Audiobook · read by volunteers
Beautiful Soup
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898)
Read by Betsie Bush, Clarica, Chanel Nelson, Beth Peat, Ezwa, Glen Hallstrom, Howard Dratch, Julian Jamison, Kristin LeMoine, Karen Savage · 18 chapters · 23 min
About the book
Beautiful Soup is the song sung by the Mock Turtle in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Lewis Carroll's verse is a parody of a popular sentimental song of his day. The poem praises a thick, rich soup in a mock-solemn tone that is both silly and charming. Here you can listen to eighteen separate recordings of it, gathered as part of a weekly poetry project. Some readers sing, some speak with relish, some play up the comedy and some make it dreamy or solemn. The poem is short, so the whole collection lasts only a little over twenty minutes, which is just enough time to enjoy how many ways the same lines can be spoken. It is an amusing listen for fans of Wonderland and a delightful sample of nonsense verse, light, musical and full of fun.
Introduction
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who lived from 1832 to 1898. He was a mathematician at Oxford and became famous for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865, and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. Beautiful Soup appears in the first of these books, where the Mock Turtle sings it near the end of the tale.
The verse is a parody, written to the tune and style of a sentimental song that was well known in Carroll's day. Parody was one of his favourite tools, and his Alice books are full of rewritten poems that tease the solemn verses Victorian children were expected to memorise. Here the target is the earnest, drawing-room ballad, and the joke is that the subject is nothing more elevated than soup.
This is a multi-version recording, a format in which many LibriVox volunteers each record the same short text. It contains eighteen versions, and was made for the weekly poetry project of early April 2007. Hearing so many versions in a row brings out the sound of the poem: its repeated phrases, its mock-grand rhythm and the way each voice finds a different kind of humour in it. Anyone who has read the Alice books will enjoy meeting the song outside the story, and anyone who has not can treat it as a stand-alone piece of nonsense verse. The spirit of play that runs through Carroll's writing is plain to hear, and the variety of readings shows how much freedom a short poem leaves to its performers.
Public domain
Lewis Carroll died in 1898: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text