39

The Mock Turtle calls it nonsense, and it may be—but not entirely. I puzzled a long time over “I must sugar my hair” and eventually connected some dots when I came across the mention of a portrait of Sir Walter Scott with “powdered hair.” It would be in character for Carroll to make fun of the powdered hair conceit, and maybe even of Scott.40

The verse, with or without allusion to Scott, was illustrated with a wood engraving by Sir John Tenniel—a black-and-white drawing of a lobster primping in front of a dressing table with a mirror. He stands upright on dancing slippers that cover his two tail fans and that are turned out in the first ballet position. In one of his claws, he holds a large hairbrush.41

This is the perfect illustration for the lobster quadrille. That a lobster has no hair really doesn’t matter at all.

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