Alice Gray

DESCRIPTION: "She's all my fancy painted her, She's lovely, she's divine, But her heart, it is another's, She never can be mine." Still, "my heart is breaking For the love of Alice Gray." He describes her beauty. When he dies, they will say his heart broke for her
AUTHOR: Words: William Mee? (source: sundry internet sites)
EARLIEST DATE: 1859 (Dime-Song-Book #2); The Lewis Carroll Handbook dates it around 1815
KEYWORDS: love beauty rejection
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Dime-Song-Book #2/72, p. 10 and #2/64, p. 9, "Alice Gray" (1 text)
Roud #13755
BROADSIDES:
Library of Congress, "Alice Gray," L. Deming (Boston), n.d.
NOTES [886 words]: This was extremely common in broadsides in the mid-nineteenth century. It seems pretty well forgotten today. But it inspired not one but two parodies by Lewis Carroll, "She's All My Fancy Painted Him" and "My Fancy" or "She's All My Fancy Painted Her" (about a woman heavily augmented to be desirable, which concludes that "She's all my fancy painted her But oh! how much besides"). These are now more readily found than is the original.
"She's All My Fancy Painted Him" has much the more complicated history. Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) wrote in his diary for August 24, 1855, "Finished and sent off... (4) a nonsensical copy of verses I wrote last year, beginning 'She's all my fancy painted him'" (DodgsonWakeling1, p. 122). The diary note does not say where he sent the verses, but it appears to have been The Comic Times. Williams/Maden/Green/Crutch:, p. 7, say that "The Comic Times. a penny rival of Punch edited by Edmund Yates, consists of sixteen numbers from Saturday Aug: 11 to Saturday Nov: 24 1855." Page 8 says that this particular poem appeared in the September 8 edition. This original version began, "She's all my fancy painted him, (I make no idle boast); If he or you had lost a lime, Which would have suffered most?" This form was printed in The Lewis Carroll Picture Book and is found in Carroll/Gardner, p. 177, note 4 and Carroll/Norton, pp. 253-254.
Dodgson earlier in 1855 had earlier inserted it in one of his family magazines/notebooks, Mischmasch, where he gave it a preface claiming "This affecting fragment was found in MS. among the papers of the well-known author of 'Wasit You or I?' a tragedy, and the two popular novels, "Sister and Son,' and 'The Niece's Legacy, or the Grateful Grandfather'" (Carroll/Norton, p. 253).
It is often stated that this poem is found in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but this isn't a very clear description of what happened. In the chapter "Alice's Evidence," the White Rabbit reads a poem that begins "They told me you had been to her, And mentioned me to him: She gave me a good character, But said I could not swim." Comparison shows that this six-stanza poem is clearly (heavily) rewritten from "She's All My Fancy Painted Him," but with the first stanza omitted. (How heavily rewritten? To the first verse in Alice compare the equivalent in the earlier version: "He said that you had been to her, And seen me here before: But, in another character, She was the same of yore.") And the first stanza, omitted from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, is the only one with any allusion to "Alice Gray." Thus there is no actual link between the song "Alice Gray" and the poem in "Alice's Adventures."
This of course hasn't kept people from proposing such a link -- e.g. Carroll/Gardner, p. 123, at the end of note 4, wonders, "Did Carroll introduce this poem into his story because the song behind it tells of the unrequited love of a man for a girl named Alice?" The poem does not appear in the original version Alice's Adventures under Ground, so this is conceivable, but I simply don't buy it. (Of course, I don't think Dodgson was in love with Alice Liddell, either. He was deeply attached with an autistic's loyalty, which could be confused for being in love, but it isn't the same thing.) No one who had not seen the original version would have any reason to connect "They told me you had been to her" with "Alice Gray," and the original text of "She's All My Fancy Painted Him" would not be known to any but a few readers of Alice. And the original poem was written long before Dodgson really knew Alice, who was only a toddler at the time; it's a parody, and never uses the name "Alice"!
"My Fancy" also has a complex history. Cohen, p. 74, says, "The humorous poem, 'Disillusionised' (dated March 15, 1862, reprinted as 'My Fancy')... appeared in College Rhymes that summer. Here again Charles pariodies William Mee's 'Alic Gray' in a tongue-in-cheek complaint of a swain's disappointment in wooing the object of his desire: first believing that she has years 'perhaps a score,' he discovers that she has 'at least a dozen more."
"College Rhymes," according to Williams/Maden/Green/Crutch, p. 15, was a collection of poems written by staff and students of Oxford and Cambridge, with one issue being created each term and an annual volume collecting the year's issues. The annual volumes ran from 1860 to 1873. Dodgson himself edited it from July 1862 to March 1863. Over the years, the Cambridge contributions gradually declined. Under the title "Disillusionised," a version of the poem appeared in Volume III, dated March 15, 1862. This version had four verses rather than the three usually quoted; the first line was "I painted her a gushing thing." This was the verse dropped to make the "My Fancy" version, making the result much more obviously related to "Alice Gray." If the 15 March 1862 date is correct, that puts it a few months before the famous boat trip that inspired Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. But the revised version without the "I painted her a gushing thing" verse would have been post-Alice's Adventures.
The line "She was all my fancy painted her" also shows up in another nineteenth century pop song, "The German Band," by G. W. Hunt, found, e.g., in BishopBuckleysComicSongs, p. 11. - RBW
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