CJhe Selected ~ters of f§Jm {IIRROfl., Charles Lutwidge Dodgson of CJ/ze Selected ~ters f§Jm Q1RROJ:L Edited by Morton N. Cohen with the assistance of Roger Lancelyn Green Second Edition pal grave The Letters of C. L. Dodgson © The Trustees of the C. L. Dodgson Estate 1979 This Selection, Introduction and Notes © Morton Norton Cohen 1982 Preface to the Second Edition © Morton Norton Cohen 1989 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WCIE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First Edition 1982 Second Edition 1989 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Carroll, Lewis, 1832-1898 The selected letters of Lewis Carroll.-2nd ed. 1. English literature. Carroll, Lewis, 1832- 1898-Correspondence, diaries, etc Re: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson I. Title II. Cohen, Morton N. (Morton Norton),1921- III. Green, Roger Lancelyn, 1918-1987 828'.809 ISBN 978-0-333-51337-8 ISBN 978-1-349-20350-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20350-5 To Gordon N. Ray Preface to the Second Edition The story goes that George Bernard Shaw once sent Winston Churchill two tickets to the opening night of one of his plays with a note inviting him to come to the performance with a friend, "if you have one." Churchill returned the tickets, explained that he was otherwise engaged on opening night, and hoped that Shaw would send him two tickets for the second night, "if there is one." Shaw's play must have had a second night, a tribute to his skill as a dramatist, just as this second edition of The Selected Letters is a tribute to Lewis Carroll's master craftsmanship as a letter-writer. Actually Carroll would have worried slightly about this particular edition because, being deeply concerned with bibliographical formalities and the processes of printing and publishing, he would note that, where the first edition of this collection appeared only in paperback, this one appears in both hard and paper covers. On the other hand, he greatly fancied puzzles and would probably have enjoyed the idea of a "second" hardback edition without a "first". Lewis Carroll himself presents something of a puzzle to readers who wonder how so private and reserved a man could write books and letters that have such a wide appeal. How does a sheltered, shy mathematics don living in the closed society of an Oxford college spin tales that cast spells upon an audience the world over? A paradox? Perhaps. But if so, the paradox is only superficial because Carroll's ink flowed from a well of deep and subtle feeling, it shimmered with whimsy, it contained ingredients so basic to the human condition that it enchants generation after generation, annihilating time, place, nationality, and convention. Like the Alice books, Lewis Carroll's letters are as readable and compelling today as they were to his original correspondents a hundred years ago. Biographers and critics have laboured hard to try to explain the magic that casts these spells, to get at the heart of both Carroll and his great classics, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass vii Vlll PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION and What Alice Found There. But genius does not lend itself easily to analysis, and more often than not, we end up with muddled theories and no sensible totality of meaning. Perhaps our critical and psychological tools and methods will improve and allow us one day to see deeper into the man and his books. In the meantime, we can note how his works retain their popularity. At this writing, we can count at least seventy-three different editions and versions of the Alice books available in Britain alone, including play texts, parodies, read-along cassettes, teachers' guides, audio-language studies, colouring books, "New Method" readers, pop-up books, abridged versions, musical versions, casebooks, and a de luxe edition selling for £141.75. What is more, the Alice books have been translated into more than fifty foreign languages and into Braille. The current UNESCO compilation, the Index Translationum, reporting foreign editions, lists thirty-one new publications of the books abroad, including four in the U.S.S.R., for the year 1982 alone. As we might expect, not only the Alice books, but Lewis Carroll's life, and Alice Liddell's as well, continue to provide subjects for stage plays, films, television productions, and ballets. The two major societies devoted to advancing Carroll studies also continue to thrive. In the summer of 1989, the British Lewis Carroll Society celebrated the twentieth anniversary of their founding with an international conference and exhibition at Christ Church, Oxford; and the Lewis Carroll Society of North America have undertaken to bring together and publish in six volumes the hundreds of pamphlets that Carroll wrote and had printed, on subjects as diverse as university politics, vivisection, and catching cold. The first of these volumes, containing Carroll's Oxford pamphlets, is scheduled to appear in 1989. Moreover, the Lewis Carroll Birthplace Trust, well launched, is establishing a Lewis Carroll Centre at Daresbury, Cheshire. As all of these activities proceed, the Alice books, Carroll's other works of fantasy, and his letters shine brightly before us, untarnished by time and unmarred by all the attention they attract. Their essential humanity and intrinsic fun lift them from the ordinary into the remarkable and afford all of us a good read. They will continue to appeal to readers through this second edition of The Selected Letters and beyond. Indeed, they will continue to appeal as long as hearts beat in human frames, as long as eyes sparkle, as long as laughter lasts. London, 1989 Morton N. Cohen Preface to the First Edition "One of the deep secrets of Life," Charles Lutwidge Dodgson confided to his friend the actress Ellen Terry, is "that all, that is really worth the doing, is what we do for others." The letters assembled here, or a remarkably high percentage of them, spell out the way that Dodgson practised what he preached. Indeed, he spent much of his life in the service of others: writing for their instruction and amusement; paying for their schooling, for their lessons in French, music, and art; getting them jobs; guiding their careers; meeting their dentists' bills; buying them railway tickets; treating them to the theatre; giving them inscribed copies of his books and other presents; taking their photographs; inventing games and puzzles for them; tutoring them in mathematics and logic; giving them religious guidance; feeding and clothing them; and, of course, telling them stories. Letter-writing itself was often for him another way of doing something for others, especially for the young girls whose friendship he so ardently cultivated. As he stood at his upright desk, he was often challenged to breathe life and laughter onto the dry leaves ofletter paper ranged before him. The result is a stream of letters that Lewis Carroll's fancy alone could create- new self-contained microcosms of Wonderland, vehicles of fun and pleasure that underscore his devotion to others and prove him, in both senses of the phrase, a man of letters. Of course, not everything he wrote was inspired by the comic muse. He was actually a serious man, formal and scholarly, shy and awkward, hard-working, fastidious, deeply religious. From his father's death in 1 868, he was, as the eldest son, head of his family, and he took to heart his responsibilities to his three brothers and seven sisters. From the age of eighteen, he was a member of the oldest university in the land, Oxford; from twenty-three a mathematics don at Christ Church; and from twenty-nine an ordained clergyman. He wrote treatises on math ematics and logic as well as children's books and concerned himself with IX X PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION the mechanics of designing and publishing them. His far-reaching interests and avocations involved him deeply in photography, the theatre, art, literature, and the minutiae of college affairs; his voluminous reading took him into the worlds of science, medicine, psychic phenomena, and technology. All these interests elicited from his pen a flow of serious, reflective letters that provide posterity with a record of his life, his mind, his soul, and go beyond to document the behaviour, manners, and psychological tenor of his age. His less serious letters are, on the other hand, marvellously fanciful creations, many of them little jewels fash ioned for child friends. These reveal the workings of the imagination we already know from the Alice books; they take the art of letter-writing into new provinces. Dodgson was, surely, one of the world's most prolific letter-writers. By his own confession, he wrote "wheelbarrows full, almost." "One third of my life seems to go in receiving letters," he claimed, "and the other two-thirds in answering them." Writing to the poet Christina Rossetti on August 16, 1882, he told her that her letter was the thirteenth he had written that day. He confessed to his young friend Mary Brown that some of the letters he had yet to answer were five and a half years old; he got about two thousand letters off every year, he told her, but even that was not enough. "I'm generally 70 or So names in arrears, and sometimes one letter will take me an afternoon," he wrote elsewhere. On New Year's Day I892 he resolved to catch up. "I began by_making a list of the people who are waiting (some of them 5 to IO years) for letters. There are more than 6o of them." "Life seems to go in letter writing," he wrote to Ellen Terr.y's sister Marion when he was fifty five, "and I'm beginning to think that the proper definition of 'Man' is 'an animal that writes letters.' " He was a systematic record-keeper, and in fact devised a Register of Letters Received and Sent, with a precis of each alongside its .date and entry number. He began this record on January I, 1861, less than a month before his twenty-ninth birthday, and maintained it diligently for the remaining thirty-seven years of his life. That Letter Register has not survived, but we know that the last number recorded there was 98,721. We also know that he kept a separate register for letters he sent and received between I 882 and I 892 as Curator of Senior Common Room at Christ Church. That register has not survived either, but by adding a modest estimate of five thousand entries one arrives at a hypothetical sub-total of IOJ,72I. To that figure one must yet add an estimate of the number of letters sent and received before either register was begun,