text: ^^ mmr LerreR ^^ The Lewis Carroll Society of North America spring 2004 Volume II Issue 3 Number 73 Knight Letter IS the official magazine of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. It is published twice a year and is distributed free to all members. Subscriptions, business correspondence, and inquiries should be addressed to the Secretary, PO Box 204, Napa CA 94559. Annual membership dues are U.S. $20 (regular) and $50 (sustaining). Submissions and editorial correspondence should be sent to the Editor, preferably by email (firstname.lastname@example.com), or mailed to PO Box 2006, Mill Valley CA 94942. ISSN 0193-886X Mark Burstein, Editor in Chief Matthew Demakos, Editor of "The Rectory Umbrella' Andrew H. Ogus, Designer The Lnuis Carroll Society of North America President: Alan Tannenbaum, email@example.com Vice-President: Mark Burstein, firstname.lastname@example.com Sec re tar)': Cindy Watter, email@example.com www. LewisCar ro ll.org On the Front Cover: This remarkable digital photomontage is © 2004 Helena de Barros. See article on p. 39. conrenrs THe ReCTORY UMBRGLLA US A Cultural Critique of Miles Franklin 's "Tea with Alice" with a Neiu Afterword Sanjay Sircar 1 A Boston Tea Party Mark Burstein 11 Mr Dodgson and the Royal Family, Part II Edward Wakeling 15 The Capture of the Snark E. Fuller Torrey, MD, and Judy Miller 21 Twenty-First-Century Vieivs of Dodgson 's Voting Method Francine F. Abeles 26 MISCHMASCH ^ LGAVeS FROM THe DeANGRY CARDGN 28 In Memoriam: Kay Rossman, Yulii Danilov, Sir Peter Ustinov 29 RAVINGS FROM THG WRITING DGSK Alan Tannenbaum 30 SGRGNDIPITY 31 OF BOOKS AND THINGS 32 Ghiuselev 's Alice-trations There's Something About Mary He Will Brook No Nonsense Sarah Adams Elementary, My Dear Dodgson Sarah Adams Masterpiece Theater Daniel Singer Golden Keys and Silver Locks Ruth Berman Viva Vivaldi Sarah Adams Mrs. Carroll's Alice Robert Arnold Hall Chasing the White Rabbit Sarah Adams Shadowplay Gregory Williams CARROLLIAN NOTGS 38 Addenda, Errata, Corrigenda, &" Illuminata Sic, Sic, Sic Fairest Helena Lights! Camera! Auction! The Library of Babel Ready, Willing and ABELL Contrairwise Sarah Adams All in the Golden Afternoon French and Music Armelle V. Futterman FROM OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRGSPONDGNTS 47 Books — Articles — Cyberspace — Conferences and Lectures — Exh ibitions — Performances Noted — Auctions — Media — Things ^*HQi9^^ The mome rath hasn 't been born that can outgrabe me. ~ James Thurber Mh, spring in the air ... (and why you should), as Walt Kelly put it. We're in the midst of a lovely season out here in Outland — as Peter Heath termed California — and I hope some of that verdant promise exudes from this issue. Under the "Rectory Umbrella," we begin with two tea parties: an account of an after- noon with Alice Hargreaves in 1932 written by the Australian author of My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin, with an "introduction and cultural critique" and a new afterword by fellow- Australian Sanjay Sircar; and a report on our lively Society meeting at Harvard. Following those is the continuation of "Mr. Dodgson and the Royal Family," in which Edward Wakeling explores Dodgson's connections with the next generation, the grandchildren of Queen Vic- toria, and how his royal associations may have informed his works. Theories on the sources of inspiration for Carroll's Hunting of the Snark have been prolif- erating of late. First there was a 2001 article by Pauline Hunter Blair in the (London) Times Literary Supplement positing that logs from the 1773 Arctic expedition undertaken by Com- modore Skeffington Lutwidge (uncle of Dodgson's beloved "Uncle Skeffington") may have had an influence {KL 66:21). Professor Morton Cohen sent a letter of rebuttal to the Times, citing Mavis Batey's suggestion that the Canterbury Pilgrims' 1850 expedition to New Zea- land might be a more likely source (reprinted in AT. 68:16). Now in this issue we are pleased to present Torrey and Miller's speculations regarding Uncle Skeffington 's Lunacy Commis- sion. As Professor Cohen put it in his letter, "Sources and influences are elusive birds, seldom amenable to capture." The prolific Dr. Francine F. Abeles next discusses "Dodgson's Voting Method" in the context of current theory and the political landscape. Our contributors, other than those credited in bylines, include: Joel Birenbaum, Ruth Berman, Llisa Demetrios Burstein, Sandor Burstein, David Calkins, Angelica Carpenter, Mor- ton Cohen, August Imholtz, Clare Imholtz, Janet Jurist, Devra Kunin, Lucille Posner, Mark Richards, Andrew Sellon, Alan Tannenbaum, Alison Tannenbaum, Edward Wakeling, the Watter family (Cindy, Charlotte, Nick, and Neil), and Germaine Weaver. And the esteemed editor of the "Rectory Umbrella," Matt Demakos, needless to say. My congratulations and appreciation to Andrew Ogus, designer extraordinaire, on this issue. I also wish to acknowledge the fine job our new printers, Napa Printing and Graphics, have been doing. As this issue features a cover by a Brazilian graphic artist, perhaps it is time to think of ourselves more properly as the Lewis Carroll Society of the Americas. Come to think of it, Rio de Janeiro seems like a splendid place for a future meeting. Such quantities of sand . . . Mark Burstein THe ReCTORY UMBRGLLA A Cultural Critique of Miles Franklin's "Tea with Alice" with a New Afterword SANJAY SIRCAR ^^ ■^^^^^^ piece on Lewis Carroll's birth centenary exhibi- ^^^^ tion of 1932 organized by the London booksell- M^ m.ers J. and E. Bumpus, "Tea with Alice of Alice in Wonderland' (1932) by Miles Franklin, author of the Australian classic My Brilliant Career (1901), lends itself to a critique of once prevalent, perhaps still-existing adult attitudes toward children and their literature. An exami- nation of her essay enables us to focus on the production, commercial dissemination, reception, and institution- alization of literature specifically for children. Produc- tion and reception take place in a particular cultural or ethnographical context (such as colonialism) and within a capitalist class society (sometimes marked by snobbery, deference, commodity fetishism, and commodification). In this larger context, children's literature can manifest Reprinted, with permission, from Children's Literature 22 (1994), ed. Francelia Butler et al. (Yale University Press, © 1994 HoUins C'.ollege). Dr. Sircar's essay has been slightly altered in this reprint. Franklin's essay first appeared in All About Books for Australian and New Zealand Readers A, no. 12 (December 3, 1932): 199, and is reproduced by permission of the Trust Company, Melbourne, Australia. The footnotes within Miles Franklin's "Tea with Alice" are by editor Matthew Demakos. The afterword is entirely new material. reverence for the good old days and for child- hood, it can engender games in which adults take the roles of children and characters from juvenile fiction, and it can foster mythmaking in regard to children's classics generally. Tea with Alice of Alice in Wonderland Miles Franklin How many millions must have wished that they could have tea with AUce and the Mad Hatter! So it scarcely seemed real when I found myself actually seated at the same table as the one and only AUce herself. But so it was in the wonderland of London, in that particularly seductive establishment, the ancient and honourable book store of Messrs. J. and E. Bumpus, on Oxford street, where Royalty shop. It all happened so simply.^ Certain people had the pleasure of their company being requested at the Old Courthouse for the private opening of the Lewis CarroU Centenary Exhibition. The card of invitation was about eight inches square, and decorated with Alice, the Cheshire Cat, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Duchess, and 1 ^ Other quaint immortal entities.^ Mr. J. G. Wilson, the head of Bumpus's, is celebrated for his organisation of imique and delightful occasions, and in this one was conspicuously successful. Those who arrived before the rooms grew too full gained a comprehensive idea of the extensive character and methodical arrangement of the exhibition. Here is all of Carroll, as testified by Mr. Falconer Madan's scholarly catalogue of 116 pages. Here is everything from cheapest reprints, parodies, card games, translations, dramatisations, biscuit tins, up to choicely printed volumes bound in veUum: and those even more cosdy freak volumes be- loved of collectors for a spurious rar- ity, for which, as a would-be living author, I have lively contempt. They are too often the prizes of the maleficendy wealthy in a snobbish sport, the toys of those who, perhaps, lack discernment, generosity or courage to recognise and aid writers in their arduous beginnings. There were endless genuine treasures lent by nearly a hundred owners; journals, letters, photographs, paintings; original drawings by Tenniel, Furness, and others; and, sent by Messrs Macmillan, the 42 original wood blocks'* for Tenniel's illustrations of "Alice in Wonderland."^ One bay was full of a large and remarkable collection of Carrolliana sent across the Adantic by its American owner. Everything imaginable was there, superbly arranged. But the guests very quickly obscured the exhibits, and the speaking began. The Patroness, H.R.H. Princess Beatrice, was unable to be present, because of an operation on her eye. The chairman, the Very Rev. the Dean of Christ Church (Dr. H. J. White), said that the very same verger who had shown him to his seat when he first entered Christ Chiu-ch was still alive, and had recentiy tumbled downstairs without hurting the stairs or himself, though he was 92. He also related how, as an undergraduate in his first term, he had met Mr. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), as mathematical tutor, and was sorry to say that he did not come up to standard in his Euclid. After a severe interview, Mr. Dodgson said that Mr. White must attend his lectures. He said that the undergraduates dreaded Mr. Dodgson, and in his own case this fear '"' USWlh CAREOIX ^'< CENTENARY- FXMimilON lYie Old Conr\ I louse J.^OOxfotxi Street WL The invitation. See footnote 2. had resulted in concentrated effort. He concluded by saying that to Lewis Carroll had been given the almost unique gift of making more children laugh than anyone else in the world; that himdreds of thousands of children had laughed at his jokes, and not one had ever blushed; and he did not think that any man could have a finer epitaph than the acknowledgment that he was one of the most amusing and purest souls in the world.^ Mrs. Hargreaves (the original Alice), in declaring the exhibition open, described herself as a very old person who tired easily, but who remembered the days when she was one of a number of litde girls, rimning about in cotton frocks, who knew Mr. Dodgson before the name of Lewis Carroll had been invented.® Sir Gerald du Maurier recalled the friendly assoc- iation between his father, the celeb- rated "Punch" artist, and Lewis CarroU, and told a new story about Mr. Wills, the great tobacco man, calling at the du Maurier home at Hampstead, one day, when Lewis Carroll was also there. In those days it was not permissible to mention in a man's presence his business, or the source from which he drew his money, and when du Maurier was about to take his visitors to see the view from the Heath, he was warned against any mention of tobacco. But no sooner was the famous spot reached from which on clear days portions of eight counties are visible, than du Maurier remarked: "Here is the most wonderful bird's eye view — oh! I beg your pardon."^ Mr. J. C. Squire, a London reviewer and essayist, referred to the long list of notable well-wishers of the exhibition, as the most extraordinary menagerie of people, who could have been collected by no other interest excepting Lewis Carroll, and finished some topical remarks by an entertaining rhyme in honor of "Alice."^ The company were then released to tea, and saw such quantities of sandwiches and cakes, including Lewis Carroll's favourite goodies, rock cakes and ginger snaps,® that the greediest might have shed a bitter tear'^ if compelled to make any noticeable inroads in such abiuidance. The venturesome seized the chau"s, the throng milled around, hiding the exhibits, till one lost sight of all but outstanding things placed high, such as the lovely Herkomer portrait of the gentle grey- haired Lewis Carroll (specially lent by the original's old coUege), the amiable, substantial, respectable, convincing Dodo, or Quentin Matsys' portrait of the pathetically, tragically, inhumanly ugly litde Duchess of Carinthia and Tyrol, recentiy resuscitated as the eponymous heroine of Feuchtwanger's "Ugly Duchess."ii The waitresses were desirous of getting some of the people out of the way, but who could be hurried when Ahce herself was coming to tea! I sought an inconspicuous corner for the part of invisible and inconsequent Dormouse, while among those present, distinguished in the world of printing presses today, to take the larger parts of Mad Hatters and March Hares, Red and White Queens, Duchesses, Knights, or Jabberwock, Carpenter, Walrus, and Gryphon for a frabj[o]us, scrumptious meal, were Lady Dickens, Mr. and Mrs. St. John Ervine, Mr. and Mrs. J. B. Priesdy, Capt. Hargreaves, Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Grahame, Lady Bridgeman, Lady Buxton, the Greek Minister, Miss Horniman, Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Huxley, the Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Sir Fredk. and Lady Liddell,^^ Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr. and Mrs. Walter de la Mare, the Master of the Temple, the Provost of Worcester College, Lady Redesdale,^^ Miss Hilda Trevelyan, Miss Irene Vanbrugh, Mr. Henry W. Nevinson, Sir Ernest and Lady Benn, Sir Victor and Lady GoUancz.^"* But the most consequential were of no consequence compared with Alice herself, attended by the original of Peter Pan (Mr. Peter Davies), carrying red roses (sent her by a lady of 90 who had known her as a litde girl in the Deanery), who came, and, as it should have been in a fairly [sic] tale, sat down at the table of the infinitesimal Dormouse. There she was just across the table from me. Alice at eighty, looking not more than 60 or 55, with her fair skin, to which her native climate has been so kind, Ahce to-day still so winning that the most matter-of- fact could realise that in this gracious lady, when a child, the greatest of all writers for children had a matchless inspiration and model. "Tea with Alice" appeared in the December 3, 1932, issue of All About Books for Australian and New Zealand Readers, a literary magazine published in Melbourne by D. W. Thorpe. A mishmash of articles, long and short reviews, and unpretentious bits and pieces of literary gossip, this issue includes such articles as "Mr. Galsworthy, Culture and Australia," "Present- Day Poetry," "Some Literary Families," "This Year's Australian Books" (including one by Franklin), "Sir Walter Scott," "New Novels and Christmas Books," along with "The Use of Books for Your Children" by the novelist Storm Jameson, "Children's Books and Libraries," "The Bookless House" by Arthur Mee of the Children's Encyclopaedia, and "Books for Children." We note immediately the cultural and commercial significance of so much on children's literature at Christmastime. The tone of "Tea" does not accord with Frank- lin's own dismissive attitude toward children's books (even though she wrote an extremely peculiar one herself: Sydney Royal, 1947),^^ expressed by her alter- ego heroine in My Career Goes Bung (1946): "Gad collected children's books which seemed to me a peculiar hobby for an old bachelor. He read from them. I never had any children's books. Ma thought them trash and I don't believe that Pa ever heard of them."^*^ Thus "Tea" is either a genuine acknowledg- ment of an exceptional work (not "merely" for chil- dren) or a journalistic playing along with (and thus a reinforcement of) the mystique of a children's clas- sic. As it stands, "Tea" is competent journalism and follows a simple pattern. Franklin recounts receiving the invitation to the centenary exhibition, lists the ex- hibits, summarizes the speeches by H.J. WTiite, Alice Liddell Hargreaves, Gerald du Maurier, and J. C. Squire to represent aspects of Carroll (Oxford, chil- dren, the stage, humor), and describes the throng, the tea, and the final thrill of sitting across the table from the original Alice. Although Franklin was a fierce nationalist who consistently repudiated charges of Australian cultural inferiority, the tone of "Tea" is very much that of the country-cousin colonial telling those at home in Aus- tralia what she has seen at "home" in England. This is most immediately apparent in the sunburnt-colonial view of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, "with her fair skin, to which her native climate has been so kind." Frank- lin was one of those who attempted to forge a sense of and pride in an independent Australian identity, but this identity was often defined in terms of inherit- ing, revering, and treasuring what was presented as the best from the Mother Country. Notions of beauty were among these, and likewise received opinions about the classics. Franklin was also stridently egalitarian, yet "Tea" is permeated with snobbery about the establishment, both in Franklin's choice of words and metaphors and in what they tell of the proceedings. The snob- bery is imperfectly hidden by the facetious inflation of the description of the venue as that "particularly seductive establishment, the ancient and honourable book store of Messrs. J. and E. Bumpus, on Oxford street, where Royalty shop." It comes through clearly in the News-of-the-Worldish noting of the absence of the "Patroness, H.R.H. Princess Beatrice" because of an eye operation, in Squire's reference to the as- sembly of "notable well-wishers," and in Franklin's list of people "distinguished in the world of print- ing presses today," four of whom are delineated by educational and diplomatic position rather than by name. The faux-naif simplicity of "It all happened so simply. Certain people had the pleasure of their com- pany being requested at the Lewis Carroll Centenary Exhibition" seems purposefully to convey a snobbish hint that invitations were scarce and that strings had been pulled, for it virtually begs the reader to wonder how Franklin wangled an invitation and what sort of people were selected to attend. Her stated unim- portance, as one receiving an unexpected privilege, blurs with her implied importance, as one of those certain people. Clearly it was enjoyable to be at the "private opening," and a whole crowd qualified for invitations. The emphasis on the grand people present is of a piece with the hyperbolic emphasis on things. These are both "extensive" and "large and remark- able"; they include "all of Carroll," even "Everything imaginable." They are "genuine treasures," "specially lent" and "superbly arranged." hiterestingly, Franklin stresses that the valuable originals are present: Ten- niel's woodblocks, the painting of the Ugly Duchess. And the same imagery extends to people — the "one and only Alice herself," "the original Alice," accompa- nied by "the original of Peter Pan"; even Dodgson is the Carroll whom Alice knew before he was Carroll, "before the name ... had been invented." The figure of Carroll himself is the center of commodification and investment with mystique, processes which oper- ate with both people and objects. So we have present in the original "the lovely Herkomer portrait" of Lewis Carroll from "the original's old college," and we have Carroll as the original "amiable, substantial, respectable, convincing Dodo." The power of the word substantial spreads from the real man to the Ac- tive Dodo. The portrait is an original object; the man is the original of the author, of the portrait, of the Active character. The value of man and portrait alike is underpinned in their being originals. Just as a hierarchy extends from the milling, crushing crowd up to the dignitaries, so does one extend "from cheapest reprints, parodies, card games, translations, dramatisations, biscuit tins, up to choicely printed volumes bound in vellum" — an echo of Lear's alphabet? '^ The things that can be produced and sold cheaply in quantity rank lower than the expensive, scarce ones. The latter give grace to the former by their juxtaposition on the list and in the exhibition, just as the crowd was presumably edi- fied and elevated by rubbing elbows with and dupli- cating the actions of the dignitaries in their company. Alice partakes of grace by association with the origi- nal man, and Franklin gains grace by contiguity with her. But after mentioning volumes bound in vellum, Franklin, in a different, more personal voice, briefly queries the snobbery relating to valuable things and notable people. She notes "those even more costly freak volumes beloved of collectors for a spurious rarity, for which, as a would-be living author, I have lively contempt. They are too often the prizes of the maleficently wealthy in a snobbish sport, the toys of those who, perhaps, lack discernment, generosity or courage to recognise and aid writers in their arduous beginnings." Here is a blow for live people against dead things, a touch of what people in the 1930s called socialist red-ragging, a valuing of access to culture (Franklin welcomed the advent of the paper- back), and perhaps, too, the envy of one who lacks and wishes for a patron. Linked by safety and security to the stress on snobbery, hierarchy, commodity, and the original ob- ject in "Tea" is the stress on the old, often in conjunc- tion with the very young. We have the ancient and honorable bookstore that sells children's books; "the Old Courthouse"; Alice, "a very old person who tired easily, but who remembered the days when she was one of a number of little girls, running about"; the "old college" of "grey-haired Lewis Carroll" (who was gray-haired neither at his birth, which the celebra- tions commemorated, nor at the birth of Alice) ; the "resuscitated" Ugly Duchess; the red roses (emblem of youth) sent by the old lady of ninety who had known Alice as a little girl in the Deanery. Hence, too, the opening of the first address by the Very Rev- erend the Dean of Christ Church Dr. H.J. White, who recalls his youth when "undergraduates dreaded Mr. Dodgson," when he had a "severe interview," when "fear resulted in concentrated effort," and then cites the many "children [who] had laughed at [Carroll's] jokes." His opening comment about the ninety-two- year-old verger tumbling downstairs unhurt is uncon- nected to Carroll, except as a reference to Old Father William (whom Franklin does not mention), and reveals the group nostalgia for and worship of old age, both of individuals and eras. Three of the four speakers. White, Hargreaves, and du Maurier, recall the vanished period; indeed, du Maurier's anecdote about an occasion when Carroll was merely present serves solely as a genial evocation of a vanished time and its snobbery (the bird's-eye tobacco). Hovering about the worship of old people and the Victorian past is a desire for safety and, beyond that, immortality. The old verger is an icon of im- mortality. "Alice, the Cheshire Cat, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Duchess" on the invitation card are not "quaint immortal entities" merely because they are fictions but also because they are quaint (child- ish, old-fashioned, odd — see the Oxford English Die- tionary) and because they are images of children, that category of the not-quite-adult human including the dwarf, the animal, and the representational object (cards and chess pieces). Wonderland and Looking- Glass figures, in being neither adult nor human, are child images (by overpowering which the child-pro- tagonist Alice grows closer to adulthood) and images of immortality, being semi-supernatural. So is Quinten Massys's "pathetically, tragically, inhumanly ugly litde Duchess," immortalized by him in a painting that is today said to be after Massys; identified without evi- dence as the real Duchess of Carinthia and Tyrol, it is possibly not even a portrait at all but a study in the grotesque. The Duchess was further fictionalized in Lion Feuchtwanger's Die hdjiliche Herzogin Margaretha Maultasch}^ Both the painter and the es- sayist render her as a thing, and she is inscribed as an icon of both adult and child by the sentimentality of Franklin's diction. The desire for the stable order, the thing, the original, the old, the past, produces an oxymoron in the mix- ture, odd at first sight, of old age and youth in the nostalgic image of the old safe time of childhood. Actual children are absent (or at any rate unmentioned) in the celebrations, but images of them are present — in the wealthy with their rare toys, in the remembered little girls in the cotton frocks, in the reference to the hundreds of thousands of child readers laughing at Carroll's jokes, in the children of Dickens and the Liddell-Hargreaves families. Indeed, the celebrations and the article remind us that Alice Pleasance Lid- dell was once both the child inspiration and the child audience for Alice (although the child Peter Davies was not quite the original of Peter Pan but more a member of an original audience). Pretending not to know the difference between a fictive child and a real one who inspired or listened to the first oral version or versions of a text may be silly, but it is salutary. The conceit reminds us that much children's litera- ture does indeed emerge from interactions between real-life children and adults and that the interactions often move from game playing and role-playing to storytelling. The most interesting thing about "Tea" is that it manifests group regression to a past life-period. We see regression in the pervasive, affectedly childish From the (London) Times, June 29, 1932. sweetness, or preciousness, that quality called twee (like but not quite the same as the American cute). We see regression in the two similar role-games of the essayist as child and the essayist as Wonderland char- acter (and child) playing the game of "let's pretend we're pretending." Both exemplify the older but still undead tweeness in talk about children's literature. This abrogation of adulthood in what seems affected wonder and playfulness is called the Poohsticks mental- ity, after those A. A. Milne aficionados who celebrate notable occasions in his life by playing Poohsticks as the climax to pilgrimages to the original places where the Pooh stories were told and which they mention. I suspect that rather than genuine nostalgia-re- gression, Franklin's textual mediation as a child or childish persona, with her own equiv- alent of the wide "dreaming eyes of wonder," involves for her at least half- conscious role-play- ing. Minxish, gush- ing faux-naivete is characteristic of the emphatically incon- spicuous first-per- son alter-ego pro- tagonists of her work all through her career. After the first paragraph, "How many millions must have wished that they could have tea with Alice and the Mad Hatter!" Franklin tells us how the wish was granted in her case in a winner-of-the-Disney-con- test, dream-come-true, queen-for-a-day tone. "Tea" begins and ends with how "it scarcely seemed real when I found myself actually seated at the same table as the one and only Alice herself." "It all happened so simply" comes in the voice of wonder at entering a fairy tale and is kept up all through, in, for example, the use of a childish register with "goodies" to express delight in the feast-abundance. It peaks with the meaning, rather than the diction, of the childish, worshiping superlatives of the last paragraph, where Franklin writes of the "matchless inspiration" for the "greatest of all writers," who, "as it should have been in a fairy tale, sat down at the table.... There she was just across the table from me." Franklin apparently sat speechless, goggle-eyed at Alice's proximity. The line between children and adults also disappears in White's odd slippage between the two categories of child innocence and adult knowledge. "Hundreds of thousands of children had laughed at [Carroll's] jokes, and not one had ever blushed" indicates some confusion between the children, who would not blush at what they failed in their innocence to understand, and their book-selecting guardians, who would be the ones to undertake any blushing on their behalf. The simple wonder of the child entering the fairy tale is allied to the strand of imagery of the second game, dual-sourced, in Franklin's mind and that of the company: playing at Wonderland. It begins with the decorated invitation "about eight inches square," larger than an ordinary one, probably meant to re- call the one handed to the Frog Footman. Franklin's own Wonderland/Looking-Glass imagery is initiated when she opens "Tea" with the child's wishful fantasy of entering the world of the book, goes on to conflate the person with the Active character in the metaphor of the "one and only Alice," and extends the confla- tion to real and fictive space with the phrase "won- derland of London." Then Squire archly calls the assemblage "the most extraordinary menagerie of people, who could have been collected by no other interest excepting Lewis Carroll." The heterogeneous Wonderland/Looking-Glass animals are metaphori- cally children, and so are the adults here assimilated to them. The adult-regression game is both Franklin's and Squire's; maybe it is shared by all present. Franklin describes the "let's pretend" game with CarroUian or childish diction, or a combination thereof: the "greediest might have shed a bitter tear" at the "frabj[o]us, scrumptious meal," at which are offered the rock cakes and gingersnaps that were Carroll's favorite goodies (is this actually recorded anywhere?). Franklin then enacts the "let's pretend" game by putting herself in the role of "infinitesimal," "invisible and inconsequent Dormouse": "I sought an inconspicuous corner for the part of ... Dormouse, while among those present, distinguished ... to take the part of Mad Hatters and March Hares, Red and White Queens, Duchesses, Knights or Jabberwock, Carpenter, Walrus, and Gryphon" were the list of solid notables. This sentence conjoins the worlds of whimsy to solidity and itself enacts the movement between them. The division in the sentence between plural and singular roles both suggests that fictive roles can be duplicated in the game of enacting them and replicates the stress on the unique original. The temper of the times and its notion of child- hood, the Victorian inheritance, comes through clearly in White's image of Carroll as "one of the most amusing and purest souls in the world." Franklin takes her cue from White in her own image of the "gentle grey-haired Lewis Carroll ... the amiable, sub- stantial, respectable, convincing Dodo" — why con- vincing? It is all very endearing, though it could not always have been so in real life. Franklin's account of Alice Liddell Hargreaves is even more obviously an exercise in mythmaking. Franklin evokes the rever- ent worshipers — "who could be hurried when Alice herself was coming to tea?" — and the converts, "the most matter-of-fact [who] could realise" her power. Alice is not only unique, "the one and only," "her- self," but also the ageless immortal, the fairy simul- taneously old and young (like George MacDonald's or Charles Kingsley's anima figures): "Alice at eighty, looking not more than 60 or 55," the lady in whom can be seen her lineaments "when a child." She is the muse — "matchless inspiration and model" — and she is the perfect lady, "Alice to-day still so winning ... this gracious lady." Alice's opening speech is the least interesting of all the addresses, and she does not say anything recordable to her worshiper. Her power is that of perfect femininity, the silent child, the silent woman. She is the daughter figure — the cotton-frocked daughter of the pure man, the mem- ory of whose birth she celebrates. She is the mother figure — mother of children (Captain Hargreaves is present) and figurative mother, who brings to birth and inhabits the literary work. She is the "very old person." And all on one page. Miles Franklin's "Tea with Alice," which surfaced serendipitously, reminds us that ephemeral accounts of events such as the Carroll centenary celebration can be of value to people interested in children's literature and the institutionalization of the classics. Its naivete, by rendering a cultural celebration trans- parent, reminds us, too, that the selective tradition in literature — whereby certain works and authors are hailed and admitted to the canon, allowed to have ad- miring readers and to bear close scrutiny — operates within children's literature. A cultural celebration like an exhibition is one of the processes of selection and institutionalization. But the exhibition in 1932 did not set out to celebrate a book or books, but their originary point, the author; the order of priority is reversed. Squire playfully replicates Carroll's role of humor- ous rhymester when he pays tribute to the Alice books in verse, but "Tea" also shows us that the occasion ac- tually focuses on neither the work nor the person but celebrates objects (though it would be claimed that the person was being celebrated through the objects that he inspired). We see, although Franklin does not, that the celebration is an exercise in selling. Her host Mr. Wilson, "celebrated for his organization of unique and delightful occasions," of which this is one, is a bookseller, the head of Bumpus, who is organiz- ing the event to publicize his shop and other wares, like Falconer Madan's Catalogue}'^ We also see that the celebration is socially biased, exclusive, hymning but not including children. The "guests very quickly obscured the exhibits, and the speaking began," and "the throng milled around, hiding the exhibits, till one lost sight of all but outstanding things." We may, if we wish, read the scene as an allegory. The people hide the things. The things, some of them money- making spin-offs that use Alice moiih (the card games and biscuit tins and dramatizations), hide the Alice books and their pleasures. The inessential detritus of snobbery and nostalgia hide the possibility that something is being sold and that that something is neither the pleasure nor the appreciation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking- Glass. But celebrations of culturally significant work and commemorations of culturally significant people do not have to be exhibitions of things nor occasions to gush. To me, a reading of "Tea with Alice" suggests that non-condescending scholarship, criticism, and the cultural study of children's literature are ulti- mately worth more than huge galas attended by the glitterati of the day. AFTERWORD The text of my original commentary appears above, silently correcting a few words and adding a few foot- note-citations (with footnote numbering amended to take into account the additional footnotes to Frank- lin's text itself). It omits only my query about whether J. C. Squire's verses are still extant, something which Matt Demakos' notes now clear up. As far as I can tell, the reprint of Franklin's piece with my commentary was not noted in Jill Roe and Margaret Bettison's work on Franklin's journalism. ^^ When this article was first printed, Barbara Wall, a scholar in children's literature, said to me that Franklin's piece gave her the clear impression that she knew nothing and cared nothing about Carroll or the Alicehooks. Franklin's account of her early years, Childhood at Brindabella,^^ actually says that literary material for children (including fairy tales) played but a small part in her childhood, and perhaps she was indeed simply "playing along" with the tone of the Carroll celebrations because that was what was expected of her, and the only sort of thing that would have seen the light of print at the time. However, it is worth noting that just as fairytale revisioning seems to play a large part in Franklin's oeuvre,^^ the introduc- tory verses to My Career Goes Bung, which exist in two forms (a draft form as well as the published version), are in the same meter as Carroll's "They told me you had been to her," with pronouns used to a somewhat similar puzzling effect, and so, to me, suggest the de- liberate modeling on and/or parody of Carroll. Bung was first drafted about 1902 and possibly redrafted in the 1930s before its publication in the next decade, so depending on when the putative 1930s redraft- ing occurred and when the prefatory verses were composed, Franklin's involvement with the Carroll centenary might have had something to do with these verses. I have given my life to the study of children's literature, so cannot be accused of condescension towards it. But I have always felt uneasy about certain things regarding the "construction" of the image of children's literature in general, which this 1930s celebration of Carroll, and Franklin's account of it, brought into focus for me. I mentioned Franklin's strident Australian cultural and social nationalism (this, and its contradictions, are one of the themes of Bung, an autobiographical novel drafted just after her first novel) and her Australian egalitarianism (a note pronounced from her first novel, the autobiographi- cal My Brilliant Career,^^ onwards, though in both novels the heroine is careful to stress how well-born she is). 1 said that these features do not accord with Franklin's description of Alice Hargreaves and the snobbery in the list of notables. Now, the Times ac- count of the celebrations, which Matt Demakos draws upon (see endnote 14), reminds us that both Franklin and the Times do the same thing, in mentioning some of the notables by position rather than by name, and indeed Squire does too. This feature led me to think that it might be worth spelling out that when cultural, social — or, for that matter, intellectual — notables give their imprimatur to a literary work, that imprimatur may help to get its merit recognized and the work sold, but is irrelevant to that merit itself, if it exists, whether or not it is recognized by the tastes of the time, be they of the market or the academy. It is the work that primarily matters, not the weighty people who read it (nor its author, if it comes to that). Nowhere in Franklin's piece, or the celebrations themselves, are the "literary merits" of Carroll's work addressed. (Matt Demakos tells me in this regard that possibly the sole recorded animadversion on the merit of the Alice books is in the couplets of Squire's verses which read: For more and more, when one's full-grown One finds in Lewis Carroll's works A deeper, healthier meaning lurks; For sometimes in the dead of night. When mind's alert and moon shines bright. And no wind blows, and no tree stirs The terrifying thought occurs That haply all the world's affairs Are run by Dormice or March Hares And Carroll wrote, and not in mirth A straight description of the Earth. Though Franklin does not directly name Carroll's work as "beloved," these celebrations and her account seem to me to take for granted this work as "beloved by all," with a love/reverence extending to the "origi- nal" Alice Liddell and Co., and thus requiring no analysis of its merits (something a little different from the annotation that was a part of the celebrations and noted in Franklin's piece). This impulse to take for granted non-mainstream work, ("for women and chil- dren" in particular) as "beloved" work, an impulse nowadays sometimes mediated though the notion of the "paracanon" in reference to such work as Little Women, strikes me as a troublesome one. A work being beloved does not preclude it also being good (being "art"), and stating a love for a work by a community of non-academic readers does perhaps provide a way into granting it a place for serious discussion. But a beloved/paracanonical work may or may not have "literary merit" (however that merit is defined). So it is likely in the hierarchical world in which we live that the results of either taking for granted or focus- ing on the love will result in an ultimate stamp of marginalization upon the work, ending up in it being covertly assumed that a beloved/paracanonical work may indeed have "appeal," but usually wof whatever literary merit is thought to be. In latter years, after World War II, Carroll's work itself has attracted much discussion from the mainstream high academic cul- ture (including linguists and philosophers as well as scholars and critics). Hence, the literary merit of these particular works of children's literature is prob- ably firmly established — though another result of this attention could also be the would-be compliments and actual insults that Carroll's work, a special case, is either "really" for adults, or "at least today, really for adults." Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that Car- roll's work is the focus of a token nod to children's literature by the mainstream, in acknowledgment of the margins (by high culture in acknowledgment of the worth of either middlebrow or popular culture), rather than a more general acceptance that literary merit of different sorts can inhere alike in works less or more simple, less or more popular, and directed at any audience. (And yes, I know about Harry Potter bringing work for children into the public eye.) So in general, the celebrations and Franklin's piece lead me to say that I feel that too much taking for granted (or assertion) of love for a work, without a balancing assertion of whatever its merits might be thought to be, is a dangerous thing to do in relation to works for children in particular (be these works old or new). As I said at the time, the celebrations and Franklin's piece also seem to indicate the trouble- some desire to steep tokenized classics for children in nostalgia, while they fetishize or glamorize the cultural capital of the past. I did not know that A. A. Milne was part of the committee for the exhibition. His inclusion indicates the deference of contempora- neous children's literature to earlier work, or perhaps even a continuity between one period of children's literature, the 1860s, and another, the 1920s (or, if you like, Alice Hargreaves and Peter Davies and Milne as standing for the beginning, middle, and end of the "golden age" of English children's literature. a notion, alas, now scoffed at as a cliche, at any rate by some Americans). But Milne's presence (like that of Peter Davies evoking the boy who did not want to grow up) is to me also emblematic of such nostalgia, conjuring up as it does the little boy who will always be playing somewhere in the wood, or he who will be six for ever and ever, whereas Alice, indeed, will grow up and tell children her story. Franklin's piece reminds us, probably despite it- self, that works of children's literature (like all litera- ture), are commodities that circulate in a commercial world, not merely in a world of those who love and study particular texts. One must be wary of all com- mercially-directed celebrations (or academic career- enhancing gatherings) that masquerade as some- thing more purely appreciative, and there is indeed a danger in being carried away by all gala celebrations that set out not so much to celebrate a worthy book, as they purport to do, but to sell things and make money for businesspeople, while drawing upon the weight of noteworthy institutions, places and people. My original draft had a paragraph that was omitted in the process of the editor's and referees' emendations and re-emendations, which related the relatively in- nocent 1930s celebrations and Franklin's piece and my reservations about both to a more contemporary celebration/exhibition, far more troublesome than the 1930s one, which also needs extended analysis and comment. Of course I know that one question- able celebration/exhibition does not vitiate all such events, and only mean to say that one need not rush into such things without reflecting on their said and unsaid motives and ends. At first, the "Alice 125" project, celebrating 125 years oi Alice's Adventures in Wonderland m 1990 under the auspices of the self-styled "Carroll Foundation" based in Flemington, Victoria, Australia, seemed a worthy endeavor, and attracted the patronage of ev- eryone from Marcel Marceau (the "World Patron") to many distinguished Carrollians. Among its be- nevolent goals were the celebration of International Literacy Year by sponsoring translations to bring the total up to 125 languages, "the world's record" (why would translations of Alice be more worthwhile than original works in languages other than English, anyway?), and a touring exhibition of works by 125 Australian artists on Alician themes, as well as books and other examples of the translations — to be seen in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Adelaide through 1991, and then 1 think possibly to go overseas (I am not sure) . At first, it seemed to go very well — the exhi- bition was a grand success, and a stunning catalogue was produced. The project drew upon the dignity of the University of Melbourne and its letterhead, it seems, and was assigned copyright by some artists for their new illustrations to Alice. Problems began to sur- face when artists and other lenders wished to recover their property, and the hired translators were look- ing for their promised payments. The Foundation quickly disappeared in a flurry of lawsuits. I had been in China, and quite innocently rang the Foundation in the early 1990s to inquire about what they did, and whether they would have a job for me. I left message after message on the telephone, and once actually got someone, a man who promised to send me an ac- count of what they did, and who acted very interested in who I was and my work in children's literature, but I received nothing (and I am still looking for that job in children's literature). Anyhow, since ephemera is by its very nature hard to trace, it is here worth re- cording for future generations that the State Library of South Australia holds the Foundation's flyer for the exhibition, which is imbued with something very like the "rhetoric of enthusiasm" that seems to have permeated the 1930s celebrations themselves and Franklin's text alike. There was also an Australian television program on the Foundation, a copy of which I forwarded to Dr. Sandor Burstein at the time, which is now held in his collection. Anyhow, Franklin's work, ideally read in con- junction with the Times dLCCOunt, Squire's pamphlet, and the catalogue, is a valuable addition to Carrol- liana, and will probably be useful when someone looks back in order to trace the changing nature of the reputation/reception of the Alice books. Let us hope that other such ephemeral items lie wait- ing to be found. For example, tracing the current holder of the folder of press clippings from 1936 on Paul Schilder's psychoanalytic reading of Alice, the folder which Dr. Lauretta Bender showed Dr. Phyllis Greenacre in the 1950s, and analyzing the contents, would be a good thing to do.^'* As a lone voice, let me add, however, my feeling that more important than these ephemeral items, in a world where studies in children's literature are not usually focused on look- ing for forgotten meritorious work from the past, is the necessit)' for Carrollians, who are at home in the area from 1862 (the fateful boat trip) to 1904 (when Edwin H. Dodgson published The Story of Sylvie and Bruno, an abridgement of the Sylvie doublet for chil- dren), to introduce the world to other meritorious Victorian works for children, by hands other than Carroll's — for example, it would be a good place to start if someone provided at least full notes and commentary on what such works (noted in his letters and diaries) as The Lost Plum-Cake actually are, and whether they are independently worth reading by us today (whether they are to hand for us or not).^^ ' According to The Times, the event took place on June 28, 1932, two months after Mrs. Alice Hargreaves' sailing for the Columbia University celebrations in New York City (where events were not so simple) and only five weeks after her return to England. "Lewis Carroll / Exhibition Opened by "Alice" / Recollection of Dean of Christ Church," The Times (London), June 29, 1932, 17 (all further references to The Times are to this article). Edward Wakeling, "Mrs. Hargreaves Comes to the U.S.A." Proceedings of The Second International l^eiois Carroll Conference, edited by Charlie Lovett (Winston- Salem, N.C.: Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 1994), 45, 52. - The invitation, by Rex WTiistler, is reproduced in J. C. Squire, Speech at the Lewis Carroll Centenary Exhibition (London: J. and E. Bumpus, [1932]), [8]. Franklin mistook the Queen of Hearts for the Duchess. ^ Alice might have looked at these woodblocks with the thought, "Curiouser and curiouser." Gordon writes: "After Dodgson's death in 1898, Alice wrote to Macmillans [sic] ... asking to buy Tenniel's original wood-block illustrations. They told her, in a canny, if needless, untruth, that they had been 'inevitably destroyed' in the process of engraving. 'What, then, shall I have as my legacy?' wrote Alice to Regi- nald." Colin Gordon, Beyond the Looking Class: Reflections of Alice and Her Family (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 230-1. ^ According to the Sotheby's 2001 auction catalog, "Alice Har- greaves lent her presentation copy of the facsimile edition o( Alice's Adventures Underground..., a photograph of herself and Eldridge R.Johnson... as well as groups of wooden and china figures..., and a copy of Our Trip to Blunderland...." The catalog called the 1932 exhibition "the first major ex- hibition of books, manuscripts, letter and photographs by Lewis Carroll to be mounted. The committee included Alice Hargreaves, Sir Leicester Harmsworth, Mrs Maud Ffooks, Major C. H. W. Dodgson, A. A. Milne, M [orris] L. Parrish, Falconer Madan, Sidney Williams and John G. Wilson...." Leivis Carroll's Alice: The Photographs, Books, Papers and Personal Effect of Alice Liddell and Her Family (London: Sotheby's, June 6, 2001), s.v. [Lot] 146: "The Lewis Carroll Centenar\' in London... J & E. Bumpus Ltd., 1932. ..Signed "Alice P. Harg- reaves" on inside upper cover...", 206. -' Franklin seems to be paraphrasing quite accurately here, since the account of White's words in The Times is similar. ** Again, Franklin is paraphrasing. The full account of Alice's speech in The Times runs: "Mrs. Hargreaves, who was pre- sented with a bouquet of roses sent to her by a lady, aged 90, who had played with her as a little girl at the Deanen, de- scribed herself as a ven,' old person who got tired ven.- easily, biu she recalled the days when as one of a number of small girls limning about in cotton frocks, she knew Mr. Dodgson, before the name Lewis Carroll had been invented." But it seems that Alice's statement is not quite accurate. On Febru- ary 11, 1856, Carroll sent to Edmund Yates, editor of The Train, a list of four pen names to replace his first choice of "Dares," and records the name "Lewis Carroll" as chosen on March 1 (the issue is dated March 1856). His first re- corded meeting with the Liddells was on February 25, but without Alice. Only on April 25, almost two months after the name appeared in print, does he first record meeting the three-year-old Alice, attempting photographs of her and her sisters, and marking the day with a white stone. Edward Wakeling, I.ewis Carroll's Diaries: The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Clifford, England: The Lewis Carroll Soci- ety, 1994),2:39, 43, 65. ' The Times does not expand on Sir Cierald dii Maurier's speech. Du Maurier was son of George du Maurier, Punch artist, author of Trilby, and Peter Davies' maternal uncle. In 1904, the younger du Maurier inaugurated the roles of Mr. Darling and Captain Hook in Peter Pan. "Bird's eye tobacco" is a kind of tobacco (like honeydew, cavendish, shag, etc.), and references to it in novels seem to indicate that it is strong and cheap. ^ The Times does not expand on Mr. J. C. Squire's "neat and amusing verses..." either. The following extract is a good ex- ample of his style: "Till recently I thought Mi.ss Alice / Coeval with the Ciystal Palace, / Prince Albert and the Albert Hall, / And not a real girl at all; / ... / I little dreamt I'd have the honour / Of ever setting eyes upon her, / Still less that fate would ever lump us / Together in the halls of Bumpus / . . . / The catalogue details the lot / Mention the whole of them, I can nol\ / But yet (without the slightest malice) / The best exhibit still is Alice, / The girl who standing at life's portal, / Induced a man to be immortal." The pamphlet mentions that Bertram James Collingwood (the yoimger brother of Stuart Dodgson), also presented a speech. Oddly, (Polling- wood's speech does not seem to be referred to in any other surviving item related to the occasion. Squire, Speech at the I^ewis Carroll Centenary, 2-3, 6. ^ Isa Bowman wrote in The Story ofl^ewis Carroll (1899), "He always said I ate far too much, and he would never allow me more than one rock cake and a cup of tea." In "Alice's Rec- ollections of (]arrollian Days," Alice only mentions "a large basket full of cakes" and "all sorts of good things" besides the "cold chicken and salad." No source was found which named any other "favourite goodies," except for references to Carroll's habit of taking a biscuit at lunch. See Morton N. Cohen, Ijrwis Carroll: Interviews and Recollections (Iowa: Uni- versity of Iowa Press, 1989) 85, 99; for Carroll's biscuit eating, see, for example, Carroll to Mrs. W. Mallalieu, July 5, 1892, Morton Cohen, \vith the assistance of Roger Lancelyn Green, The Letters of Lewis Cairoll (New York: Oxford Universit)' Pre.ss, 1979), 914. "* In this sentence, Franklin refers to the fourth and fifth stanzas of "The Walrus and the Carpenter": "Such quanti- ties of sand" and "And shed a bitter tear." See Lewis Carroll, "Tweedledum and Tweedledee" in 'Through the Looking-Glass (London: Macmillan, 1872), 73-4. " For a full account of this work, see Michael Hancher, The Tenniel Illustrations to the "Alice" Books (Ohio State University Press, 1985), 40-47. According to Hancher the attribution to Massys, now the preferred spelling, is questioned. '^ Alice's brother (1865-1950) and his wife. " Lady Redesdale (mother of the Mitford sisters) was the former Sydney Bowles, who was one of Carroll's child corre- spondents. See Cohen, Letters 2, 840-1. '"^ The Times printed an extensive list of attendees, and, like Squire's pamphlet, often listed them by title rather than by name. The following may be of interest to Carrollians: Sir Harold Hartley, Mr. Harold Hartley, Mr. Falconer Madan, Mr. S. H. Williams, Sir W. Graham Green, Lady Hastings, Mi.ss Beatrice Hatch, Miss Evelyn Hatch, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Morgan, Lady Max-Muller (sic). Sir John Murray, Mrs. A. Murray Smith, Mrs. Reginald Smith, and Mr. W. M. Standen. Where Franklin names "Sir Victor and Lady Gollancz," 'Tlw. Times names "Lady and Miss Gollancz." ''' Miles Franklin, Sydney Royal (London: Shakespeare Head, 1947). See Sanjay Sircar, "Miles Franklin's Sydney Royal (1947): An Antipodean Menippea for Children," The New Revieio of Children 's Literature and Lihrarianship 1 (1995): 135-160, and "Transformative 'Australianness' and Powerful Children: Miles Franklin's Sydney Royal," Bookbird?>l, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 25-30. '*' Miles Franklin, My Career Goes Bung (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1946, rpt. 1980), 169. '^ "The Visibly Vicious Vulture, '^\Tio Wrote Some Verses to a Veal-Cutlet in a Volume Bound in Vellum." Edward Lear, More Nonsense Pictures, Rhymes Botany dfc. (London: Robert Bush, 1872). '^ Lion Feuchtwanger, Die hdfiliche Herzogin Margaretha Mault- asch, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, (Berlin: Weg\veiser- Verlag, 1923, reprinted 1972). ''' Lewis Carroll Centenaty Exhibition, Including a Catalogue of the Exhibition, with Notes and Essays on Dodgson 's Illustrators by Har- old Hartley, and Additional Literary Pieces, Chiefly Unpublished, with Six Illustrations, edited by Falconer Madan (London: J. and E. Bumpus, Old Courthouse, 1932). '^^ A Gregarious Culture: Tofncal Wjitirigs of Miles Eranklin, edited by Jill Roe and Margaret Bettison (St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 2001). ^' Miles Franklin, Childhood at Brindahella: My Eirsl Ten Years (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, [1963]). '^'^ See Sanjay Sircar, "My Brilliant Career as Metafiction: Feminist Rewriting, Resistance and Collage," Zeitschrift fiir Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A (hmrlerly of Language, Literature and Culture 46, no. 1 (Spring 1998), 52-68; "Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career," The Courier-Mail (Brisbane), Education Supplement, June 18, 1985, 31; "Artfully Artless: Miles Franklin and My Brilliant Career," Folio (Winter 1983), 20-27; "Reading and Writing against the Maerchen: Miles Franklin's No Family," Marvels and Tales, 10 no. 2, Dec. 1996, 53-67. -' Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career (London: William Black- wood & Son.s, 1901). '^'* Phyllis Greenacre, Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of Two Lives (New York: International Universities Press, 1955), 259. ''^■' Quite by happy coincidence, this call has been picked up by Charlie Lovett (see pp. 13-14). I am told that Mr. Lovett has negative views of all the books (-arroll championed, but even accounts of books not of the first rank, or books downright poor, are useful in building up and filling out our sense of the period, for ordinary readers today have virtually no direct access to the texts. And degustibus non est disputandum: opinions on these forgotten books themselves might legiti- mately differ as well; further, they might be extrinsically or intrinsically interesting, for various reasons, as against merito- rious. 10 yC ^(Mtofi/ S^ ^arti/y MARK BURSTEIN -0^^ ■^^^^h, Boston and environs. Famous for its Ljk tea party, and a place where Wonderland M. Xlies not just in one's imagination but at the end of the "Blue" MBTA subway line (it's a grey- hound-racing track in Revere). Erstwhile home to the Girl's Latin School, where the only one of Carroll's pennings to be published exclusively outside of England was printed, and pres- ent home to the Harcourt Amory collec- tion, where Carroll's own vellum-bound copy of Wonderland now is housed. More below. On Friday, the Maxine Schaefer Memorial Reading took place at the Perkins School for the Blind in nearby Watertown. The Perkins School, founded in 1829,' educates blind and deaf-blind students, and is proud to be the alma mater of Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller. Maxine's daughter EUie began the hour- long visit, attended by about fifty students from their middle- and high school classes, by explaining who Maxine was and why she was so important to our society. Despite being a bit "under the weather," the fabulous Patt Griffin performed a memorable rendition of the Cat- erpillar scene. After the enthusiastic applause died down, Alan Tannenbaum, David and Mary Schaefer and grandson Mickey Salins answered questions. The students and the school library were then pre- sented with CDs of Wonderland, the first time the fund has been used in a medium other than books. "It truly warms my heart to see the children's excitement when they attend one of these readings and receive their gift. The readings have occurred for over seven years now! My mother would be so proud!" ~ Ellie Schaefer-Salins. The general meeting took place the next day, a hot, muggy Saturday, May 8, within the air-condi- tioned comfort of the Houghton Library at Harvard University in Cambridge. We sat in a darkish green, neo-Georgian room amidst glassed-in incunabula and other books with brown bindings and gilt stamps, a room in which Mr. Dodgson would surely have felt most at home — save for the laptops and digital pro- jectors, of course. Through the generosity of Arthur Armory Collection bookplate. A. Houghton Jr., class of 1929, Harvard (founded in 1636) became the first American university to con- struct a separate research facility for the housing and study of rare books and manuscripts by establishing the eponymous library in 1942. The meeting began with a few announcements by our president, Alan Tannen- baum,''^ including sad news about Kay Rossman (p. 29), the sched- ule of our next meetings (p. 30), and a proclamation heralding the present author's ten years of edi- torship of the Knight Letter. Peter Accardo, whose title is "Acquisitions Bibliographer, Department of Rare Books" at the Houghton, bade us welcome. He led off with an excerpt from John Ruskin's autobiography, Praeterita, describing an after- noon tea with the Liddell girls, and went on to discuss the Hough- ton's Carroll holdings. In 1926, the university received the oustanding Lewis Carroll collection of Harcourt Amory, class of 1876.^ Just a minuscule sample of their noteworthy holdings were on display: downstairs in a case were Carroll's own copy of the 1865 Wondeiiand, bound in white vellum; handwritten manuscripts of one of the issues of the Rectory Umbrella and one of Mischmasch; the table-of-contents page for Looking-Glass with Car- roll's handwritten corrections;* and other treasures. Scattered around the meeting room or in Accardo's hands were: a copy of Phantasmagoria with Carroll's corrections and handwritten copies of reviews; a first-edition Looking-Glass with drawings, touched-up proofs, and letters from Tenniel to the brothers Dal- ziel bound in; and a large electrotype (raised white- on-white letters!) edition of Wonderland \n?ide, coinci- dentally, for the Perkins School for the Blind (above) in 1904. And these were just the "teasers" from their vast collection. Our first speaker was Frederick C. "Rick" Lake, Harvard class of 1980, lyricist, ballroom dancer, and investment advisor — to give you just a flavor of his wide-ranging mind. He presented warm, anecdotal 11 Will Brooker recollections centered around three journeys: one personal, one folkloristic, and one mythical. Among his personal remembrances was writing the libretto for Looking-Glass! during his college days, which was awarded Harvard's David McCord Prize in the Cre- ative Arts; and more recently, writing libretto and lyrics for Elephant &" Castle, a musical which relocated Looking-Glass to one night during the London Blitz. Coincidentally, our own Andrew Sellon starred as Humpty Dumpty in the first one, and mastered multi- ple roles for the second."' Lake's senior honors thesis, "Folkloristic Aspects of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adxjen- tures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass," the basis of part of today's talk, had also been presented at "The Lewis Carroll Phenomenon" conference at Cardiff University of Wales in 1998. As Lake says, "Folklore was, perhaps, among the first critical approaches ever suggested for the works of Lewis Carroll... The idea was in a letter to the author himself, from a fellow academic pointing out the par- allels between the Alicehooks and classic world myths: Are we to suppose, after all, that the saga of the Jabberwocky is one of the universal heirlooms which the Aryan race at its dispersion carried with it from the great cradle of the family? You really must consult Max Miiller about this. It is probable that the origo originalissima may be discovered in Sanskrit, and that we shall by and by have a labrivokaveda. The hero will turn out to be the Sun-God in one of his Avatars; and the Tumtum tree the great Ash Yggdrasil of the Scandinavian mythology."'' Robert Scott, Dean of Rochester, known later for his German translation of the poem, wrote the letter in 1872. Lake's talk (abridged in this report even more than usual, as his article is being prepared for future presentation in these pages) showed how the Alice stories (both variants of a similar tale) fit into classic story structures of folklore and mythology. He also illustrated how their creation was comparable to the oral transmission of traditional tales, both in the real circumstances of their origin and the fictional retellings inside the books. (For example, the Alice books both start with the invocation to the goddess /muse, in the style of Homer and other ancient sto- rytellers.) His exegesis demonstrated how they also conform to the standard typology of "girl tales": from the Substituted Bride and the Search for the Lost Spouse to, most familiar of all, Cinderella. He delved into "life-and-death food elements," comparing the stories to Genesis and the Scottish folktale "Ashley Pelt." Invoking the spirit of Joseph Campbell, Lake also eloquently discussed how the Alice stories fit into "the universal monomyth" and archetypes of all cul- tures, from Babylonian creation myths to Star Wars. Alan Tannenbaum then introduced some of our guests. Among the forty souls gathered were repre- sentatives from sister societies in England (Dr. Selwyn Goodacre, Will Brooker), Canada (Dayna McCaus- land, Andy Malcolm), and Japan (Eiko Okuni). Our featured guest. Will Brooker, Associate Pro- fessor in Communication at Richmond (the Ameri- can University in London) and author of six books including Batman Unmasked'^ and the excellent new volume Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Cul- ture (see p. 32 for a full review), spoke next. His fasci- nating talk, "The Man in White Paper: Lewis Carroll in British Journalism, 1992-2004," was a captivating look at the public perception of Dodgson as reflected through 77 printed articles he had culled using the Lexis-Nexis search engine. Much of his talk was adapted from chapter two of his book, and so need not be gone into in great detail here. Suffice it to say that Booker's thesis is that there are two coexisting images of Dodgson: the "sainted innocent" and the "dark pedophile" — a "national treasure and a vaguely suspect enigma" — and that we are not dealing with the real man and the real little girl, but rather with icons called "Lewis Carroll" and "Alice," with the double-quotes emphasized. When theories pass from the measured argu- ment of more scholarly discourse to the bold statements of popular discussion, we find crudely drawn caricatures forming in the public consciousness. Most readers will come to associate these cartoonish but powerful images, rather than the cautiously indecisive portraits we gain from recent biographies, with the name Lewis Carroll. There is no room for subtlety or tentative suggestions in this kind of writing... and we should be aware that their articles will do more than any scholarly work to shape most people's understanding of what "we," as a culture, "know" about him. 12 He concluded that Mr. Dodgson seems retroac- tively on trial, as we fruitlessly and unfairly attempt to judge him by modern standards. In the 1930s, he was seen through distorted Freudian lenses; in the 1960s through psychedelic ones; in today's perverted world, through "tabloid" eyes. A nearby eatery provided fine midday comes- tibles. In the afternoon program, Charlie Lovett, past president of our Society and author of ten books, several of them on Carroll, prefaced his talk by discussing The Jabberiuock, magazine of the Girls' Latin School-' from 1888 to 1928. Carroll's letter to them granting them permission to use the title and explaining the origins of the term is well known, as is his poem — Carroll's only publication exclusively printed outside of England — "A Lesson in Latin," making humorous use of the homograph amare (the infinitive "to love" and the vocative "bitter one"). Two other letters were written to the school; one of them was published. As issues of this magazine are nigh unto impossible to find, Lovett kindly produced a lovely eight-page keepsake for us, containing facsimi- les of two pages from the first issue (February, 1888), all of Dodgson 's contributions, and an obituary poem to him, all reprinted from originals in Lovett's collec- tion, i" He then began his talk, "Lewis Carroll: Shepherd of Books," by discussing his latest project: collecting a duplicate of the library of C. L. Dodgson, using Jef- frey Stern's Lewis Carroll, Bibliophile^^ as a springboard, and correcting many of its errors, inconsistencies, and omissions in the process. His resultant 350-page "monster," a true and accurate catalogue of Dodg- son 's library, will be published by McFarland next spring, and Charlie is on a personal quest to acquire ever-more-arcane titles. Lovett then began his actual theme: those very few books by authors other than himself in whose publication Dodgson was instrumental, or at least in- fluential. There were five: The Likeness of Christ (1880) by his acquaintance Thomas Heaphy, whose art he had admired; Through Ranks to a Commission (1881) by his former student Acland Troyte; Bumblebee Bogo's Budget (1887), a collection of poems by his friend Wil- liam Webb Follet Synge, illustrated by another friend, Alice Havers (Mrs. Frederick Morgan) and published anonymously (by "A Retired Judge"); Evie; or, The Visit to Orchard Farm (1889) by his cousin Elizabeth Geor- gina Wilcox; and The Lost Plum-Cake (1897) by the selfsame cousin, then Mrs. Charles Allen. Mr. Dodgson did not display much critical acu- men in the books he "shepherded," to say the least. Lovett's hysterically funny readings of some of the abysmal poems from Bumblebee Bogo's Budget (not to mention his infectious enthusiasm in his manifold declaimings of the title) showed for what meager //V Bumblebee Bogo substance Dodgson practically forced Macmillan to publish this book — in identical formats to the Alice books yet! It did not sell well. Similarly, Evie, a maud- lin, treacly tale of a dying girl discovering the joys of the countryside, was poorly produced and of no particular merit, but was quite amusing to our mod- ern ears when the more mawkish passages were read. Dodgson 's introduction to The Lost Plum Cakevjais not only his only preface to another's book: it was the last piece of his writing to appear in print in his lifetime. Lovett concluded by mentioning some books that Dodgson did not have much to do with publish- ing, but kept a large supply of, to give as gifts. His greatest enthusiasm here seems to have been for an 1887 picture book by Edith Shute (illustrator, by the way, of The Lost Plum Cake) csdled Jappie Chappie and Hoiv He Loved a Dollie, an utterly racist (to modern eyes) bit of drivel probably based on the immense popularity of The Mikado. Next, Dr. Anashia Plackis of Stony Brook, a children's literature specialist whose doctoral dis- sertation was on Carroll, spoke on "Oxford's Trojan Horse: Lewis Carroll's Covert Drama," a speculation on Dodgson's theology and how it informs his writ- ings. She began by demonstrating how passionate was his opposition to censorship, how resistant he was to priestly authority, and how he was almost heretical in his disbelief in eternal punishment. These views, of course, were best kept secret, as he was a Broad Church member Dn Plakis took us back before the time of Con- stantine to show how the priestly caste was inaugu- rated, and how it gained its autocracy. The blatantly anti-authoritarian Alice books, she feels, are a "Trojan horse," as they were meant to expose the tactics of suppression and intimidation of the priests and bish- ops who keep the lait)' in thrall. With nods to the "Little Birds" poem of Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (the references to "letterpress, when roasted" as defining bookburning and censor- ship), Milton's Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1644), and several of young Dodgson's early magazine pictures of the sadism 13 Dr. Selwyn Goodacre of authority being punctured by youthful ideahsm ("The First Earring," "High Life and Low Life" from the Rectory Umbrella, and "He Gave It to his Father" from Mischmasch, leading to the great emblematic illustration of the Jabberwock being slain by the di- vine child), and Carroll's own illustration from Under Ground oi {he White Rabbit ("symbol of the Beast"), she showed how much he despised the abuse of authority. Dodgson "worked quietly within the cor- ridors of power to make Oxford a more humane and democratic institution." Her enlightening discussion moved on to the theological disputes around 1867 with Wilberforce, Darwin and the like. She noted that the Adventures "w eve first told on July 4th, a date of no little significance to the overthrowing of authority. Her diversions and digressions into the "Mouse's Tale" ("Fury as Satan"), the quoted passage about William the Conqueror, Dodgson as a Gnostic and a Socratic, Tertullian, and The Da Vinci Codevjere of further interest. She noted that Dodgson's father (the ultimate authority figure in Dodgson Jr. 's youth) sided with the Bishop in all this. In Wonderland, the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy collapses: "You're noth- ing but a pack of cards." There was a brief intermission and feeding-frenzy as books and other objects were sold, bartered, and given away. One piece of excellent news: the DVD of Andy Malcolm and George Pastic's superb 24-minute film "Sincerely Yours," premiered at our San Fran- cisco meeting, is now for sale (p. 41). Our final speaker. Dr. Selwyn Goodacre, former chairman of the Lewis Carroll Society (UK) and edi- tor of its journal /a/^^^rti'oc/t)! for two decades, returned to his greatest literary passion, the original Macmillan Alice, for his talk "Annotated Tenniel." With his usual dry wit, he kept us enthralled. It was Goodacre's contention that while Martin Gardner had done sterling work with the various editions of his Annotated Alice, he had paid scant at- 14 tention to the pictures of John Tenniel. Goodacre sought to redress the balance by homing in almost exclusively on the pictures for Alice's Adventures, and demonstrating the many ways in which Tenniel complemented the text and added to the story with his own humorous touches. Using a PowerPoint presentation, he showed pic- tures of every page of the "6s." edition that had a Ten- niel picture, commenting on each one in turn, point- ing out the interaction between text and picture. So we saw the Father William pictures as chapbook pas- tiche, the subtle and humorous changes in the court- room scenes, what the chimney smoke reveals as Bill is hurtled skyward, the possible background figures in the puppy picture, and the way in which characters are grouped in the Caucus Race scenes for maximum effect. Goodacre showed how often Tenniel was able to support Carroll in solving problems set by the text, for example the tricky situation presented by a child approaching, and having to cope with, a Tea Party made up of adults. We saw how skillfully Tenniel used lighting effects to frame or maximize key features in the pictures, and why, for example, some pictures are full page, some alongside blocks of text, some chap- ter headings, and so on. For a full exposition, we must await the possible eventual publication of Goodacre's Annotated Tenniel. He distributed a nice keepsake of statistics and data on the illustrations, including a tantalizing segment on sections of the book that could have been illustrated, and a bibliography. With a few more hearty cries of "Bumblebee Bogo's Budget" (a tongue-twister leading to "Stum- blebum Bongo's Bupkis" and other variations), we dissolved, only to re-amalgamate at one of Boston's fa- mous seafood restaurants for dinner, where we had to explain to our British friends that "chowder" (or, lo- cally, "chowdah") was American for "beautiful soup." ' Visit their Web site at www.perkins.org to learn more about this worthy and historical institute. '^ Whose itinerary was between the Rhyming State Capitols (Austin to Boston). ■^ Its handsome catalogue, by Flora Livingston, was printed in a hardcover edition of 65 in 1932. ■* See "The Authentic Wasp" by Matt Demakos in Knight Letter 72:15. ■'' Most regrettably, Andrew was prevented from attending this meeting due to illness. *' Robert Scott to Lewis Carroll, 1872, in Aspects of Alice, edited by Robert Phillips (New York: Vintage, 1971), 377. ' Will Brooker, Batman Unmasked (London: Continuum, 2001). " Will Brooker, Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture (London: Continuum, 2004). ■' Now the co-ed Boston Latin Academy. '" Further information can be found in Charles Lovett's Lewis Carroll and the Press — An Annotated Bibliography of Charles Dodgson's Contributions to Periodicals (Oak Knoll/British Li- brary, 1999). ' ' Jeffrey Stern, Lewis Carroll Bibliophile (Luton, Bedforshire: White Stone Publishing; The Lewis Carroll Society, 1997). ^^ Mk. Dodgson and rhe Royal Family EDWARD WAKELING Part II: The Duchess and Her Family THE DUCHESS OF ALBANY Dodgson became acquainted with the Queen's son Prince Leopold^ during his days at Oxford, but he did not meet his wife and children until some years later, by which time Leopold had already died. Dodgson met the widow Princess Helena^ as a guest of Lord Salisbury at Hat- field House in June 1889. The two Royal children were also there. In a letter to Isa Bowman, written from Hatfield House on June 8, 1889, he wrote: Then there is the Duchess of Albany here, with two such sweet little children. She is the widow of Prince Leopold (the Queen's youngest son), so her children are a Prince and Princess.... Now that I have made friends with a real live little Princess, I don't intend ever to speak to any more children that haven't titles. In fact, I'm so proud, and I hold my chin so high, that I shouldn't even 5^^ you if we met!'' The Duchess oj Albany and her children (Private Collection) Clearly impressed at being introduced to the Duchess and her children. Prin- cess Alice'' and Prince Leopold,'' he recorded in his diary the same meeting: Once at luncheon I had the Duchess as neighbour, and once at breakfast, and had -jM Based on a talk given to the Lewis Carroll Society (UK) on April 28, 2000. Extracts from Dodgson's diaries and letters are the copyright of the Trustees of the C. L. Dodgson Estate, who have kindly given permi.ssion for them to be reproduced in this article. Part I, "Queen Victoria and Her Family," was in the previous issue (#72) of the Knight Letter, and it included an abbreviated family tree. All letters presented with salutations and signatures are published here for the first time. several other chats with her, and found her very pleasant indeed. Princess Alice is a sweet little girl, though with rather unruly high spirits. Her little brother was entirely fascinating: a perfect little Prince, and the picture of good humour.'' PRINCESS ALICE On June 10, 1889, Dodgson noted in his diary: "I got the Duchess' leave to send the lit- tle Alice a copy of the Nursery 'Alice': and mean to send with it Alice Under Ground for her- self."' There was something in Dodgson's personality that made him inclined to help and support a widow with chil- dren, even though the family was of royal blood. There are many other instances of him befriending widows and families who had lost their father; for example, the Bar- rys, the Balfours, the Cootes, the Druries, the Haringtons, the Ottleys, the Quins, the Ste- vens, and so on. In a letter dated June 12 to Beatrice Ethel Heron-Maxwell (1855-1939), lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Al- bany, Dodgson gave his candid opinion of the Royal children: the little Duke. ..was, to my mind, about 1% times, let us say, as fascinating as his sister!... Don't think, because I rate the little boy's charms as higher than his sister's, that I fail to see hers. The little Princess I thought very sweet, but liable, under excitement, to betray what is called "self-will" (it is really weakness of will) and that selfishness which is the beset- ting sin of childhood. Under weak manage- ment, that child would, I should fear, grow up a terror to all around her!... how should 15 we get on tete-a-tete? If I were offered a tete-a-tete walk with whichever I preferred of those two children, I should choose the little Duke... I don't feel on sufficiently in- timate terms with the children to send any messages. Besides, I n^f^send, to a child, any colder message than "love": and that would be presumptuous to a Princess!*^ Some years later, Dodgson's opinion of the Prin- cess changed, as this diary entry for November 16, 1891 indicates: The little Alice is improved, I think, not being so unruly as she was two years ago: they are charming children. I taught them to fold paper pistols, and to blot their names in creased paper, and showed them the ma- chine which, by rapid spinning, turns the edging of a cup, etc., into a filmy solid: and promised to send Alice a copy of [William Allingham's] The Fairies... \ mark this day with a white stone.'^ He began by sending gifts to the Albany family, but he was highly conscious of this royal favor, so much so that his tone becomes gushing and embar- rassing to us today. For example, this letter to the Duchess, which he wrote on July 1, 1889, survives as a draft in the Dodgson Family Collection with numer- ous corrections all in Dodgson's hand: In sending the book, promised for the little Princess Alice, and one also which... I am permitted to give to the little Duke of Albany, I am bold enough to hope that your Royal Highness will honour me by accepting one more book as well, which will follow in a few days. May I also take the opportunity — per- haps the only one I shall ever have — of add- ing a few words to what I said on a subject we spoke of; in one of those interesting little talks which I remember with so much pleasure. The subject was the desirability of remembering, or forgetting, a remark made by one of your children, on a scene in the life of Our Lord.... Is it not a cruelty (however unintentionally done) to tell any one an amusing story of that sort, which will be for ever linked, in his or her memory, with the Bible words, and which may have the effect, just when those words are most needed, for comfort in sorrow, or for strength in tempta- tion, or for light in "the valley of the shadow of death," of robbing them of all their sacred- ness and spoiling all their beauty? "* The Duchess responded with a "thank-you" letter dated August 17 acknowledging the copy o^ Alice's Ad- ventures Under Ground that Dodgson discussed send- ing in the above letter: Accept my best thanks for the nice book you kindly sent me. It gives me much plea- sure as I am a great friend of your Alice and her adventures. I must now also thank you for your letter to me and the two charming books with which you made my children very happy. I think they will well remember the kind gentleman who spent so much time with them in amusing them and telling them stories." Dodgson sent a copy of the reprinted colored Nursery "Alice" to the six-year-old Princess Alice later that year and received a letter of thanks from her, written in her best handwriting, no doubt guided by a governess or her mother. "I thank you very much for the pretty book which I like very much. I like very much the painted pictures and I have read the story myself."'- CoUingwood recorded that when Dodgson sent a copy of The Nursery "Alice" to the Princess, he re- ceived a note of thanks from her, and also a letter from her mother, in which she said that the book had taught the Princess to like reading, and to do it out of lesson-time. CoUingwood also reported that Dodgson gave her brother. Prince Charles,'^ a copy of Merry Elves; or, Little Adventures in Fairyland, illus- trated by C. O. Murray and first published in 1874. In his note of thanks for the gift, the Prince wrote, "Alice and I want you to love us both."'"* Dodgson sent Prin- cess Alice the following letter dated June 1, 1890: My dear Alice, 1 thank you and your little brother very much for writing your names so nicely on your photograph: and for your nice little note. Now 1 want you to do a little puzzle for me: and if you do it very nicely, I'll tell you what I'll give you — a golden arm-chair, large enough for you to sit in, with crimson velvet cushions, and made so that you can fold it up small, and put it in a thimble, and carry it about in your pocket! You see this paper-ring that I've made for you, don't you? And you know that every piece of paper has got two sides, don't you? Very well. Now all you've got to do is this. You mustn't tear the ring, or cut it: you must keep it exactly as it is: but you must get a nice black pencil, and mark a lot of crosses all the way along one side of the paper — like this you know — + + + + + + + + + + + and, when you've quite covered one side with crosses, then turn it over to the other side, and put a lot of rounds all the way along it — like this, you know — oooooooo o o o o o and, if you do that very nicely, then 16 4 V 9em./P'3od^ ^ J>ta. /o Oil' ^^ijIjo ^. I'll send you the golden arm- chair, that came all the way from Wonderland! I send my love to your brother, and to your dear little self: and I am Your loving friend, Lewis Carroll.'^ The puzzle, based on the single-sided Moebius strip, al- most certainly confounded the Princess, and she had no chance of earning Dodgson's gift of a golden armchair from Wonder- land. Princess Alice later recalled her early friendship with Dodg- son: "Doctor Dodgson or 'Lewis Carroll' was especially kind to Charlie and me, though when I was only five I offended him once when, at a chil- dren's party at Hatfield, he was telling us a story. He was a stammerer and being unable to follow what he was saying I suddenly asked in a loud voice, 'Why does he waggle his mouth like that?' I was hastily removed by the lady-in-waiting. Afterwards he wrote that he 'liked Charlie but thought Alice would turn out badly.' He soon forgot all this and gave us books for Christmas with anagrams of our names on the fly-leaf.""^ Dodgson later published two acrostics that he composed for the royal children in Three Sunsets and Other Poems, collectively titled "Puck Lost and Found."^^ BISCUIT TINS AND PAPER PISTOLS Princess Alice, recalling in her autobiography her childhood memories, wrote: "we played a lot with a collection of little bronze animals we had acquired by knitting, as Mother had wrapped them in paper and then wound them inside a great ball of wool — a bribe on her part. We kept them in tins given to us by Lewis Carroll with pictures from Alice in Wonder- land on their sides and our names scratched by him on the bottom."'*^ In fact, the pictures were from Through the Looking-Glass, and the containers were the famous and extremely rare biscuit tins that Messrs. Jacob and Company issued in 1892 with Dodgson's approval. Dodgson had 300 empty tins to give away as gifts (50,000 are said to have been produced). Dodg- son received letters of thanks from both the Prince and Princess, both written from Claremont: I thank you very much for the pretty box you sent me. I think Charlie is much too big to get into it. ii^no'n/'' . 'J. IS(^2 -hif.ttu. I have not forgotten you, nor how to make pistols. I should like to go to Oxford again, and see you.'-' She was responding to the following letter from Dodgson, which accompanied the tins. Whenever Charlie is very naughty, you can just pop him in, and shut the lid! Then he'll soon be good. I'm sending one for him, as well: so now you know what will happen when you're naughty! I've written your names on your boxes, that you may know which is which. Please excuse the writing: it's not very easy to write on tin, you know. I send my best love, for you to divide with your brother: and I would advise you to give two-thirds to him, and take three-quarters for yourself.-" The eight-year old Prince Charles replied, "I thank you very much for the nice box you have sent me. I have put all my toy animals into it."^' There is no clue in Dodgson's diary to provide the background to the following letter received from the Duchess of Albany, and his letter to her is also missing. However, it seems he tried to arrange a meet- ing with the Duchess for an unknown friend (possibly an actress) while she was staying at Balmoral with other members of the Royal Family. Claremont, Esher November 2, 1892 Dear Mr. Dodgson, Unfortunately I was already home again when I received your letter, and therefore cannot oblige you or your friend, and I am affraid \_sic\ I cannot do anything either for your friend at Balmoral for I know it is useless to make any request of that kind. I am afraid your friend and her company will have a bit- terly cold tour up in the north but perhaps it will make a full house more likely at Aber- deen. My little people are, I am thankful to say, very well and grown very much since you saw them. They were very happy in Scotland, and have come home very rosy. Every day they become more companions to me, and reading to them in the evenings, while they knit, is a great pleasure, for they have good memories and are very eager and interested, and I think I learn as much as they 17 do, by all the questions they want answers to. You would be much amused by their inven- tions at their play for they have a very lively imagination, and yet are very matter of fact. Hoping you have been and are keeping well and with kind- est regards. Believe me Yours sincerely, Helen22 ymo, ru/i Jwijr -ti) rrta/tz d -^^f^y^ovo. aofu 7b , Oy ru)6 (JoiML a A WIRE-PUZZLE AND BOOKS On August 7, 1893, Dodgson wrote to Sir Robert Hawthorn Col- lins (1841-1908), Comptroller of the Princess's Household, with a proposal to send more gifts to the Royal children: (1) Does Alice possess an illustrated child's book, called Little Thumb? If not, I want to give it her. The pictures (of children and animals) are lovely, and enough to inspire her with the wish to learn to draw, if that wish has not yet occurred to her. (2) Does either of them possess a wire-puzzle, lately published, called "Home-Rule"? If not, I want to give it — to Alice, if she already has the book: if not, I'll send the book for her, and the puzzle for Charlie. '-^'^ Princess Alice received the book, and Prince Charles was sent the wire-puzzle. Their replies are as follows: Claremont August 24, 1893 Dear Mr. Dodgson, I thank you very much for the pretty book you have sent me. 1 have already finished it and I think the story and the pictures very pretty. I am glad to say your spider has remained on your letter and has not been impertinent enough to crawl over my papers as it did over yours. You asked me which was my favourite ani- mal, it is a dog and Charlie's is a kitten. Charlie and I send our love to you. Your affec Alice Claremont, August 24, 1893 Dear Mr. Dodgson, I thank you very much for the puzzle you so kindly sent to me. I watched Mother do it up and un-do it, so that now I can do it myself. Next Thursday we are going yachting. Yours affectly Charles Edward ^^ It is easy to understand Prince Charles's greater interest, perhaps, in spending some time yachting, maybe on the Royal Yacht. In the final surviving let- ter from Princess Alice, we hear of an event that took place on the Royal Yacht. Claremont Octobers, 1893 Dear Mr. Dodgson, I thank you very much for the dear little pig you have sent me. Is the answer to your riddle "Alice" (all ice)? Charlie has had chickenpox but is nearly well again. I had it on the yacht. Your affec Alice^'' The following November, Dodgson sent this let- ter to the Duchess: Will you kindly send your copy of Sylvie and Bruno to Messrs. Macmillan, 29 Bedford Street, Covent Garden, that the forthcom- ing volume, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, may be bound to match. I hope it may be out by Christmas, but am not sure. The labour of getting such a book through the Press, is more than any one, who has not experienced it, would imagine. I have been engaged on it more than 4 months (not in xvriting it — it was nearly all written, years ago) , and am working about 8 hours a day at it. The other day I worked for 13 hours!'^'' It appears that the Duchess sent the children's copy to Macmillan (not presented by him; he saw the Sylvie and Bruno books as being for older children and adults, and presentation copies to young children are rare). So Dodgson had to write to R. H. Collins to put the matter right. Clearly, the Duchess had a special morocco-bound copy that he wanted to match. There is no further evidence of contact between Dodgson and the Albany family. CONCLUSION Let us return to the kings and queens in Alice's Adven- tures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Do they tell us any more about Dodgson 's atti- tude to royalty? Do the illustrations by Tenniel reveal his attitude to the Royal Family? It is interesting that Tenniel chose to include the State Crown of Eng- 18 Jtt/vci/nJt/ you/ ^'lu omodi Lyiy t/w mm wT/ mw Aa/Vfy x)-e/nC"rm, J mm ludall'Truu Im. land, St. Edward's Crown, in his illustration of Alice meet- ing the Queen of Hearts. He was no stranger to depicting the Royal Family, especially Queen Victoria, in the pages of Punch. The Crown adds a respectful element of reality to his illustration. The Queen of Hearts is a three-dimen- sional character in Tenniel's illustrations, whereas the King of Hearts is a more two- dimensional character. Does this reflect the strong influ- ence that Queen Victoria had on society? The queens in Wonderland and Looking-Glass play significant roles. They expect to get their way, ruling with firmness and determination, ordering Alice to submit to their every wish. The White Queen in Looking-Glass is an excep- tion — she is more muddle-headed and mild. Is Dodgson parodying perceived regality and majesty? This is a distinct possibility. He had first-hand ex- perience of the Royal Family and he knew that the Queen ruled her family with strictness and determi- nation, preparing them for their role in society, pre- paring them for duty to their country. He saw the outcomes of this upbringing when he met two of the Princes who became undergraduates at Oxford. His own attitude towards children was very different. He probably did not agree with the stern approach meted out by "dumpy" and "plain" Queen Victoria in bringing up her children. The ruthless Queen of Hearts has echoes of Queen Victoria, and this is pos- sibly by design. Even some illustrators after the copy- right ran out in 1907, Brinsley Le Fanu for example, have depicted the Queen of Hearts as Queen Victo- ria. ^'^ The White Queen is described by Dodgson in his article for The Theatre as: "gentle, stupid, fat and pale; helpless as an infant; and with a slow, maunder- ing, bewildered air about her, just 5Mgg'^5^mg' imbecil- ity; but never quite passing into it."^^ Is this Dodgson's view of the real Queen Victoria, the private image not seen by her subjects, but seen by Dodgson at Christ Church as a short, plain, dumpy individual? Did he want to make some statement about the way she had brought up her children? Again, this is a distinct pos- sibility. Dodgson took a keen interest in the Royal chil- dren. We have already heard about his gifts to Prin- cess Beatrice, the Queen's youngest daughter. She did not forget Dodgson's kindness, even in later life. During the run-up to the centenary celebrations of Dodgson's birth in 1932, Princess Beatrice^^ became .xi'^LfmonC. one of the most significant supporters and was Patroness of the Lewis Carroll Exhibition in London. She lent her 1866 white vellum bound Aliceiox the display, where, according to the cata- logue prepared by Falconer Madan, it had pride of place. ■^" To summarize, Dodgson was no stranger to royalty. He was in the privileged position of seeing them close up, conversing with them, cor- responding with them, and seeing them as real people rather than hav- ing the distant and often false view that prevailed among ordinary folk. His impression of Queen Victoria was influenced by his meeting with her, and the way in which she treated her children. To some extent he did not approve of her rigid and controlling manner. He gave many gifts to members of the Royal Household and developed a close and warm friend- ship with some of them. His attitude towards royalty may have influenced his depiction of the kings and queens in his two Alice books, which do not always show them in the best light, but as flawed and strange beings, often ruthlessly parodying royal etiquette. Yet he remained a loyal subject of his Queen and a true believer in Victorian standards and values. ' Prince Leopold George Duncan Albert Wettin, Duke of Albany (1853-1884). - Princess Helena Frederica Augusta of Waldeck-Pyrmont, Duchess of Albany (1861-1922). "^ Dodgson to Isa Bowman, June 8, 1889, in Morton Cohen, with the assistance of Roger Lancelyn Green, The Letters of Lewis Carroll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 743. "* Princess Alice Mary Victoria Augusta Pauline (1883-1981). ■'' Prince Leopold Charles Edward George Albert (1884-1954). ^ Dodgson, June 10, 1889, British Librar)'. On this date, Carroll made a composite entr)' in his diaries of days spent at Hat- field House from May 17 to June 10. Edward Wakeling, ed., Lewis Carroll's Diaries: The Private Journals of Charles Lutrvidge Dodgson, vol. 8 (Luton & Clifford, England: The Lewis Car- roll Society, forthcoming). See also Roger Lancelyn Green, The Diaries of Lewis Carroll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 471. ^ Dodgson, June 10, 1889, British Librar)'. Being a composite entry, this comment, which does not appear in Green's ver- sion of the diaries, may not have occurred on the same day as the events above. ^ Dodgson to Beatrice Ethel Heron-Maxwell, June 12, 1889, Roy Davids Bookseller. '^ Dodgson, November 16, 1891, British Library. '" Dodgson to the Duchess of Albany, July 1, 1889, Dodgson Family Collection. Collected in Cohen, Letters, 748, with remarks as to its being a draft. Carroll expresses the same sentiment in a letter to an unidentified recipient; see Cohen, Letters, 1116-7. " The Duchess of Albany to Dodgson, August 17, 1889, The Dodgson Family Collection. See also Cohen, letters, 748 n 3. '^ Princess Alice to Dodgson, [n.d.], Cohen, Inters, 749 n 1; 19 Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Cairoll (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), 297-8. Prince Leopold Charles Edward George Albert We tin, Duke of Albany and later reigning Duke of Saxe-Co- burg-Gotha (1884-1954) Prince Charlie to Dodgson, [n.d.], Collingwood, Life and Letters, 298. Dodgson to Princess Alice, June 1, 1890, Private Collection. Alice Mary Victoria Augusta Pauline, Princess, Countess of Athlone, For my Grandchildren: Some lieminiscences of Her Royal Highness Princess Alice (London: Evans Brothers, 1966), 66. Lewis Carroll, Three Sunsets and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1898), 64-65. Countess of Athlone, For my Grandchil- dren, 65-66. Princess Alice to Dodgson, August 17, 1892, Dodgson Family Collection. See also Cohen, Letters, 924 n. 1. Dodgson showed the two children how to make paper pistols when they visited him at his rooms in Oxford. Dodgson to Princess Alice, August 15, 1892, in Cohen, Letters, 924. Prince Charlie to Dodgson, August 17, 1892, Dodgson Family Collection. See also Cohen, Letters, 924 n. 1. Duchess of Albany to Dodgson, November 2, 1892, Dodgson Family Collection. Dodgson to R. H. Collins, August 7, 1893, in Cohen, Ut- ters, 969-70. Dodgson adds one further question "(3) I have several times written to the Duchess (and have had most kind letters from her), but I have never known what is the lama/ ^nmt^u^m. 'ma/wed proper way, either to begin, or to end, my letters: and have had to rely on what so many men in the "Schools" rely on for their "paper-work," viz., "the light of Nature"! Would you kindly enlighten my ignorance?" ^'' Princess Alice to Dodgson and Prince Charlie to Dogson, both dated August 24, 1893, Dodgson Family Collection. For partial quotations of these letters, see also Cohen, Utters, 970 n. 1. 2,T Princess Alice to Dodgson, October 6, 1893, Dodgson Family Collection. "^'^ Dodgson to the Duchess of Albany, November 30, 1893, in Cohen, Utters, 997. '"^^ Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, illus., Brinsley Le Fanu (London: Stead's Books for the Bairns, 1907). ■^^ Lewis Carroll, "'Alice' on the Stage," The Theatre, n.s., 9 (April 1887): 182. ^'^ Princess Beatrice Mary Victoria Feo- dora (1857-1944). ■'"* Madan, together with Sidney Herbert Williams, brought out during the previous year A Handbook of the Literature oftlie Rev. C. L. Dodgson (I^ewis Carroll) (London: Oxford University Press, 1931) in a limited edition of 754 copies, four of which were on mould-made paper. This book was dedicated to Princess Beatrice and bears the following printed dedication: "This book is respectfully dedicated to Her Royal Highness, Princess Beatrice (by permission), with gratitude for her gracious and kindly interest in this tribute to 'Alice' S.H.W." Princess Beatrice was presented with one of the special cop- ies, bound in dark blue leather with gilt trimmings. THE STIRRUP-CUP Mr. P 'YOU'RE THE LAST OF THE YOUNG GENTLEMEN, SIR, AND I'M SURE YOU DESERVE TO BE HAPPY. BLESS YOU!! [Drinks. Vunch, April 29, 1882, defncting neivlyweds Leopold and Helena. 20 TML CArruKL or tml snakic E. FULLER TORREY, MD, AND JUDY MILLER Since it was first published in 1876, Lewis Car- roll's The Hunting of the Snark has intrigued and baffled scholars. John Pudney, in Lewis Carroll and His World, claimed that "no poem has ever been more analysed."' Its mystery has provided grist for numerous doctoral dissertations, spawned Snark clubs that meet regularly in Oxford, Cambridge, and London, and even provided a name for one of the U.S. Air Force's guided missiles. Reviews of the poem at the time of publication called it a "glorious piece of nonsense" and "the most bewildering of modern poems... inspired by a wild desire to reduce to idiocy as many readers, and more especially reviewers, as possible." ^ Various scholars have claimed that the poem is an allegory or satire about vivisection, an Arctic expedition, a contempo- rary trial, a church controversy, or the author's sexual repression.'' Some scholars have maintained that it "is one of the few poems of deliberate nonsense that is an addition to our literature. "^ Morton Cohen, in his biography of Lewis Carroll, labeled it "the longest, most intricate nonsense poem in the English lan- guage,"^ and Michael Holquist claimed it to be "the most nonsensical nonsense which Carroll created. "*" Lewis Carroll never explained his poem, al- though he received numerous requests to do so. In its preface, he called it "a brief but instructive poem" with a "strong moral purpose."' After its publication, he enjoyed giving elliptical answers when asked what the poem meant. To one correspondent, he wrote that he could not explain the Snark, saying, "Are you able to explain things which you don't yourself un- derstand?"*^ To some children, he replied: "I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense! Still, you know, words mean so much more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant. '"^ Given Lewis Carroll's propensity for creating games, puzzles, and brain-teasing mathematical prob- lems, it would be uncharacteristic of him to create a ■^ This article is based on E. Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller, The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Insanity from 1 750 to the Present (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001). poem of pure nonsense. Previous scholars have failed to focus on one of the most important relationships and profound events of Carroll's life. With that rela- tionship and event as a starting point, the meaning of The Hunting of the Snark becomes manifest. Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge was Lewis Carroll's maternal uncle. Despite a thirty-year age dif- ference, Lutwidge and Carroll were extremely close friends from the early 1850s until Lutwidge's death in 1873.>" Both men were lifelong bachelors and shared many interests. Lutwidge was deeply religious and a member of the National Society for Promoting Reli- gious Education. Carroll was an ordained Deacon in the Church of England; according to one biographer, "religion was the most important factor in his life."" Lutwidge was a founding member of the London Statistical Society, while Carroll was a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford. And it was Lutwidge who introduced his nephew to photography. Carroll's dia- ries are replete with notations of dining with "Uncle Skeffington," staying with him in London, attending concerts and plays together, and even vacationing together, as they did in 1871 in Scotland. Skeffington Lutwidge was a lawyer whose oc- cupation from 1845 until his death was as a salaried inspector on the Lunacy Commission. The Commis- sion, created in 1845 by the Lunatics Act, consisted of six professional inspectors (three physicians and three lawyers) whose full-time job was to make unan- nounced inspections of England's 177 county, pro- vincial, and metropolitan asylums and madhouses. In their work, the inspectors were described as "rummaging through cupboards, tasting food, and ransacking beds. . . . The board [Lunacy Commis- sion] centered its attention on the physical condition of asylums."''^ The inspectors also had authority to discharge patients who had been inappropriately admitted and even to recommend the closing of an asylum or madhouse, although these powers were rarely utilized. In addition to the six inspectors, the Lunacy Commission included up to five other lay members, although these additional positions were not always filled. In the years immediately preceding Skeffing- ton Lutwidge's death, the commission consisted of ten members: Francis Barlow, William Campbell, 21 John Cleaton, MD, Colonel Henry Clifford, John Forster, Skeffington Lutwidge, Robert Nairne, MD, Bryan Procter, Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper), and James Wilkes, MD. Lord Shaftesbury was the chairman of the Commission, having been the primary author of the 1845 act that created it and being the most outspoken advocate for lunacy reform in England. On May 21, 1873, while inspecting the Fisherton Lunatic Asylum in Salisbury, Skeffington Lutwidge was attacked by a patient named McKave. Accord- ing to The Times, McKave "suddenly darted towards him and severely wounded him on the temple with a large rusty nail, the point of which had recently been sharpened."'^ Lewis Carroll immediately went to Salisbury, where his uncle initially appeared to be recovering. Six days later, however, Lutwidge's condi- tion rapidly deteriorated and he died. Lewis Carroll recorded in his diary his "dear Uncle's death. "'^ In July 1874, Carroll began writing The Hunt- ing of the SnarkJ-' At the time, Carroll was helping to nurse his twenty-two-year-old nephew and godson, who was dying from tuberculosis. In the poem, the Baker relates the following: "A dear uncle of mine (after whom I was named) Remarked, when I bade him farewell — " "Oh, skip your dear uncle!" the Bellman exclaimed. As he angrily tingled his bell. "He remarked to me then," said that mildest of men, "'If your Snark be a Snark, that is right: Fetch it home by all means — you may serve it with greens, And it's handy for striking a light. "'You may seek it with thimbles — and seek it with care; You may hunt it with forks and hope; You may threaten its life with a railway-share; You may charm it with smiles and soap — '" ("That's exactly the method," the Bellman bold In a hasty parenthesis cried, "That's exactly the way I have always been told That the capture of Snarks should be tried!") "'But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day. If your Snark be a Boojum! For then You will softly and suddenly vanish away, And never be met with again!'""' The Hunting of the Snark is almost certainly a poem about the Lunacy Commission and the death of Skeffington Lutwidge. Snarks are insane patients of whom, Carroll says, "common Snarks do no man- ner of harm."" However, "Some are Boojums""^ and "If your Snark be a Boojum! For then / You will softly and suddenly vanish away, / And never be met with again!" Several members of the Snark-hunting crew are identifiable as members of the Lunacy Commission. The Baker is a composite of Skeffington Lutwidge and Lewis Carroll. He is described as having many different names (Lutwidge had four; Carroll had five, if both his real name and pseudonym are counted), and nobody was certain what name to use. As schol- ars have noted, the Baker had 42 boxes; Carroll was 42 years old at the time he started the poem. And the Baker is described in a self-deprecating, humorous way: "His form is ungainly — his intellect small."'-' The organizer and leader of the Snark-hunting expedition is the Bellman: The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies — Such a carriage, such ease and such grace! Such solemnity, too! One could see he was wise, The moment one looked in his face!'^" Despite this stature, the Bellman is ridiculed in the poem as merely tingling his bell, believing that the number three has a sacred power, giving contra- dictory orders, and steering the ship by a map that is a blank sheet of paper. Lord Shaftesbury, the chair- man of the Lunacy Commission, was a well-known aristocrat, widely praised social reformer, and devout Evangelical Christian who prayed twice daily and ac- cepted the Bible, including the Trinity, as the literal Word of God. He was also described by biographers as aloof, humorless, and puritanical; one biographer characterized his outlook as consisting "of a series of negatives [which] thus removed much of the plea- sure and color from life."'-^' Although they probably admired Lord Shaftesbury's commitment to social 22 reform, Lutwidge and Carroll, both of whom loved the theater, would have had less sympathy with his puritanical values and fundamentalist religiosity. The Butcher and the Beaver are also identifiable as members of the Lunacy Commission. The Butcher is described as a prolific writer: So engrossed was the Butcher, he heeded them not, As he wrote with a pen in each hand, And explained all the while in a popular style Which the Beaver could well understand. ^2 John Forster, a law^yer on the Lunacy Commis- sion, was the son of a Newcastle butcher and was a prolific writer who authored the five-volume Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonioealth, as well as biogra- phies of Oliver Goldsmith and Charles Dickens. His close friend on the Commission was Bryan Procter, who, under the pseudonym Barry Cornwall, pub- lished three books of poems. ^^ In The Hunting of the Snark, the Beaver is described as assisting his close friend, the Butcher: The Beaver brought paper, portfolio, pens. And ink in unfailing supplies: While strange creepy creatures came out of their dens. And watched them with wondering eyes.^^ Little information is provided in the poem on other members of the Snark-hunting crew, making it difficult to definitively link them to specific members of the Lunacy Commission. The Banker, who is attacked by the Bandersnatch and becomes insane, may have been Dr. Robert Nairne, a Commission physician who was also the treasurer of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society. Nairne did not, as far as is known, become insane; however, Greville Howard, a lawyer who replaced Lutwidge on the Commission in 1873, did become insane shortly after being appointed. The Barrister, who was "brought to arrange their disputes," may have been William Campbell, a lawyer and close friend of Lutwidge's who had served on the Commission with him since 1845. And the maker of Bonnets and Hoods, who prepared to fight the Snark by "ferociously" planning "a novel arrangement of bows," may have been Henry Clifford, a Member of Parliament and Colonel of the Monmouth Militia.''^^ The method of Snark hunting recommended by the Bellman is also consistent with the activities of the Lunacy Commission. The method is described as follows: "'You may seek it with thimbles — and seek it with care; You may hunt it with forks and hope; You may threaten its life with a railway-share; You may charm it with smiles and soap — '"^"^ These instructions are repeated six different times, leading "some to suspect that it may conceal a private, cryptic message," according to Martin Gard- ner in The Annotated Snark.'^' The use of thimbles, forks, and soap is reminiscent of the activities of the lunacy inspectors as they examined the clothing, bed- ding, food, and sanitary conditions in the asylums. '-^^ The railway-share may refer to the fact that the in- spectors, who usually traveled by train, were among the railway's better customers. The Bellman's descriptions of Snarks is also loosely consistent with the mental states of many insane persons: "Come, listen, my men, while I tell you again The five unmistakable marks By which you may know, wheresoever you go. The warranted genuine Snarks. ["J-^'^ First, its "taste" is "meagre and hollow, but crisp: / Like a coat that is rather too tight in the waist." Second is "its habit of getting up late" and becoming confused about when to eat. "The third is its slowness in taking a jest," perhaps referring to an impairment in abstract thinking, which is characteristic of the form of insanity now known as schizophrenia. "The fourth is its fondness for bathing-machines," possibly referring to the paucity of bathing facilities in the asy- lum. And "the fifth is ambition,"'" by which Carroll may have been referring to grandiose delusions that are characteristic of some insane individuals. Lewis Carroll's interest in insanity and his sophis- ticated understanding of insane thought processes are not surprising. Insanity was surely a regular topic of conversation with Uncle Skeffington, and on at least one occasion, in 1856, Carroll visited an asy- lum.'' Many scholars have commented on the promi- nent theme of madness in Alice's Adventures in Won- derland and Through the Looking-Glass, both conceived in the decade before Skeffington Lutwidge's death. The Hatter has a mad tea party, and the Cheshire Cat claims that "we're all mad here."''^ Why, then, did Lewis Carroll write The Hunting of the Snark} At one level, it is an expression of his grief at the loss of his closest friend and intellectual com- panion. Even the structure of the poem, subtitled "An Agony in Eight Fits," conveys the tragedy Carroll wished to express amidst the superficially whimsical dialogue and double entendres. "Agony" suggests ex- treme pain, anguish, a paroxysm of emotion. "Fit"'' is an archaic word for part of a poem, but it also means a seizure or convulsion. Edward Guiliano is correct in calling The Hunting of the Snark "the saddest of Carroll's writings. . . . One senses terror and despair throughout the overtly humorous Snark."^'* At a deeper level, the poem reflects Lewis Car- roll's grappling with the problem of evil in a world he 23 believed to have been created by a benign and merci- ful God. In such a world, insanity itself is a problem, affecting, as it does, random individuals. Moreover, Carroll was well aware of the issue of increasing in- sanity, which was being widely debated at the time. Uncle Skeffington had even testified about this issue in 1859 before a Select Committee on Lunatics of the House of Commons.'^"' Lewis Carroll was a devout, obsessive man who was passionately devoted to order. The existence of insanity — the Snark — was deeply upsetting to him. Roger Henkle, in a 1973 article "The Mad Hatter's World," observed that "the recurrent preoccupation with anarchy and madness in 'Wonderland,' espe- cially, entices us to speculate on the part they played in Carroll's thought. . . . We have in Carroll a not unusual fear of anarchy and a tendency to equate individual insanity to social chaos. "'^^ One passage in The Hunting of the Snark espe- cially supports this interpretation: "I engage with the Snark — every night after dark — In a dreamy delirious fight: I serve it with greens in those shadowy scenes. And I use it for striking a light[."]'" Using the Snark "for striking a light" echoes Carroll's own description of how he wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: "Sometimes an idea comes at night, when I have had to get up and strike a light to note it down...."^** Carroll was a well-known insom- niac who in 1893 described the kinds of problems that kept him awake: there are mental troubles, much worse than mere worry, for which an absorbing subject of thought may serve as a remedy. There are skeptical thoughts, which seem for the mo- ment to uproot the firmest faith; there are blasphemous thoughts, which dart unbidden into the most reverent souls; there are unholy thoughts, which torture, with their hateful presence, the fancy that would fain be pure."''^ Lewis Carroll, then, was wrestling with the prob- lem of evil and what it implied about the existence of a merciful God. Insanity itself, the Snark, was sufficient to challenge his faith but, even worse, some Snarks were Boojums. The death of his uncle, described as a man "whose kindly and generous disposition had endeared him to all his colleagues,"^" challenged Carroll's faith much more severely. What kind of God would end such a man's life by a random, irrational, senseless, pure act of evil? What kind of God would also take the life of Carroll's dying nephew and god- son, whom Carroll was nursing at the time he wrote the initial lines of The Hunting of the Snark? Lewis Carroll could not reconcile his uncle's death with his religious faith. Thus, when asked to explain the meaning of his poem, Carroll was being honest when he answered, "Are you able to explain things which you don't yourself understand?" Simi- larly, Carroll refused to let Henry Holiday, whom he had hired to illustrate the poem, depict the Boojum. Holiday wrote that all of Carroll's "descriptions of the Boojum were quite unimaginable, and he [Carroll] wanted the creature to remain so."'*' It is also significant that Lewis Carroll originally planned to have The Hunting of the Snark published as a Christmas poem.'*'^ The poem is a plea for faith when confronted by evil, l^he Hunting of the Snark, then, is not a whimsical, nonsense poem, but rather Lewis Carroll's cleverly disguised Book of Job. ' John Pudney, Leiuis Carroll and His World (New York: (iharles Scribner's Sons, 1976), 84. ■^ Review of The Hunting of the Snark, by Lewis Carroll , The Graphic 13 (April 1.5, 1876): 379, and The Athenaeum 67 (April 8, 1876): 495, reprinted in Morton Cohen, "Hark the Snark" in Lewis Carroll Observed, edited by Edward Guiliano (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1976), 99, 106. ^ Morton Cohen, I^ewis Carroll: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 1995), 410. '* Derek Hudson, Lewis Carroll (London: Constable, 1954), 221. ■'' Cohen, Leiuis Carroll, 404. ^ Michael Holquist, "What is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modern- ism," Yale French Studies 4^ (1969), 145-64, reprinted in Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland [Norton Critical Edition], edited by Donald J. Gray (New York: W. W. Norton. 1971), 407. ' Lewis Carroll, preface to The Hunting of the Snark (London: Macmillan, 1876), ix. ^ Lewis Carroll to Mary Brown, March 2, 1 880, in Morton Cohen, with the assistance of Roger Lancelyn Green, The Letters of Lewis Carroll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 374. *■' Lewis Carroll to the Lowrie children, August 18, 1884, in Cohen, iMters, 548. '" Cohen, I^vis Carroll, 41 ; Lewis Carroll to his sister Elizabeth, June 25, [1852], in Cohen, Letters, 19. ' ' Langford Reed, The Life of Lewis Carroll (London: W. and G. Foyle, 1932), 103. See also Cohen, Lewis Carroll, 362. ''^ Nicholas Heney, "A Slavish Bowing Down: The Lunacy Com- mission and the Psychiatric Profession 1845-1860" in 'The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, edited by William F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (New York: Tavi.stock, 1985-1988), HI. •^ The Times, May 30, 1873, 5. '"^ Lewis Carroll, May 28, 1873, Edward Wakeling, Lewis Carroll's Diaries: The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Clif- ford, England: The Lewis Carroll Society, 2001), 6:279. See also May 2 1 through May 23. ''' See Lewis Carroll, November 6, 1875, ibid., 6:432. '^ Carroll, "The Baker's Tale" in Snark, 29-30. '^ Carroll, "The Bellman's Speech," ibid., 24. '*^ Ibid. '^ Carroll, "The Landing," ibid., 7. 2" Carroll, "The Bellman's Speech," ibid., 20. 2' Geoffrey B. A. M. Finlayson, The Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, 1801-1885 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981), 602. 2^ Carroll, "The Beaver's Lesson" in Snark, 53. 2^ Hervey, "A SlaNish Bowing Down"; D.J. Mellett, "Bureaucracy and Mental Illness: The Commissioners in Lunacy 1845-90," Medical History 19 (1891), 221-50; Frederic Boase, Modem English Biography (Truro: Netherton and Worth, 1892; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965). 24 Carroll, "The Beaver's Lessson" in Snark, 53. See note 23. Carroll, "The Baker's Tale" in Snark, 30. Martin Gardner, The Annotated Snark, in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, edited by James Tanis and John Dooley (Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann, 1981), 44. Hervey, "A Slavish Bowing Down," 111. Carroll, "The Bellman's Speech" in Snark, 21-2. Ibid., 22-23. Lewis Carroll, "Januaiy 18, 1856, Edward Wakeling, Diaries, 2:24. [The claim that Carroll actually visited the asylum is debatable since Carroll merely wrote, "Southey came over to spend the day in photography, but we went instead to Dr Diamond of the Surrey Lunatic Asylum: he gave me two he has done lately, an excellent full length of Uncle Skeffington, and a boy at King's College, Frank Forester." However, the authors are likely correct that Carroll had some first-hand experience with lunatic asylums. -Ed.] Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (London: Mac- millan, 1866),90. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2002), CD-ROM, version 3.0, s.v. "fit, fytte." Edward Guiliano, "A Time for Humor: Lewis Carroll, Laugh- ter and Despair, and The Hunting of the Snark," in Lewis Car- roll: A Celebration — Essays on the Occasion of the 150th Anniver- sary of the Birth of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, edited by Edward Guiliano (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1982), 123, 130. E. Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller, The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Insanity from 1750 to the Present (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rut- gers University Press, 2001), 87. Roger B. Henkle, "The Mad Hatter's World," Virginia Quar- terly Review 49 (Winter 1973) , 99-1 1 7. Carroll, "The Baker's Tale," Snark, 32-3. Lewis Carroll, "'Alice' on the Stage," The Theatre, n.s., 9 (April 1887), reprinted in Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland [Norton Critical Edition], edited by Donald J. Gray (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 282. Charles L. Dodgson, M. A., Pillow-Problems: Thought out During Sleepless Nights [from Curiosa Mathematica, Part II] (London: Macmillan, 1893), ix. The Times, May 30, 1873, 5. Henry Holiday, "The Snark 's Significance," Ararf^n), January 29, 1898, reprinted in Lewis Carroll and His Illustrators: Col- laborations and Correspondence, 1865-189S, edited by Morton N. Cohen and Edward Wakeling (New York: Cornell Univer- sity Press, 2003), 33. [On the page preceding their article on the Lewis Carroll Centenary Exhibition held in London (see Sanjay Sircar's article, p. 1 ) , " The Times claimed to be the first to print Holiday's Boojum drawing." See "Lewis Carroll / Ex- hibition Opened by "Alice" / Recollection of Dean of Christ Church," The Times (London), June 29, 1932, 16. -Ed.] Lewis Carroll, October 24, 1875, Wakeling, Diaries, 6:427. [Gardner may have misinterpreted Carroll when he wrote that he "records in his Diar)' on 24 October 1875 that he has the sudden notion of publishing the Snark as a Christmas poem" {Snark, 4). Surely, the diary entry shows that Carroll merely \vishes to publish at Christmas, "A sudden idea oc- curred, about which I wrote to Holiday and Macmillan, of publishing the Snark poem this Christmas...." He often fret- ted missing the Christmas market with Tenniel. -Ed.] [Being informed of this interpretation, the authors reply, "You may be correct that Carroll was referring to Christmas in purely economic and marketing terms. On the other hand, Carroll was an ordained Deacon and deeply religious, as Morton Cohen's 1995 biography makes clear It seems unlikely that Carroll was thinking of Christmas in purely economic terms regarding the publication of a poem that fundamentally concerns the problem of evil."] 25 "•^^^ Tuuenty-First-Century Vieuus of Dodgson's Voting Method FRANCINE F. ABELES '^o emphasize how important the election pro- cedureis for the result of an election, Donald Saari, a preeminent voting theorist, spoofed in a recent article that he could come to your organi- zation, talk to its members and then design a voting procedure involving all candidates, which would elect 3)0Mr designated candidate.' Since the American presi- dential election of 2000, many articles dealing with voting procedures have appeared, several of them fo- cusing on what today is known as Dodgson's Method. Dodgson described it in his 1876 pamphlet "A Method of Taking Votes on More Than Two Issues."-^ In a recent series of three articles,^ Thomas Ratliffe analyzed Dodgson's Method utilizing Saari's tech- niques that expose the essential differences between pairwise 2ind positional methods, the two fundamental categories of voting procedures. In a subsequent article, Saari and a colleague subjected Dodgson's Method to further analysis.^ Saari's geometric tech- niques allow him to explain all the paradoxes, cycles, conflicts, and discrepancies that can occur between positional and pairwise methods.'' Dodgson's Method selects the pairwise (Con- dorcet)'' winner, the candidate who beats every other in head-to-head comparisons. But when an election doesn't produce such a winner, Dodgson replaces the actual rankings of the candidates with the "clos- est" set of those rankings, that is, the set of rankings obtained by making the smallest number of adjacent changes in the individual rankings so that there will be a Condorcet winner. To illustrate his method (adapted from Ratliffe, "A Comparison of Dodgson's Method and Kemeny's Rule"), consider an election with 30 voters and 4 candidates: A, B, C, D. Assume 10 voters rank the candidates in the order ABCD; 7 voters rank them in the order CDBA; 3 rank them ADCB; 3 rank them DCAB; and 7 rank them BDAC. There is no Condorcet winner because a majority of 16 voters prefer A to B, a majority of 17 voters prefer B to C, and a majority of 17 voters prefer C to D, but a majority of 17 voters prefer D to A creating a cycle. Dodgson's Method would replace the ABCD ranking of two voters with BACD, making B the Condorcet winner. With the positional (Borda)' procedure, voters rank all the candidates by assigning each a number: for example, if there are three candidates, assign 3 to your top-rated candidate, 2 to the one you next prefer, and 1 to the one you least prefer. The (group) rank assigned to each candidate is determined by summing the numbers from the individual ballots (the Borda count). Our familiar plurality voting method (winner take all) is a type of positional method whereby voters rank only their most pre- ferred candidate. In a 2004 article the economist Partha Dasgupta and the social scientist Eric Maskin described a vot- ing method, a compromise between pairwise and positional methods, that they claim is not only the fairest possible method, but also one that easily can be implemented." We have known since 1951, when Kenneth Arrow first published his landmark book, Social Choice and Individual Values, that no voting method is perfect. Arrow established the fundamen- tal principles that a voting procedure should satisfy. One of these is known as transitivity and the other as neutrality. Transitivity requires that if voters prefer candidate A to candidate B, and they prefer B to can- didate C, then A should be preferred to C. If a cycle occurs, as in the example above, the procedure does not satisfy the transitivity requirement. To meet the second condition, neutrality, a voting procedure must not favor one candidate over another, and the voters' choice between two candidates should not depend on how they view some third candidate.'' For example, consider the following possible rankings of the popular vote (adapted from Dasgupta and Maskin)'" in the 2004 American presidential election with just three candidates: Kerry, Bush, and Nader. Suppose each voter ranks them in one of these orders: Kerry-Bush-Nader, Bush-Kerry-Nader, Kerry-Nader-Bush. The pairwise (Condorcet) vot- ing procedure (which is transitive here and satisfies neutrality) represents the voters' intentions: Kerry is the winner because he is preferred to Bush and to Nader. But the positional (Borda) procedure will not represent the voters wishes because it does not satisfy neutrality. To see this, consider a possible scenario for the vote in this election: Suppose 51% rank Bush over Kerry over Nader, and 49% rank Kerry over Nader over Bush. Assume there are 100 voters. Then Kerry will win because his Borda count will be (51 X 2) + 26 (49 X 3) = 249 to Bush's (51 X 3) + (49 X 1) = 202. But if instead, the 49% rank Kerry over Bush over Nader, then Bush will win because his Borda count is now (51 X 3) + (49 X 2) = 251. Even though 49% of voters gave Kerry and Bush the same ranking in both cases, the presence of a third candidate (Nader), who really can't win the election, has altered its outcome. We have seen that an unmodified Condorcet procedure can fail to satisfy transitivity, and an unmodified Borda procedure can fail to satisfy neu- trality. Dodgson's Method is a modified Condorcet procedure that does satisfy transitivity, but as Ratliffe showed, it will not satisfy neutrality." To accurately represent the wishes of voters, what voting procedure (for the popular vote) should be used? Clearly, our current procedure, plurality vot- ing, is very flawed because it permits a third candidate to unduly influence the election result. Dasgupta and Maskin recommend a hybrid: voters should rank all the candidates (assuming there are more than two). If no one candidate is preferred to all the others in head-to-head comparisons, i.e. there is no Condorcet winner, then the highest-ranked candidate given by the Borda count should be the winner. ' Donald Saari, "Geometry of Chaotic and Stable Discussions," American Mathematical Monthly 111 , no. 5 (2004) , 377-93. Charles Dodgson, A Method of Taking Votes on More Than Two Issues ([Oxford?]: [(Clarendon Press?], 1876), reprinted in The Political Pamphlets and Letters of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Related Pieces, edited by Fran Abeles (New York: Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 2001 ), 46-58. Thomas Ratliffe, "Some Startling Inconsistencies When Electing Committees," Social Choice and Welfare 2] (2003), 433-454; Thomas Ratliffe, "A Comparison of Dodgson's Method and the Borda Count," Economic Theory 20 (2002), 357-372; Thomas Ratliffe, "A (Comparison of Dodgson's Method and Kemeny's Rule," Social Choice and Welfare 19 (2001), 79-89. Donald Saari and S. Barney, "Consequences of Reversing Preferences," Mathematical Intelligencer 25, no. 4 (2003), 17-31. Donald Saari, "Mathematical Structure of Voting Paradoxes: Pairwise Vote," Economic Theory 15 (2000), 1-53; Donald Saari, "Mathematical Structure of Voting Paradoxes: Posi- tional Voting," Economic Theory 15 (2000), 55-101. A method first proposed by the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794). A method first proposed by Jean Charles Borda (1733-1799). Partha Dasgupta and Eric Maskin, "The Fairest Vote of All," Scientific American (March 2004), 92-97. Fran Abeles, "Kenneth O. May on Arrow and Group Choice," Proceedings of the Canadian Society for the History and Philosofihy of Mathematics 15 (2002), 1-8. Dasgupta and Maskin, "The Fairest Vote of All." Ratliffe, "A Comparison of Dodgson's Method and the Borda Count." "BRITISH VOTER OF THE FUTURE' (Punch, August 4, 1871) 27 j^.scv^W^sc^ Leaves /troo? tI?6 Deaneny Ganden In a word, the newly incarnated Knight Letter IS magnificent. The transformation of organization and content wrought by editors Mark and Matt, and Andrew's artistic contribution make this journal a pleasure to read. Fran Abeles Union, New Jersey On Jeopardy last night, a question in a category titled something like "19th Century Literature" mentioned the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon, the answer (question) being the first Alice book. The contestant answered (questioned) "What is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?" There was a little pause. Alex looked over to the judges. The contestant looked over to the judges. Alex looked back at the contestant. The answer was ap- proved. Play continued. Of course, as all of you can probably guess, the answer Alex saw was "Alice in Wonderland' and not the full title the contestant gave. 28 What's right about ''Alice in Wonderland' and right about ''Alice Through the Looking-Glass" and wrong about " The Portrait of Dorian Gray" (Wilde titled it "The Picture of...") is a close call, and if you don't mind, I would like to develop this thought further, but I hear the beeping of a fork-poked, microwaved chicken teriyaki... Matt Demakos Madison, New Jersey ^ Would you be so kind and indul- gent as to let me in on some of the UK in-jokes in the new Firefly Wonderland illustrated by Ralph Steadman that you mentioned in your review {KL 72:36)? I'm dying of curiosity. Desne Ahlers San Francisco Among the then current in-jokes (pres- ent in the original editions), according to Alan White in the Lewis Carroll Review (Issue 26, October 2003), (-•; the man in the white paper suit (Disraeli in the Tenniel) is prime minister Edward Heath i^ the Cheshire Cat is Cliff Michel- more, a popular TY "presenter" f-T the cook may be actress Rita Tush- ingham t^ the Duchess may be Barbara Cart- land but then, so might the dog i>^ the Hatter's notice "Can you come back next week?" was a TV game show (Beat the Clock) catch-phrase c-- The cook 's saucepan has a Design Council label of approval and comes from the same store as the Hatter's coffee pot t^ the Hare is wearing an MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) tie Subsequently, an article entitled "A Brush with Surrealism " by R. M. Healey in Rare Book Review for Feb- ruary 2004 quotes Steadman as say- ing, "Wfien I illustrated Alice back in 1967 1 saw the characters as figures to be transported 100 years fonvard. For instance, the White Rabbit zvas a com- muter, the Duchess was based on the actress Dandy Nichols, and the Mad Hatter had to be some awful quiz-show presenter. " 3n itlemoriam Kay Rossman (1918 -April 5, 2004) Kathleen Walker Rossman has passed away at the age of 86. She was well known for her charitable work, particularly in the early years of the Literacy Volunteers of America. Kay's involvement with Carroll began when she bought the Cheshire Cat Gift Shop in Cazenovia, New York, in 1977, and became curious as to the origin of its name. She soon found our society, and became a long-time and most passionate member, showing up with her husband, Newell, former vice chancellor of Syracuse University, at most of our meetings. She also began a serious collection of Carrolliana, which continued after she sold the shop in 1982 and retired to Sarasota, Florida, in 1987. Her generous donation of her collection to the Bird Library of her alma mater, Syracuse University, in 1997 {KI. 56:23, 58:13), serves interested students and researchers to this day. As a board member, she often prodded us to follow, in Wonderland fashion, Robert's Rules of Orders in our executive meetings. Her infectious enthusiasm will be sorely missed. #^ ^-^ (1936 -Nov 24,2003) Born in Odessa on August 21, 1936, Yulii Aleksandrovich Danilov became one of the greatest Russian mathematical physicists of his generation. After service in the Soviet army, he took his doctorate in mathematical physics at Moscow State University in 1963 and then joined the facult)' of the Kurchatov Institute for Physics in Moscow, where he remained for the rest of his life. He published numerous articles in journals of mathematics and physics, was awarded the Kepler Medal, translated over a hundred scientific books into Russian (including George Gamow's Mister Tomkins in Wonderland) , and was a leading member of the informal but extremely keen circle of CarroUians in Russia. His Carrollian works include a volume that contains translations of A Tangled Tale and Symbolic Logic together with many puzzles, letters, and other materials, published by Mmp (Mir) in 1973, with illustrations by Yuri Vashchenko. An essay "A Physicist Reads Carroll" was published in the appendix of Nina Demurova's translations of Wonderland and Looking-Glass brought out by Havka (Nauka) in 1978. In 3hahme-Cm/IA (Znanie-Sila) he published an article on Lewis Carroll's Russian Journal. An article on "Lewis Carroll and his Puzzles" appeared in the mathematical journal Kbaht (Kvant), and his brilliant translation, also with illustrations by Vashchenko, of the late Peter Heath's The Philosopher's Alice remains to be brought out. He will be missed by scores of students in Russia, mathematicians around the world, and those CarroUians in Russia and in America, like the present writer, who were privileged to call him a friend. August A. Imholtz, Jr. ^-^ ^«# Sir Peter Ustinov (1921 -March 21, 2004) The distinguished, beloved, and much-awarded actor, writer, and director Sir Peter Ustinov had many stellar highlights in his exemplary career. Being the Walrus in the 1999 special-effects fiasco calling 'iXs,e\i Alice in Wonderland, starring Tina Majorino, Whoopie Goldberg, and so on was not one of them. 29 ■^^ Ravings j:koo) ihe Wmring Desk OF ALAN TANNENBAUM In case you missed our recent meeting at the Hough- ton Library at Harvard in Cambridge — and you missed a good one — please read the thorough syn- opsis earher in this issue. From my point of view, the meeting was a grand success, and based on emails, ap- parently many of the attendees felt the same. I want to especially thank Peter Accardo of the Rare Book Department for being our host. Mr. Accardo made sure that everything we needed was in place, including the room and the multimedia equipment. He also arranged for some key items from the Harcourt Amory collection to be out on display, which was a spe- cial treat for attendees. I also want to thank Rachel Howarth for mak- ing the facilities available to us. Our meetings are getting more hi-tech each time: Three of the five presentations, plus the introduc- tory remarks, were projected using computer-based slides. Selwyn Goo- dacre, who is surely known to all Carrollians, used digital images of all 42 Tenniel pictures from Alice's Adventures to illustrate, so to speak, his excellent talk. As did Charlie Lovett, with digital images scanned from many interesting books that Carroll had on his own shelves. I want to thank all of the speakers: Anashia Plackis, Will Brooker, Rick Lake, Selwyn Goodacre, and Charlie Lovett for put- ting together a thought-provoking, educational, and entertaining set of talks. And, for those in attendance, Charlie Lovett brought a very well-produced handout representing the original issues of The Jabberxvock, a publication by the Girls Latin School in Boston (very apropos our meeting venue). Will Brooker had auto- graphed copies of his new book for sale, and Selwyn Goodacre distributed a little gem of a bibliographical booklet. At the marathon Board of Directors meeting on Friday night, many subjects were discussed. We learned of the passing of Kay Rossman, a long-time Society member and avid Carrollian collector. I knew Kay from the very first meeting I attended twenty years ago, and I know we will all miss her dearly. We discussed upcoming meetings: mark your calen- dars for October 23, when we will meet at the Arne Nixon Center in Fresno, California. Robert Sabuda, well-known pop-up book artist/engineer will be our featured speaker. Watch for an August mailing with all the details. Angelica Carpenter, LCSNA Board member, is organiz- ing a great meeting with lots of extras. Spring 2005 will find us in New York city, and the fall conclave (currently scheduled for Octo- ber 15, 2005) will take us to Des Moines, Iowa, where a month-long series of events relating to Lewis Carroll and Alice will surround our meeting! The Iowa Arts Council and Cultural Affairs Bureau is back- ing this program, which includes a retrospective of member Mary Kline-Misol's Carroll-inspired art- work. I encourage everyone to plan ahead for these upcoming meet- ings. The Board also approved a pro- cess for accepting grant proposals to assist authors in publishing a Carroll-related book when the Society does not choose to publish it our- selves. The funding from the Society is not meant to cover all expenses, but rather to serve as one source of assistance for authors not otherwise able to pub- lish. Details of the publications grant process will be posted to our Web site before the next meeting, and will be reported in these pages. Speaking of Society publications, on behalf of the entire membership of the LCSNA, I wish to thank Charlie Lovett for his leadership of the Publi- cations Committee for the past ten years. Charlie will continue to serve as the editor of the Pamphlet Series (three volumes to go), but other commitments make it necessary for him to step down as publications chair. Contrariwise, Mark Burstein, after his ten years, is continuing as editor-in-chief of the fine pub- lication you are holding in your hands. Along with Matthew Demakos as a co-editor, and some profes- 30 sional layout and design skill from Andrew Ogus, the Knight Letter gets, better with each issue. Finally, you may have noticed that the Society is now accepting online payment for meetings and membership dues, vising PayPal. This free and secure payment system will be expanded in the near future to pay for the Society-published books in our inventory. We plan to make the process easy by having forms on our Web site, but in the interim, you can simply use the PayPal account firstname.lastname@example.com to send money to the Society and save the time and expense of an envelope and postage. We also accept major credit cards through PayPal. See you in California! Kjrk: We're not leaving until McCoy is released. Parmen: This isn't the Enterprise. You are not in command, captain. Philana: Why discuss it? Get rid of them. Parmen: No, my dear. That might offend the good doctor. You wish to stay? By all means. You can help us celebrate our anniversary. In the process, I hope we can persuade you to join our tiny republic. McCoy: You won't persuade me. Parmen: I think we will. Kirk (singing): "I'm Tweedledee, he's Tweedledum," Spock:"Two spacemen marching to a drum." Kirk & Spock: "We slither among the mimsy toves And gyre among the borogoves." The Star Trek (original series) episode 6^, "Plato 's Stepchildren, " aired No- vember 22, ig68, and featured this abysmally sung duet. The episode itself has a place in history for containing the first-ever interracial kiss — be- tween Kirk and Uhura while under telekenetic influence — to be shown on American network television. Both Mr Shatner and Mr. Nimoy produced dreadful albums of their "singing" during this era. Their in- iw "%ND\^' imitable vocalizing is available in the compilation CD Golden Throats: The Great Celebrity Sing-Off (Rhino, ig88), the original LP al- bums (Shatner's The Transformed Man, icf68; The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy and his The Way I Feel, both 1^68) and all over the Net wherever horrid singing is celebrated. Shatner's rendition of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds " must be heard to be believed. Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole) to Cameron (Steve Railsback): Now listen to me: That door is the looking-glass, and inside it is Wonderland. Have faith, Alice, close your eyes and enjoy . . . The Stunt Man (1980) Wonderland © 1998 Carol Borzyskoivski Reprinted by permission. This work previously appeared in the American Poehj Monthly. Black, cold, narrow as a grave, I didn't see the hole — didn't look before I stepped down. Long, long I fell past shards empty as plastic champagne glasses, past deflated balloons pink and yellow, past a magician's empty black hat dead rabbit, curiouser and curiouser. Past the touch of your lips brushing my neck — a silver moth in flames, onto barren lunar landscape I stopped. And Alice, it's true what they say it's not the fall that kills you. 31 GHIUSELEV'S ALICE- TRATIONS The dazzling Wonderland illustrations of lassen Ghiuselev, once the province of a German- language edition {KL 65:21) and now available in an English edition from Simply Read Books {KL 72:47), have an ancillary treasure. One can now purchase the monochrome poster (the whole story in one image!) from www.simplyreadbooks.com for $35. The English edition itself includes many newly commissioned illustrations that were not in the original German edition. Wonderland wsis also published in Taiwan in a square format, and it seems that there will soon be editions in Japanese and Spanish. Happily, Ghiuselev has also been commissioned by Simply Read to do a Looking-Glass for publication in the winter of 2006. The American Institute of Graphic Artists (AIGA) has awarded this volume a place in its prestigious 2004 "50 Books/50 Covers" show. ^VS a^3 ^ THERE S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY The Art and Flair of Alary Blair: An Appreciation John Canemaker (Disney Editions, 2003) For Alice in Wonderland, "a proj- ect that had fascinated and con- founded Disney since his earliest days as a filmmaker," one of his major hurdles was in the design and overall look of the film. Having tried and rejected David Hall's work {KL 68:2 footnote), he turned to one of his favorite art- ists, Mary Blair. Her joyful palette and concepts for costumes, props, characters, and staging were both incorporated — and altered — into the finished product. A nine-page section of this book is rich in illus- trations of how she was (and was not) subsumed. The rest of this handsome volume is replete with a colorful carnival of her playful paintings and drawings, and the story of her life and art. HE WILL BROOK NO NONSENSE Sarah Adams Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture Will Brooker, Continuum (2004) Will Brooker, researcher of popular culture of the late twentieth century and author of books on Star Wars fans and Batman, seems at first to be an unlikely person to write about Alice 2Lnd Lewis Carroll. However, it is his outsider status as someone familiar with the books yet not a "fan" that lends him a unique ability to analyze from within. As he states in his preface, Alice's Adventures: Lexois Carroll in Popular Culture is as much about Brooker's own process of becoming a "fan" of the Alice books, as it is about how Alice affects popular culture. Many LCSNA members may think to skip over the first chap- ter, dealing as it does with recent (1990-2003) biographies of Lewis Carroll. Brooker, however, creates a fascinating analysis of what we know about Carroll at this time. He compares how biographies written by Bakewell, Cohen, and Leach (and, to a lesser extent, Thomas, Stoffel, Bjork, Wakeling, Jones, and Gladstone) each treat the four aspects of Carroll's life about which there are so many questions: the "golden afternoon," the censorship of his diaries, the guilty prayers in his diary, and the photographs of nude children. Three distinct pictures of Carroll emerge. ... We have Bakewell 's blurry double-exposure of a fundamentally innocent figure who may have harbored sexual urges but barely understood them; Cohen's man of intense but unusual passions, rigidly controlled and internally fired up; and Leach's portrait of the author as shockingly "normal" in his desires but hiding them behind a myth of celibate child- loving. Brooker pulls no punches — while obviously drawn to Leach's theories, he points out as many inconsistencies and errors in her work as he does with Cohen and Bakewell. Perhaps we should all keep in mind his conclusion: Each viewpoint of this man's life is sim- ply a rearrangement of a limited number of facts, fleshed out with imagination, supposition, and theory. A discussion of Carroll and Alice in the media points out that while biographers bring new informa- tion about their subjects to fans and academics, it is journalists who are the conveyors of knowl- edge (true or perceived) to the general public. Unfortunately, it is a never-ending cycle: Lewis Carroll is "news" due to the questions sur- rounding his life, so every article discusses his life as questionable. There are as many questions surrounding the books as there are surrounding the man. Are the Alice books a "light-hearted dreamworld" of "pretty nonsense," a Freudian "allegory of growing up," a "nightmarish journey to be survived," a parody of British poli- tics, a burlesque of Oxford society, a reflection of Carroll/Dodgson's schizophrenic tendencies, an ex- tended death metaphor, or a pe- dophile's love song to a little girl? Again, Brooker's analysis doesn't 32 so much give us answers as show us why the "experts" don't have the answers either: So much depends on your age, your era, and what you are looking to find. Chapters on illustrating Alice, parodies and 'Turther adventures of," movies, and video game adap- tations are particularly informa- tive, again even for people familiar with the material. In addition to a short discussion of early illustra- tors, Brooker compares Tenniel and Carroll's illustrations with those of Arthur Rackham, Mervyn Peake, Lisbeth Zwerger, Helen Oxenbury, and DeLoss McGraw. This discussion inspired an en- joyable afternoon with all seven books open and surrounding me as I compared illustrations. Detailed summaries of "sequels" were interesting, while giving me the impression that I hadn't missed much by not reading them previously. A comparison of key narrative elements of six film and television adaptations of Alice left me amazed at how easily the story can be adapted to invoke different moods: It is almost unbelievable that Disney's brightly colored, perky and musical cartoon was derived from the same source as Jan Svankmajer's haunting stop- motion animation of skeletal and taxidermied animals. A detailed chapter devoted to Ameyican McGee's Alice com- puter game, and the fan websites thereof, shows just how far the idea of a "Dark Wonderland" can be taken. Alice, comatose in a mental institution after the ac- cidental death of her family, must return to a Wonderland under the control of the evil Red Queen in order to free her mind from its emotional trauma. Carrying what appears to be a bloody butcher's knife, she encounters dark and twisted versions of well-known characters on her journey to de- stroy the Jabberwock and the Red Queen's rule. Amazingly, the fan sites take the ideas even further, creating artwork, short stories, and poetry based on the game. In his chapter on fans, Brooker describes the typical Lewis Carroll Society (UK) member as conser- vatively dressed, well-mannered, over the age of fifty, and highly educated with a tendency towards a correct and slightly archaic form of speech and writing. Despite this appearance of academia, he goes on to make the worthy point that members of the LCS are seeking to fulfill the same needs as the members of a Star Trek, X-Files, or any other fan group: the finding or building of a community; the collection of arcana; debate; mak- ing "pilgrimages"; performance as a way of sharing knowledge; and curatorship. In addition to events that he covers as a member of the LCS, Brooker also includes a "per- sonal selection" of "pilgrimage" sites, of both historical (Carroll's birthplace) and popular interest ("Alice's Curious Labyrinth" at Disneyland Paris). HAMSTER ALLEY by Polly Keener On the subject of curatorship, the LCS is particularly notable in that many of the foremost experts on Carroll are members, in addition to descendants of both Dodgson relatives and of Alice Hargreaves, thus giving it a certain amount of authority and power that most fan groups lack. While it is true that Alice\s a quintessentially English book, there is a truly international love for it. Particularly in this age of Internet and international media, it is difficult to limit the discus- sion to just one country, and thus a Swedish biography, American novels and video games, and a Czech movie are included. Brook- er's explanation of why he chose to limit his search of newspaper articles and Internet sites to those from Britain (a wider search would be huge and unmanageable) is reasonable, but his focus on only the British society is a bit frustrat- ing. A comparison with the North American and Japanese societies would have been interesting: Do the generalizations about LCS members apply to these societies as well, or is there a different de- mographic, and why? Why is Alice so appealing to the Japanese that they travel around the world to visit Daresbury? Alice's Adventures: Lexuis Carroll in Popular Culture is an interesting, multifaceted analysis of both what is currently known about Lewis Carroll and his books, and how these stories and images D/P YOO KNOCU rf{BRem£^ lots OF Ffitnovs AABBfrsl 0UNNV, ANt> HRfiVey.. . ^"'"^'^ flNO CBTSf CATSl SacH AS ".",,-,... CHiPSH/fiB CAT.-; _ ^N Hfi^sremf. C>ON'r FORG^r FfifffousiiMnsnEta SCCff AS... 33 have been interpreted by today's society in movies, Internet sites, video games, comic books, and amusement parks. Despite a some- what British focus, I recommend this book to any fan of Carroll's books, whether knowledgeable or not, due to the comprehensive and unbiased overview of current Carrollian studies, as well as the discussion of how Alice's adven- tures continue to intrigue and inspire. ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR DODGSON Sarah Adams The Problem of the Surly Servant: A Charles Dodgson/ Arthur Conan Doyle Mystery Roberta Rogow (St. Martin's Minotaur, 2001) While visiting Charles Dodgson in Oxford, Arthur Conan Doyle and his wife, "Touie," discover the body of a thieving scout. Then the threatened exposure of a childhood nude photograph brings an undergraduate of one of the new women's colleges to Mr. Dodgson to request assistance. These two events intertwine with college boat racing, illegal boxing matches, town versus gown infighting, and the classism inherent in Victorian society, as Dodgson, Doyle, and Touie assist both the city police and the university officials in solving the murder. This is the fourth book in the Charles Dodgson/Arthur Conan Doyle mystery series by Roberta Rogow, and the problems of the previous books that have been dis- cussed by other reviewers (KL 57: 23, ii^ 61:16, /;X 62:1 1, XL 64:21) are carried on in this one. While the Victorian settings are meticu- lously researched, the mystery is easily solved and the characters are rather shallow: Dodgson is elderly and prissy, Doyle is young and bouncy. Touie is the most clearly developed of the characters, and actually ends up solving the mystery. Alice Har- greaves appears briefly, as does Dean Liddell, who amusingly real- izes that in order to have the inci- dents cleared up without scandal to Christ Church, he must forbid Dodgson to investigate, knowing that Dodgson's dislike of him will prompt him to disobey. At our Spring 2001 meeting in Neiu York fKL 66:2-5), Ms. Rogoio gave a talk, "Mr. Dodgson of Christ Church, " to the LCSNA and didn 't even men- tion her oiun books! - Ed. MASTERPIECE THEATER Daniel Singer Walt Disney had longed for years to produce an animated film ver- sion of Lewis Carroll's stories. In 1951, at a cost of some $3 mil- lion, Disney's energetic, colorful, tuneful Alice in Wonderland yN-a^ released — but despite advertising on the relatively new medium of television and the publicity from a nast)' legal battle that tried to pre- vent a rival film from opening at the same time, Disney's A/?V:<? failed miserably at the box office and was quickly swept into the studio's vault. Walt was saddened by its failure; unlike his other features, which were released theatrically every seven years, Alice w^i% allowed to be shown on television and rented by schools on 16 mm — until its associations with mind-al- tering drugs in the 1960s banished it into hiding. A/eVi? returned to the wide screen in 1974, drawing mod- est audiences. Following a final re- lease to theaters in 1981 it became available on home video, where its qualities were finally appreciated by a large mainstream audience, helping it to become one of the best-selling children's videos of the 1980s. Now you can enjoy Disney's Alice in Wonderland at home with the newly-released two-disc "Mas- terpiece Edition" DVD. Those who like the film (many despise Walt's Americanized, vaudevillian adaptation) will be delighted that it has been dusted off and trotted out so elegantly 53 years after its initial release. The film remains a superb example of animation art: masterfully drawn, styled, and colored, and full of clever details and amusing vocal performances. Highlights include: Alice's grace- ful descent down a Dali-esque rab- bit-hole; the charming Doorknob that tries to help headstrong Alice in her quest to get through the locked door; a completely surreal (though re-written) rendition of "The Walrus and the Carpenter;" Alice's sneeze sending Bill the Liz- ard up the chimney and into obliv- ion; a sumptuous Garden of Live Flowers; a hilariously stoned Cater- pillar who illustrates his dialogue with smoke rings; card characters that are actually flat; and the most maddeningly mischievous flamin- goes and hedgehogs that any Alice has ever wrangled. You'd think the Disney animators were high as kites when they turned Alice's dream into a nightmare in which she has to run through a twisted, melting Wonderland to get back to the riverbank — you can clearly see why the film's popularity with ston- ers gave it an unsavory reputation. The overall effect of Disney's hy- peractive adaptation is somewhat obnoxious and exhausting — but it's loaded with charm, humor, and artistry. Just try not to think of Carroll's gloriously superior text while you're watching it. But wait, folks, there's more! See "Uncle Walt" introducing the film on his television show in 1954 and '64! See Alice's Wonderland, Walt's 1923 breakthrough silent film with which he founded his Los Angeles animation studio. See the delightful 1936 Mickey Mouse cartoon Thru the Mirror. See One Hour in Wonderland, Walt's first foray into television, and several other early TV shows that adver- tised the film, all featuring young Katherine Beaumont (the voice of 34 Alice), whom Walt was constantly trotting out in a blue dress and pinafore. See present-day Kath- erine Beaumont introducing a song that was deleted from the final film. And children will enjoy singing along with their favorite songs and playing the interac- tive games — and there's even a little card game thrown into the DVD case as well. There's plenty here for kids and grown-up fans to enjoy. The archival material is rarely seen nowadays, so it's a treat to have it available in this handy package. The digitally restored and re- mastered print makes this Alice the best-looking home-video release ever, with exceptionally bright and detailed picture and sound. A center-speaker channel has been added for 5.1 surround. The cover art and new graphics are gorgeous. It's nice to see the Disney Studio produce a gem like this in the midst of their latter-day turmoil. * GOLDEN KEYS AND SILVER LOCKS Ruth Berman An unusual fantasy classic with a small Alice tie-in has come back into print. (Originally, it came out in 1949 from E. P. Dutton, and had a couple of paperback editions in the 1980s, but those are all a good while back, and are rare or getting rare.) Silverlock by John Myers Myers is a comic voy- age of a stolid, practical man (at least, he's always assumed he was stolid and practical) through a place called the Commonwealth, which is utterly unfamiliar to him. The reader soon notices that it is a commonwealth of literature, and every place and person in it is either directly from literature or is a composite of related types. One chapter has him getting a meal from an irritating man oddly dressed in Victorian clothes and his equally irritating friends who are in a rabbit costume and some kind of a rodent costume. Silver- lock is baffled by their nonsensical insistence on exact precision of language, and their insistence that they are not really open to serve meals at all hours of the day or night — it's just that it's always the hour of teatime for them. The new edition is from the New England Science Fiction Association's NESFA Press, PO Box 809, Framingham MA 01701. Price is $26 plus postage. See www.nesfa.org/press/. I had a hand — well, more like a "fingertip" — in this edition, as it reprints a lot of extra items (but nothing of Carroll interest in the extras) , including music that fans have composed for some of the songs in the story, and including the five lines that I added to "Friar John's Song" to complete the verse that gets interrupted. Besides the music, the extras are new and reprinted essays on Silverlock, data on Myers, and a guide to the works that show up in the journey. An online guide to the luork is found at toww. speakeasy. org/~anitra/ commonivealth/refindex.html. - Ed. 1^ VIVA VIVALDI Sarah Adams Alice in Vivaldi's Four Seasons.- The Music Game Music Games International Alice xuent out for a walk, and walked into a music clock. ■ But the clock went [sigh] and broke. Now she's caught inside, no joke. How ivill Alice get out? That, my friend, is ivhat this game is all about. . . Play to unlock the music clock. When Alice picks up the White Rabbit's pocket watch and it breaks, she is trapped inside this slightly surreal game. You must help her solve twelve musical puzzles to fix the watch and return home. A white-and-pink-striped Cheshire Cat narrator provides instructions and help, disappears leaving his grin behind, then reappears to deliver another bon mot (sometimes a quote from Alice, sometimes an Alice- like rhyme, sometimes a line of instruction involving puns such as "purrrcussion") . The game consists of twelve puzzles: one for each piece of Vivaldi's music, which corresponds both to a month and to an hour of the clock. Points are counted as seconds and minutes of time, and collected in an hourglass watched over by various Alice characters such as the mad Hatter, Mock Turtle, White Rabbit, a pig in a baby bonnet, and a frog in a wig. Even children too young to be familiar with Alice W\\\ get a giggle out of the animals in period dress playing musical instruments, such as a bewigged hippo playing a harp and the two mice necessaiy to play the double bass. The Cheshire Cat's verbal in- structions are not always entirely clear, but most of the games are easily figured out (if not necessar- ily easy to win) and the written in- structions are just a click away. The first eleven puzzles vary from ac- tivities that aren't actually games, such as viewing an instrument encyclopedia and listening to the music for each month, to versions of the well-known games of Memory and Tetris, to the creative puzzle in which the player must help Alice get out of the White Rabbit's house by matching an original Four Seasons piece with a musical piece played with different instru- ments, tempo, or style. Nearly all of the puzzles involve active listening in some way. While most of the puzzles can be easily completed, several have additional levels where the play becomes quite difficult. Of particular complexity are the several games in which the player must match sounds or pieces of music or iden- tify instruments playing, some- thing that nonmusicians are 35 seldom called upon to do. How- ever, this does give the player a fascinating look into how a sym- phony is put together. The twelfth puzzle is cleverly hidden as eleven pieces within the other puzzles. Each puzzle has a picture and music that can be manipulated before going on to the actual play. Three dials with four options each change the background picture/percussion, foreground/ tempo, and details/ instruments. Finding the silent option on each dial presents you with both a scene from Alice znd the entire Four Seasons piece for that month. The game is recommended for children six and older, though a young child would most likely benefit by playing with a parent. Fortunately, the intricacies of the game mean that not only will the adult enjoy helping, but will most likely keep playing long after the child has run off to another proj- ect. Nor is a child necessary at all! Order from www.KidsMusic Stage.com. MRS. CARROLL'S ALICE Robert Arnold Hall My libretto for Mrs. Carroll's Alice, a multimedia mini-chamber opera, is drawn freely, with artistic license, from episodes in the two Alice books. My selections from the stories are intended to bring out the aspects that give it such universal meaning and appeal. The genius of Lewis Carroll re- sides in how he shows us ourselves. Capturing this in music, image, and sound has been my guiding concept. Alice is catapulted into an unknown world, full of novel experiences, many of which are of a challenging, always confusing, sometimes hostile nature. She is barraged with verbal contradic- tions and insults. In her profound innocence, she struggles to make sense of, and come to terms with it all, and does cope. This is really the story of the ontological strug- gle of every human being: Begin- ning as infants, we all struggle to make sense of strangeness, to sift sense out of nonsense, order out of chaos, to find meaning and our place in this confounding, double- speak, wonderland world. This is the universal human drama, from cradle to grave. We all go down the rabbit hole. The music is intended to am- plify and support this drama. Largely tonal and accessible to a potentially huge audience, but musically interesting enough to engage Carroll aficionados as well as others who know and love his works. Identifying signature themes are associated with each character. Accompanied by piano alone, two mezzos and a soprano speak and sing multiple roles, the principal ones being Alice and her mother. Some may object, but I feel that if Dodgson can create Lewis Carroll, I can, for artistic purposes, give him a wife to speak and sing as his narrator, and make Alice their daughter. I cherish the belief that he would approve! The performers, in black leotards and wigs and masks representative of each character, will appear spot- lighted on a dark stage, singing and acting their various roles. In its rather unusual multime- dia thrust, this work integrates the arts of libretto writing, music, act- ing, image-making, mask making, and sound design. The project enjoys the fiscal sponsorship of the Bay Area Video Coalition, a prime promoter of a wide variety of many art media since 1947. A grant from the American Composers Forum has funded the art work, and other funding is being sought for a pre- mier at the theater of the Califor- nia Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in April 2005. Mark Streshinsky, a staff direc- tor of the San Francisco Opera, was stage director of a similar — ^very stunning and successful — multimedia production of the Wagner Ringlegend condensed to one evening and performed by the Berkeley (California) Opera. He and Jeremy Knight, who handled the technical end, will bring their skills and experience to our pro- duction. Art work is by Christine Desrosiers of San Francisco (www. crdillustration.com, one of whose pictures is below) . There will be about a dozen basic color images. Secondary images, including ani- mations, will be morphed by using computer technology. Using a computer-controlled large-format data projector, these illustrative images will be shown, along with soimd effects, at significant points in the performance. John Geiger, a sound designer from San Fran- cisco (www.geigersound.com), will provide the sound effects. Annie Hatten of Berkeley (www.masquearrayed.com) will make the masks. Some episodes will be done as shadow theater. Together, all these media will make feasible the presentation of such events as changes in Alice's size and movement which would be extremely difficult and costly, if possible, to stage in conventional opera. With these features and only four performers, this work could be performed, with little financial risk, for small and diverse audiences in small venues, and especially for audiences less cultur- ally and economically privileged than those who can afford opera ticket prices. Live performance or a video recording could be 36 presented in schools, where it will have educational value, and it could be used for opera out- reach programs and television. This work will shine the light of Carroll's genius in rarely, if ever, touched corners. Anyone wanting to help de- fray the costs of production can make tax-deductible contribu- tions through the Bay Area Video Coalition, my nonprofit fiscal sponsor (www.bavc.org/media/ sponsorship/support_form.htm) . The budget is significant, though small for an opera. It ex- cludes any compensation for my efforts in writing the libretto and music, and producing, and hardly any for my enthusiastic and dedi- cated artist. More information and excerpts of the music are available on www.music-hall.net and I would be happy to answer any questions at email@example.com or 16162 Lilac Lane, Los Gatos CA 95032, 408.358-2283. CHASING THE WHITE RABBIT Sarah Adams On the evening of Wednesday, June 9, a group of adults gathered at a children's bookstore for a tea party. Several LCSNA mem- bers, including Andrew Ogus, were spotted in the audience. In California for the Children's Lit- erature Association conference in Fresno (p. 45), John Docherty, Editor/Librarian and Secretary of the George MacDonald Society at the British Library and author of The Literary Products of the Leivis Carroll-George MacDonald Friendship, spoke on Wonderland at Hickle- bee's Children's Book Emporium. He discussed how Wonderland is an Easter story in that Alice's jour- ney follows the spiritual journey, undertaken by Christians, known as the Imitation of Christ. Mr. Docherty illustrated his talk with enlarged versions of Carroll's and Tenniel's illustrations, slides of me- dieval paintings, and many refer- ences to Blake and Dante. At the end of his fascinating talk, tea was served, along with scones, cream puffs, and small pecan tartlets. Hicklebee's (www.hicklebees. com) is a wonderful children's bookstore located in the down- town Willow Glen district of San Jose, California. ^ SHADOWPLAY Gregory Williams Alice in the Shadoivs, part of the "Celebrate Puppetry Through Shadows" festival at Tierra Del Sol, Shadow Hills, California, April 24. When the audience arrived for the performance of Maria Bodmann's Alice in the Shadows, some brought folding chairs and blankets. These supplemented the ones laid out for them by the artist, who had also placed paperback copies of Wonderland around the area. This was to be a performance that fully reveled in Carroll's words and characters, and the audience was encouraged to follow. The shadow screen, gaily fes- tooned with flowers around its perimeter, looked like something you'd see at an outdoor movie. This, it turned out, was totally appropriate as the show took on aspects of film animation, with the screen containing the charac- ters and story. The artist had also placed a section of chairs on each side behind the screen, inviting the audience to watch the perfor- mance from "backstage." What a curious way to set up a shadow show! It turns out that the shadow artist, Maria Bodmann, was incor- porating shadow-play traditions from Indonesia, where she studied as a Fulbright scholar. In Indone- sia, the audience is encouraged to watch the performance from both sides of the shadow screen. Having performed traditional Balinese shadow shows with her partner, musician Cliff DeArment, for sev- eral years, Bodmann created Alice as her first nontraditional story interpreted in ancient shadow puppetry. For the Balinese shadow shows, DeArment leads a troupe of gamelan players. For Alice, he leads a band of electric guitars and a drum, again set up directly behind the shadow artist in the traditional style. The pre-show music gave the first glimmer that this Alice would take us to the psychedelic world first encountered cultur- ally in the '60s. The incense that Bodmann fired up at the start of the proceedings only added to that feeling. Once the shadows hit the screen, the movement of the characters meshed perfectly with Jefferson Airplane songs that blended equally well with Carroll's surreal story. Bodmann has kept the show true to Carroll's text, aside from incidental ad libs that add im- mediacy to the proceedings. She does, however, pull the book into three separate episodes, arrang- ing flashbacks to other sections of the story. This installment we saw in Sunland dealt with the last part of the book. No worry, however, we did get to see the White Rabbit go down his hole in a flashback Alice recounts to her Wonderland friends. As a performer, Maria Bod- mann stands out for her character manipulation and voice work. She handles comedy with a flair and, as the only performer behind the screen, voices every single charac- ter in a distinct fashion. Her Alice has just the right mix of innocence and spunkiness to offset the insan- ity of the rest of the characters. From the Queen of Hearts to the mad Hatter, Bodmann inter- changes voices as adeptly as she changes her puppets. Truly, her audio part of the show is as superb as the visuals. (She does have two assistants on either side of her to handle the many characters and set pieces that come on and off the screen.) 37 The lighting was equally excel- lent. At times, special lighting effects filled the screen with ever- changing amoebas of color and shape. Bodmann's adept use of shadow puppets created believable morphing as Alice made her star- ding physical mutations. The success of any show is mea- sured by the audience response. In Sunland, the audience thoroughly enjoyed the show. The under-ten crowd seemed as transfixed as the adults. One little girl perched upright in her mother's lap for the entire performance; the smile never left her face. Two brothers, eight and six, made sure to run behind the screen at every effect and transition to enjoy both sides of the performance. How perfect is a show that allows children to run circles around it; they never get restless. It will be interesting to see the future installments of Bodmann's Alice in the Shadows. To be sure, I will arrive early with my blanket, beach chair and a cooler full of refreshment. Ms. Bodmann 's delightful show was a highlight of the fall '98 Society meet- ing in Los Angeles, and has been seen in many venues since, as readers of "Far-Flung" know. Her Web site is www.balibeyond.com; check therefor upcoming performances. Two of Bodmann 's puppets. carrollian Notes -^^ ADDENDA, ERRATA, CORRIGENDA, & ILLUMINATA In "The Gag Writer" {KI. 72:26) panels 4 and 5 were regrettably in reverse order. SIC, SIC, SIC "Then it's down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, and into never-never land with lots of music inspired by Lewis Carroll's two Alice novels." ~ blurb on www.wnyc.org for the David Gar- land show (see p. 46). Never-never land? "... the art of pugilism has long been lost in a dark wood which has been cast in the shadow of a long gone past when mice still got separated from men. An un- popular champion, which some perceived to be much like Lewis Carroll's cowardly lion, only added to that feeling." ~ article on EastSideBoxing.com. If I only had a brain... The conference program of the Children's Literature Association, to be held here at Fresno State June 10-12, has a cover illustration of Alice, seen from behind, going through the looking-glass. But when you open the cover, you are in Oz! There are Oz illustrations throughout the program, which is printed on rainbow-colored paper, like The Road to Oz. The back cover illustration shows Dorothy having tea with a rabbit. John R. Neill's Dorothy is blonde, and this pic- ture, from The Emerald City of Oz, is clearly meant to look like something from the Alice books, in my humble opinion. ~ Angelica Carpenter "Certainly Mr. Del Tredici has had no more luck securing a complete performance of Dum Dee Tweedle, an exhilarating and wonderfully unconventional opera based on more Alice texts, than he has with his Favorite Penis Poems. ~ "Sex and Romanticism? A Composer Dares All" by Anne Midgette, Neiu York Times, May 29, 2004. "In the [19]30's, the property was leased by Sir Frederick Liddell, father of 'Alice,' until his death in 1950." ~ "History of Sandy" (a town in Bedforshire, UK) at www.sandy-bedforshire.co.uk. 38 © 2004 Helena de Bairos FAIREST HELENA Brazilian artist Helena de Barros, whose works grace our cover and this page, first became enamored of Carroll's works when she was still a teenager, reading the excel- lent Portuguese translation by Sebastiao Uchoa Leite. Her first experiments on illustrating Wonderland were made in 1992, and continue to this day, with the truly dazzling results displayed at www.fotolog.net/ helenbar/. (Click on "more" at the bottom of the left nav bar to see over a hundred Alice images.) "I had made my dress a few months before for a friend's cos- tume party, and started to make some pictures during my free time, as I am a graphic designer and work a lot with photomon- tage. Suddenly, it was turning into almost the entire book. I try to be as close to the original text as I can, reading it many times before starting to work. Carroll's text is stuffed full of delightful images that are always in my mind; trying to put it into graphic form is a great satisfaction. After conceiving the images, I photograph myself as Alice using a digital camera with a tripod and timer, and do all the image manipulation using Photoshop, spending almost 30 hours working on each one, which are made in high resolution for printing. The Mock Turtle and Gryphon image alone took me a month and a half. I have been totally surprised by the public re- sponse: The site has reached over 300,000 viewers, a number I could never have expected. It has reached some local papers and magazines too; one of them, O Globo, is one of the most impor- tant papers in the country and I was given a two-page article in the computer science section. I am very proud of carrying CarroH's I work to so many people. A lot of them are surprised to know de- tails from the story, which here in Brazil is more well known through Disney's adaptation than from the original text. Now, at the same time I am working to complete illustrations for the whole story and am searching for sponsors to publish it as a book with a simulta- neous exhibition of large-format prints." She was recently inter- viewed in the Brazilian magazine Vizoo 36 May /June '04 under the title "Helenbar: Digital Alice in Webland." ■^ The j'E provides both free and paid services. They publish the /E Monthly, a free electronic maga- zine containing articles on shows, auctions, interviews, overviews, perspectives and reviews, as well as providing a constantly fresh worldwide book auction calendar and a free instant auction lot search. (An article on the Burstein Carroll collection can be found at www.am ericanaexchange. com/aemonthly/ exhibition_detail. asp?eid=122.) For paid sub- scribers, they offer a very important database for bibliographers, dealers, librar- ians, researchers, and collectors. It contains informa- tion gleaned from auctions, dealer-, collector- and bibliographical catalogues based on more than a hundred sources and presently comprises more than 675,000 full text records. This means you can trace prices of a specific book offered in auctions over the past hundred years! They also offer MatchMaker to upload and manage your wants to the Internet, eBay, and their own Auc- tion Watch to look for matches. Check them out at www.americana exchange.com. 1^ J lights! camera! auction! The Americana Exchange (M) is a site for those interested in the his- tory of printing in the Americas, and it also maintains a quite useful record of auction sales. M provides essential tools for those who buy, sell, collect, or research rare books and ephemera. THE LIBRARY OF BABEL Perhaps Borges' famous medita- tion on the universal library (com- posed, in his schema, of hexagonal galleries)* is closer to realization. Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive * "La biblioteca de Babel" published in Eljardin de senderos que bifurcan, 1941, reprinted and translated widely. 39 at www.archive.org has a rather ambitious goal: building a digital librar)' of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts (books, movies, audio) with the end result of "Uni- versal Access to All Knowledge." Like a paper library, they provide free access to researchers, histo- rians, scholars, and the general public. There are many sections: the archive itself (the "Wayback Machine") takes snapshots of the entire World Wide Web and makes them available. Want to know what our LCSNA home page looked like on January 25, 1999 or any of fifty-some other dates? It's all here in over 300 terabytes (trillion bytes) of data, currently growing at a rate of 12 terabytes per month. They also sponsor the "Million Book Project," a searchable digital library with 10,000 texts to date and "The Children's Library," which includes all of the books from the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL), providing a prestigious compilation of in- ternational literature for children around the world. (Mr. Kahle estimates that the entire contents of the Library of Congress could be digitized and made available in both facsimile and searchable text format for the cost of six hours of the Iraq war.) Another side project is the "Internet Book- mobile," with the ability to access, download, and print any one of the almost 20,000 public domain books currently available online. "Just like the bookmobiles of the past brought wonderful books to people in towns across America, this century's bookmobile will bring an entire digital library to their grandchildren." It is a mobile digital library capable of down- loading public domain books from the Internet via satellite and print- ing them anytime, anywhere, for anyone. Did you know that a full color, slick paper paperback can be printed on demand for about $1 a volume, and the processing fees of checking the same book out of a library runs about $2? Naturally, Wonderland was one of the very first books they made available. At this writing, it can be read online in the 1916 Gabriel edition illustrated by Gordon Rob- inson, or a 1905 A. L. Burt ("in words of one syllable"), or printed in a hybrid Tenniel-Rackham for- mat. However, there is more to come. The present author has pro- vided them with eleven rare early illustrated editions in English (in- cluding the Snark), and editions in Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Farsi, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Pol- ish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Rus- sian, Spanish, Swahili, and Tamali. This is only the beginning. ^ READY, WILLING, AND ABELL Literature Online (lion.chadwyck .com), "the world's largest cross- searchable database of literature and criticism" is available by paid subscription to "universities and other higher education institu- tions as well as public and special- ist arts libraries ... [and has] over a third of a million full-text works of poetry, prose and drama in Eng- lish, together with the definitive online criticism and reference li- brary." Their Annual Bibliography of English Language and Litera- ture (ABELL) has begun to index all substantive Knight Letter articles by author, title, and subject matter ("additional search terms"), be- ginning with 2002. A fine service; unfortunately neither available to the public nor Google-able. CONTRARIWISE Sarah Adams One of the things that is so won- derful about the works of Lewis Carroll is that for every Humpty- Dumptian explanation of what something means, someone else is sure to have an equal and op- posite explanation. Events have conspired to give us something of the same in what we know of Carroll's life, particularly in terms of his interest in little girls and/ or young (and not so young) women. The recently formed group Con- trariwise, the Association for New Lewis Carroll Studies, has firmly marked on which side of the argu- ment they stand by putting Look ingForLewisCarroll.com online. Looking for Lewis Carroll is strongly based on the research and writings of Contrariwise founding members Karoline Leach and Hu- gues Lebailly, with the aim of pre- senting "evidence, ideas, theories, questions, and no conclusions." Much of the site not specifically attributed otherwise is drawn from Leach's In the Shadow of the Dream- child, though many sections are significantly expanded. After a bare-bones biography that, as promised, asks more ques- tions than it answers, the site takes an in-depth look at Carroll's many biographers (including Collin- gwood. Bowman, Reed, Gold- schmidt, Lennon, Taylor, Green, Hudson, Gattegno, Clark, Cohen, Bakewell, and Thomas). Accord- ing to this analysis, the majority of these biographers ignored hard evidence and obvious conclusions in order to perpetuate a myth most likely invented by Carroll's own family in order to cover up his many socially unacceptable friendships with young and not-so- young women: that the saintlike Carroll preferred the company of children, particularly little girls. This analysis of the biographies leads into a section titled "Chal- lenging the Myth." It includes the original 1996 articles by Leach and Lebailly that started the whole ball rolling, re-evaluations of Carroll's photography (including an ex- cerpt from Douglas Nickel's Dream- ing in Pictures), and his philosophy and religion (with an introduction to the section by John Tufail). The "Carroll in the 21st Century" 40 section continues with articles by other Contrariwise members, such as "White Stone" by Kate Lyon (first pubUshed in the Knight Let- tered)), "From Chaos to Cosmos: the Genesis of Sylvie and Bruno" by Pascale Renaud-Grosbras, and "Creativity and Lewis Carroll" by Jenny Woolf. A page of links leads the reader to specifically Carrollian sites (on- line versions of Under Ground and S&'B, the various society websites, pages on Carroll's photography, and literary criticism), sites on Carroll's world (his artistic friends and associates, contemporary articles on prostitution and Bud- dhism, information on Victorian photography, Theosophy, and the Society for Psychical Research), and general overviews of Victo- rian society (social and political issues of the day, the church and religious controversies, Victorian history and literature). The amount of information available on this site is amazing, with recent additions including Carroll's serious and love poetry, an extract from Anne Thackeray's From an Island, and John Tufail's address at the recent Carroll conference on "The Illuminated Snark." Articles still to come in- clude such wide-ranging topics as the expressions of guilt in the diaries, Carroll's avoidance of the priesthood, the "Wasp in a Wig" chapter, Carroll's article against vivisection, notable editions of the books, and book reviews. For a site with so much information, it is easily navigated, with the ability to delve down to a particular article or to follow each topic from one to the next. Ultimately, whether you agree with the Contrariwise viewpoint or not, the site's re- sources (and expected updates) make it well worth exploring, read- ing, and revisiting. ALL IN THE GOLDEN AFTERNOON Full leisurely we glide through the very day in 1859 on which Alice and her two sisters were being captured on a sofa for the now iconic photograph. Andy Malcolm and George Pastic have at long last released their heartfelt and exquisitely crafted film Sincerely Yours on DVD, running a leisurely 24 minutes. A tantalizing glimpse was offered us as long ago as October '99 at our meeting in Toronto {KL 62:5) — it was then called A Golden After- noon — and the film was premiered in almost finished form at our San Francisco gathering in Novem- ber '02 (fully reviewed in KI^ 70: 3). This sweet series of intimate vignettes is a "sort of time capsule and glimpse into the mind and world of an extraordinary soul," as the reviewer put it, and carries our highest recommendation. Andy Malcolm, 363 Regional Rd 8, RRl, Uxbridge ON L9P IRl, Canada; (905) 852-2510; -2508 fax; foot firstname.lastname@example.com. US$22 includes postage. n^ "yes, said ALICE, "we learned FRENCH AND MUSIC." Armelle V. Futterman Leiuis Carroll et la musique perso.club-internet.fr/reverend/ carroU/ Although Lewis Carroll claimed he did not know anything about music, and is believed to have been deaf in one ear, music — and especially songs — are intimately linked to his work. The author of this Web site, Alexandre Reverend, himself a composer, director, and author of three children's books, introduces us to many of the songs from Carroll texts, and provides a wonderful service in having on the site recordings of many of them. In 1985, Alexandre Reverend went to Oxford looking for lost music sheets for the many poems found throughout Carroll's work, songs that were often parodies of popular Victorian songs or nursery rhymes. Reverend found eighty music scores in various Oxford libraries. With the help of Cyril de Turckheim, a French composer and music director. Reverend wrote a musical production built around the recovered songs, tell- ing of the imaginary meeting of Lewis Carroll and five little girls on the beach at Eastbourne. Le Sacre d Alice ("Alice's Coronation") opened in December 1985, at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris. The Web site (which is in French) allows the reader to listen to a selection of twenty-two songs: original popular songs parodied by Carroll; composite arrange- ments of his poems based on varia- tions by Victorian composers; and samples from the Saville Clarke operetta. The site is divided into sec- tions — introduction, songs, music, stage productions, nursery rhymes, parodies, scores — and describes within a historical context how Carroll wove parodies of popular songs and nursery rhymes into his books. With the books' growing popularity, and in the absence of recorded interpretations of the original songs, various Victorian composers subsequently wrote their own variations, often oblivi- ous to the fact that these paro- died songs already had existing melodies. This sometimes clouded Lewis Carroll's relationships with composers. It is somewhat ironic that his parodies, inspired by his love for these popular songs, gained a notoriety that contrib- uted to eclipsing the originals, without succeeding in preserving them in their original musical form. Reverend notes that Carroll heard one of the first recordings on Edison's phonograph, in Lon- don, in 1890. WTiile deploring the poor quality of the sound, he immediately recognized the ad- 41 vantages of the new invention and v^fished he could jump ahead fifty years, when the technology would have been perfected. Reverend's researches led him to discover letters from Carroll to many composers, and to translate into French and subsequently publish, in 1990, the correspon- dence between Carroll and Saville Clarke. From this vast epistolary material. Reverend presents a lot of information on the writing of new music for the songs. During Carroll's lifetime, several compos- ers put the Alice songs to music. In 1870, years after the first publica- tion of Wonderland, William Boyd (1845-1928), an organist and hymn composer, was the first to publish a booklet of music called "The Songs from Alice in Wonder- land." In 1871, as Looking-Glass was about to be published, Carroll authorized Boyd to write music for any of the songs, while point- edly noting that melodies already existed. Many other composers, including Alfred Gatty, Annie E. Armstrong, C. H. Marriott, and E. C. Llewellyn, subsequently wrote — and rewrote — scores to many of the most famous poems. In 1885, Armstrong herself published new versions of twenty songs. Among the music scores avail- able on the site is one for "Dream- land," the only poem written by Lewis Carroll especially for a com- poser, his friend Charles Edward Hutchinson. The Web site offers audio links for many songs along- side their mention in the text, allowing the reader to listen to them as well as read about them. Reverend assures us that this new technology would certainly have pleased Lewis Carroll. From Carroll's diaries, Reve- rend traces his fascination with the theater. He started working on a stage adaptation of Alice in Wonderland SiS early as 1867, only two years after the publication of the book. His journal refers to his discussion of the project with various theater directors — Coe, Percy Fitzgerald — without much progress. In 1876, a production of the Adventures by G. Buckland drew mild satisfaction from Lewis Carroll, who asked for a few changes, but ultimately refused to authorize a re-opening of the show the following year. Several queries by Carroll to Sir Arthur Sullivan about writing music to the songs from Alice were met with refusal. In 1883, he put the same request to the composer Alexander Camp- bell Mackenzie, who accepted. Carroll sat down to tackle the task of writing the libretto of the proposed opera. In May 1884, he notified Mackenzie that he was abandoning the project. Two years later, Henry Saville Clarke re- quested permission for an operatic adaptation of Wonderland and Looking-Glass in two acts. Numer- ous letters testify to Lewis Carroll's careful overseeing of the project. The operetta opened in December 1886, with the music composed by Walter Slaughter, and notes in Carroll's journals show his satisfac- tion. The show toured England for several months before reopening in London in 1888. Notes on two other Alice productions appear in Carroll's diaries; one in June 1889 at an art school received unfavorable comments from the author; the other, by Ruth Daniel with music by Paul Rubens, in June 1895, drew directly from the books' dialogues and the original engravings by Tenniel. Parodies and nursery rhymes, such as Humpty Dumpty or Twee- dledum and Tweedledee were of great interest to Lewis Carroll, who started to write an essay on the subject before the publication of Alice in Wonderland. Because of the popularity of his books, people sometimes credit Carroll with the creation of these popular Victo- rian characters. Carroll's parodies outlasted his models, some of them having completely disap- peared. Reverend lists the original songs and poems alongside the parodies; thus, in his own way, con- tributing to righting this wrong. 42 BOOKS The celebrated American illustrator and comics pioneer A. B. Frost (1851- 1928) is known to us for his collaborations with Car- roll in A Tangled Tale and Rhyme? and Reason ? Now Fantagraphics Books (Se- attle) and Editions de I'An (Angouleme, France) have co-published Stuff and Non- sense, which collects three albums of Frost's "sequen- tial graphic stories" (com- ics) together with sixty illustrated limericks and other material into one handsome, oversize volume. All text in the book, including an introductory essay exploring his connections to Carroll, is in both French and English. Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde (Penguin USA, 2003). "Detective Thursday Next is back for another round of time travel- ing and bookish sleuthing after Fforde 's successful debut, The Eyre Affair. Like his earlier novel, this one is set in an alternate uni- verse — one in which time travel is possible and the boundaries between life and literature are porous." One of the books into which she travels is Wonderland. In Joyce Carol Oates' The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art (Ecco, 2003), she recalls early fascination with Wonderland, and relates that she strongly identified with the "quest- ing, inquisitive Alice." In Lilian Jackson Braun's The Cat Wfio Talked Turkey (New York: Putnam's, 2004), the twenty-sixth in her series of mysteries solved by a cat, Carrollian names abound and the mystery's solution revolves around the cat's pushing the Snark off the bookshelf. " 'What's a Snark? Sounds like something spelled backwards.' " remarks one of the characters — probably with- out having seen Kate Lyons' essay (/O. 71:15). ////,/. Colin Manlove's From Alice to Harry Potter: Children '5 Fantasy in England (Christ Church, NZ: Cybereditions, 2003), avail- able in paperback ($21) or as a download to Adobe Reader from www.cybereditions.com ($16), is an introductory survey of the topic. Reviewed in The Lion and the Unicorn, Vol. 28 No. 1, January, 2004. The four-volume Dictionary of Nine- teenth-Century British Scientists, Ber- nard Lightman, editor (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), contains an essay on C. L. Dodg- son, penned by our own Dr. Francine Abeles. Deborah O'Keefe's Readers in Wonderland: the Liberating Worlds of Fantasy Fiction from Dorothy to Harry Poi^^ (New York: Continuum, 2003) actually starts with Alice, not Dorothy. Tioelve Impossible Things Before Break- fast by Jane Yolen is a collection of stories for the young (age 9-12) reader, including "Tough Alice," which takes place in Wonderland. Published in 2001 in hardcover by Turtleback Books and in paper- back by Magic Carpet Books. Lost Girls, a series begun in 1991 and having gone through many publishers, is British comics-writ- ing legend ( The League of Ex- traordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, Watchmen) Alan Moore's and artist Melinda Gebbie's tale, set in 1913, of a meeting between three of childhood literature's female characters (Alice, Dorothy, and Wendy) and their erotic explorations. The se- ries is "an attempt to reinvent pornography as something exqui- site, thoughtful and human." Top Shelf will be releasing the first edition as a three- volume hardcover graphic novel set (in a slip case), and will offer a limited run of books signed and numbered by both Gebbie & Moore as well. See www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog. php?type=2&tide=219. Victorian Literary Trivia: 640 Ques- tions and Quotations from Jane Aus- ten to Oscar Wilde by Kelley Dickin- son, Lorman Press, 2004. Includes many about Mr. C. Order from her at 425 Lakeshore Drive, Madison MS 39110. $17. kelley@victorianlit erarytrivia.com; (877) 656-5320. A lovely little booklet of the Snark in Hebrew has been produced as a tribute to its translator, the late Rivka Knohl. It is being distributed gratis to anyone interested. Con- tact Amnon Shappira | r. Halafta, 15 I 93181 Jerusalem | Israel; email@example.com. Another fine Snark booklet, this one in English, has been pro- duced by Ramble House. Titled A Snark Selection, it is comprised of the poem, with Gavin O'Keefe's superb illustrations, and two chapters by 1940s mystery writer Harry Stephen Keeler. Order from Fender Tucker, 443 Glad- stone Blvd., Shreveport LA 71104; firstname.lastname@example.com; (318) 868-8727; www.ramblehouse.com/ snark.htm. $12 + p&h. Alice, Lela Dowling's fine adapta- tion of the stories originally pub- lished in comic book format by Eclipse in 1987, has been collected into a graphic novel by About Comics. $9. 43 Eachtrai Eilise i dTir na niontas ( Wonderland in a new translation into Irish, but you knew that) from Coisceim & Evertype, 2003. See www.evertype.com/gram/ eachtrai-eilise.html. Best way to order is through the An Siopa Leabhar bookstore. Email them a credit card # or send it via post: email@example.com; An Siopa Leabhar, 6 Harcourt Street, Dublin 2, Ireland. Hardcover €20.00 + postage, paperback €7.50 + postage. ARTICLES The Lincoln Center Theater Review, Issue 37 (Winter/Spring 2004) discusses the play King Lear, here directed by Sir Jonathan Miller and starring Christopher Plummer in the title role. The front cover photograph was J. M. Cameron's King Lear Allotting His Kingdom to His Three Daughters, 1872, featuring Alice Liddell as Cordelia. Inside was her Alethea, also featuring Miss Liddell. An article by Ruth Gledhill in the Times (London), March 24, 2004, discusses Princess Louise, Queen Victoria's sixth child, and alleges that the Reverend Robinson Duck- worth, he of the trip-up-the-Isis fame, was Louise's lover as well as her religious guide. In Children 's Literature, the annual of the Modern Language Associa- tion Division on Children's Litera- ture and The Children's Literature Association, Volume 32, 2004, is "The Boy Who Lived: From Car- roll's Alice and Barrie's Peter Pan to Rowling's Harry Potter" by Amy Billone. It asks the question, who is today's most beloved child char- acter and argues that Harry Potter competes with Alice and Peter Pan and wins, by combining both of them inside himself. "Missionary Mail from Tristan da Cunha, Part 2" by Robin Taylor in Gibbons Stamp Monthly, June 2004, contains a photograph of a letter from Edwin Dodgson to "My Dear- est Maggie" and a complete trans- literation of it, speaking about the difficulties of sending and receiv- ing mail. The article is illustrated with Tristan stamps commemo- rating Dodgson 's arrival on the island and the ships involved in his voyages. The article can be read online at www.gibbonsstampmon thly.com. You must register (free) before reading it. The Vandeboncoeur Collection of Im- ages, Issue Three (March 2002) has a 13-page color section on Harry Rountree, including his Alice work, email@example.com. 3809 Laguna Ave., Palo Alto CA 94306. $20. CYBERSPACE Internet navigator — and a lot more! — ^Alexa (www.alexa.com) rates sites daily on the basis of traf- fic (of other Alexa toolbar users). Under "Lewis Carroll," the LCSNA has two of the top five (our Soci- ety page is #2, our Lewis Carroll home page #4) . Surprisingly, the #1 most visited site is Ruth ZarofTs interactive adventure {KL 58:22), #3 is the Carroll page at www.literature.org, and #5 is the Pazooter Works' "Secrets of Lewiss [sic] Carroll Revealed (KL 67:27). Speaking of our Web site, there is a new page about the Knight Letter at lewiscarroll.org/kl/kl042004/ KnightLetter.htm. Our "Lewis Carroll Home Page" is averaging 22,000 hits a month, from 132 countries. '''Alice in Wonderland: A Children's Book or a Migraineur's Diary?" by Deborah Wirtel suggests Car- roll was actually a migraineur, and that Alice's manifestations in the book were representative of his migraine auras, which she dis- cusses, along with "Alice in Won- derland Syndrome." It is a good summary and has some useful links, headaches.about.com/od/ profiles/a/carroll_l.htm. The Disney Channel's early '90s TV series Adventures in Wonderland has a fan site at www.lanceandeskimo.com/ journal/alice.shtml. One of the programs (also in book form) was the rather peculiar White Rabbits Can't Jump, featuring O.J. Simp- son as the title character. Everything known about Kaulbach Island (Canada) and its 1976 Won- derland stamps can be found at www.rpsc.org/Library/kaulbach/ more8.htm. A picture of the Cheshire Catmo- bile from the 2001 Burning Man Festival at www.wired.com/news/ culture/0, 1 284,46557,00.html. "Twisted Alice, a spiritual prophy- lactic" rant at cosmicircus.com/ twisted.htm. A Mad Tea Party of mechanical dolls at www.ellenrixford.com/ htmls/2mechdollsdispla.html. The "word of the day" on March 12 at Merriam-Webster's online site www.m-w.com was "Jabber- wocky." "This nonsensical poem caught the public's fancy, and by 1902 'jabberwocky' was being used as a generic term for meaning- less speech or writing. The word 'bandersnatch' has also seen some use as a general noun, with the meaning 'a wildly grotesque or bi- zarre individual.' It's a much rarer word than jabberwocky,' though." All you need to know about "Cheshire cells" ("The Cheshire group is the space group of the crystal when its material contents are removed leaving only the sym- metry elements, like the smile that was left when the Cheshire Cat disappeared") can be found on www.ccp4.ac.uk/ccp4/html/ cheshirecell.html. Cutesy Korean cartoon charac- ters called "Pucca" took a trip to Wonderland in June, according to their downloadable icon and "cross-stitche" \_sic} patterns. Visit puccaclub.com/eng/. 44 "Intel: Keeping Tabs on Your Slithy Toves" by Mark Frauen- felder on "The Feature" discusses the "Jabberwocky" project at Intel Research in Berkeley, California. Software downloadable to a Blue- tooth mobile phone counts the number of "familiar strangers" in your "urban atmosphere" and gives you a clue as to how often you've seen this or that person be- fore. www.thefeature.com/article? articleid= 100626. The Nineteenth-Century Ameri- can Children's Book Trade Di- rectory, has been launched at www.americanantiquarian. org/btdirectory.htm. "Based upon the unparalleled collection of Children's Literature held at the American Antiquarian Society, this comprehensive directory contains 2,600 entries documenting the activity of individuals and firms involved in the manufacture and distribution of children's books in the United States chiefly between 1821 and 1876." The thirteenth annual Loebner prize contest to find the most "human-seeming" chatbot (a computer program that simulates conversation) was won by "Jabber- wock" by Juergen Pirner. A varia- tion of the Turing Test, the contest was held in Surrey University's Digital World Research Centre in 2003. The chatbot "Alice" by Richard Wallace (no relation to the demented anagrammer who wrote The Agony of Lewis Carroll [KL 54:8] ) came in near last, de- spite having won twice previously. Third place went to "Jabberwacky." (Do I detect a pattern in the names?) If anyone comes up with a chatbot that actually passes the Turing Test (i.e., its responses are "indistinguishable" from a human being's), he, she, or they can claim $100,000. www.loebner.net/Prizef/ loebner-prize.html. m CONFERENCES AND LECTURES The Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children's Literature at California State University, Fresno, hosted the 31st annual conference of the Children's Literature Asso- ciation from June 10 to 12. More than 140 speakers offered talks on varied topics related to the confer- ence theme of "Dreams and Vi- sions," including Sue Fox of Cali- fornia State University, Hayward, on "When Dreams Are Night- mares: Voicing the Unspeakable in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, [etc.]" and Marah Gubar of the University of Pitts- burgh, "Lewis in Wonderland." Presenter John Docherty spoke on "Blake and Carroll and also held a workshop in San Jose, California (see p. 37). EXHIBITIONS Claire Khalil's oil paintings and watercolors exhibition at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York City, September-October 2003, and The Buder Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, October-December 2003, incorporated many images of Alice, including a cityscape of Venice, Italy, where she appears in various spots. Blaine Kern's Mardi Gras World is New Orleans' showcase of Carni- val, with thousands of sensational sculptured props on display year- round. Devra Kunin visited them in February and saw giant heads of the Duchess and Tweedledee (or ~ dum?). www.mardigrasworld.com. "The Red Rose Girls" at The Nor- man Rockwell Museum in Stock- bridge, Mass., featured the art of Jessie Willcox Smith {Boys and Girls ofBookland) . November 2003-May 2004. Vik Muniz plays with toys. That is to say, in his "Rebus" series he uses tiny plastic toys such as soldiers, jacks, guns, cars, whistles, cowboys. Indians, and creepy-crawlers to compose a replica of a photo- graph. "Alice as Beggar-maid" was so constructed, photographed, and made into 100" X 72" Ci- bachrome prints. At the Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, April-May. $25,000. 1^ PERFORMANCES NOTED Lobster Alice hy Kira Obolensky, in which Salvador Dali travels to Hollywood to work on Disney's movie, Synchronicity Performance Group, August 2003 in Adanta, Georgia. The Ensemble Theater of Cincin- nati presented a musical Alice in Wonderland by Joe McDonough and David Kisor in December, 2003. This production debuted five years ago. Alice in Wonderland by the Chil- dren's Theater Association — Bill Starr, director and choreogra- pher — in San Francisco, January. For kids. Alice in Wonderland by the Pied Piper Workshop of the North Bay Repertory Theater in San An- selmo, Calif., March. For and by kids. Maria Bodmann's "psychedelic rock'n'roll shadow play" oi Alice in Wonderland at the National Day of Puppetry festival in Tierra Del Sol (Southern California) April 24; also in Phoenix, Arizona, June 24 where you could also see a version by the National Marionette The- ater the next night. See also p. 37. The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits is a 50-minute work for a 32-voice choir and "Snarkes- tra, an ensemble of instruments rejected by people of good taste and common sense." The new work, by Washington composer Maurice Saylor, was performed by the Cantate Chamber Singers (www.Cantate.org), in May, 2004, at the Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, MD. You can hear it atwww.SibeliusMusic.com 45 by searching "Snark." Take care to listen to the full score and not the vocal scores. The complete text can be found at etext.library.adelaide. edu.au/c/carroll_l/snark. "Tasting Memories" at the Neigh- borhood Playhouse in Manhattan in June, starring Kitty Carlisle Hart, was a smorgasbord of songs and poems about food. "The Wal- rus and the Carpenter," as simg by Tammy Grimes, Alvin Epstein, and Philip Bosco, was featured. AUCTIONS All Star Auctions on May 29/30 had two relevant items: an origi- nal production multi-eel image of the Disney Alice in a bottle, on a hand-prepared background, est: $3,500-4,000, and an extremely rare Mary Blair (see p. 32) con- cept painting of Alice under the table, est: $6,500-7,500. Neither sold, www.allstarauctions.net. MEDIA "The World of Alice in Wonder- land" on "The Exchange" on New Hampshire Public Radio on May 10 featured Trish Anderton's in- terview with Will Brooker (see p. 32). "I have just finished listening online to an excellent replay of the interview with Will Brooker about his new book, his interpreta- tions of the roots of its criticism, the history and the meanings of Alice, the Lewis Carroll societies, Disney, video games, drugs, and many other subjects. It ran for a full hour and I think it was very enjoyable. Even our own Matt Demakos was interviewed for about five minutes, and one of our newest members called in to add his testimonial about the Saturday meeting [at Harvard] and the Society. Despite the interviewer's attempts to steer towards the more sensationalistic topics at times, the show, in my opinion, left a very positive impression of Alice, Car- roll and Carrollians. I encourage you to listen to the interview on- line." ~ Alan Tannenbaum. Hear it at www.nhpr.org/view_content/ 6327/. On Minnesota Public Radio's The Writer's Almanac, a daily five-min- ute filler of poetry and history broadcast on public radio stations nationally, host Garrison Keillor discussed Lewis Carroll on his 172nd birthday, January 27, 2004, along with snippets about fellow- birthdayers Jerome Kern and Mo- zart. Not much new and Keillor, of course, managed to mispronounce both "Dodgson" and "Liddell." Evening Music xuith David Gar- land from WNYC in New York on NPR presented "Down the Rabbit Hole" on Friday, April 9, with mu- sical selections from Fine, Taylor, Baumann, and Del Tredici. "W" Hotels' new series of print ads proclaim "Welcome to Wonder- land." Dunno why. WTiotels.com. THINGS AJames Sadler Alice teapot, from the BBC America Shop, www.BBCAmericaShop.com, (800) 898-4921. Bill Bruford's album One of a Kind (Polydor, 1979)— Polydor, 1979)— now available on CD — contains the track "Fainting in Coils," which begins with a reading from Wonderland. Charles Stierlen, a Peruvian artist now living in Florida, has done a series of Alice-inspired oil paint- ings, 30" X 40" or 36" X 48" in size, average price is $1,200. The word "nymphet" might come to mind. You can see his work at www.wonder-stierlen.com/ alice.htm. {Alice in Cyberspace: A Radio Drama Series by David Dem- chuk, published in softcover by the LCSCanada and available from The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, firstname.lastname@example.com, P O Box 122, Sauk City WI 53583, is an amusing 15-part "adaptation" of the story, sort of Doug Adams mixed with Dennis Potter. The CD of the 1999-2000 CBC/Radio Canada broadcast may be ordered from their shop at 250 Front Street West, Toronto, ON, M5V 3G6, Canada; email@example.com; (800) 955-771 1. Their Web store at www.cbcboutique.com has a two- cassette package containing a 1965 radio dramatization of Wonderland and a 1947 broadcast of Looking- Glass. If you need some hedgehog step- ping stones to complement the pink flamingoes on your lawn, see Smith and Hawken's new catalog. Sets of two for $20. (800) 776-3365; smithandhawken.com. Or a nicely reproduced Tenniel Gryphon from Alberene Royal Mail Catalog. $35. (800) 843-9078; email@example.com. Linda Sunshine's resplendently colorful All Things Alice book featuring many early artists (Rack- ham, Hudson, Folkard, McManus, Kay, Atwell, Winter, etc.) is coming this fall, and will be covered in depth in the next issue. Mean- while, an associated 2005 calendar is being published by Welcome Books. An order sheet has been inserted into this issue, but for the record you can order it for $12.95 (includes free s&h if you men- tion the LCSNA) from Welcome Books, 6 W. 18th St., New York NY 10011; (212) 989-3200x24; firstname.lastname@example.com. Very nicely done! 46