The Lobster Quadrille Trivia Quiz

Answer:

One summer afternoon in the 1860s, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832 - 1898), a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Oxford, took the daughters of Dean Liddell of Christchurch for a trip on the river in a rowing boat, and began telling them a tale of a little girl, not unlike Alice Liddell, who fell down a rabbit hole and had a series of extraordinary adventures. The story was subsequently published as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", and a sequel "Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there" appeared a few years later. For both of these stories, Dodgson used the pen name of Lewis Carroll.

After adventures which involve changing size by eating or drinking things, a peculiar tea-party, an encounter with a duchess who has a baby like a pig, a meeting with a disappearing grinning cat, and an extraordinary game of croquet, Alice found herself on a beach. She was taken by a Gryphon to meet the Mock Turtle, so that he could relate his history. He told of his time at school when he was a real turtle, taught by an old turtle called Tortoise ('because he taught us'). They learned lessons such as Reeling and Writhing, and the four branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Destraction, Uglification and Derision. He then went on to the games, mentioning the lobster quadrille, where you have to form two lines along the seashore, each with a lobster as a partner and advance and retire twice, then the lobsters throw their partners out to sea. The Gryphon and the Mock Turtle offered to show Alice the dance, and the Mock Turtle provided the music by singing his song.

As with many other poems in the story, the song was based on a real poem, this one by Mary Howitt (1799 - 1888) called "The Spider and the Fly". The first line and the rhythm of both are similar, but the subject matter was changed to fit the story. The reluctance of the snail to arrive on the shores of France, where snails are considered a culinary delicacy, was only hinted at. Lewis Carroll was also making fun of what had become a popular form of dancing.

The quadrille, when not being a trick-taking or solitaire card game, or a dressage movement for four horses, or a type of squared paper, or a pattern for tiles, is a dance for four couples. It became popular in Europe and European colonies around the world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The dancers stand in a formation around the sides of a square, and perform a sequence of five or six movements; often each movement is done four times, and led by each couple in turn. It is not unlike an American square dance. Both dances have developed from some of the traditional English country dances as performed in previous centuries.