"What do you make a backstory out of, Mr. Grnksghty?"
"Treacle, mainly," he replied....
-- WOLP ch 5, p. 53 in US hardback

"What are tarts made of?"
"Pepper, mostly," said the cook.
"Treacle," said a sleepy voice behind her.
"Collar that Dormouse!" the Queen shrieked out....
-- Alice in Wonderland ch 11 "Who Stole the Tarts?"

Question 1. Is this the intended reference?

Question 2. Does it only mean that the Queen's stolen tarts are part of the Alice backstory? Or is something else going on?

Question 3. Are backstories mainly treacly -- thick, slow and sweet? (Treacle is called molasses in US-speak.) Do they leave out pepper?

Question 4. In Alice the cook is obsessed with pepper and the Dormouse with treacle. Does this mean backstories are made of whatever you're mostly interested in?

LarryK

H'mmm, interesting questions...


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"Logic is like Fire, a good servant but a bad master."

Yes, I think that probably is the reference - not necessarily that exact quotation but certainly the whole treacle thing clearly comes from 'Alice' - don't forget the treacle well.

According to my 'Annotated Alice' there actually was a 'treacle well' existing near Oxford in Carroll's time - although 'treacle' originally had a different meaning, referring to 'medicinal compounds given for snakebite, poisons and various diseases.'

I really don't know what is going on, but when I first read this I envisaged treacle being used as a sort of binding agent/filler...not just in the 'Alice' backstory but in all of them. I should think various other ingredients would be added to give different 'flavours' depending on what the backstory was.



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Some days I see the point

I think the answers are 'yes', 'no', 'don't know' and 'maybe.' ... in no particular order.

And treacle really does come from mines.

rob

> According to my 'Annotated Alice'

Hmm, yes, it does say that, doesn't it, in the Tea Party chapter.

According to the examples in the OED, uses of the old medicinal meaning peter out to a trickle in the 18th century, so by Carroll's time "treacle well" would have sounded quaint and nonsensical -- just the sort of thing he'd latch onto. Like "much of a muchness" ("muchness" being one of the things beginning with M that the Dormouse's three liddell sisters drew in/from the treacle well).

The same chapter in Annotated gives multiple answers to "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" including all the ones Thursday uses in the Swindon bar in TEA.

> I envisaged treacle being used as a sort of binding agent/filler

But treacle mainly? More filler than anything else? Hmm, now that I think of it there might be something to that: how much detail can you put in a backstory?