Full text of "Knight Letter No. 82"

KNIGHT LETTER

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T/^^ Lewis Carroll Society of North America

Summer 2009

Volume II Issue 12

Number 82

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.

Editorial correspondence should be sent to the

Editor in Chief at wrabbit@idiom.com.

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions for The Rectory Umbrella should be sent to mahendra373@hotmail.com.

Submissions for Mischmasch should be sent to

sarah@voraciousreader.com or ray@ganymede.org.

Submissions for All Must Have Prizes should be sent tojoelbirenbaum@comcast.net.

ISSN 0193-886X

Andrew Sellon, Editor in Chief

August 8c Clare Imholtz, Editors, The Rectory Umbrella

Sarah Adams-Kiddy 8c Ray Kiddy, Editors, Mischmasch

Mark Burstein, Production Editor

Andrew H. Ogus, Designer

THE LEWIS CARROLL SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA

President:

Andrew Sellon, andrewsellon@optonline.net

Vice-President:

Cindy Watter, hedgehogccw@sbcglobal.net

Secretary:

Clare Imholtz, imholtz99@atlantech.net

www.LewisCarroll.org

Annual membership dues are U.S. $35 (regular),

$50 (international), and $100 (sustaining).

Subscriptions, correspondence, and inquiries should be addressed to:

Clare Imholtz, LCSNA Secretary

11935 Beltsville Dr.

Beltsville, Maryland 20705

ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE

Angelica Carpenter, Alice Berkey, Sharin' Schroeder, Nancy Willard, Devra Kunin

Knight Letter is printed on 30% post-consumer waste recycled paper
using vegetable inks.

Cover. Theater drawing by Jonathan Dixon
adapted from La Guida di Bragia (LCSNA, 2007)

Photo Credits: Production stills from La Guida di Bragia (cover; p. 3 C;

p. 5 upper L and R, lower C) courtesy of Theaterwork (www.theaterwork.org);

CONTENTS

THe ReCTORY UMBRSLLA

Alice, Mooney, & Spooney in Enchantmentland

AUGUST IMHOLTZ,JR. 6= MARK BURSTEIN

Furniss Blasts: Caricaturing Carroll

MARK BURSTEIN 6f ANDREW OGUS

Contemporary Sylvie and Bruno Reviews, Installment

CLARE IMHOLTZ
lO

One Snark, Two Snark, Real Snark ? or Boo-Snark ?

ALISON TANNENBAUM
16

The Hunting of the Butcher

DOUG HOWICK

MISCHMASCH

LSAVeS FROM THe DeANSRY CARDGN

JABBSRING AND JAM
30

RAVINGS
31

Nores S^ QusRies
32

SeReNDIPITY
33

ALL MUST HAVe PRIZGS
JOEL BIRENBAUM

IN MSMORIAM
36

CARROLLIAN NOTeS

Amanda McKittrick Ros

MARK BURSTEIN

The Lesson Books

MARK BURSTEIN

Alice in Wartime

ANDREW SELLON (fb" SaRAH AdAMS-KiDDY

Sic, Sic, Sic

OF BOOKS AND THINGS
42

Alice in Washington

ELLIE SCHAEFER-SALINS

Jabberwocky at Lincoln Center

JANET JURIST

Lewis Carroll in Numberland

CLARE IMHOLTZ

Princyclopedia

CLARE (^AUGUST IMHOLTZ

Alicia Scavino 's Alice

MARK BURSTEIN

Under His Hat

RAY KIDDY

FROM OUR FAR-FLUNG

CORReSPONDeNTS

Art — Articles 6f Academia — Books — Cyberspace

Events, Exhibits &" Places — Movies & Television

Performing Arts — Things

"^^^^^ hoy, members! Gather round the mainmast,
^^^^ I have news for you. As you know, for the
X m.past three years I have served as your Editor

in Chief, having taken charge when our former long-
standing captain understandably found the duties
too time-consuming on top of a thriving personal and
professional life. I now find myself in the selfsame po-
sition, and am delighted to report that as of the next
issue, Mark Burstein will be back at the helm, which
will allow me to focus on my presidential duties. So,
welcome back, Mark! In addition, crew members
Clare and August Imholtz have requested permanent
shore leave due to their own commitments. Please
join me in extending to them our heartiest thanks for
maintaining the Rectory Umbrella so beautifully for
the past three years. I'm delighted to announce that
the Umbrella will now be carried by member Mahen-
dra Singh, who charmed our membership with his
mysterious Snark-hunting wit at the fall 2008 meet-
ing. I'm also very pleased to report that Sarah Adams-
Kiddy, Ray Kiddy, Joel Birenbavim, Andrew Ogus, and
Devra Kunin will remain on the ship's roster in their
current capacities; they deserve our thanks as well,
even though they are not going ashore.

It's been a singular pleasure working with this
lively crew. My profound thanks to all for what has
been a remarkable three-year tour of duty. I hope
that you readers are enjoying the changes and addi-
tions we've made to the magazine, and that you will
continue to provide the new crew with your sugges-
tions and feedback, so that our magazine will always
yield a varied, thought-provoking and entertaining
catch. Thank you all in advance for that.

So, what's in this issue? Another hold of gold, just
for you: the Santa Fe spring meeting recap, more con-
temporary reviews of Sylvie and Bruno by Clare, a col-
laborative essay by Mark and Andrew Ogus on Harry
Furniss's drawings of Mr. Dodgson, a delightful Snark
poem from Alison Tannenbaum, and a fascinating
examination of depictions of the Butcher (along with
other Snarkiana) by Doug Howick. Not to mention
the booty below deck in Mischmasch! Once more, set
sail, noble reader. And enjoy.

ANDREW SELLON

ALICE, MOONEV, & SFOONEV
IN ENCBANTMENTLANB

AUGUST A. IMHOLTZ, JR. 6^ MARK BURSTEIN

"^^C ^^^^ost of the dozen or so LCSNA mem-
m \# % bers — including the Natsumes from the
M. IlLCS Japan — who attended our all-day

meeting on May 9, 2009, flew into Albuquerque and
then drove up to Santa Fe, with mountains and mesas
on each side of the highway, a distance of about sixty
miles through the sometimes rolling country, barren
except for the sagebrush, which seem to exist on a
teaspoon of water a month.

Our meeting began at Theaterwork's headquar-
ters (offices, studio, rehearsal space, costume shop,
etc.) with introductory remarks by president Andrew
Sellon, and the reading of a greeting {p. 2) from Bill
Richardson, governor of New Mexico, followed by a
warm welcome to us all by Theaterwork's artistic di-
rector, David Olson.

David is a fine raconteur, and talked about the
performance we would see in the evening and how
it came to Santa Fe. He gave us a gripping account
of the evolution of Theaterwork from its founding in
1966 as Teatro Laboratorio de Bogota in Colombia,
where he had gone as a United Nations representa-
tive on a cultural mission. His early experiences there
affected him enormously and taught him how theater
could be a force for political change — "to transform
the world" — as well as entertainment ("Knock 'em
alive" being his motto). The military government did
not appreciate the liberating and dignifying works

David produced and he was forced to leave the coun-
try. After taking a year to return to the United States,
he and his wife spent sixteen years in Minnesota be-
fore coming to Santa Fe. In the fourteen years since
then he has staged more than eighty plays and operas
including works by Chekhov, Moliere, Miller, Wilde,
Menotti, Humperdinck, and of course now Lewis
Carroll.

The LCSNA's own multitalented Jonathan Dixon
(illustrator, narrator, voice actor [Mooney], arranger
and composer of the music for the performance of
La Guida di Bragia, and organizer of what turned out
to be an absolutely superb program all around) then
explained how he came to bring the play to David's
attention. Dixon's interest in Lewis Carroll's early
work, especially this curiously titled "ballad opera,"
dates from his 1992 visit as a young man to Croft
Rectory, where he met the current owners and saw
the initials CLD that the young Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson had scratched on a window pane. He feels
that Dodgson's years at Croft were warm, secure, and
cozy, a welcome change from both the cold dwell-
ing his family had lived in at Daresbury and his dif-
ficult school years at Rugby; this time shortly before
he went to Oxford was a comfortable family respite,
which informs our appreciation of this play. Jonathan
illustrated the LCSNA's edition of The Hunting of the
Snark (1992) while studying at the University of Iowa,

Bill Richardson

then moved to Santa Fe, where he became involved
with Theaterwork. In 2006, Olson wanted to stage a
pixppet play and Jonathan suggested La Guida di Bra-
gia, which he also had illustrated brilliantly — first for
KL 61 (1999) and then with some additional drawings
for the splendid hardcover edition that the LCSNA
published in 2007.

Olson became interested in Carroll and his only
surviving play. Jonathan next put together a "study
book" (a thick three-ring binder in fact) on Carroll
for the members of the Theaterwork company, who
took to the challenge of
staging such a work as La
Guida with remarkable
enthusiasm and creativ-
ity. Although the play
may have been originally
written for marionettes
or stick puppets, the com-
pany decided that to pre-
serve the intimacy and
feel of Dodgson's home-
spun theatrics they would
instead use dolls, the
challenge of animating
which was met with great
aplomb. Mooney and
Spooney, for example,
were created from cast-off
baby dolls retrieved from
a bin at a thrift store, then
altered in the gender
sense, transformed with
prosthetics, and clad first
in nondescript dress and
then in blue railway uni-
forms that looked quite
authentic and fitted the
bill perfectly. The entire
"cast," in fact, was made of

similarly rescued dolls, who were costumed and given
new lives on stage.

David also discussed the play in terms of the-
ater — would it have passed a scriptwriting class?
(It would have been suggested that Mooney and
Spooney's issues should be resolved at the end.)
What were its weaknesses and strengths? (The now
indecipherable inside family jokes; its sheer exu-
berance.) Should the puppeteers be hidden or in
plain view? (Theaterworks cleverly chose the latter,
costuming them as Victorian servants, who because
of their station would themselves have been "invis-
ible in plain view.") Should the voices be taped or
live? (The former, making for a smoother run, less
crowding, and a cast that could include true opera
singers.) Who should speak the prologue and epi-
logue? (The puppeteers.)

State of New Mexico

office of the governor

A Welcome Message from Governor Bill Richardson

As Governor of New Mexico, I would like to extend a warm welcome to the members of the
Lewis Carroll Societ\> of North America and their guests to Santa he as the time of its 400th
Anniversary Celebration approaches. Surely the stories and poems of Lewis Carroll have been
spoken countless times over those years, mionishing and delighting people of all ages.

Let me congratulate you on your work of preserving, the works of Lewis Carroll, extending
research into his life and exploring the impact of his words and images on the cultural life of
the world. IVe are honored to have you here, f am sure your days with us wilt he good ones. It is
especially gratifying to know that the play LA OVUM DI BRA 01 A will he presented for the first time
in more than one hundred and fifty years in New Mexico.

Perhaps, had he had the chance. Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) might have found a
special delight of his own in a visit to New Mexico in its early days. He could have followed his
own thought across our landscape, "And we 'II wander through the wide world, and chase the
buffalo " He would have been most welcome - as arevou

With warmest regards.

Bill Ricltardson
Governor of New Mexico

Stale Capitol • Room 400 • Sariia Fo, New Mexico 87501 • 505-476-2200

The stage, in a Victorian color palette, was a min-
iature theater, actually not so miniature: about nine
feet tall with the stage window itself about three feet
high and four feet wide. Envision a free-standing the-
ater in Victorian music hall fashion, in front of which
is a re-creation, with many Carrollian allusions, of
a sitting room on the floor of which can be found
photographs, a cracked handbell, a looking-glass, a
stuffed rabbit, a white glove, and so on, even a minia-
ture tool set much like the one young Charlie Dodg-
son had made for his sisters. (The performance itself

is reviewed below.)

After a deli-
cious and very New
Mexican lunch at
nearby Tortilla Flats,
we reassembled at
Theaterwork for a
live performance
of Gerald Fried's
chamber piece The
Chess Game (for nar-
rator, flute/piccolo,
oboe, violin, cello,
and piano) with the
composer himself
as oboist. It was a
magical musical en-
deavor with narra-
tion of three scenes
from Through the
Looking-Glass: the
running-in-place
scene, the garden
of talking flowers,
and the two bum-
bling knights. De-
lightfully melodic,
it reminded one
of us of the early
1950s Omnibus performance of Peter and the Wolf and
the other of the Alec Wilder accompaniment to the
Cyril Ritchard recordings of the A/ic^ books. Jonathan
Dixon vividly read the text passages introducing and
separating the music, which itself was simply wonder-
ful — its perky leitmotifs and sequences capturing in
another kind of language the quirkiness and beauty of
Carroll's text in a musical landscape by turns charm-
ing, exhilarating, whimsical, cacophonous, and poi-
gnant. At times the woodwinds were just this side of
madness: in finale of the flower garden sequence, as
Fried explained to us after the performance, all five
instruments, in five different keys, join in sequentially
one beat apart to drive Alice from the garden.

The Chess Game premiered with the New York
Chamber Soloists in 2006 and one hopes a digital
recording of that performance will become available

David Olson

Jonathan Dixon

Gerald Fried

(or perhaps a new one featuring Jonathan and the
musicians we heard). Fried, a composer of four sym-
phonies and three operas, is perhaps best known for
his works for film and television, which have garnered
one Oscar and five Emmy nominations (one win, for
Roots), including the scores for Stanley Kubrick's
Paths of Glory, many of the original Star Trek television
episodes (including the Alice-themed "Shore Leave,"
wherein McCoy spots the White Rabbit), The Man
from U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible, etc. Gerald gra-
ciously spent more than a few minutes talking about
his music, his view of Carroll ("Beckett by way of
Adorno"), and answering our appreciative questions.
Fried said he found Loohing-Glass "simply irresistible"
as a subject. The same description could apply to his
charming composition.

Following a short break we again took our seats
and were treated to the tale of how the LCSNA book
publication of La Guida di Bragia came to be. It all
started, or at least the LCSNA's involvement with
this curious operetta by the young Dodgson, with

a conversation Jonathan Dixon had with Professor
Morton N. Cohen in 1992 — a busy and seminal year
for Dixon. Morton suggested that the Society pub-
lish the playscript, which had only been published
once before, in the Christmas 1931 number of the
British magazine The Queen. (The original manu-
script had been sold at Sotheby's from a lot identi-
fied as "the property of Major C. H. W. Dodgson" on
February 14, 1929 and much later was bought by the
American pencil magnate Alfred Berol, who gave it
to the Fales Library of New York Universit)' with the
rest of his magnificent Carroll collection.)

Former LCSNA president Peter Heath wrote an
introduction to the text that, with a transcription of
the play and illustrations by Jonathan Dixon, was pub-
lished in the Knight Letter in 1999, permission having
been obtained both from executor Philip Dodgson
Jacques and the Fales Library. A note in the magazine
promised "A separate publication, doing better jus-
tice to the illustrations and with ancillary material, is
being planned"; a mere eight years later found it so.

Left: Orlando (before); right: Orlando (after); opposite, clockwise
from UL: Orlando, Sophonisba, Mooney and Spooney, Kaffir,
Mrs. Muddle, Huntsman

The Fales Library gave us digital copies of the pages
of Carroll's original text, which were included in our
hardcover publication. Jonathan Dixon expanded
some of his existing illustrations, added some new
ones, and worked very closely with designer Andrew
Ogus throughout. Mark Burstein added a note on
the possibility that Carroll was parodying not only the
great Bradshaiv's Railway Guide hut John Maddison
Morton's 1851 play Grimshaiu, Bagshaxu and Bradshaw,
and read to us a portion of Punch's review of that play.
Andrew Ogus then explained how he worked on the
selection of the color of the endpapers and joyfully
collaborated with Jonathan on the design, and much
about the principles and rationale for the selection
of the fonts [e.g., Fairfield] used in printing this new
edition of the work. Andrew illustrated what he meant
by showing alternative fonts and explaining why they
simply could not work for the book in hand. His com-
ments provided an enlightening insight into how a

book designer works not only with the text but with
the illustrations and, in certain fortunate cases, their
creator. With that we repaired to the Santa Fe Hotel,
where we enjoyed another excellent meal punctuated
by lively conversation. It went on so long that some of
us arrived back at Theaterwork just in time for the
special 8:00 p.m. private performance.

The performance, the first production since
young Charles Dodgson was behind the curtain, was
nothing short of brilliant. Angela Janda Goldstein
and Larry Lee, both members of the Theaterwork
company, were the puppeteers, who deftly commu-
nicated much emotion and drama by manipulating
the bodies and limbs of Mooney and Spooney, So-
phonisba and her husband Orlando, Mrs. Muddle,
and other cleverly and appropriately attired dolls.
The upper-class characters spoke in verse, often sing-
ing to operatic melodies, and the lower-class, newly
employed railway officials in prose. Every word in

the original text was spoken, plus some that were not
there — Jonathan and David created lines in some
mock-African language, Zulu perhaps, for the char-
acter of the Kaffir.

The dialog was played from a recording made
by Adam Harvey, Angela Janda Goldstein, Larry Lee,
Jonathan Dixon, soprano Elizabeth Calvert, tenor
Tim Willson, Jack Sherman, and 83-year-old British
actor David Frankham (the cat Sgt. Tibbs in 101 Dal-
matians; Star Trek, et al, and a man who remembered
using Bradshaw's Guide in his younger days!) as
Bradshaw himself. The three acts, to much laughter
and applause, went by all too quickly and the audi-
ence gave a ringing ovation at the conclusion. After
the play we wanted to send "electric diagrams" (as
Mrs. Muddle would say) to those who were not able
to join us to let them know what a wonderful time
they had missed. On behalf of the LCSNA, Andrew
Sellon closed the meeting by thankingjonathan and

David Olson for their extraordinary efforts, accom-
plishments, and hospitality. Before leaving, we had
an opportunity to socialize with David Olson and his
Theaterwork company.

We should note here that the public perfor-
mances which had taken place over the three pre-
ceding evenings in a beautiful recreation of a nine-
teenth-century theater also featured as a prelude
Jonathan's rendition of Carroll's "Rules and Regula-
tions" followed by a soprano, Marilyn Barnes, clad as
Sophonisba and accompanied by Glen Smerage on
piano, singing four songs written by Walter Slaughter
for the 1886 Saville Clark adaptation, Alice in Wonder-
land: A Dream Play. The entire evening was videotaped,
and we are discussing the possibility of a D\T) release
with Theaterwork.

New Mexico bills itself as "the Land of Enchant-
ment"; on this day that may even have been an under-
statement.

Furniss Blasts: Caricaturing Carroll

MARK BURSTEIN 6^^ ANDREW OGUS

The following is a joint critical venture: Part III was
penned by Andrew Ogus, the rest by Mark Burstein.

l: THE MAN

Harry (born Henry) Furniss (1854-1925) is mainly
known to Carrollians for his ninety-two whimsical il-
lustrations to the Sylvie and Bruno duad, although he
also applied his talents equally well to Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland, and contributed, by his own count,
over twenty-six hundred drawings to Punch from 1880
to 1894. His twenty Won(i^r/awrf illustrations (the origi-
nals of sixteen of which now reside in the Berol Col-
lection, and examples of which can be seen in KLs,
59:15 and 74:50) were first published in fortnightly
issues of The Children's Encyclopedia,^ and reprinted in
several other publications in the succeeding years, in-
cluding The Book of Knowledge in the U.S. and transla-
tions into Russian (1909) and Hebrew (1950).^ They
have been quite hard to find; fortunately for us all,
the LCS Canada is planning to publish a new edition
of WbwrfCT'/aw(i featuring all of Furniss's AZic^ drawings,
with related articles, sometime in 2009.

Other minor Furnissian-Carrollian connections
abound. Some are discussed by Ruth Berman in
"Harry Furniss in Wonderland," KL 74:14, and in Goo-
dacre and Wakeling's 1999 article for The Carrollian.

Furniss's troubled up-and-down relationship with
Mr. Dodgson is well-mined territory in Carrollian
literature, but his own eminently humorous, anec-
dotal reminiscences can be found in his two-volume
autobiography, The Confessions of a Caricaturist,^ in his
article "Recollections of Lewis Carroll" in The Strand
Magazine, No. 205, January 1908, which also features
a caricature of Tenniel, two of Alice, one of Humpty,
and one of Phoebe Carlo, the young actress who first
played Alice (the article will be included in the LCS
Canada publication) ; and in Dodgson's profile in Some
Victorian Men.^ Readers preferring to draw their own
conclusions are encouraged to read their occasion-
ally volatile correspondence in Lewis Carroll and His
Illustrators? His second autobiography, Harry Furniss
at Home, contains several parodies of Tenniel's Alice
drawings (and Carroll's style) in his lampoon "Frag-
ments of a Fiscal Wonderland: Advice from a Chan-
clawyerpillar."'' One more, a near-miss: In 1912, at the
age of fifty-eight, Furniss visited the United States,

where he worked in the studios of Thomas Alva Edi-
son, writing and acting in early film shorts. Regret-
tably, he was two years too late for Edison's Alice in
Wonderland (1910). Harry Furniss was an ebullient,
larger-than-life figure, and I for one look forward to
Edward Wakeling's article, "An Uncomfortable Col-
laboration," in the forthcoming LCS Canada book.

Furniss was first and foremost, as can be gleaned
from the title of his autobiography, a superb carica-
turist, primarily of the politicians and other celebri-
ties of his day. He spent many of his later years as a
popular lecturer and raconteur, touring England,
America, Canada, and Australia, giving talks (he
called them "Popular Entertainments") during which
he often sketched.

II: THE DRAWINGS

My research (some, it must be said, rather serendipi-
tous; some due to the wisdom of Messrs. Wakeling
and Goodacre) has turned up seven Furniss carica-
tures of Dodgson, all reproduced here together for
the first time. The original 1931 edition of the Hand-
book lists but three, as it only catalogs the Strand ar-
ticle and misses those published in Furniss's books. ^
As there is no mention in Dodgson's Diaries of his sit-
ting for Furniss, we can assume they were all drawn
from memory or photographs, some possibly serving
as visual fodder for his one-man shows, others for his
books and articles.

♦Figure 1 is a drop-cap used to introduce his remi-
niscences of Dodgson in his Confessions.

♦Figure 2 was published in Some Victorian Men.

♦Figure 3 also comes from the Confessions and
depicts Dodgson's puzzlement at Furniss's
feigned madness, in a tale he relates therein.
The original is in the National Portrait Gallery
in London.

♦Figure 4 {Handbook #678) was printed in the Strand
article. The original is also at the National Por-
trait Gallery.

♦Figure 5, "Lewis Carroll at the Play," resides in the
Berol collection at New York University; the date
is unknown.

♦Figure 6 (Handbook #679) is also from the Strand
article.

Figure i (igoi)

Figure 2 {ig2^)

♦Figure 7 {Handbook #677) is a
caricature of Dodgson at a
lectern, his body in three-
quarter view and his face in
profile.

The last-named was seen for
the first time by most LCSNA
members as the cover illustration
to Elizabeth Sewell's Lewis Carroll:
Voices from France, the 2008 mem-
bers-only publication, although
it had been reproduced in The
Carrollian} The original pen-and-
ink drawing (c. 1888) has been
in the Burstein Collection for
many years; it was once owned
by Sidney Herbert Williams of
Handbook fame, who, in June of
1925, issued a series of twenty-
five photolithographic facsimiles,
which he signed and, presumably,
distributed to his friends, whose
names — e.g., Carroll scholars
Flodden Heron (#3) and Harold
Hartley (#14) — were hand-writ-
ten in as part of the inscription.^
As the Sewell book cover only
shows the top half of the drawing,
we thought it only right to reproduce the whole of it,
from the original, in the Knight Letter. It is certainly
the friendliest of the lot.

"'This here young lady,' said the Gryphon, 'she
wants for to know [its] history, she do.'"

Ill: COMMENTARY

Examining these drawings with the relatively inno-
cent eyes of someone largely unfamiliar with Furniss
was a fascinating task.

Figure ^ (igoi)

The caricaturist's af-
fectionate shorthand is
clearly at work, reducing
his subject to a familiar
profile, from the entrap-
ping initial cap to the be-
wildered visitor in Figure
3, to the sharp, deft shapes
on the arms in Figure 6,
and on to the formal por-
trait of Figure 7. Look
how the always sloping
brush strokes stop and
start in Figure 7, how the
dark areas under his coat
give stature to the now
dignified Dodgson. And
Figure 3 provides a witty
summation of Dodgson's
difficult and demanding
relationships with his il-
lustrators: the author,
who only means well by
his suggestions, versus the
maddened and frustrated
artist! Almost every line of
the bewildered Dodgson
drives toward the haplessly
split Furniss, whose upper
half is trying in vain to force his visitor away, while
his bottom half is in flight. The tall and lanky figure,
towering over the maddened artist, is rendered with
rapid, sloping lines, rich blacks, and lively whites. Was
Furniss struck by the magnificent Dodgsonian nose,
softened though it is in Figure 4?

Note that three of these pictures include the
writer's attributes of books or papers; Figure 7, with
its invisible lectern, contributes to his professorial au-
thority. Figures 3 and 6 contain what must have been

Figure 4 (igo8)

Figure ^ (n.d.)

a familiar gesture of his lengthy fingers:
the diffident, dubious reassurance of
touching his chin. In Figures 4, 5, and 6,
Dodgson tenderly holds books and pa-
pers between thumb and forefinger, his
other fingers doubled below for support.

Figure 1, published in Furniss's Con-
fessions in 1901, appears to have been re-
drawn or copied to be printed at a larger
size in Some Victorian Men in 1924 (Figure
2). The similarities are so strong it seems
clear that either Furniss had a remark-
ably specific memory or, more likely, he
chose to re-render his earlier drawing.

We can imagine Furniss's hand al-
most automatically flickering over the
paper, with, first, the addition of shad-
ing lines behind Figure 2, replacing the
"T" and giving the drawing depth and
dignity. The face is less angled, more self-
conscious. Look closely at the rendering
of the omnipresent bow tie: its pattern-
ing seems virtually unchanged. The oval
treatment of the eyes; the long, deep in-
dent near the mouth; the wisps of hair fi^^^f, 5 (jgo8)
floating mullet-like above the neck are
barely different. Even the rapid lines de-
lineating the cheek almost match. The lively touches
of white under the ear are gone, while the lines de-
fining the cheek and slanting down from the mouth,
and the vigorous curve below the nose in Figure 1
have solidified a bit twenty years later.

Taken as a whole. Figure 1 is a brighter drawing,
sparkling in a way that Figure 2 does not. Twenty-two
years later the accentuated angles and the lively eager-
ness of the figure are gone. Is this merely the result of
copying? The loss of Furniss's abilities as he aged? Or
is it that Furniss's vision of Dodgson has settled into
the stodgy characterization by which the Victorians
are still perceived today?

IV: THE TWO
FURNISSES

One of the side-effects of
researching this article was
the discovery of one Harold
Furniss, also an English il-
lustrator, born just two years
after "our" Harry. They were,
and are, often confused, a
fact mentioned in Harry's
Confessions, and detailed in
an article, "Harry and Harold
Furniss" by John Adcock.^''
The problem continues to
this day: I had to correct Wiki-
pedia, which had conflated
them. Harold was, in the
main, an editor, writer, and
illustrator of police/crime
"penny dreadfuls."

v: dodgson's

HEIGHT

Falconer Madan (1851-1935),
who was well acquainted with
Dodgson, comments in the
Introductory Notes to the
Handbook, "Dodgson's height has been exaggerated
in some reminiscences, which describe him as tall.
The error may be due to Harry Furniss's drawing of
him. As a fact he was of medium height, about 5 ft. 9
in. A personal friend writes 'he was of middle height,
and always wore a long black coat, with a rather strag-
gling white tie,' another 'he was not tall,' another
'he was of moderate height.'" Morton Cohen's Bi-
ography proffers several different opinions from his
child friends and relatives, e.g., Ethel Hatch, Isa Bow-
man, and niece Irene Dodgson Jaques, whose guesses
go from "medium height" to six-feet-tall." A pair of
full-length "assisted self-portraits" (that is, Dodgson

Figure 8(1898)

Figure 7 (c. i

would set it up and then have someone remove the
lens cap) taken together in Christ Church circa 1856
perhaps would provide evidence: one can be seen on
p. 196 of Cohen's Biography; the second greets one on
the portal page of Wakeling's website, www.lewiscar-
roll-site.com, and was the basis for Figure 8, an etch-
ing from The Strand Magazine.^^ I suppose an expert
in forensic photogrammetry could be called upon to
resolve this issue once and for all, assuming that the
doorway, desk, or chair (or, for that matter, any ob-
ject) in or near which he was photographed is still in
existence and can be located and measured. Perhaps
a benevolent Carrollian would be so kind as to take
along a measuring tape on his or her next trip to Ox-
ford and put the issue to rest.

' London: Educational Book Company, 1908-09.
^ See ''Alice Illustrated by Harry Furniss: A Brief

Biographical Study and a Checklist of Editions"

by Selwyn H. Goodacre and Edward Wakeling in

The Carrollian, No. 3, Spring 1999.
' London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901; New York: Harper 8c

Brothers, 1902.

London: John Lane, The Bodley Head; New York: Dodd,

Mead and Co., 1924.

Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003,

Morton Cohen and Edward Wakeling, eds.

London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904.

A Handbook of the Literature of the Rev. C. L. Dodgson

by Sidney Herbert Williams and Falconer Madan

(London: Oxford University Press, 1931), revised by

Roger Lancelyn Green and reissued as The Lewis Carroll

Handbook'm 1962.

No. 13, Spring 2004, in Selwyn Goodacre's article

"Bibliographical Notes."

The reproduction in The Carrollian is of the latter. Any

collector possessing other copies is encouraged to

contact me.

http://john-adcock.blogspot.com/2008/09/harry-

harold-furniss.html.

Cohen, Morton, l^ewis Carroll: A Biography (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf; London: Macmillan, 1995).

Vol. 15 No. 88, April 1898 in an article, "Portraits of

Celebrities," immediately preceding "Lewis Carroll" by

Beatrice Hatch.

Contemporary Sylvie and Bruno Reviews^ Installment 8

CLARE IMHOLTZ

>;*>=-

Reprinted here are ten contemporary reviews
of Sylvie and Bruno. I am deeply indebted to
Sharin' Schroeder, who kindly forwarded
me most of these reviews.

Dodgson, rather famously, says in the Preface to
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, "Let me also here assure
them [reviewers of SB] that it is not from any want of
respect for their criticisms, that I have carefully for-
borne from reading any of them." However, my re-
search in the Macmillan & Company letterbooks of
correspondence, held at the British Library, shows
that Dodgson was not without interest in reviews. On
December 16, 1889, four days after publication of SB,
Macmillan & Co. wrote to Dodgson, "Your instruc-
tions as to review copies [presumably, where to send
them] were all carried out." On December 23, Mac-
millan wrote to a press-cutting agency in High Hol-
burn, "We have been requested to send you a guinea,
and to ask you to send to Miss Dodgson, The Chest-
nuts, Guildford, notices of 'Sylvie & Bruno' . . . till the
guinea is worked out." So perhaps, if Dodgson did
not read reviews, his sisters read them to him? Well,
it is fair to speculate thus. In fact, he soon admits in
the Preface that "Criticisms have, however, reached
me from private sources. ..."

If Dodgson was aware of the reviews reprinted
below, we have to wonder how difficult it must have
been for him to hear again and again that SB — which
he believed to be his most important work — in no way
measured up to the Alices. While the reviewers here
are mostly appreciative and show great respect for
Lewis Carroll as author of the Alicehooks, even the
most positive cannot quite bring themselves to give
full-throated approval to SB; there is always at least
a bit of puzzlement and regret about the moralizing
aspects of the new book. It will probably surprise to-
day's readers to see that several of the reviewers seem
quite taken with Sylvie and Bruno as characters.

The Daily News, December 13, 1889, p. 5
The author of "Alice in Wonderland" has written a
new book, "Sylvie and Bruno" (Macmillan and Co.).
Mr. Harr)' Furniss has illustrated the book abundantly,
and in his quaint drawings, and the still quainter text,
we seem to have all the elements of the old delight
that people found in the most successful child's book

of the Victorian age. Here be monsters in plenty, gro-
tesque men and women, beautiful children and ugly
children, and the whole machinery of imaginative ex-
travagance. Yet the author will not have it that he is in
any way repeating himself. He is seeking a new path.
To repeat himself he feels sure would be to court
disaster, and why should he attempt it, since he has
been repeated in the old line by others something
like a dozen times? So "Sylvie and Bruno" is to in-
clude, along with "acceptable nonsense for children,"
"some of the graver thoughts of human life." Did not
"Alice" include the latter too? — at least by the clearest
implication — and we need ask for no more in a work
of this kind. "Sylvie and Bruno," therefore, is not new,
as to that "departure"; it is only a pleasant road that
we seemed to have traveled before. The narrator, a
sort of impersonal first person pronoun, has to fade
off into fairyland, without a shock to his nerves, or
to ours, whenever the subject requires it. He accom-
plishes this in no small part by the familiar device of
the dream. We are at one moment with him, and an
unknown lady companion, in a railway carriage on
the way to Fayfield (suggestive name), and at another
in the palace of a Warden of a sort of undiscovered
country, where all happens according to the fairies'
law. When we are to come back again, it is but halt-
ing the train at a junction, and the shock wakes our
narrator up, and releases us from the experiences
of every-day life. The Warden's country is, after all,
but the vestibule of Fairyland. We must go down the
marble stairs (not Down the Snow Stairs,* this time),
which run from beneath a bush, before we can fairly
say that we are within the precious confines.

But as soon as we pass the threshold of sense
with the dozing gentleman, we are with very strange
people. The "Warden" is one of them — the ruler of
the country, with Bruno and Sylvie, boy and girl,
his delightful children. These are some of the good
characters and they have three perfect contrasts on
the shady side in the Sub- Warden, the Sub- Warden's
wife, and Uggug, their most abominable offspring.
The Sub-Warden might be a Brazilian, f for the ease
in which he plots the Warden out of his office. He
is assisted by a villainous "Lord Chancellor," whose
face, as pictured by Mr. Harry Furniss sometimes
suggests unconscious cerebration working on memo-

ries of Mr. Punch. "The Professor" and "The Other
Professor" form dehghtful corner-men| to this long
hne of eccentricity in innocence or in crime. The
Professor is a particularly learned doctor who has
"actually invented three new diseases, besides a new
way of breaking your collar bone." "My Lady," the odi-
ous Sub-Warden's wife, suggests in her portly frame
and severe expression, a haystack out of temper. It
is the old pleasant nonsense in a new setting, and if
any man could doubt it for one moment let him pick
at random among the verse: [the "Buffalo" stanza of
the Gardener's Song is quoted here]. The more seri-
ous purpose is didactic in the execution, and it has
a happy tendency to reserve itself for the end of the
book. If there is anything of it at the beginning, it
is in the preface. This should take high rank among
compositions of this kind for the originality of its
treatment. We shall all read "Sylvie and Bruno," as we
shall read "The Hunting of the Snark," because we
have read "Alice in Wonderland," and we shall like it,
because taste is apt to be as faithful to old friendships
as character itself.

* Down the Snow Stairs by Alice Corkran (d. 1916) was an early
A/z'c^ imitation, published by Blackie and Son in 1887.

t Reference uncertain.

X According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "Corner-men
are the grotesques of a minstrel company."

GLASGOW HERALD, DECEMBER IQ, 1889, P. 9, UNDER
"CHRISTMAS books"

There is no publication of the season which will be
welcomed with more delight than Mr. Lewis Carroll's
new fantasy, for it is something more than a fairy-tale.
It is published by Messrs Macmillan & Co., and al-
though three or four times the thickness of the two
"Alice" books, is uniform with them in binding, paper,
and general get-up. There is a difference in the case
of the illustrations, which in the former works were
from the wonderful pencil of Mr. John Tenniel. This
time Mr. Harry Furniss is the favoured artist, and
his drawings are marvellously good. As for the plot
or movement of "Sylvie and Bruno" it is difficult to
describe. The movement, indeed, is a duplex one — a
real alongside a fanciful drama. This curious melange
of realism and fairyism is one of Lewis Carroll's favou-
rite devices. In "Sylvie" the transitions and complica-
tions are so rapid that a delicious state of bewilder-
ment is the result. Anything more charming, however,
than the two dream children, Sylvie and Bruno, was
never dreamed even by Lewis Carroll; and if the hu-
mours of Outland are not quite so irresistible as those
of Wonderland and Looking-Glassland, they are still
very funny. The nonsense-verses of the Gardener, are
as cleverly ridiculous as one can desire, while Bruno's
invention of the "Phlizz" is as puzzling as the abid-
ing smile of the Cheshire Cat in Wonderland. There
is, however, a more serious tone and purpose about

this book than about its predecessors, although the
moral is never allowed to interfere with the fun. In a
lengthy preface the author is almost solemn as he lays
down his opinions as to the provision of literature for
children. We need not discuss these opinions here,
and as to child-literature one can only hope for a con-
tinued supply of such thoroughly delightful matter as
the author of "Sylvie and Bruno" provides.

BIRMINGHAM DAILY POST, DECEMBER 27, 1889, P. 7,
UNDER "gift books"

Any new book from the pen of the author of "Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland" is sure of a hearty wel-
come from old and young. It has been assumed that
in the series of remarkable books of which that which
we have named was the first the author was writing
for children, but probably as many adults as children
have read them, and with as keen relish. For what
class "Sylvie and Bruno" was intended it would be
hard to say: we have a story of real life, and one in
which children can hardly take much interest, inex-
tricably woven with the experiences of "Outland" and
"Fairyland" — most delectable nonsense, such as grave
readers may consider almost too childish for them;
and we pass from one to another, and back again,
often in the same sentence. For an adult who is not
superior to "gracious fooling" the book is delightful:
we do not know where more absolutely charming and
fascinating figures are to be found than Sylvie and
Bruno; but in the human part of the strange book
there is much which would weary children, much
which would be unintelligible to them, and much
which it would be neither prudent nor wise to place
before them. The silly girl who gushingly pretends to
be learned and profound is very well caricatured in
such a passage as the following, but it is above the
heads of the nursery: —

"Talking of Herbert Spencer," he began, "do
you really find no logical difficulty in regard-
ing Nature as a process of involution, passing
from definite coherent homiogeneity to indefi-
nite incoherent heterogeneity?"

Amused as I was at the ingenious jumble he
had made of Spencer's words, I kept as grave a
face as I could.

"No physical difhcuhy," she confidently re-
plied; "but I haven't studied logic much. Would
you state the difficulty?"

"Well," said Arthur, "do you accept it as
self-evident? Is it as obvious, for instance, as
that 'things that are greater than the same are
greater than one another'?"

"To my mind," she modestly replied, "it
seems quite as obvious. I grasp both truths by
intuition: But other minds may need some logi-
cal — I forget the technical terms."

"For a complete logical argument," Arthur
began with admirable solemnity, "we need two
prim Misses ."

"Of course!" she interrupted. "I remember
that word now. And they produce ?"

"A Delusion," said Arthur.

'Ye — es?" she said dubiously. "I don't seem
to remember that so well. But what is the
whole argument called?"

"A Sillygism."

"Oh, yes! I remember now. But I don't need
a Sillygism, you know, to prove that mathemat-
ical axiom you mentioned."

"Nor to prove that 'all angles are equal,' I
suppose?"

"Why, of course not! One takes such a sim-
ple truth as that for granted!" &c., &c..

This, in its way, is admirable; but the children
whose silver laughters were wakened by "Alice's Ad-
ventures" and "Through the Looking-glass" would
probably find it as bewildering as it is said a certain
august lady, who had desired to see any new work by
Lewis Carroll, found a book of abstruse mathematics
by him. And who would care to place before a child
the suggestions of a passage such as this: —

"Would you — would you mind my telling you
something he said about prayer^ It had never
struck me in that light before."

"In what light?" said Arthur.

"Why, that all Nature goes by fixed, regular
laws — Science has proved that. So that asking

God to do anything (except of course praying
for 5j&mfwa/ blessings) is to expect a miracle,
and we've no right to do that. I've not put it
as well as he did: but that was the outcome of
it, and it has confused me. Please tell me what
you can say in answer to it."

"Well, let us see how far the result is produced
by fixed laws. The cup moves because certain
mechanical forces are impressed on it by my
hand. My hand moves because certain forces —
electric, magnetic, or whatever 'nerve-force'
may prove to be — are impressed on it by my
brain. This nerve-force, stored in the brain,
would probably be traceable, if Science were
complete, to chemical forces supplied to the
brain by the blood, and ultimately derived
from the food I eat and the air I breathe."

"But would not that be Fatalism? Where
would free-will come in?"

"In choice of nerves," replied Arthur. "The
nerve-force in the brain may flowjust as nat-
urally down one nerve as down another. We
need something more than a fixed Law of Na-
ture to settle ivhich nerve shall carry it. That
'something' is Freewill."

And so on deepening into a tone of grave solem-
nity and dealing with the subtlest of mysteries. But
there is much of laughter-compelling nonsense and
the most witching prettiness, which might well be
read aloud to children, of which we may quote one of
many examples: —

"What's the matter, darling?" said Sylvie, with
her arms round his neck.

"Hurted mineself loelly much!" sobbed the
poor little fellow.

"I am so sorry, darling! How ever did you
manage to hurt yourself so?"

"Course I managed it!" said Bruno, laugh-
ing through his tears. "Doos oo think nobody
else but oo can't manage things?"

Matters were looking distinctly brighter,
now Bruno had begun to argue. "Come, let's
hear all about it!" I said.

"My foot took it into its head to slip "

Bruno began.

"A foot hasn't got a head!" Sylvie put in, but
all in vain.

"I slipted down the bank. And I tripted over
a stone. And the stone hurted my foot! And I
trod on a Bee. And the Bee stinged my finger!"
Poor Brimo sobbed again. The complete list
of woes was too much for his feelings. "And it

knewed I didn't ynean to trod on it!" he added,
as the climax.

"That Bee should be ashamed of itself!" I
said severely, and Sylvie hugged and kissed the
wounded hero till all tears were dried.

"My finger's quite unstung now!" said
Bruno. "Why doos there be stones? Mister Sir,
doos oo know?"

"They're good for something,'" I said: "even
if we don't know what. What's the good of dan-
delions, now?"

"Dindledums?" said Bruno. "Oh, they're
ever so pretty! And stones aren't pretty, one bit.
Would oo like some dindledums. Mister Sir?"

"Bruno!" Sylvie murmured reproachfully.
"You mustn't say 'Mister' and 'Sir,' both at
once! Remember what I told you!"

"You telled me I were to say 'Mister' when I
spoked abo^it him, and I were to say 'Sir' when
I spoked to him!"

"Well, you're not doing both, you know."

"Ah, but I is doing bofe. Miss Praticular!"
Bruno exclaimed triumphantly. "I wishted to
speak about the Gemplun — and I wishted to
speak to the Gemplun. So a course I said 'Mis-
ter Sir'!"

"That's all right, Bruno," I said.

"Cowrie it's all right!" said Bruno. "Sylvie just
knows nuffin at all!"

"There never if as an impertinenter boy!"
said Sylvie, frowning till her bright eyes were
nearly invisible.

"And there never was an ignoranter girl!"
retorted Bruno. "Come along and pick some
dindledums. That's all she's fit forr he added in
a very loud whisper to me.

"But why do you say 'Dindledums,' Bruno?
Dandelions is the right word."

"It's because he jumps about so," Sylvie
said, laughing.

'Yes, that's it," Bruno assented. "Sylvie tells
me the words, and then, when I jump about,
they get shooken up in my head — till they're
all froth!"

I expressed myself as perfectly satisfied with
this explanation. "But aren't you going to pick
me any dindledums, after all?"

"Course we will!" cried Bruno. "Come
along, Sylvie!" And the happy children raced
away, bounding over the turf with the fleet-
ness and grace of young antelopes.

We should like to quote a bit of the wild para-
doxical nonsense, but we have gone as far as we are
justified in giving a sample of Mr. Carroll's wares; and
who when he cries them and asks QuisJWiW not an-
swer Ego'?

THE GRAPHIC, DECEMBER 28, 1 889, P. 794, UNDER
"CHRISTMAS books"

A new story by the author of "Alice in Wonderland"
is safe to be //«<? children's book of the season so there
is little doubt of a warm reception for "Sylvie and
Bruno" (Macmillan). This time Mr. Lewis Carroll's
contribution is not all fun and frolic. A solemn tone
and meaning mingle with the humorous fancies, as
if to illustrate the theory of ideal juvenile literature
which the writer unfolds in the preface. From the
youngsters' point of view, it may be somewhat tanta-
lising to find the adventures of the bewitching little
brother and sister interrupted suddenly by moral
and religious arguments and a "grown-up" love-story,
but older readers must admire the art with which the
materials are blended. In his lighter vein, Mr. Carroll
pursues his old happy style. Sylvie and Bruno move in
a quaint world, peopled with odd characters, like the
two professors or the poet-gardener, always indulging
in delightfully inconsequent rhymes. The ballad of
"The Badgers and their Herrings" is another first-rate
piece of nonsense-verse, ludicrously illustrated by
Mr. Harry Furniss, who is just the right artist to carry
out Mr. Carroll's ideas, and who furnishes a host of
comical drawings. Undoubtedly, "Sylvie and Bruno"
supplies the answer to all perplexed people inquiring
what book to get for their small friends and relatives.

Murray's magazine, v. 7, no. 38, February 1890,
wp. 288, under "our library list"
The author of "Alice in Wonderland" breaks new
ground in the present volume, for, interspersed with
packages of the old inimitably humorous nonsense,
an ordinary love-story pursues its hum-drum course
while distressingly obtrusive "morals" seem to hover
in the air. We cannot think that the change is an im-
provement. Tales with a ptirpose are "as plenty as
blackberries," love-stories are far from uncommon,
but books which keep the reader amused by pure
whimsicality, wit without sting and fancy without
emotion, are as rare as they are charming. Sylvie and
Bruno are the two children of "the Warden," a ruler
of Outland, plotted against by his wicked brother
and brutally stupid sister-in-law; they are only seen
in visions by the author, whose waking hotirs are oc-
cupied with the affairs of a certain Arthur Forester,
M.D., and Lady Muriel Orme. The subjects treated
of range from deep religious problems to the wild-
est nonsense. Flashes of humour in the old delight-
ful vein are not uncommon, but the general effect of
the story is rather confused and the jokes are often
fetched from far. Perhaps no one but Mr. Carrol [sic]
could have conceived a watch "which has the peculiar
property that, instead of its going with the time, the
time goes with it," or have written the mad gardener's
song: of which the following is a stanza: . . . [The re-
view concludes with the "Banker's Clerk" stanza.]

THE LEEDS MERCURY WEEKLY SUPPLEMENT,
FEBRUARY I5, 1 89O, P. 4

"The Dreamland of Fiction "

A quarter of a century has elapsed since English chil-
dren welcomed with delight Mr. Lewis Carroll's
"Alice in Wonderland." The book hit the mark of the
child's fancy and became a classic of the nursery. It
contained just that admixture of real and unreal, of
the waking and dreaming world, of sense and non-
sense, which captivates the humour of little readers —
and of a good many grown readers besides. Its queer
paradoxes and odd surprises, its serious absurdities
and absurd gravities, its topsy-turveydom — these,
together with its memorable poems and still more
memorable illustrations combined to make "Alice's
Adventures" one of the most delightful and extraor-
dinary books of the generation. Nor did "Through
the Looking Glass," which followed half a dozen years
later, share the fate usually reserved for sequels to
an original 7>M d'esprit. It lacked, perhaps, the spon-
taneous fresh humour of its predecessor; and had
the appearance of too careful an elaboration of the
most popular features of "Alice in Wonderland." Still
children welcomed it heartily for the sake of its little
heroine, and have accorded it a share of their favour
almost equal to that won by the book which created
her.

It is difficult to augur an equal popularity for the
latest work from the pen of our veteran child's au-
thor. "Sylvie and Bruno" is a bigger book than either
of the other two; it is certainly more ambitious; the
thread of a story runs more clearly through it, and
Mr. Harry Furniss's illustrations are not unworthy
to be compared with those of the yet greater master
who first gave Alice and her queer companions vis-
ible form. But as a child's book, "Sylvie and Bruno"
will prove disappointing and perplexing — even to
the more sophisticated nursery readers of our day.
The adventures of the delightful little hero and hero-
ine in Dogland and Fairyland lack the surprises and
thrilling encounters which took place in Wonderland
and behind the Looking Glass. The clever talk of the
children and their Professor is often too clever to be
laughable; and the continuity of the incongruities
is sadly broken up for the impatient young student.
If, however, he will persevere he will reach the ac-
count of Bruno's entertainment to the frogs, which
will reward him for much patience; and the freaks of
the Outlandish Watch, reversing the incidents of an
ordinary nursery dinner, which is worthy of the au-
thor of the "March Hare's Tea Party." On the child's
mind the melancholy undertone of the book, with
its story of unrequited love weaving itself in and out
of the other story of the fairy brother and sister will
be thrown away. Mr. Carroll, no doubt, expects as
much. He knows that children care very little about

the love affairs of dukes' daughters with officers and
doctors. That part of "Sylvie and Bruno" is intended
for us adults, to whom a tale of a broken heart always
appeals. To our mind, the most interesting feature of
Mr. Carroll's work is the dream suggestion which
runs through them. In his present story this is more
evident than in either of the others, since we are con-
stantly encountering the dreamer himself. . . . [The
review concludes with several paragraphs on the rel-
evance of dreams in literature and life.]

THE PRESTON CHRONICLE AND LANCASTER
ADVERTISER, MARCH 1, 189O, P. 4

[Following directly upon a review of Jerome K.Je-
rome's Three Men in a Boat]. . . Forced wit bears the
same analogy to the real article as does the pale pea
of February as seen in Convent [sic] Garden to the
emerald marrow-fat of June seen at a country vicar-
age on a Sunday. But why has the supply become so
scanty? Why does even the author of "The Walrus
and the Carpenter" adhere but half-heartedly to his
vocation to cause dull care to flee away, and in his
new book, "Sylvie and Bruno," make us pay for the
rapture of the mad gardener's song with maundering
dissertations on Sunday observance?

THE THEATRE, MARCH 1, 189O, P. 178

In the preface to his latest book Mr. Carroll wails over
the difficulty of being original. This he need not do,
for he has made one odd line of humour peculiarly
his own, and in it, if he has many imitators, he has no
peers. The greater part of "Sylvie and Bruno" no one
but its author could have written. Through its pages
we are constantly called up halting with little spurts
of laughter over such whimsical tricks of speech and
fancy as became a type of household jest near twenty-
five years ago. Think of that, my good men! A quarter
of a century, with its revelations and revolutions in
literature, has passed over our whitening heads since
Alice, and the Duchess, and the little crowd of card-
courtiers stepped into print and our most close affec-
tions simultaneously. And we see by the publishers'
list that the nursery is still faithful to a favourite that
has become traditional, and that Alice has entered
upon her eight-hundred-and-third century,* and is,
we have no doubt, hale and hearty yet. But the little
lady's huge popularity is her father's worst confusion,
for how may he devise a rival to her daintyship that
may hope to compare with the quaint child of her
younger fancy? Sylvie, Bruno and Co. are charming
little creations, but they lack the utter sweetness of
inconsequence that characterized their progeni-
tors. And then we resent being treated to moral dis-
quisitions in fairy tales, even when Alice's parent is
the preacher. Sincerity, charity, piety — what excel-
lent qualities are these, yet how out of place if made
obtrusively prominent in a story of nonsense! And

what do we want with Lady Muriel and the sick cast
of an unhappy love-tale in Carroll-land? What do we

want Oh, beloved jester, that you should commit

that grievous error of taking the public into your con-
fidence as to the creations of your brain! An author,
as reviewed through his works, should ever be a mys-
tery, an unknown quantity, 2l Junius in nuce —

"For a ticket, apply to the Publisher."

No: thanking the public, I must decline.

A peep through my window if folks prefer:

But please you, no foot over threshold of mine."t

Think of Poe and his "Philosophy of Composi-
tion" and weep. But if there is a mistake or two ap-
parent in this new volume of yours, there is yet more
that makes us shake hands again with the ghost of
thine old self over that quarter century of years. Hail
the gardener, and the Chancellor, and the Professor
most of any! And, if the declining sun at the finis of
the book is meant to typify the laying down for good
and all of thine own eventful pen, we should like to
press amongst the childish world that crowd about
the doors of thine fancy, to cry a last heartfelt fare-
well to one who has enriched our baby literature with
dowry of more pure, harmless, and delicious fun than
ever were its gain before. But one word as to the il-
lustrations. Handicapped by illustrious tradition, Mr.
Furniss has yet succeeded in imbuing his little per-
sonalities with a grace and charm that are all their
own; and indeed one or two of his vignettes are quite
models of exquisite prettiness.
* Eighty-third thousand.

t Junius was a pseudonymous contributor to The Public Adver-
tiser, an eighteenth-century newspaper. "In nuce": in a nut-
shell. The stanza of poetry is from "House" by Robert
Browning.

society v. 9 no. 1 15, march 189o, p. 252, under
"bow bells"

The mixture of the dream and the story is dread-
fully bewildering, and though the love affairs of Lady
Muriel are pretty reading enough, we feel conscious
that we expected something very much more thrill-
ing from the originator of our dear friend, "Alice." As
to the dissertations on death, on Sunday observance,
and many another kindred topic, they are wholly un-
welcome and irrelevant. Mr. Carrol [sic] tells us that
this stout volume is the work of ten years, but really
it is a little surprising that he should care to append
such a confession to so disappointing a farrago.

the graphic, again, in a column entitled "the

reader,"april 5, 1890
"Sylvie and Bruno," Lewis Carroll's new book (Mac-
millan), is a disappointment. It is a pity to have to
say so, but that, we are sure, must be the opinion of
all readers. Mr. Carroll touched high-water mark in

"Alice in Wonderland," for nothing else he has done
since has been quite so good as that immortal piece
of nonsense. Were "Sylvie and Bruno" his first work, it
would be hailed as something new and rare. But Mr.
Carroll has himself set up previously the standard by
which we must judge him; and tried by that standard,
his last book must, unfortunately, be pronounced not
up to his reputation. Of course there are many beau-
tiful and funny things in "Sylvie and Bruno." The
two children themselves are delightful creatures; the
Lord Chancellor, the Professor, and the Sub-Warden
of the early chapters are conceptions as whimsical as
some in "Alice in Wonderland." The Gardener, too,
is a character almost worthy to rank with the Hatter
of the earlier book; but about the whole there is an
air of effort, a conscious attempt at fun, a laying bare
of the inner springs which move the machine. Even
the Gardener's song, inconsequent and curious as it
is, lacks the spontaneity and reckless humour of the
lyrics in "Alice." Still, those who have not enjoyed
the other books (and no doubt there are benighted
persons who have never read them) may well extract
amusement from this. Children will certainly be fas-
cinated by the curious adventures of the brother and
sister in Fairyland, and there are grave passages of
reflection in which Lewis Carroll touched a solemn
and religious note. Mr. Harry Furniss has supplied
many illustrations to the volume; and these we can
scarcely praise more highly than by saying that they
are among the most dainty and imaginative products
of his pen.

■^s^

ONE SNARK,
TWO SNARK,

ALISON TANNENBAUM

While all boojums are snarks; the reverse is untrue;
Only some snarks are boojums, but who is who?
Most snarks are harmless, the Bellman will say,
But a boojum will cause you to vanish away!

Let us review what we know of the snark;

It has five distinct traits, which here we remark:

Its taste is unique; its sleep cycle shifted;

It can't take ajoke; with ambition, it's gifted.

Old bathing machines carried hither and thither
Could frighten some beachgoers into a dither.
These are five signs of a genuine snark;
But with only these facts, we are still in the dark.

There are different batches, the Bellman explains.
One kind has feathers, and bites, causing pains;
The other has whiskers, and scratches — a curse!
But is either a boojum, and which one is worse?

Identity, snarkwise, is complex and weird.
It makes a taxonomist twiddle his beard.
Snarks vary a lot, and there aren't any "norms,"
So a "key" can't be made, with all of those forms!

At the time of the writing the tale of the snark.
Science was younger, and much in the dark.
Now we have methods and techniques galore
To investigate, analyze species, and more.

Is it boojum or snark? To make a decision.
We must look at blood, genes, and hair, with

precision.
Do they have the same chromosomes, livers, and

gizzards?
Did they come from the birds, or from mammals, or

lizards?

But samples are needed, from blood or from bone,
From the shaft of a feather, or hair root, alone.
How to reach many snarks was the problem at hand.
Scratching their heads, famous scientists planned.

A field expedition was duly dispatched.
With all new equipment; nothing was patched.
A centrifuge, test tubes, pipettes, all in store;
Electrophoresis devices, and more.

No thimbles were taken, no railway shares packed.
But forks for their meals, and soap, were not lacked.
A lab ship was fitted, with all needs afforded.
With hope in their hearts, elite scientists boarded.

The tale offered only one sensible thought.
Thus, a "tropical clime" destination was sought.
The voyage began, the prestigious team ready
To sample all snarks, within forest or eddy.

The journey was perilous; strange things they saw.
Their weird observations recorded with awe.
Dodging the jub-jubs, and bandersnatch claws.
They stuck to their mission without any pause.

•^^

real snark?
orboo-sivpar;'?

The snarks they encountered were fierce to the core,
Some had teeth, some had claws; they all raised a roar.
They were darted with sedative, measured,

and tagged.
Their blood was collected; hair labeled and bagged.

Many months passed, and the scientists tired,
But accomplished the task for which they were hired.
Forty-two snarks' parts were in their collection.
Boojum or snark? They worked on detection.

Testing was done, and the data accrued.

A pattern emerged, and wild theories subdued.

The snark genome was mapped (as for humans,

you know) ,
Every characteristic, right down to the toe.

Three methods were tried, and results were

the same;
The maps overlapped, and the press agents came.
Like the adage the Bellman maintained to the crew,
What's demo-ed three times must surely be true!

It was no surprise for Carrollians (you!)
That snark chromosome count was a firm 42!
The pattern, however, varied with type.
And support was thus gained for the "snark
batches" hype.

The gene for the feathers (the biting-snark form),
Was on pair 21, and looked like a worm.
The teeth were on 30, a dominant gene,
The better to chew on a don or a dean.

The whiskers and scratching emerged far away.
On pairs 10 and 11, adjacent they lay.
Long claws were recessive; the whiskers were, too;
Thus, it's less likely this snark will harm you.

But what makes a boojum depart from the snarks?
Is it deep and obscure, like neutrinos and quarks?
No; the transform is right there on pair 42:
A defect that generates eyes of light blue!

This momentous report should be taken to heart.
Beware of the boojum, in whole or in part.
A snark with blue eyes, whether toothed or

with claws.
Is a danger to all, and abides by no laws.

The experts developed a new Latin name
For the terrible Boojum, of frightening fame.
In the Snarxidae family, there is only one
Fouquieria horridentis, a species to shun!

Snarks can be scary, and oftentimes are;
They can injure and maim, and might leave a scar.
But a Boojum will eat anything it can chew.
And what it likes best are collectors, like YOU.

Please note that the texture of the title font is genuine Snarkskin,
supplied by Alison, which she was able to obtain, but only great risk.

■^^

THE HIIHTIJIG OF THE BIJTCHEB

DOUG HOWICK

Before we embark on yet another Carrollian
hunting escapade, it may be interesting for
readers to learn the reason for my original
interest in The Snark. It has to do with a forest indus-
try service organization known as Hoo-Hoo Interna-
tional, which was founded in Gurdon, Arkansas, in
1892, at the peak of the lumber boom that revital-
ized the "New South" of the United States after the
Civil War.

It seems that six gentlemen involved in that in-
dustry had been at a meeting of the Arkansas Yellow
Pine Manufacturer's Association. While waiting for
a train on the way home, they realized that a lot of
their time was wasted traveling from one meeting to
another. They decided to form an umbrella organiza-
tion to "support the health, happiness, and long life
of its members."

Beyond that, the founders had no rigid rules or
regimentation. In fact, they appear to have made con-
siderable effort to be unconventional. When deciding
what to call their first president, one of their number
who was familiar with the works of Lewis Carroll, sug-
gested that the office be known as "The Snark of the
Universe" — and so it is to this day. Now 115 years old,
Hoo-Hoo International is a service organization that is
open to all individuals in the forest products industry
in many countries, and dedicated to the welfare and
promotion of that industry. (See www.hoo-hoo.org.)

As a forest products researcher, I became a Hoo-
Hoo member in 1972 and being an entomologist
with etymological interests, I soon found out why the
international president was called the Snark, bought
my first copy of Martin Gardner's The Annotated
Snark — and from then on, I was hooked!

What began as a subject of fascination gradually
became a hobby and a profound interest. I began to
quietly and privately research all matters to do with
the Snark. My predominant interest developed into
comparing the interpretations of the various Snark-
hunting crew members by a wide range of illustrators.
Originally, I collected lower-priced copies (even ex-
library books) to see the interpretations of as many
illustrators as were obtainable. My hunting led me to
many bookshops in many countries, sometimes with
excitingly fortunate discoveries such as my first first

edition in a London bookshop in 1985. Later and
more recently, with the help of the Internet and eBay
as well as the indulgence of other "Snarkophiles," I
have become reasonably successful in obtaining a
wider range of better-quality editions.

Some Carrollian scholars such as John Tufail
think there is little value in considering any illustra-
tions other than the original ones by Henry Holiday.
While I concede Tufail 's thesis (2003) that Holiday re-
ceived his instructions from Carroll and created his
illustrations to reflect Carroll's cryptic messages and
allusions, I contend that the interpretations given to
the words we know so well by so many illustrators over
a period in excess of 130 years continue to keep the
Snark alive. Furthermore, it is my personal belief that
Holiday managed to slip in a few interpretations of his
own even though Carroll approved of the end result.

Since Holiday, more than sixty other illustrators
(see Andresen) have shown us some sixty different
ways to interpret Carroll's fable — for a fable it surely
is! These talented illustrators communicate to us not
only their own interpretations of Carroll's creation
but also their own innovative adaptations, and ex-
tensions of the story, without in any way detracting
from Carroll's words. Holiday's illustrations, or any
of the hidden meanings they may have worked out
between them. And as Selwyn Goodacre (2006b) has
observed, "It is fascinating to see which scenes appeal
to a particular illustrator." New illustrated editions
of the Snark now appear at the rate of about two or
three per year. May there be many more!

THE TICHBORNE TRIAL

Many may know of the notorious Tichborne Trial at
the Old Bailey in England but some may not. It was
a fascinating case and attracted the interest of mil-
lions — including Lewis Carroll.

One of the world's most audacious impostors, a
man named Arthur Orton (also known as Thomas
Castro), was the subject of one of England's longest-
running trials in 1873-74. Orton was a butcher in
Wagga Wagga, Australia, and had seen an advertise-
ment placed in the press by the Dowager Lady Tich-
borne seeking news about her son. Sir Roger Charles
Doughty Tichborne, who in 1853 had set sail in a ship

Figure i . Left, The Tichborne Claimant i Collection
Print, i8y^, charcoal and chalk. Dr. Edward
Kenealy, barrister for the Claimant, standing,
wearing legal dress ivith his robes puffed out
behind him, by Spy, circa iSy^—iSy^.

Right, The Barrister by Henry Holiday in Fit the
Fourth, The Hunting of the Snark.

y Figure 2. Left, The Tichborne Claimant. Right,
/"^^^ The Butcher by Henry Holiday.

called The Bella that then foundered, and was pre-
sumed drowned. Lady Tichborne refused to believe
that her son was dead and advertised for any news
about him in all the newspapers of the time.

Orton saw the advertisement and wrote to Lady
Tichborne claiming to be her son. Lady Tichborne
was delighted and sent money for Orton and his fam-
ily to come to Europe. Orton met Lady Tichborne
in Paris and she was considerably surprised by his
appearance! Her son had been slim with a long thin
face when he left England and the man who had re-
turned was a middle-aged very fat man!!

Several members of the family were not so eas-
ily duped and voiced their misgivings, but Lady Tich-
borne took no heed of their doubts. After a trial that
lasted 102 days, a jury determined that the "Tich-
borne Claimant" was an impostor. In a subsequent
trial for perjury lasting 188 days, Arthur Orton was
convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison. He was
released in 1884 and confessed in 1885.

Lewis Carroll's interest in the trial is well docu-
mented (Collingwood, 2004) and a book on the case

was in his library (Gardner, 2006). Suggestions that
the trial had varying degrees of influence on The Snark
have been made by Paull (1989), Bowern (1997b),
and others. There is little doubt that the form of Hol-
iday's Barrister was drawn from Edward Kenealy, the
barrister in the Tichborne Case (see Fig. 1).

THE ONTOGENESIS OF THE BUTCHER

Whilst accepting the above origins of the Barrister, I
have developed the hypothesis that Carroll instructed
Holiday to depict the Butcher according to his (Car-
roll's) own concept. I am therefore in agreement
with John Paull (1989) that Carroll's Butcher is based
upon the Tichborne Claimant, Arthur Orton, the
butcher from Wagga Wagga in Australia.

Whether there is illustrative proof of this is open
to conjecture. Paull opines that "there is a striking
resemblance between Butcher Orton and Holiday's
Butcher." Photographs and caricatures of Orton
alongside images of Holiday's Butcher do not, in
my opinion, demonstrate this beyond reasonable
doubt.

I would suggest however, that there may be suf-
ficient references within the poem itself to form the
basis of textual likelihood — if not proof.

Fit the First in describing the Butcher, says The
last of the crew needs especial remark (because he's not
what he seems to be) and he looked an incredible dunce.
Historians dismissed Orton as almost illiterate and an
ignoramus. He could only kill Beavers: Bowern (1997b)
suggests that "Beavers" is surely a pun on "beeves,"
which is the plural of beef and means oxen, cows, or
bulls regarded as fit for food. So of course he would
kill beeves because he was a butcher. What is more,
Orton, using the assumed name of Thomas Castro in
Australia, had been in the employment of a Mr. Hig-
gins who kept a hotel and butcher shop, and his dex-
terity as a slaughter man was legendary. He could kill
and butcher a bovine in a remarkably short period of
time. In Fit the Fourth, the Butcher dressed himself fine,
with yelloiv kid gloves and a ruff which, together with
his physical size and shape, would have made Orton
resemble a Beefeater.

Fit the Fifth says that the Butcher thought of his
childhood, left far behind possibly because Orton denied
his own childhood while masquerading as Tichborne.
Although his education was rudimentary, he was a fast
learner and made up for scholastic deficiencies with a
cunning intellect and natural talent for rhetoric. Dur-
ing his years as the Tichborne Claimant, he demon-
strated his ability to learn the rules quickly (such as the
Rule of Three). When explaining this Rule to the Bea-
ver, the Butcher xvrote ivith a pen in each hand indicating
that he was ambidextrous, the alternative definition
of which is to be duplicitous or marked by deliberate
deceptiveness. That deceptiveness continues with the
Butcher's offer to give a lesson in Natural History. Orton
had learned that when traveling in South America
prior to his disappearance, the real Roger Tichborne,
being a prolific letter writer, was in almost constant
contact with his overly possessive mother, sending her
and other relatives full details of his travels, hunting,
fishing, and natural history expeditions.

Fit the Sixth details the Barrister's dream in which
the Judge declares that the xohole question depends on an
ancient manorial right, possibly referring to the (then)
recently contested right to the ancient manorial Tich-
borne Hall, before sentencing the pig to transporta-
tion for life to where but Australia?

Finally, of course, Arthur Orton was a butcher
and the son of a butcher.

42 BUTCHERS AFTER HOLIDAY

I have collated the Butchers of 42 different illustrators.
Details are given in order of publication date and
illustrations of each are reproduced in the following
pages. The source of each illustration is provided in
the caption; the great majority have been taken from
editions of the Snark in my personal collection. The

omission of examples by certain illustrators implies
no criticism of their work, but may rather be due to
my inability to interpret it (for example, I am still un-
sure which of the illustrations by eminent surrealist
artist Max Ernst is, in fact, the Butcher!).

1. Peter Newell, 1903: in sepia monochrome,
Newell's Butcher is very much a butcher's boy
and in his depiction of the Beaver's Lesson, is
appropriately "dressed fine" in kid gloves and a
ruff, writing with a pen in each hand.

2. Edward A. Wilson, 1932: A line drawing rear
view on green paper, highlighted with splashes
of yellow color.

3. Cobbledick, 1939: Possibly in deference to
Henry Holiday, Cobbledick's illustrations have
the appearance of woodcuts. Each member of
the crew is a different animal and the Butcher is
a pig!

4. Malcolm Easton, 1939: The only illustration
shows seven of the crew marching across the
book's front endpapers, with the Butcher hold-
ing a paw of the Beaver in one hand and a carv-
ing knife in the other.

5. Mervyn Peake, 1941: Peake is one of the most
popular and acclaimed illustrators of the Snark.
His Butcher looks both baffled and enlightened
as he explains the Rule of Three while scribbling
away on dozens of sheets of paper.

6. Aldren Watson, 1952: Woodblock illustrations
contain interesting posers. The Butcher stands
behind his cutting block (which has a "B" on
one side) and a black cat prances by as the Bea-
ver places a pen behind his left ear.

7. Tove Jansson, 1959: Swedish artist Tove Jansson
enjoyed international acclaim for her Moomin
books well before illustrating the Snark and
Alicehooks. Her Butcher sits on a barrel labeled
''Sdpa" looking rather as though he is at the
wrong fancy-dress party!

8. Kelly Oechsli, 1966: This illustrator is one of
my personal favorites. I continue to look for a
copy in really good condition but to date I have
located only ex-library editions of this book. The
line pen-and-ink drawings with added color wash
are very delicate and interpret Carroll's char-
acters delightfully. The Butcher carries a small
sack across the deck while the poor little Beaver
struggles with a very large sea-chest.

9. Peter Vos, 1966: All characters are sketched and
labeled in case the reader has any doubts about
who is who. The Butcher has a vague but threat-
ening look about him.

10. Helen Oxenbury, 1970: Oxenbury's Butcher is
older than those of many other illustrators, and
has quite a competent air about him.

11. Byron Sewell, 1974: The elaborate edition by
which Sewell burst upon the Snark scene is well
known. The ship and its crew stretch out in con-
certina form and the back pocket holds cards
by which the top, middle, and bottom parts of
each crew member may be interchanged. The
Butcher is styled very much on Holiday's, com-
plete with beaver cap, carefully combed hair and
quizzical expression — but no ruff.

12. Harold Jones, 1975: This Butcher gives the
impression of being industrious and anxious
to please. The illustrator follows the detail of
Carroll's text in an appealing understated way.

13. Ralph Steadman, 1975: Some of Steadman's inky
illustrations "with innumerable lines" may be
considered a bit extreme but his no-nonsense
Butcher is traditional and competent.

14. Quentin Blake, 1976: The grey line-drawing
shows a rather unsure Butcher, waiting for a
chance to use the cleaver dangling from his
right hand.

15. John Minnion, 1976: A magnificent Butcher,
testing the sharpness of his cleaver and eagerly
anticipating its effect on whatever he is able to
chop up. Minnion based his Butcher on a British
television personality who used to present a pro-
gram called The Old Grey Whistle Test (Minnion,
2007, pers. comm.). Having seen a 1976 photo-
graph, I am able to say that Minnion captured
the persona which, given his renown as a politi-
cal caricaturist, is not surprising.

16. Frits van der Waa, 1976: The illustrator pro-
duced several Snark illustrations in 1976, four of
which he subsequently posted on his website. He
has since been kind enough to send me copies
of others. The rear view of the Butcher walk-
ing hand-in-hand with the Beaver is a part of a
larger scene and does not do sufficient justice to
the artist but I particularly wanted to include his
contribution.

17. Evert Geradts, 1977: This rendition from the
Netherlands shows the Butcher enthusiastically
sharpening a knife while the Beaver ignores him
and gets on with the lace-making.

18. Inge Vogel, 1977: Another Dutch version, with a
very bored Butcher who looks thoroughly fed up
with what's going on around him.

19. Annie-Claude Martin, 1981: This French artist
published a set of 32 pencil drawings with an-
notated text in French. All link up to form an
enormous collage. The Butcher is young and
industrious as he works away with quill pens
looking more like a printer than a butcher.

20. Patrick Woodroffe, 1983: This prolific artist
worked closely with Mike Batt on the designs for
the stage and television version of his musical

Snark. He created the record cover and theater
programs and also produced a large number of
illustrations intended for a book, also in collabo-
ration with Batt. The book never was finished,
but the artist kindly made available to me his
concept of the Butcher — complete with helmet,
boots, and spurs.

21. Frank Hinder, 1989: Australian Frank Hinder's
work was first presented to the First Interna-
tional Lewis Carroll Conference. His characters
were given faces indicative of their occupation.
The Butcher is therefore hatchet-faced — and
ambidextrous.

22. Danny Kerman, 1989: This Hebrew version of
the Snark has rich color illustrations and the
Butcher clutches a blood-stained knife as the
moon rises over the ship's rail.

23. Michael Sporn, 1989: A well-known and accom-
plished animator, Sporn completed a film of the
Snark over the span of several years which was
animated entirely by him in between other proj-
ects. It is now available on DVD. His Butcher is
endearingly unsure of himself.

24. Leonid Tishkov, 1991: Illustrating a Russian
translation of the Snark, Tishkov depicts all crew
members without clothes and personalizes them
according to the Russian word for their occupa-
tion. I am advised (Moskotelnilov, pers. comm.)
that the Butcher can be only a poacher in Rus-
sian translation and is thus shown holding a rifle
rather than the customary meat cleaver.

25. Jonathan Dixon, 1992: The wonderfully imagi-
native illustrations by this artist include a cross-
eyed Butcher who is tip to no good.

26. Axel Torgard, 1994: I don't profess to under-
stand the Faroese language, although the pub-
lication also has text in English. However, I well
understand the nefarious looking Butcher who
almost seems to be testing the sharpness of his
knife on his own moustache.

27. Gavin O'Keefe, 1995: The second Australian
contribution is from a prolific artist specializing
in book illustrations and covers. His Butcher
wears a small dunce's cap and a ruff as wide as
his shoulders.

28. Paul Stanish, 1996: A hypothetical second Snark
hunting expedition was created for distribution
to schools but was not successful (Wesley-Smith,
pers. comm.). Although wearing a traditional
butcher's apron, the Butcher also sports a bow
tie.

29. Gregory L'Homme, 1997: This French illustrator
has the Butcher looking rather like a dentist as
he explains the Rule of Three to the Beaver.

30. Brian Puttock, 1997: Puttock has produced a
traditional Butcher who appears to have been
inspired by that of Ralph Steadman.

31. Julio Pomar, 1999: This artist's color pictures
illustrated a French publication of the Snark
and were also the subject of an extensive exhibi-
tion in Paris the same year. Some aspects of his
Butcher are a little indistinct but there is no
doubt that he wears a large ruff as he writes with
a pen in each hand.

32. Ami Rubinger, 2000: The book, published in
Hebrew, has been difficult to locate but fortu-
nately, the illustrations are published on the
artist's website. His fearsome Butcher, clad only
in underpants and a top hat, clutches an enor-
mous carving knife.

33. Trudi Castle, 2005: This illustrator is currently a
storyboard and concept artist working in
Europe. Her stunning Snark collection has not
yet been published in a book but is available on
her website. Her Butcher is a luridly evil charac-
ter dreaming of the Beaver and brandishing a
knife which bears the inscription "He could only
kill beavers."

34. Janusz Stanny, 2005: Taken from a recent Polish
translation of the Snark, this Butcher sits on deck
holding a knife and slobbering in anticipation of
future butchery.

35. Allan P. Williams, 2005: Although many of his
illustrations are far from conventional, his
Butcher is an effective character.

36. David Elliot, 2006: Elliot is an award-winning
writer and illustrator of children's books. His
Snark illustrations have been published in a fine
press edition and on his website. His pensive
Butcher writes with a pen in each hand and
wears a ruff.

37. Peggy Guest, 2006: This artist has shown her il-
lustrations at an LCSNA meeting, and her inspir-
ing Snark collection is published on her website.
Her Butcher is a careful artisan, with patched
trousers but a sharp and shiny cleaver.

38. Charlotte Lambert, 2006: Complementing a
bilingual French/English edition of the Snark,
this artist's unusual style maintains many of
Carroll's concepts. Her Butcher is obviously
involved with the Rule of Three although other
aspects are more difficult to interpret.

39. John Vernon Lord, 2006: This artist, wise in the
ways of Lewis Carroll and in his Snark work, has
produced some really interesting interpreta-
tions. His 2006 Butcher could be a brother to
Helen Oxenbury's 1970 version!

40. Geneva Rossett-Hafter, 2007: I first discovered
this illustrator's Snark project on a website but
fortunately it was soon published in book form.
The Butcher, again in dunce's cap and ruff,
explains the Rule of Three while perched on a
rock on Snark Island.

41. Robert Saunders, 2008: This English artist col-
laborated with the translator of the latest (and
only) Norwegian publication of the Snark. The
Butcher has long side whiskers which seem to be
in danger of straggling into the almost obliga-
tory ruff.

42. Mahendra Singh, 2008: I'm delighted that the
significant number 42 in this collection of
illustrations is by an artist who describes himself
as "an illustrator busily fitting Lewis Carroll into
a proto-surrealist straitjacket...." Mahendra's
weekly Snark blog attracts an increasing number
of followers and he has recently spoken about
his Snark to the LCSNA. His illustrations are
respectful of the original text while offering
new insights and levels of humor. He has gener-
ously produced the (as yet) unpublished illustra-
tion of "The Major-General Butcher" especially
for this article. Note that the Illustrious Order
of the Beaver takes pride of place on the Major-
General's chest!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It has been an enormous pleasure to have had the
opportunity to share my interest in and enthusiasm
for the Snark with many like-minded people, most of
whom are far more erudite and expert than I. Many
have been most helpful and patient in sharing their
knowledge and imderstanding of both Carroll and
the Snarkwith me and readily acceding to my requests
for advice. Some have even sent me copies of books I
had previously been unable to locate.

I gratefully acknowledge them all and particu-
larly the following, who constitute a virtual "Snarkote-
rie" of cooperation: Selwyn Goodacre, Peggy Guest,
John Howick, August Imholtz, Clare Imholtz, Norton
Ladkin, Manny Litvin, Andrei Moskotelnilov, John
Minnion, Gavin O'Keefe, Reg Ramsey, Mark Rich-
ards, Mahendra Singh, John Tufail, Frits van der Waa,
Peter Wesley-Smith, and Patrick Woodroffe.

REFERENCES

Andresen, H. (2008). Illustrators of the Snark.

folk.uio.no/herbjora/snarkillustrators.html.

Atlay,J. B. (1899). "The Tichborne Trial," in: Famous
Trials of the Century. Grant Richards, London.

Bowern, C. (1997a). The Hunting of the Snark Con-
cluded. Angerona Press, Ryde. 28 illustrations
and illustrated dust wrapper by Brian Puttock.

Bowern, C. (1997b) . The Hunting of the Snark Decoded.
Angerona Press, Ryde.

Collingwood, S. D. (1898). The Life and Letters
of Lewis Carroll, T. Fisher Unwin, London.

Gardner, M. (1974). The Annotated Snark, Penguin
Books, Harmondsworth.

Gardner, M. (2006). The Annotated Hunting of
the Snark: The Definitive Edition. W. W. Norton
& Company, New York.

Goodacre, S. H. (2006a). "The Listing of the Snark"
in: Gardner, M. (2006). The Annotated Hunting of
the Snark - The Definitive Edition. W. W. Norton &
Company, New York.

Goodacre, S. H. (2006b). All the Snarks. Inky Parrot
Press, Oxford.

Holiday, H. (1898). The Snark's Significance. The
Academy 53.

Paull,J. (1989). "Why a Snark?" in: The Hunting of the
Snark. Carroll Foundation, Flemington,
Australia. 15 illustrations by Frank Hinder.

Tufail,J. (2003). The Illuminated Snark. lnteina.tiona\
Carroll Conference, University of Rennes 2,
October 17-18. http://contrariwise.wild-reality.
net/illuminatedsnark.pdf

Where not given, the title is The Hunting of the Snark.

I. Peter Newell. The Hunting of the Snark
and Other Poems and Verses. Harper
df Brothers, New York and London, 190^.

2. Edward A. Wilson. Peter Pauper
Press, New Rochelle, 1932.

5. Cobbledick. Peter Pauper Press, Mount
Vernon, New York, ig^g.

Malcolm Easton. The Hunting of the
Snark &: Other Verses, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, London, ig^g.

5. Mervyn Peake. Lighthouse Books,
Chatto & Windus, London, ip^i.

6. Aldren Watson. The Hundng of the
Snark and Other Nonsense Verse.
Peter Pauper Press, Mount Vernon, New
York, 7952.

7- Tovejansson, Snarkjakten. Holger
Scholdts Forlag, Helsingfors, icf^p.

Kelly Oechsli. Pantheon Books,
New York, ig66.

' S

( '

9. Peter Vos. De Roos, Utrecht, ig66.

10. Helen Oxenbury. Heinemann,
London, igyo.

1 1 . Byron Sewell. Catalpa Press,
London, 1974.

1 2 . Harold Jones. The Whittington Press,
Andoversford. igj^.

73. Ralph Steadman. Michael Dempsey,
London, igj^.

14. Qiientin Blake. Folio Society, London,
i()'j6.

75. John Minnion. John Minnion, London,
igy6.

1 6. Frits van der Waa. www.xs^all.nl/
-fudwaa/ strips/ snarke.htm, ic)j6.

1 7. Evert Geradts. De Jacht op de Strok, 18. Inge Vogel. De Jacht op de Trek,

Drukwerk, Amsterdam, igjj, UitgeverijJ. Couvreur, The Hague, igyj-

ig. Annie-Claude Martin. La Chasse au
Snark, Garance, Paris et Geneve, igSi.

20. Patrick Woodroffe. ivww.patnckwoodrofje- 21. Frank Hinder. Carroll Foundation,
world.com/past.htm, I g8^. Flemington, Australia, igSg.

'?. iTj.

22. Danny Kerman. Shva Publishers, Israel, 23. Michael Sporn. Michael Spom
igSg. Animation, New York, igSg.

24. Leonid Tishkov. Ohota na Snarka.
Rukitis, Moscow, iggi.

2^. Jonathan Dixon. Lewis Carroll Society of 26. Axel Torgard. Eftir Snarki. Forlagio
North America, New York, 7992. Sprotin, igg4.

"^^ j^^fj^

27. Gavin O'Keefe. Victoria, Australia, igg^.

28. Paul Stanish. Second Expedition,
by Peter Wesley-Smith, Cherry Books,
Camperdown, NSW, Australia, igg6.

^t^l^SUm^

*'*^ ^^Hiii^^ e!'^

r^^^^

29. Gregory L'Homme. Le Snark. Collection 50. Brian Puttock. The Hunting of the
Theatre, France, i()9y. Snark Concluded, by Cathy Bowern,

Angerona Press, Ryde, iggj-

^i. Julio Pomar. La Cihasse au Snark. Edi- 32. Ami Rubinger www.amirubinger.com.,
tion de la Galerie PILT7ER Paris, iggg. 2000.

35. Trudi Castle, www.thecatnip.com/
2oo^art.htm, 2005.

^4-Jo-nusz Stanny. Wyprawa na amirlacza.
Oficyna Naukowa, Warszawa, 200^.

35. Allan P. Williams. iUniverse, Inc, Neio
York, Lincoln and Shanghai, 200^.

56. David Elliot. University ofOtago,

privately printed, Dunedin, New Zealand,
xvww. davidelliot. org/ gallery _results.
php ?book=2^ &submit_book= 1 , 2 006.

37- Peggy Guest, unvzv.peggyguest.com/
illustration. htmL 2006.

3 5. Charlotte Lambert. La Chasse au Snark.
Lux Editeur, Montreal, Quebec, Canada,
2006.

^g.John V. Lord. Inky Parrot Press, Artists'
Choice Editions, Church Hanborough,
England, 2006.

40. Geneva Rosett-Hafter. Bell Books, London, 41. Robert Saunders. ]^kten pa Snarken.
2007. Askerforlaget, Norway, 2008.

42. Mahendra Singh, wivzv.justtheplacefor
asnark.blogspot.com, 2008.

•2^

■^,
"j^

Leaves /troo?
r/^e Deaneny Ganden

How wonderful to receive this
book on Elizabeth Sewell's work
today; I was looking for a box from
Amazon with studies on Rilke,
whom I seem to be encounter-
ing a lot lately, and now have to
go in search of Sewell, Mallarme,
and Rimbaud. ..not a bad thing as
I start my eighth decade. Thank
you!

Mary DeYoung, Pine River,

Minnesota

I was up late last night reading
the latest Knight Letter. I thought
I would relate a few incidents
regarding it: I was glad to get
my pin and I wear it proudly. I
was standing in line at the coffee
counter at my local bookstore, and
the beverage manager asked me
where to get a Society pin. I told
her to become a miember of our
Societ)'...hope she did. While I was
there, the book manager asked me
to come to the back room. "We
have something for you." It turned
out to be a salesmen's sample of

the Scieszka/Blair Alice. I was de-
lighted to get it, even though the
pages are unbound.

R. Steven Terry Jr.,

Traverse City, Michigan

My cover illustrations and the ac-
companying interior illustrations
and article in the latest Knight
Letter [KL 81] turned out so well.
I am very grateful to the LCSNA
members who made all of this pos-
sible. Going to the meeting and
imbibing the CarroUian ambience
was a real morale booster for me,
and now this wonderful exposure
in the Knight Letter, well, I am semi-
speechless!

My family was suitably im-
pressed by this forensic proof-
positive of my appearance at the
LCSNA meeting! Can you believe
it, they scoffed when I told them
of the Carrollian cabal lurking
in the heart of Gotham. ..they are
scoffless now, I can assure you!
Please give my compliments to
Andrew Ogus; the layouts and

illustrations were perfectly crisp
and dark.

Mahendra Singh,
Montreal, Quebec

I have seen many photos of last
year's spring meeting in the
homepage of LCSNA. Everyone
is so cheerful and looks to be hav-
ing a very good time. I remember
Kimie [Kusumoto] had talked
to us at our summer meeting in
Tokyo about the nice atmosphere
and good auction of the meeting.
That was it!

Yasuko and Hiroacki Natsume,
Tokyo, Japan [explaining why
they came to our 2009 spring
meeting]

Really pleased with the magazine.
Please look me up on dali.com
orjett.downtownartistproject.org
for THREE NEW finished Alice
paintings! I'm kinda proud of
the continued variations that I've
been able to squeeze out. But then

again, I have great subject matter
to riff on, don't I ?

Jett Jackson,

Los Angeles, California

Thank you for welcoming me to
the Society. I just received my first
issue of the Knight Letter and en-
joyed it so much, I'd Uke to read
more!

Yes, pictures and conversations
make all the difference!

Raine Szramski,

Phoenix, Arizona

Hello from the Queen of Hearts'
dungeon. I'd like to take this op-
portunity to share with you an
example of the depth and breadth
of influence Carroll and his Alice%
have on a demographic least likely
to embrace our heroine. I'm talk-
ing about prisoners, real tough
guys who do mean things for a liv-
ing (myself included, though I'm
decidedly reformed).

My interest in Carroll the man
and in his better known works
began a few years back. Alice and
Carroll kept popping up every-
where around me: in a legal brief
I read, in a book ad in the New
Yorker, in the bibliography of a

novel, jvist to name a few. Finally
I heeded the call and ordered
Martin Gardner's The Annotated
Alice. My interest exploded after
that. I began a delightful corre-
spondence with Mr. Gardner after
I spotted an inaccuracy printed
on the dustjacket of which he was
unaware. It was with his assistance
that I found the LCSNA and later
became a member. Since then,
I've collected a few more related
books, which have all filled my
personal "Wonderland" journey
with untold hours of happiness.
And the Knight Letter?, have been
essential in my ongoing education
about things Carroll.

Incidentally, I've found myself
Wonderland's de facto ambassador
to prisoners. Among my associates,
there has sprung up an interest
in reading my small but precious
collection. I receive nothing but
positive responses from these most
unlikely fans.

Also of interest, my prison pro-
hibits trade cloth-bound books,
but will allow them if the staff
slices off the covers. Blasphemy!
However, I must have my books.
So with a little ingenuity and a
modicum of artistic talent, I've
managed to produce a facsimile
Alice in Sunderland by painting

the entire cover to look like the
original, rendered in acrylic paint
on a now cloth (bedsheet-) bound
hardback book. My Annotated Alice
came with a stunning dustjacket,
so I used chipboard and a leather
hide (purloined from the boot fac-
tory) . Voices From France sports the
cover artwork photocopied, cut,
and posted onto a sheet painted
red, white, and blue.

I hope you have enjoyed my
letter and I thank all involved
for producing the Knight Letter.
Your service to the enjoyment
and scholarship of Carroll and his
works is sincerely appreciated.

The Knave of Hearts/

Jason Duran,

San Luis Obispo,

California

I enjoyed Professor Hallett's
Hortulanus Insanus very much,
and I am sure that CLD would
have too. Still reading Voices from
France — ^very much up my street!

John Christie, Blackhills, Elgin,

Moray, Scotland

Through History with J. Wesley Smith

"As yoar friend. Reverend Dodgson, I feel bound to point out that
the publication of this chiltlish drivel will do your reputation great
harm. People will be sure to find out who Lewis Carroll really is."

A hearty welcome to our new
members: Jack Buckley, Mary
Burford, Andrew Edison, Cynthia
Ferry, David Frankham, Lonnie
Hanzon, Wendy Ice, Jett Jack-
son, Yasuko Natsume, Katherine
Neville, Nobuko Niwano, Selkie
O'Meara, Maurice Saylor, John
Schilke, Kerri Shadid, Raine Sz-
ramski, and Sarah Young.

noTes ifKoof) ihe lcsna secneiany

JABBERING

ANB JAM .^■:

The LCSNA now has close to 300
members. (If anyone is dubious
about continuing their member-
ship due to the economic down-
turn, they should drop me a note.)

There seems to be a mini-boomlet
(a precise term of measurement)
in new memberships of late, and I
wonder if some of this might not
be due to our very popular new
LCSNA Facebook page, which was
created and is maintained by for-
mer president Alan Tannenbaum.
You can view it and read the wall
here: http://www.facebook.com/
group.php?gid=98241035511 .

There can never be too many
Lewis Carroll Facebook pages, so
you may also want to take a look
at Joel Birenbaum's Alice in Won-
derland Collectors page, which is
here: http://www.facebook.com/
group.php?gid=43026347327.
(Joel is also a former LCSNA presi-
dent.) Both of these pages are ex-
cellent ways for LCSNA members
to find other members and even
nonmembers with shared Carrol-
lian interests.

And, speak of an embarrassment
of riches, don't forget regular visits
to the LCSNA blog: http://lcsna.
blogspot.com/, which keeps us
up to date with all things Carrol-
lian. When you add to all this the
fact that LCSNA's own web page is
being refurbished, the mind reels.

Another older, but equally cool
form of social networking is to
wear your LCSNA cameo pin (or
your old one, or both) wherever
you go. You never know what good
fortune this might bring. Doubt-
ers, see Steve Terry's letter in this
issue's "Leaves."
The new pins were mailed to all
members early this year. I appreci-
ated the many nice notes of thanks
I received, but I may as well fess
up: they should have gone to Patt
Griffin, who coordinated pin
selection and ordering, and to
Alison and Alan Tannenbaum,
who did the mailing — both gargan-
tuan tasks.

Jam Tomorrow? I was just jabber-
ing (via e-mail) with Mark Rich-
ards, the chairman of the Lewis
Carroll Society (UK). Mark writes,
"We have just started planning a
meeting for Summer 2010. This
will be based in Guildford, with
one day spent at the Surrey His-
tory Centre in Woking (where a
lot of the Dodgson family archives
are held). We hope to make it a
packed 3+ days — exploring the
Guildford area in more detail
than we have done before — and
having a sort of mini-conference
as part of it, looking at the later
years of Lewis Carroll's life (plus
his funeral, dispersion of his pos-
sessions, etc.). It is very early in
the planning at the moment, but
I have already made a provisional
arrangement with the Surrey His-
tory Centre. I'm hoping the trip
will attract a number of overseas
visitors, and specifically I am hop-
ing for some contributions from
overseas members.

Ravings ynom ihe Wmring Desk

OF ANDREW SELLON

Our spring meeting in Santa Fe was such a
grand experience that I don't know where
to begin. Ah, yes, at the beginning: Jona
than Dixon. Our excursion to New Mexico would
simply not have happened without Jonathan. He
proposed his town as the meeting location, and
partnered with Theaterwork's artistic director David
Olson to present the first fully staged performance
of La Guida di Bragia since young Charles Dodgson's
own. Members present were treated to a
private performance after the main meet-
ing; something we will not soon forget.
(Some of us had the extra treat of seeing
it performed in front of a local audience
on Friday night, in a beautiful Masonic the-
ater.) Jonathan also enlisted distinguished
and award-winning composer Gerald Fried
to present a live performance of his Look-
mg--G/a55-themed chamber suite. The piece
was exquisite, and well played by all. Mark
Burstein, Andrew Ogus, and members of
the theater contributed greatly to the panel
discussions. Theaterwork further honored
us by kindly acting as host site for our meet-
ing, complete with an after-show reception
and a welcome message from Governor
Bill Richardson! Live theater, live music,
and lively conversation: the result was very,
very Guida indeed! I only wish that more members
could have joined us. Thank you, one and all, espe-
cially Jonathan and David, for a true Southwestern
treat. To learn more about the delightful production
of La Guida, visit www.theaterwork.org. Theaterwork
hopes to tour the production across New Mexico,
and we are also encouraging them to produce a DVD
for those unable to attend.

I'm also going to rave in advance about our up-
coming fall 2009 meeting. Just as Jonathan spear-
headed efforts for the spring meeting, David Schaefer
is heading up the charge for our fall session in Fort
Lee, New Jersey, just across the George Washington
Bridge from New York City, which will center on rare
and early film versions of the Alice stories. The com-
bination of screenings and lectures promises to be a

reel treat in every sense, so make your plans now to
join us!

We're also working on plans for a redesign of our
beloved LCSNA web site, to bring it more in step with
the times. The web committee is meeting regularly
and diligently to brainstorm about needed features,
look and feel, and of course, content. If you have sug-
gestions for enhancements to the site, by all means
email them to me. We have a lot of ideas of our own,
but eagerly welcome your input and sup-
port for this ambitious project. Our focus
is on providing quality content that is regu-
larly updated, in an attractive and easy-to-
navigate format, to a site that you'll want to
visit for updates at least a couple of times
a month. No excessive flashiness, just the
real goods, delivered fresh to your browser.
Stay tuned!

vy'

In this final appearance of the
"Notes 8c Queries" column, we are
pleased to present several reflec-
tions on the Alice books by XL's
own designer par excellence,
Andrew Ogus, and one woolly
observation by Mischmasch editor
Sarah Adams-Kiddy.

In More Annotated Alice, Martin
Gardner cites Robert Sutherland's
Language and Lewis Carroll as que-
rying the presence of the Anglo-
Saxon attitudes of the White King's
messengers ( TTLG, Chapter VII,
note 2). Clearly they are a reflec-
tion of the Mouse's tale of the
Earls Edwin and Morcar, Anglo-
Saxons who submitted to the
French William the Conqueror.

Also in More Annotated Alice (Chap-
ter rV, Note 5), Gardner writes
"Carrollians have noticed that" the
picture of the White Rabbit's fall
into the cucumber frames shows
him wearing a checked waist-
coat, unlike the original white of
Chapter I." Rather than an error
on Tenniel's part, this alteration
reflects a close reading of the text:
In Chapter II the tardy Rabbit
returns to the hall of doors "splen-
didly dressed." He has rushed
home to prepare for his engage-
ment with the Duchess, to change
his clothes into a surprisingly
modern mix-and-match of pat-
terns, and to gather up his fan and
gloves, further delaying his arrival.
The loss of the latter items forces
him to return once more in search
of the errant Mary Ann, finding
instead another enormous Alice.
The Rabbit's reappearance in the
hall also suggests that the doors

function as a series of shortcuts
between the various areas of
Wonderland; as one of its impor-
tant denizens he would, of course,
have such access.

No one enjoys being stood up;
perhaps it is disappointment as
much as pepper that enrages the
Duchess.

Readers of La Guida di Bragia will
recall the heroes of the piece,
Mooney and Spooney. Mooney's
name may be taken to refer to
the kmacy caused by the moon;
"spooney" as an epithet for foolish-
ness is found in chapter twenty of
Great Expectations, the work of an-
other great CD.

Curiously, the avidly listening owl
in Tenniel's illustration of the
Mouse's tale does not appear to
concern the squeaker. The Mouse
is so carried away by the sound
of his (her?) own voice that the
presence of a predator goes un-
noticed.

Do the trees and flowers of Won-
derland maintain a constant size,
comparable to that of flowers and
trees in our world (with perhaps
the exception of the rose trees,
but perhaps they are miniature
roses)? The fauna seem to main-
tain what they would consider
"proper" sizes; it is Alice who ad-
justs to them.

The Pigeon says she has "taken
the highest tree in the wood." So
this tree is always taller than the
other trees. Furthermore, plants
are not able to ingest substances
such as mushrooms or little cakes

unless the latter are composted
(thus presumably losing their
magical properties).

What is the geography through
the Looking-Glass? Alice proceeds
straight across the board, leaving
one to wonder what fabulous mon-
sters live on the rest of the squares.

If the ways around Looking-Glass
house belong to the Red Queen,
does she somehow control the
country outside the board? Or
only at that side? But it is the
"White" side, appropriately con-
trariwise to expectation.

Why is mock turtle soup green if
"real" turtle soup is brown? Is it
mock Mock Turtle Soup? Assum-
ing the Mock Turtle is singing
about Mock Turtle soup and not
some other flavor.

Having recently learned to knit
socks using four (sometimes five)
needles, I noticed that while one
only ever is working with two nee-
dles at a time, all of the needles
move as part of the process. In ad-
dition, the active stitches are trans-
ferred continuously from one nee-
dle to another, in a way that an
observer might think that more
needles are being added. While
we are never told what the sheep
is knitting in "Wool and Water,"
perhaps its knitting with more
and more needles simultaneously
is a parody of the sock-making
process. It seems likely that, due
to the times and the number of
his sisters, Dodgson would have
seen socks being made.

Many aspects of [the story of
Basilius] pull us into the world of
Roman late antiquity: clashing reli-
gious practices, legal interference
in religion, the brutality of the
laws, and the willingness of all par-
ties to believe a very great many
impossible things before breakfast.
From The Ruin of the Roman
Empire by James J. O'Donnell,
HarperCollins Publishers, Nexv York,
New York, 2008.

somerset: Prick not your finger

as you pluck it off,
Lest, bleeding, you do paint the

white rose red,
And fall on my side so, against

your will.

From King Henry VI, Part I,

Shakespeare

Molly would be about seventy now,
which makes me feel that Miss
Budd must be well over a hundred.
If so, she will not mind my saying
that she looked like the Duchess
in Alice in Wonderland.

From Autobiography by A. A.

Milne, Atlantic Monthly Company

and E.P. Button &" Co., Inc, Nexu

York, 1939.

Gorg drew himself up to his full
height. His body uncurled like a
centipede's, and it made me think
of the caterpillar from Alice in
Wonderland, though not in a way
that made my heart pound any
less.

"WHO ARE YOU," Gorg said, as
if he'd read the same book.
From The True Meaning of
Smekday by Adam Rex, Hyperion
Books, 2007.

'Goats," said Maxwell Hyde, "are a
special case. Mad as hatters, all of
them."

From The Merlin Conspiracy
by Diana Wynne Jones, 2003,
Greenwillow Books.

l love pussy cats," he said once
more, and demonstrated his af-
fection by reaching down to give
Raffles a little scratch behind the
ear. The little devil purred, and
the fat man scratched him some
more, and Raffles purred some
more, and then trotted off and
leapt onto an open spot in the
cookbooks section, on the fourth
shelf from the bottom. From there
he gazed at us, and if he'd had a
grandparent from Cheshire in-
stead of the Isle of Man, I do be-
lieve he'd have been smiling.
From The Burglar on the Prowl
by Lawrence Block, William
Morrow, an Imprint of Harper
Collins publishers, 2004.

But I was scheming to devise

A wheeze to catch the spanner

With magnets of uncommon size
And sell it for a tanner

etc., etc.

From Five Red Herrings by
Dorothy Sayers, 1931. Lord
Peter Wimsey, whom Sayer has
quote Alice in many of her books,
composes a parody while looking for
a spanner (wrench) that was used
to bash in someone 's head. Also
of note is that Lord Peter buys his
luife a first edition of Alice in one
of Sayers 's posthumously published
xvorks.

Then she slowly melted in her
chair and was replaced by a hoo-
kah-smoking caterpillar that said
nothing but "Wah, wah, wah, wah,
wah," but did pay for breakfast.

From Fool by Christopher Moore,

William Morrow, 2009.

If Victor and the Mad Hatter and
other people had been involved in
some kind of swindle and went to
prison, would it help her?
From Something Like a
Love Affair by Julian Symons,
Mysterious Press Books, Warner
Books, Inc. 1992

Carroll — 'a wit, a gentleman, a
bore and an egotist' — was con-
demned by nature to be an irritat-
ing patron.

From English Masters of Black
and White: Sir John Tenniel
by Frances Sarzano (quoting
Harry Furniss), Pelligrini
& Cuday, New York.

ALL MUST HAVE PRIZES

Confessions of an Alice Doll Collector

JOEL BIRENBAUM

No, I am not admitting to collecting dolls,
although I do have more than a few in my
closet. The story here is based on discus-
sions with Alice Berkey, a premier Alice doll collector
and charter member of the LCSNA. Akin to the Mock
Turtle, Alice used to be a "real" collector, in that
she collected illustrated Alice books, but somewhere
along the way, she was diverted to collecting Alice
dolls as well. I guess it is true, if you don't
know where you are going, any path will
take you there.

Berkey remembers seeing an Alice
doll used as an accent piece in an ex-
hibition of Alice books belonging to
Stan Marx, founder of the LCSNA.
It was a Madame Alexander doll, and
Berkey thought that was a lovely way to
present A/?r^ books. Logically, I guessed
that this was when she went astray, but
collecting defies logic, and this was not the
case. No doubt this planted a seed that took
seven years to germinate, when a bookseller asked if
she collected Alice dolls. It was at this point that Alice
realized that she needed to collect Alice dolls. That
is the way collectors think; they don't collect because
they desire to, they actually yieed to.

Armed with this new imperative, she followed
her passion with an omnivorous hunger. After all,
she had to make up for lost time, and bought almost
every Alice doll she could find, without regard to con-
dition or type. In this way, she built up quite a large
collection. In 1982, the sesquicentenary of Carroll's
birth, she attended an exhibit at the Pierpont Mor-
gan Library in New York, where she was shocked to
see so many Alice items that she had been totally
unaware of. That's when she had her epiphany: She
would never be able to attain all things Alice, and she
was okay with that. I envy her for the peace that must
bring. I am still among the unenlightened.

Suddenly, it became incredibly easy to pass up
buying every Alice doll she saw. The condition of the
doll became much more important, and she realized
there were dolls she liked and some she didn't. When
I asked what quality of an Alice doll made it desirable,
she replied, "dolls that warm my heart." She found

that dolls that were made to be played with generally
appeal to her more than artist dolls. At first I assumed
that this was due to some anti-snobbishness or a rejec-
tion of targeted collectibles, but again I was wrong.
She simply finds these dolls to be more sincere.

This being the case, she is fond of her Effanbee,
American Character, and Nancy Ann Storybook Alice
dolls. These are common, popular dolls that were
inexpensive when they were new. Her Barbie
Alices made by Mattel also bring a smile
to her face. She has many Madame Al-
exander Alices, probably because they
made so many. There are different
styles, named for the face they have —
Wendy, Mary Ann, Margaret, Maggie,
and Lissy — and various sizes. So a doll
doesn't have to be expensive to hold a
place of honor in Alice's collection.
When Alice asks young girls which
doll they like best, nine out of ten choose
the Grimm's Fairy Tale Alice from the late 70s
or early 80s. She has no idea why. Adults are reluctant
to choose, but if they do, they often pick the Shirley
Temple Alice by Ideal. Perhaps this is because Shirley
Temple is someone they recognize.

The collection also contains dolls that are one of
a kind, such as a wooden doll made by Helen Bul-
lard of Holly Dolls of Ozone, Tennessee, which has
mohair hair and a pretty painted face. Although Alice
is partial to classic Alice dolls with long blonde hair, a
blue dress, and white pinafore, every once in a while
an odd one gains entrance to the collection. One
such example is a cloth Alice with a Tennielesque
face, in a floral print dress and a clashing red and
white check pinafore. It is a doll she bought in Eng-
land at a store that specialized in English crafts. Alice
admits she has no hard and fast rules, yet she does
think that an Alice doll should be recognizable with-
out the accompaniment of a white rabbit, pig-baby, or
other accessory.

Equally interesting was listening to Alice reflect
on how she built her doll collection. She subscribed
to Collectors United newspaper, and she used to pore
over ads endlessly. They were not arranged in any log-
ical order, so this was quite a chore, only undertaken

by the most avid collectors. She progressed to placing
ads for Alice dolls wanted, and chasing leads given
to her by her friends. She said it was touching to see
how many people cared about her collection and
tried to help. She has a special connection to dolls
she acquired in this way. Looking back on this, she
feels like a pioneer women, who did it the hard way,
hunting and gathering, whereas today all you need

to do is connect to the Internet. When asked if there
was anything special she still wanted, she replied that
she is happy with what she has, but that doesn't mean
she has stopped looking and buying. She did intimate
that a complete Alice doll reference book would be
the perfect addition to her collection, which now
numbers 199 Alice dolls.

American Character Dolls

Left to right: Valentine, ig^os; Madame Alexander 196^; Grimm's
Fairy Tale Dolls igyos; Effanbee ig^o

Madame Alexnder, ig^J. 1930

Nancy Ann, ip^os

t^«-> -■"' ^

Ideal Shirley Temple, 1962

Anne Wilkinson, 19JOS

3n iHemoriam

We note the deaths of three men who made important contributions to perpetu-
ating Lewis Carroll's literary and cultural legacy.

#«^

^-^

Adrian Mitchell

(October 24, 1932 - December 20, 2008)
Michael Rosen, the children's laureate of Britain, wrote in The Times (London)
on February 17, 2009, about Mitchell's A/ir^play, which was performed at the
National Theatre a few years ago, "Watching the play, I got the impression that he
had become irritated by how Lewis Carroll had been posthumously demonised for
alleged paedophilia. In the play, Carroll was a dreamer, who cherished Alice Lid-
dell's imaginative powers." Mitchell's play was published in England by Oberon
Books in 2001, in their Plays for Young People series, and was reprinted in 2005.

^-^

Christian Enzensberger

(December 24, 1931 -January 27, 2009)
The Times (London) led its notice (February 12, 2009) thus: "It was Christian
Enzensberger who made Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the
Looking Glass available to German readers in scintillating translations."

► ^>)"<<C - *

PhUip Jose Farmer

(Januar)' 26, 1918 - February 25, 2009)
Nexu York Times (February 26, 2009): "A prolific and popular science fiction writer
who shocked readers in the 1950s by depicting sex with aliens and challenged
conventional pieties of the genre with caustic fables set on bizarre worlds of his
own devising, died Wednesday. He was 91 and lived in Peoria." Alice Liddell, along
with other "real life" people, such as Sir Richard Burton (the explorer), Samuel
Clemens, and Baron von Richthofen, was an important character in his Riverivorld
series.

Carrollm Notes

THE HOT HAND

OF BEWILDERMENT:

AMANDA MCKITTRICK ROS

ON THE ALICE BOOKS

Mark Burstein

Opera has its Florence Foster
Jenkins, cinema its Edward Wood,
but among the hterati one name
stands above all others in the sin-
cere wretchedness of her prose.
The bloviated and often allitera-
tive purple-osity of the oeuvre of
Irishwoman Amanda McKittrick
Ros (1860-1939) first came to
my attention in college as I was
studying the Oxfordian world of
the Inklings (J. R. R. Tolkien, C.
S. Lewis, et al.), who were said
to have ended many an evening
with a contest to see who could
read Mrs. Ros's work out loud for
the longest time without dissolv-
ing into laughter. Her "admirers"
eventually included such lumi-
naries as Aldous Huxley, D. B.
Wyndham-Lewis, and Mark Twain
himself, who called her novel Irene
Iddesleigh ".. .enchanting. . .a wor-
thy rival to Julia Moore... in the
realms of 'Hogwash' literature."*
Connoisseurs of the ludicrous
formed societies devoted to her,
corresponded with her, and often
visited her. Fortunately, she never
once caught on to the joke.

It is beyond the scope of this
article to supply readers with the
jaw-dropping inaniloquence of
her work, but since original vol-
umes of her works {Delina Delaney,
Helen Huddleston, Poems of Puncture,
Fumes of Formation, etc.) today go
for hundreds of dollars, you are
recommended to seek out Thine
in Storm and Calm: An Amanda

McKittrick Ros Reader ( Blacks taff,
1988) from which the letters below
were excerpted, or In Search of
the World's Worst Writers (Harper
Collins, 2000), in which author
Nick Page calls her "the greatest
bad writer who ever lived. A mas-
ter — or rather mistress, for she was
nothing if not female — of both
poetry and prose, a gloriously
over-the-top writer who was utterly
convinced of her own greatness
and of the merits of her work."
I will content myself with two
quotes, one from Irene Iddesleigh:
"Speak! Irene! Wife! Woman! Do
not sit in silence and allow the
blood that now boils in my veins
to ooze through cavities of unre-
strained passion and trickle down
to drench me with its crimson
hue!" and the opening lines of
her poem "Visiting Westminster
Abbey," to wit: "Holy Moses! Have
a look! / Flesh decayed in every
nook!"

Herewith, sans comment and
verbatim, is some of her corre-
spondence of interest to Carrol-
lians. T S. Mercer was her editor
and publisher, and a great admirer
of her work; (Edward) Norman
Carrothers, a botanist and friend.

To T S. Mercer
6 April 1928

I was reading recently of a very-
appetising price Dr Rosenbach
paid for the mss of 'Alice in Won-
derland' (Mrs Hargreaves). I think
this personality still lives.

Under Heaven, I ask in all sin-
cerity, do you really think this Work
worth £15,400? What think you of
this money-producing Magnet of

literature? Have you read 'Alice in
Wonderland'? I never did. Do you
know if it is still procurable?

Do you conscientiously con-
sider it is worth such a fabulous
price? It knocked me into 'Won-
derland' right away and am still
seriously 'wondering' if I should
ever attain this golden goal! by a
freak of fortune! If so, ))om would
certainly come in for a goodly por-
tion of the spoil.

Don't for a moment think I
shall overlook all your thoughtful-
ness re my Works.

I think 'Six Months in Hell' wd
come near this mark — should I
meet with a twin Dr Rosenbach
but of a more stable temperament
than this example of 'Egregious
Outre Monsieur'.

15 April 1928

About 'Alice in Wonderland'. I
have made enquiries about it but
none seem to have thought it
worth reading. I should indeed be
glad if you cd allow me to see it. I
will return it safely to you.

It is strongly suggested that Car-
roll is an assumed name and that
the person who wrote it first was
a German named 'Heiner', but I
doubt if there is a single person
mentioned who is genuine.

It seems Mrs Hargreaves was
a little foundling found tied to a
doorhandle on a poor Welshman's
cottage. Whether or not there is
any truth in the matter, I don't
know.

However it was and is a good
financial asset.

4 May 1928

I thank you once again for your
very nice detailed letter, also for
'Alice in Wonderland' with its
lovely little gold and ruby cover.

You may rest assured I shall
never part with your precious little
gift, while Hfe's lamp burns within
me. I have said 'gift', but I will be
very glad to pay you for it on hear-
ing its price. I really feel so deeply
in your debt already.

Don't be angry however at
expressions of opinion, I consider
this little Vol. apart altogether
from my great appreciation of
being possessor of such a largely-
read work of an idiot for I hold
any man wearing a clerical coat,
especially, for a hundred and
one reasons, should receive 100
strokes of the Birch to celebrate
him into that region he best de-
serves for writing such an idiotic,
nonsensical, whimsical, disjointed
piece of abject happenings burst-
ing with Stygian Style Expressions
lined throughout with a pricky-
patterned policy the gods would
grunt at and decent-minded
abhor!

I hold there isn't a child (be
that child young, middle-aged
or old, born since Noah was, by
Godly Command, appointed Cap-
tain of that Divine Yacht shaped as
an oblong meal-store into which
were huddled seven other crea-
tures, six of whom were genuine
plaster-casts of Nature and from
whom we virtually descend) who,
in its first or second degree of
childhood, could understand one
solitary page of this book as it
stands.

I have read hundreds of beauti-
ful children's books by sublime
Authors, but this one excels them
in point of deficiency and want of
efficacy. It certainly deserves the
price paid for the ms inasmuch as
its enormity goes to prove what

most Authors practise, viz. 'gulling
the majority'.

It may be I have raced over
its parts too hastily to arrive at a
proper estimate of its worth, but I
fear further impressions are use-
less.

I should have liked it auto-
graphed by you. Depend however
upon the fact that I appreciate
none the less for forwarding it to
me, and hope one day I shall be
the proud writer of a Work that
will yield me equally.

To Norman Carrothers
14 April 1932

...I have numerous gifts of books
given personally to me. Quite
recently a gentleman friend in
London sent me a specially got-up
volume, 'Alice in Wonderland',
garbed in maroon and gold. I
read it every line and my opinion
about it is its beautiful garb is
absolutely lost cloaking its idiotic
pages, and that 'hogwashing' critic
who found time to whiff its pages
with the wind of irony should be
stoned to death for trying to de-
ceive the public with such lines of
drunken bluff. When I finished
its perusal I could not recall one
redeeming feature of elegance
from cover to cover. It is so de-
scriptive of some old clergyman
in his smallest of years trying to
make up a sermon of very irregu-
lar infantisms. Enough of 'Alice in
Wonderland', save that the gulled
American who paid £15,000 for
such rubbish must have been a
warder over a gang of weaklings
for an indefinite period, when he
too became infected with their
idiotisms.

But on the other hand if this
purchaser had handed me this
sum, I would have criticised him
as a first-class exhibitor of brainful-
ness.

Julia Ann Moore "Sweet Singer
of Michigan," (1847-1920) is in
the good company of William
McGonagall and perhaps a stray
Vogon or two in a competition for
the worst poetaster of all time.

A MOUSE, A CAT, &>
A KING: THE LESSON BOOKS

Mark Burstein

La chatte.

Ou est ma chatte?

Jc lie sals pas.

Je lui ap-por-tais du lait.*

EUe aime beau-coup le lait.f

* I was bringing some milk to her.
t She is very fond of milk.

As Alice was swimming about in
the Pool of Tears, she "remem-
bered having seen, in her broth-
er's Latin Grammar, 'A mouse — of
a mouse — to a mouse — a mouse —
O mouse!'" Soon thereafter she
"began again: 'Oil est ma chatteT ,
which was the first sentence in
her French lesson-book." Then,
as the "queer-looking party ... as-
sembled on the bank," the Mouse
recited "the driest thing I know .
. . 'William the Conqueror, whose
cause was favoured by the Pope
. . .'" The latter two quotations
come from well-known (at least to
Carrollians) nineteenth-century
schoolbooks, presumably owned
by the Misses Liddell, but the first?
Good question.

"Ou est ma chatte?" is indeed
the first sentence of the first lesson
in La Bagatelle, intended to introduce
children of three or four years old to
some knowledge of the French language,
first published in London in 1804
by John Marshall and by many
other publishers since, including
a revision by "Madame N. L." in
1841, in which the age of children

addressed has become "four or
five years old."' It was first so
identified by Hugh O'Brien in the
Irish Times, April 5, 1963, and then
noted in the Oxford Journal Notes
&' Queries, December 1963. Mr.
O'Brien also believes (quite er-
roneously, I fear) that Mr. Carroll
based much more of Wonderland
on that little volume, citing similar
French passages about cakes, gar-
dens, children falling asleep, and
so on, and positing, "Lewis Carroll
juggled the order of these and
made up round them the story
familiar to us," committing the
hoary post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy,
and finding meaning where there
is only low-level coincidence.^

Similarly, the "William the
Conqueror" passage is known to
come from A Short Course of His-
tory First Series: I. Greece. 11. Rome.
III. England, published in London
by Whittaker and Co. in 1848 (see
"What the Archbishop Found," KL
70:26), and was first identified as
such by Roger Lancelyn Green
in his edition of Carroll's Diaries
(London: Cassell, 1953, p. 2).

But is there a similar ur-text
for the declension of "a mouse"?
Probably not, but the possibil-
ity exists and there are, for the
nonce, two fine theories in, as the
Mock Turtle would put it. Laugh-
ing and Grief. The spokesman for
a Latin referent is Dr. Selwyn H.
Goodacre; for a Greek, August A.
Imholtz,Jr.

Goodacre 's "In Search of Al-
ice's Brother's Latin Grammar" in
Jabberwocky Issue 22, Spring 1975,
presents an ingenious theory. The
Latin for mouse, mus, is a third-de-
clension noun with many irregu-
larities, which would disqualify it
from being the chosen exemplar
for any textbook, even though
Carroll's case order — nomina-
tive, genitive, dative, accusative,
vocative — is correct for its day
(it changed in the 1870s). After
dismissing several likely candi-
dates of Latin textbooks of that
era, Goodacre lands upon Punch
writer Percival Leigh's The Comic

Latin Grammar; A New and Face-
tious Introduction to the Latin Tongue
(London: Charles Tilt, 1840), a
copy of which Dodgson owned. ^ In
it, only one noun is fully declined,
albeit in verse form, namely musa,
a muse. Could Alice, he asks, look-
ing over her brother's shoulder,
have mistaken mus for musa?

Imholtz first published his
speculations as a response letter
in Issue 30, Spring 1977.^ Noting
that Dodgson was a careful clas-
sicist, he feels the absence of the
ablative case (by, with, or from
a mouse) may not have been a
mistake, but rather a clue that
the subject was, in fact, a Greek
noun, whose five-case declension
would be consistent with Carroll's
translation (Latin has six cases).
In the pre-1865 Greek grammars
Imholtz could find, the standard
first declension feminine exem-
plar was, in fact, [jouoa, "mousa,"
again meaning a muse. Imholtz
suggests, then, that Alice was
seeing a standard declension in
a standard Greek grammar of
a word, "mousa," that more re-
sembles "mouse" than does the
Latin mus. In the Classical Greek
of Dodgson's day at Oxford (still
true today), the diphthong ou is
pronounced like the "o" in coiv,
so "mousa" also sounds very much
like the English "mouse." And he
finds it rather appropriate that a
daughter of Henry George Liddell
would have a Greek grammar to
hand.

So, was Carroll referring, as
he did in the two other cases, to
a genuine schoolbook, albeit one
which in this case has simply not
yet been identified? Possibly. Was
he making a pun on, or misdirec-
tion or misperception of, a word
in an actual Latin or Greek text-
book? Possibly. Or perhaps he was
just making a joke.

ADDENDUM

I would be remiss in not mention-
ing another nineteenth-century
children's book, albeit one con-
taining a lesson of a different kind.

Seumas Stewart, in his Book Col-
lecting: A Beginners Guide,^ argues
that the Queens' catechizing Alice,
particularly in regards to flour,
in Chapter IX of Looking-Glass
is a direct parody of "one of the
grimmest children's books of all
time," The Child's Guide to Knoiol-
edge; Being a collection of useful and
familiar questions and answers on
every-day subjects, adapted for young
persons, and arranged in the most
simple and easy language, by A Lady
(Fanny Umphelby, 1788-1852).
First published in London by
Hurst, Chance, and Co. in 1828,
this "unhappily popular book"
went though at least 63 editions
through 1913.

I would very much like to thank
Selwyn Goodacre and August Im-
holtz for their erudite cooperation
on this article.

' Dr. Selwyn Goodacre has 14 editions
in his collection, dating from 1822
to 1882. Publishers include Baldwin,
Cradock, and Joy; Baldwin and
Cradock; Robert Baldwin; Simpkin,
Marshall, and Co. (their 1858 edition
was addressed to children "five and
six years old") ; and Crosby Lockwood
and Co. Many were "revised" and/or
"embellished with new cuts."
^ Fallacious or not, I have suggested
to the editors of this fine journal
that it be republished in its entirety
as a curiosity, if nothing else.
^ Lovett, Leiuis Carroll Among His Books

#1204.
'' The article was later revised and
published as "The Absent Ablative
and the Search for Alice's Brother's
Latin Grammar" in The Classical
Bulletin, Vol. 55, January 1979.
^ London: David & Chades, 1972;
New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973.

ALICE IN WARTIME:

Mrs. Miniver and Journey's End

Andreio Sellon &' Sarah L. Adams

Any of us could probably cite a
long list of A/k^inspired books,
movies, and plays with little dif-
ficult)'. Most of these are light-
hearted in nature. But two pieces
come to mind on a more serious
topic: using Carroll's nonsense
to hold off the very real and im-
mediate horrors of war. Below
are segments from the 1928 stage
Av2Lm2L Journey's Endhy R. C. Sher-
iff (made into a film in 1933 and
adapted for television in 1988)
and from the well-known 1942
film Mrs. Miniver (based on the
1937 book of the same name by
Jan Struther) starring Greer Gar-
son. In both pieces, the characters
read from Wonderland to escape
the death and destruction just
outside their shelters. \n Journey's
End, set in a British trench on the
front lines during World War I,
Lieutenant Osborne, fully appre-
ciating the nonsense of war, and
sensing all too accurately his im-
minent death, quotes from it not
once, but twice. In the stunning
2007 Broadway revival, before he
goes off on his final mission he
carefully leaves behind not just his
wedding ring, but the precious
book as well. In Mrs. Miniver, the
title character and her husband
read from the book while waiting
out a World War II air raid with
their sleeping children in their
bomb shelter.

Journey's End: Act II, Scene ii:

[A quiet spell in the trenches; no activ-
ity on the front above.]
trotter: What are you reading?
OSBORNE (zvearily): Oh, just a book.
trotter: What's the tide?
OSBORNE (showing him the

cover): Ever read it?
trotter: Alice's Adventures in

Wonderland — why, that's a kid's

book!
OSBORNE: Yes.

trotter: You aren't reading it?
OSBORNE: Yes.

trotter: What — a kid's book?
OSBORNE: Haven't you read it?
TROTTER (scornfully): No!
OSBORNE: You ought to. (He reads:)
How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail
And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale?
How cheerfully he seems to grin
And neatly spread his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smilingjaws!
TROTTER (after a moment 's thought):

I don't see no point in that.
OSBORNE (wearily): Exactly. That's

just the point.
TROTTER: You are a funny chap!
Act III, Scene i

/OSBORNE and young LIEUTENANT

RALEIGH try to pass the time
before the two of them attempt an
assigned raid on the German camp
which Osborne knows will almost
certainly prove fatal.]

RALEIGH: I'm sorry, I don't mean
to keep talking about the raid.
It's so difficult to — to talk about
anything else. I was just wonder-
ing — will the Bosche retaliate in
any way after the raid?

OSBORNE: Bound to — a bit.

RALEIGH: Shelling?

OSBORNE: "The time has come,"
the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and
sealing-wax
Of cabbages — and kings."

RALEIGH: "And why the sea is boil-
ing hot —

And whether pigs have wings."
OSBORNE: Now we're off! Quick,

let's talk about pigs! Black pigs

or white pigs?
RALEIGH: Black pigs. In the New

forest, you find them quite

wild....
(RALEIGH notices Osborne's ring

on the table; he picks it up.) I say,

here's your ring.
OSBORNE: Yes. I'm — I'm leaving it

here. I don't want the risk of

losing it. (Osborne does not look

at Rcdeigh. )

RALEIGH: Oh! (There is silence. He
puts the ring slowly down; we hear
it clatter on the table.)

OSBORNE (rising): Well, I think per-
haps we ought to get ready.

RALEIGH: Yes. Righto. (He also rises.)

Mrs. Miniver

clem: That's a bomb.

MRS. miniver: They are going for
the aerodrome again.

clem: Have you finished with this,
darling?

MRS. Miniver: Yes.

clem: It's a lovely story. I wonder
if Lewis Carroll ever dreamed
it would live forever. You know,
it's the first story I read.

MRS. miniver: Mine too.

clem: Really? "How she would
keep, through all her riper
years, the simple and loving
heart of her childhood: and
how she would gather about her
other little children, and make
their eyes bright and eager with
many a strange tale — "

MRS. miniver: "Perhaps even with
the dream of Wonderland of
long-ago: and how she would
feel with all their simple sor-
rows, and find a pleasure in all
their simple joys, remember-
ing her own child-life and the
happy summer days."

clem: The happy summer days.

SIC, SIC, SIC

"Like Lewis Carroll's White Queen,
who famously declared that hav-
ing jam and toast every other day
meant 'jam yesterday and jam
tomorrow, but never ever [sic]
jam today,' the court seemed to
be suggesting that trading with
the enemy could only have been a
crime if the enemy had won."
From The Man Who Made
Vermeers, Unvarnishing the
Legend of Han van Meegeren
by Jonathan Lopez, Houghton
Mifflin Publishing Company, 2008.

"There's a large mustard-machine
near here. And the moral of that
is — 'The more there is of mine,
the less there is of yours.'"

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
Random House, 1946.

"The well-known sinologist and
linguist Sir Angus Peacock has
pointed out that whilst 'tempus
fugit' undoubtedly has its origins
in the quotation from Virgil, the
first time that the two words ever
appear in literature in that form,
is when the White Rabbit (Cunicu-
lus Albus) in Alice in Wonderland
uses the phrase." This discussion
of "Tempus fugit" on Wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Tempus_fugit) later was marked
as a possible hoax, then removed
entirely.

Rare Book Review, Oct./Nov. 2008,
has an article on page 70 en-
tided "NUMBERS UP: The White
Rabbit's obsession with time was
merely a reflection of his creator's
love affair with numbers, discovers
Charlotte Luxford." This review
of Robin Wilson's Lewis Carroll in
Numberland includes two uncap-
tioned illustrations. One seems to
be a diagram, the other is a photo-
graph of Lewis Carroll's father!

'From a medieval Book of Hours
to a 19th-century version o^ Alice
in Wonderland, many illustrations
in these books were intended as a
religious education."

From '"The Illustrated Book ':
When Text Meets Image" by Emily
Tartanella, The Bi-College Nexus,
January 29, 2009. http://www.
biconews. com/lp=13790

"[Alice] was both their inspira-
tion and their recipient during
a particularly wet boating trip
with Gerald Duckworth and her
younger sisters, who were given bit-
parts as the Duck, the Dodo, and
Slow Loris."

irow Julia Margaret Cameron by
Amanda Hopkinson, Virago, 1 986.

In an interview in the April issue
of Teen Vogue, Miley Cyrus tells how
she loves Disney animation, partic-
ularly Alice in Wonderland, because
"It's such a perverted movie.... It's
all about Ecstasy. I swear! Look it
up online."

Alice in Washington
by Ellie Schaefer-Salins

Alice

Adapted and directed

by Mary Hall Surface

Performed by Roundhouse

Theatre Bethesda

Bethesda, Maryland

November 26 - December

28, 2008

Alice

Created by Nick Olcott

and Tim McCarty

Performed by Quest Productions

Gallaudet University's

Elstad Auditorium

March 7-8, 2009

Alice in Wonderland invaded Wash-
ington, DC, in the winter of 2008/
2009. There were two productions
of the story at two very different
theaters with two very different
interpretations. I decided to go
and check them both out to see
how other people view the works
of Lewis Carroll. They were both
very curious indeed!

First, Roundhouse Theatre in
Bethesda put on a production
oi Alice duung November and
December of 2008. Roundhouse
Theatre is a local professional
theater company that has been in
the area a long time and uses local
talent in their shows. Their new
400-seat theater was built in 2002
and was a cozy place for the show.
Unfortunately, the theater was less
than half full on the Friday night
that we were there. I went to see
the show with other Carrollians,
David and Mary Schaefer and my
seven-year-old daughter, Eva.

Alice ■wTiS, an interesting show.
There was one actor for Alice
and another as the white rabbit,
and then about six more actors
who changed roles with each new
scene. The set of large windows
and doors never changed, but
props were used to show different
scenes. One of my favorite parts
was when Alice was in the hall of
doors. There was a normal-sized
table with a key and bottle on it.
When Alice grew big, the normal-

0^ ^''d X,

sized table was taken from the
stage and a small dollhouse-sized
table replaced it. When she grew
small, the regular table reap-
peared, but this time it was held
up in the air by four actors. These
changes were very good, as were
the actors. The actor who played
Alice was also good, but she said
Alice's lines as well as the narra-
tion from the book: She would say
a line, then follow it with, "Alice
said." I found this very awkward
and unnecessary. But overall, the
play was done well and was fun to
see. I thought it was a little slow
but this is a problem for people
like me who know the story so well.

The second rendition of Alice
was performed by the Quest act-
ing troupe. This group has mostly
deaf actors and the show was put
on at Gallaudet University's Elstad
Auditorium, so was a very different
adaptation. In my career, I work
with people who are deaf and I am
fluent in American Sign Language
(ASL) , so I thought that this would
be the perfect play for me. Again,
Eva came with me to see the play
and I thought I would have to in-
terpret parts of it for her, but very
little interpretation was needed.
The performance was based more
on movement and modern dance,
with little signing done at all.

The six dancers were very tal-
ented. One of the best scenes was
when five of the dancers formed
the arms and body of the caterpil-
lar while Alice "talked" to it. An-
other scene used flashlights that
were spinning around and then
suddenly stopped to form a large
face and smile of the Cheshire
Cat. The audience gasped when

this happened! However, the rest
of the show was extremely confus-
ing as to which scene was occur-
ring, and I was not always sure just
what was happening. If I could
have just sat back, enjoyed the
dancing, and stopped wondering
about what was happening in the
play, then it would have been quite
interesting. But instead I left feel-
ing confused about the produc-
tion as an Alice &\.ory.

Washington, DC, should be
happy that Alice invaded the town.
Both productions had great talent
and interesting interpretations.
Things are always very curious
here. Is it possible that next we will
see Obama in Wonderland with
the pig and pepper scene repre-
senting the swine flu? Who knows?
This Carrollian will report on the
important shows in town when
they happen next!

Jabberwocky

Family Musik with Rob Kapilow

Saturday, April 25

Lincoln Center

for the Performing Arts:

Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY

Reviewed by Janet Jurist

"Jabberwocky" was commissioned
by Lincoln Center for the Per-
forming Arts, and this was its New
York premiere. Frankly, I did not
think much of it. The entire pro-
gram was one hour long, and was
filled with many things to amuse
the children. "Jabberwocky"
took only about 20 minutes. Rob
Kapilow's music was pleasant but
nothing very great. The singing,
by the Young People's Chorus of
New York City, was very nice but
it was difficult for me to make out
the words even though I know
them. I doubt if any of the many
kiddies that attended could either.
There were four dancers, from
the Pickle Shoes Dance Theatre,
who acted out the plot and they
were good. Nothing too elaborate,
however. Kapilow did talk about
"suitcase" words and explained a
few. I guess that he was afraid to

use the word "portmanteau." I was
hoping to talk to Kapilow after the
performance, but could not make
contact.

Lewis Carroll in Numberland
A Dramatic Presentation

by Robin Wilson

Mathematical Association

of America

January 6, 2009, Washington DC

Clare Imholtz

To our surprise, Wilson's presen-
tation was not pure mathematics
but included dramatic readings of
all sorts from Carroll's letters and
books. Wilson himself, dressed in
frock coat and top hat, enthusi-
astically took the part of Carroll,
and other roles were taken by
Mrs. Wilson and some 30 of his
colleagues. The presentation was
divided, fittingly, into eight fits. Fit

1 included readings of letters to
child-friends and to Mrs. Liddell,
along with a demonstration that

2 X 2 = 5 (as Carroll proved in a
letter to Wilton Rix). Fit 2 focused
on Wonderland readings, and Fit 3
on the Snark and Sylvie and Bruno.
While the material from the latter
book (Fortunatus' purse, the 1:1
map, the gravity train) was sound,
it proved not to dramatize well. Fit
4 covered Carroll's early days and
letters from Oxford, while Fit the
Fifth included not only several of
Carroll's puzzles, but our favorite
bit — a dramatization (utilizing
the entire auditorium space) of
the story of an Oxford tutor who
would only deign to speak to his
student through several intermedi-
aries, leading inevitably to humor-
ous miscommunication. The fit
concluded with a symmetric poem
which could be read both verti-
cally and horizontally (for the lat-
ter, the readers lay across chairs).
Fit 6 presented scenes from the
rarely dramatized Euclid and his
Modern Rivals and The Dynamics of
a Particle, while the seventh and
eighth fits finished up with Car-
roll's work on equations, elections,
and symbolic logic. All in all, this

was a highly entertaining hour,
leaving us with a new apprecia-
tion of both Lewis Carroll's rec-
reational mathematics and Robin
Wilson's showmanship.

Princyclopedia

Clare and August Imholtz

Princyclopedia, an annual book
event sponsored by Princeton
University's Cotsen Children's
Library, is a five-hour extravaganza
that tries to present the many fac-
ets of a single book to the children
of Princeton and the surrounding
communities. This year the event,
held March 28, celebrated Alice in
Wonderland through a variety of
hands-on projects, activities, and
demonstrations. The LCSNA was
one of about thirty organizations
and businesses to participate. We
watched children, and often their
parents, engage in Snark hunts
and life-size chess games, view per-
formances of "Jabberwocky" by the
Princeton drama club, build multi-
colored models of the bridge over
the Firth of Forth with the help of
the engineering department, de-
sign Mad Hatter hats, explore opti-
cal toys, take rides in horse-drawn
Victorian carriages, and even taste
tea-flavored ice cream (a mixture
of Earl Grey and chocolate).

The LCSNA table focused on
several aspects of Carrolliana. We
had examples from a math puzzle
(the "1089" puzzle) on a white-
board (unfortunately, the Princ-
eton math club had decided not
to participate), which was a big hit.
One 12-year-old even wrote out a
complex algebraic formula for us
on how it worked! Next time we'll
definitely bring more math puz-
zles. We provided kids with lots of
handouts, demonstrating mirror
writing (plus a mirror where kids
could try it themselves; some kids
were quite quick at it, others not),
mazes, and rebus letters. In addi-
tion, we had several Alice transla-
tions to look at (people especially
enjoyed the Hebrew and Russian

translations), and biographical
information on two posters.

All in all, some 4,000 kids and
parents visited Princyclopedia 2009.
Your LCSNA representatives had
a great time, and strongly recom-
mend other members to partici-
pate in similar community events,
should the chance come your way.
We also want to commend Dana
Sheridan of the Cotsen, who did
a frabjous job in making it all
happen.

Alice in Wonderland

Buenos Aires: Ediciones

Dos Amigos (2006)

111. by Alicia Scavino, Facundo Ali

12X9 inches, 185 pages

Mark Burstein

Sadly, talented Argentine painter
and printmaker Alicia Scavino (b.
1937) passed away in 2006 before
completing the planned etchings
for the last two chapters of a phe-
nomenally beautiful Alice's Adven-
tures in Wonderland for Ediciones
Dos Amigos of Buenos Aires (an
edition of 25 copies, 20 of which
were for sale). With boxed but
unbound pages (in cork clamshell
and red-cloth lined covers by
Samuel Garbarino and Mariano
Romero) and text in English, this
sumptuous hand-set letterpress
edition is imaginatively illtxmi-
nated with ten double-page color
intaglio etchings (plus title page)
by Scavino. The last two chapters
were illustrated by Facundo Ali,
who also completed Scavino's
designs for the paper wrappers,
and there are ten smaller (ap-
proximately 4 by 3 inches) hand-
colored cliche-verre prints within.
Bookseller Priscilla Juvelis of
Kennebunkport, Maine, the exclu-
sive distributor for Ediciones Dos
Amigos in North America, sold
out the run of the entire regular
edition (listed at $5,000), each
of which contained two original
watercolors by Facundo Ali. One
copy, in a beautiful burgundy
French Levant binding with inlays
and gold morocco onlays by James

The original edition

Brockman of England, sold for
$35,000 at the New York Antiquar-
ian Book Fair in April. Juvelis also
carries a small (4 by 6!/^ inch)
20-page artist's book, one of 20
copies, containing a Wonderland
excerpt in Spanish and a double-
page aquatint by Alicia Scavino,
hand-bound by Sol Rebora, for
$3,000. It is still available.

I ran into Alicia's Wonderland
at the (ahem) 42nd California
International Antiquarian Book
Fair in February, attracted by the
spectacular binding by Michael
Wilcox, which expresses, among
other things, a tribute to Ms. Scav-
ino. The binding — black morocco
centered by inlays of a large blue
and green (Cheshire Cat — also
depicts several other characters,
playing cards, and so on. Housed
in a beige cloth box lined with
black velvet, whose additional pull-
out tray contains the original cork
covers, Scavino's watercolors of
the Mock Turtle and her illustra-
tions for the stiff paper wrappers,
and copies of Wilcox's concept

sketches for the binding, the book
was recently sold for $50,000 by
Bromer Booksellers of Boston
and can be viewed at www.bromer.
com/onlinecatl 0_alice.html.

Under His Hat

Robert H. Batey

Strategic Book Publishing,

2009, ISBN 9781606934623

Reviewed by Ray Kiddy

For someone who has not studied
his life, it might be possible to
theorize that the Reverend Dodg-
son did not come up with the Alice
stories. They are rather fanciful,
and on the surface he does seem
somewhat understated in charac-
ter. Perhaps a particularly active
childhood imagination, such as
Alice Liddell's, could come up
with these ideas. If these stories
were told to a competent chroni-
cler, one can see them becoming
the two Alice books attributed to
Lewis Carroll. If one imagines how
this might occur, and is very cre-
ative about it, this would be one

of the central pillars of the book
before us, called Under His Hat, by
Robert Batey.

Another pillar of this book is
the relationship between Alice
Liddell and Coffee Johnny, a char-
acter who is in the habit of wear-
ing large top hats and who ends
up being a familial, though wholly
undocumented, link between the
Liddell family and the Batey fam-
ily. According to Batey, this comes
from a purported misadventure of
the young Henry Liddell, Alice's
father, with a German au pair that
supposedly led to a quiet trip to an
orphanage and a quick boat back
to Germany. The book begins near
the time of Coffee Johnny's birth
and follows him and then Alice
Liddell through their many ad-
ventures. Alice's "hatter" is often a
deus ex machina, and his adventures
with the young Alice parallel many
scenes in the Alice canon. The
story follows Alice into her later
years, where the connections be-
tween her and the members of the
Batey family become more clear.

This is all amusing enough.
The book is engagingly written
and it moves along. And while the
cover and the introduction sug-
gest that the story is historical fact,
nothing else really does. There
are some Carrollians we have seen
who might be a bit too fond of a
footnote to support their theories.
But Robert Batey writes an entire
book, includes conversations held
in private, and describes many
other events that would be diffi-
cult indeed to discover, and does
it all without a single citation of
any kind! In the Introduction, he
claims the books of Mavis Batey
as sources, and coyly suggests he
might know things that she has
not published. But he never de-
scribes his relationship to Mavis
Batey, or even says whether they
have ever communicated. It leaps
to mind that there might be a rela-
tionship, being that they have the
same last name, but he is never
specific about it. Yet he knows
things. How he knows these things

is a mystery and he says, in other
fora, that he wishes he could say.
Perhaps he could say. Perhaps he
could say, even, in a book. So why
has he not?

Robert Batey says he was told
these stories by family members
who would never lie. But many
families have fanciful stories of
this type that they believe to be
true. My family claims kinship with
a certain pirate, and you might
even be able to guess which one.
But these stories cannot be taken
at face value. They need at least
some documentation before they
can be reported as fact.

Ultimately, whether intended as
fact or fancy, it must be argued that
this story does a serious disservice
to Lewis Carroll. It would be shock-
ingly clever for a four-year-old child
to see a rabbit and imagine him in
a waistcoat, and one might laugh
at the precociousness of it. But is it
really so wrong to give Lewis Car-
roll his due? He did not write just
the Alice books. He told stories to

groups of children all his life. He
wrote and staged performances
of plays for his family while he was
still a child. Even his mathemati-
cal puzzles have that trademark
bit of the absurd. And The Hunting
of the Snark was not created by any
child. We may see him as a staid
Victorian, but it is not easy for us
to appreciate the complexities and
passions of those times. It seems
ungracious and ungenerous to
judge Lewis Carroll as so dull that
he just wrote down stories he'd
heard from someone else.

Lewis Carroll gave us not
merely books, but a world that has
become a canvas on which many
artists have drawn. That Robert
Batey chose to paint his family's
picture on that canvas is not neces-
sarily a problem. But it is a shame
that he felt the need to try to
obscure the signature of the artist
whose imagination first created
that world. It is a jolly effort, but
not to a joyful effect.

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ART

Jenny Portlock has created
a lovely little accordion-
fold book (approx. 3"X4")
entitled The Alice Collection,
Five Illustrations Taken
From Her Original Wood
Engravings (see KL 78) .
It is available for £20 by
contacting Ms. Portlock at
marchhare@cooptel.net.

Since 2005, University of
Southern California stu-
dents have created every-
thing from poems, essays,
and novels to films, paintings, and
sculptures in pursuit of the Won-
derland Award, a multidisciplinary
competition inspired by the work
of Lewis Carroll. The goal of the
award is to promote the use of
the G. Edward Cassady, M.D., and
Margaret Elizabeth Cassady, R.N.,
Lewis Carroll Collection, held in
use's Doheny Memorial Library.
These artworks were on display at
the library and online from Janu-
ary 30 to May 1 6.

Artist Ellen Kahn's exhibit of
paintings and works on paper,
"Alice Revisited," references the
hall of doors in AA/W and the
garden of live flowers in TTLG
to "focus on the psychological
struggle that is involved with trying
to break free from childhood and
move out into the world to dis-
cover one's own identity." Kahn's
works were shown at the 440 Gal-
lery in Brooklyn, New York, from
February 19 to March 29.

Disney Dossiers: Files of Character from
the Walt Disney Studios by Jeff Kurtti
(Disney Editions, 2006) includes
studies of Alice and the White
Rabbit.

ARTICLES ^r^ACADEMIA

The February 22 New York Times
women's spring fashion supple-
ment has a feature on aprons and
pinafores ("Wrap Star," page 74).
It states that "Alice in Wonder-
land may well be the most famous
apron wearer ever." Purists note:

the accompanying illustration is
Disney, not Tenniel.

At the "Place and Space in Chil-
dren's Literature" conference at
Keble College, Oxford, in March,
the talks included "Assigning the
Reader's Space: Interplay of the
Verbal and the Visual in the Alice
Books" by Mou-Lan Wong of Ox-
ford University. On the event's
website is a comment of interest to
Carrollians: "This conference will
also help set the stage for a 2011
Bodleian Exhibition on Oxford-
based children's fantasy, which
v^ll be accompanied by a further
academic conference and possible
publication." We will keep you
informed.

In "In the Blood" (p. 103), a re-
view of Annotated Draculas in the
March 16 Neto Yorker, ]o2Ln Acocella
writes, "One could say that Drac-
ula, like certain other works — Alice
in Wonderland, the Sherlock Hol-
mes stories... — is a cult favorite."

The Editors of the Knight Letter

are pleased to announce that,

beginning with this issue, all

URLs (links) in "Far-Flung,"

which up to now have been

printed, are now online

and clickable! Go to

http://delicious.com/lcsna

and by using the alphabetical

list or, better, the "tags" at the

right, you can find the item(s)

you want.

Hmm. How then would
Ms. Acocella define a "pop-
ular favorite"?

Keith Wright, a member
oftheLCS (U.K.) and
the Daresbury Lewis Car-
roll Society, publishes the
Daresbury Chronicle, a very
fine addition to the world
of Lewis Carroll periodi-
cals. Keith will be happy to
e-mail anyone interested
a PDF of the journal at
no charge. You may reach
him at keith@cheshire46.
freeserve.co.uk.

"Lewis Carroll and Alice Play Call
Our Bluff by Alan Lance Ander-
sen and Rebecca Ann Edwards
appeared in the July 2009 issue
of GAMES magazine. This nicely
illustrated piece is a feature ar-
ticle/puzzle in which the reader
tries to solve the puzzle in the
text — by determining which of the
many tidbits of Alice history are
true and which the authors made
up — based on, to quote Mr. An-
dersen, "quirky trivia" about Lewis
Carroll and Alice Liddell. There
is a "Hidden Contest Puzzle" in
the article as well, with prizes for
the first people to figure it out.
The fact that there is a contest is
not known to general subscribers
— part of the contest is to find the
contest.

On June 15, The Oxford Chil-
dren's Literature and Youth Cul-
ture Colloquium presented a talk
on "Disney's Alice, Hello Kitty's
Alice, and Carroll's Alice: An
Aspect of Children's Cultures
in the U.S., U.K., and Japan" by
LCSNA member Yasuko Natsume
of Tsuda College, Tokyo. This talk
examines American and Japa-
nese animated film adaptations
of AA/W as a means of accessing
children's cultures in the U.S.,
U.K., and Japan. Natsume's paper
focuses on Disney's self-support-
ing, independent Alice (who
stands in contrast to the majority
of early Disney princesses) and

Sanrio's 1993 Hello KittyTw ver-
sion, in which Kitty, a Japanese
symbol of cuteness, plays the part
of Alice.

The February 2009 issue of Book
and Magazine Collector includes a
well-illustrated and researched
article on illustrated editions of
AA/W with a bibhography.

On January 12, the Oxford Mail
reported that "An amateur histo-
rian from the U.S. believes he has
discovered a connection between
the court of King Henry II in
Woodstock and classic children's
book Alice in Wonderland." Inter-
esting that he went to Oxford to
consult a historian, but doesn't
seem to have talked to any Alice
experts, several of whom live in his
hometown of San Francisco.

Although the Tenniel illustration
of Alice and the Duchess appears
at the top of the Guardian 's article
"British Library mislays 9,000
books" (by Anil Dawar and Maev
Kennedy, March 17), the 1876
AA/Wlisted is one of the lesser of
the missing treasures.

BOOKS

A new book, Tales for Little Rebels: A
Collection of Radical Children '5 Litera-
ture, edited by Julia L. Mickenberg
and Philip Nel (NYU Press, 2008,
ISBN 9780814757208), includes
"Who Stole the Tarts?" from The
Togo Stepmother Goose (1954) ,
adapted and illustrated by Walt
Kelly.

Before Tommy Kovac scripted the
six-issue Wonderland comic for Dis-
ney (AX 80: 1-2, 41 ) , he wrote and
drew the darker, edgier AALW-\n-
spired "Antipathies" story in Skel-
ebunnies for Slave Labor Graphics,
which has just released the com-
plete tales as a 120-page graphic
novel (SLG Press, 2009, ISBN
9781593621513). Not for kids!

What would happen if Alice left
Wonderland and opted for a
trip down the Red Line? You can
find out by reading Alice s Adven-

tures in Cambridge (2008, ISBN
9781596296053), a 1913 parody
reprinted for the first time by The
History Press. Harvard Lampoon
staffers have updated the book
with a new introduction.

The Mad Tea Party and Other
Festival Skits by Alan Lance
Andersen (Lulu.com, 2009, ISBN
9780557040032) offers schools
and small theater groups short
humorous scripts that have been
performed by Palladian Interactive
Theatre at Renaissance Faires and
street festivals. In "The Mad Tea
Party," author Lewis Carroll invites
the fictional Alice and some of her
mad friends from Wonderland to
re-create the notorious tea party
while he attempts to explain a
few of his little inside jokes — ^with
unexpected results when his own
characters don't exactly go along
with the plan. There is also a "Mad
Croquet Party" component with
the Wonderland characters inter-
acting with festival attendees.

Katherine Neville's thriller The
Eight (Ballantine Books, ISBN:
9780345419088), first published in
1989, has just had its 20th anniver-
sary on the bestseller lists. It is in
part a tribute to chess and to Alice.
A forthcoming book on chess
stories [details in the next KL] will
include a new story by Neville, "set
at Oxford during the high Alice
years."

The Magician 's Book, A Skeptic 's
Adventures in Narnia by Laura
Miller (Little, Brown and Com-
pany, New York, 2008, ISBN
9780316017633) discusses C. S.
Lewis's works by comparing them
with earlier children's fantasy
books: "Men like J. M. Barrie
and Lewis Carroll preferred the
company of children not (as the
jaded modern mind sometimes
presumes) because they were pe-
dophiles seeking adult pleasure
from children, but because they
longed for childlike pleasures they
couldn't share with adults. What
they really wanted, what they tried
to regain in playing pirates or

planning outings with little boys
and girls, was something truly
impossible: they wanted their own
childhood back."

Brian Lies's Bats at the Library
(Houghton Mifflin, 2008, ISBN
9780618999231), a follow-up to
2006's Bats at the Beach, includes a
series of creative illustrations that
parody classic children's books.
Each is done in the style of the
original illustrator, such as Ten-
niel, but features bats as the main
characters, so Alice is shown talk-
ing to the Cheshire Bat, upside
down in the tree, of course!

The Big Book of Little: A Classic Il-
lustrated Edition (Chronicle, 2006,
ISBN 9780811850858), compiled
by Cooper Edens, a "garden of
beloved children's stories full of
small characters," has a short illus-
trated excerpt from AALW.

The British Library has released a
new facsimile edition of Lewis Car-
roll's original manuscript, Alice's
Adventures under Ground, accom-
panied by commentary by Sally
Brown, British Library Curator of
Modern Literary Manuscripts.

David Denby's new book, Snark
(Simon & Schuster, 2009, ISBN
9781416599456), is "'a polemic
in seven fits' and places his obser-
vations of contemporary culture
against a history of satire and
invective. After introducing the
current state of snark and its prac-
titioners, he returns to the earliest
dabblers in snark, first citing the
origin of the word. For that, he
credits the Rev. Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, who
first used the word in a mock epic
called The Hunting of the Snark:
An Agony in Eight Fits. While Car-
roll hunted the snark (a creature
that, among other things, 'has no
sense of humor and can't stand
puns') he was no writer of snark
himself." (Review from "Of seethe,
snarl and glinting malice" by Carol
Herman of the Washington Times.)
[ With all due respect to Ms. Herman,
while Mr. Dodgson may not have envi-

sioned the current usage of the word he
coined, anyone xvho has read certain of
his pamphlets (king-fishers, anyone"?)
knows that he was, in fact, capable
of the occasional snarky observation.
—Ed.]

Diego Olmos's graphic novel
H20ctopus is the story of the great-
est detective in the imaginary
world of AA/Wand TTLG. In
H20ctopus #1: La cabeza del gato
(Public Square Books, 2007, ISBN
9781594974014), H20ctopus finds
himself employed in the search
for the Cheshire Cat, an animal
of great power that evil forces are
seeking to control. But when the
cat's head mysteriously disappears,
the clues will lead him into the
real world of nineteenth century
Europe. Unfortunately, this and
later books are available only in
Spanish at this time.

In her book Enchanted Hunters:
The Power of Stories in Childhood
(W.W. Norton & Co., 2009, ISBN
9780393066012), Maria Tatar
focuses extensively on AA/Wand
Peter Pan, two books that she ar-
gues marked a "seismic shift in
our understanding of children's
literature."

Gerrard Wilson's Alice on Top of
the World (Lulu.com, 2009, ISBN
9780956155306) is set some four-
teen years after TTLG. Alice sud-
denly finds herself in a strange
place, wondering how she could
have got there, let alone why she is
a child again. She meets the White
Rabbit and they set off to find
his new house at the top of the
world. Alice soon falls far behind
the fast-hopping Rabbit, but she
endeavors to find her way without
him. While on her strange journey
Alice comes across hungry aspi-
distras that beg her to find them
some fertilizer, an incredibly old
Elf called Fie, who, living in a fer-
tilizer mine, has plenty, but is not
disposed to giving her any, a white
sea lion called King Tut, who gives
her some extremely confusing
directions, and a magical escalator

that finally transports her to the
very top of the world.

The most recent publication from
Juvenilia Press is The ftectory Maga-
zine (2009, ISBN 9780733426810)
written (largely) by thirteen-year-
old Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
with contributions from other
members of the Croft Rectory. The
Rectory Magazine displays the young
professional at work — as poet,
short-story writer, journalist, artist,
and editor. The confident self-
mocking style, comic verse, word
puzzles, nonsense games, and
parody we associate with AA/W are
clearly exhibited in this delight-
fully whimsical early family maga-
zine. (The original can be found
in the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center at the University
of Texas, Austin.)

Evolution, 2L textbook by zoologist
Mark Ridley (Wiley-Blackwell,
2004, ISBN 9781405103459) de-
scribes dynamic equilibrium or
"the Red Queen mode of coevolu-
tion, [where] natural selection
continually operates on each spe-
cies to keep up with improvements
made by competing species..." Rid-
ley is not to be confused with Matt
Ridley, science writer and author
of The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolu-
tion of Human Nature (Penguin,
1993, ISBN 9780140245486).

In this unique approach to inter-
preting Alice, The Logic of Alice:
Clear Thinking in Wonderland
(Prometheus Books, 2008, ISBN
9781591026754), LCSNA mem-
ber Dr. Bernard M. Patten shows
that Lewis Carroll fused his pas-
sion for logic, mathematics, and
games with his love of words and
nonsense stories to produce a
multifaceted, intricately structured
work of literature. Patten provides
a chapter-by-chapter skeleton key
to AALW, which meticulously dem-
onstrates how its various episodes
reveal Dodgson 's profound knowl-
edge of the rules of clear thinking,
informal and formal logic, sym-
bolic logic, and human nature.

The second edition of Karoline
Leach's In the Shadow of the Dream-
child: The Myth and Reality of Lewis
Carroll (Peter Owen Ltd., 2009,
ISBN 9780720613186) includes
updated and revised material.

Usually books on mathematics or
logic reference AA/W However,
chapter 7 of Making Mathematics
With Needlework: Ten Papers and
Ten Projects (edited by Sarah-Marie
Belcastro and Carolyn Yackel,
AK Peters, Ltd., 2008, ISBN
9781568813318), references SBC.
Susan Goldstine uses the "Mein
Herr" chapter to explain the con-
cept of Fortunatus's Purse, a bag
where the inside is also the out-
side. She goes on to explain the
mathematics of the idea, and then
how to actually create one.

CYBERSPACE

The Macintosh's first game was
called Through the Looking Glass.
Sometimes referred to as "Alice,"
it featured pieces that looked like
Lewis Carroll's characters (Ten-
niel style). Some 25 years later, the
game has returned as AliceX, a
version to be played on the Apple
iPhone or iTouch. The concept is
to maneuver Alice around a chess-
board, with the goal of capturing
all the pieces on the board. This
isn't a strict game of chess, though.
Alice plays with the capabilities of
one of the chess pieces, starting
out as the queen but eventually,
at higher levels, restricted to the
moves only a pawn can make.
AliceX features 96 levels in four
speed groups (lazy, late, flying,
and insane) ; there are also differ-
ent piece designs, including "Alice
Classic," "Hip Hop," and "Bush Me-
morial." If you want to get a sense
of the game before spending your
US$2, or you don't have an iPhone
or iTouch, you can try a "lite" ver-
sion on the AliceX website.

Electronic Arts Inc. and Spicy
Horse Games announced Febru-
ary 19 that they have signed a
publishing deal for a new title

based on EA's 2000 classic, Ameri-
can McGee's Alice^'^.

One of the great things about
modern poetry is that we can listen
to or watch recordings of the poets
themselves reading their works.
Perhaps using a modified Waybac
Machine, Jim Clark (YouTube user
poetryanimations) has made it pos-
sible now to watch poets of the past
"read" their works, including Lewis
Carroll reading "Jabberwocky!"

On February 5, Google introduced
a mobile version of its Google
Book Search, giving iPhone and
Android users instant access to
more than 1.5 million public do-
main books. The development
team presented the hand-written
AAUG 2iS an "extreme case" of
problems in using optical char-
acter recognition to extract text
from page images, which had to
be overcome before the project
could be completed.

Did you know that AAIWis an
official British icon? Developed
by the British Department for
Culture, Media, and Sport, ICONS
worked with the public to identify
and explore 100 uniquely British
items and ideas as a way of explor-
ing the cultural landscape. Not
surprisingly, AA/W was one of the
first ten identified, and the website
provides quite a bit of background
on the book.

EVENTS, EXHIBITS, & PLACES

According to the April 20 issue of
the Yorkshire Post, the Old Chapel
in Ripon is up for sale. Used for
background in several of Charles
Dodgson's photographs while his
father was canon at Ripon Cathe-
dral, and featuring stone carvings
that may have inspired some of
the characters in AA/Wand TTLG,
the Old Chapel was converted to a
home 1 1 years ago.

New York's Museum of Modern
Art will present a major career
retrospective on film director Tim
Burton from November 22, 2009,
to May 26, 2010. With his Alice

in Wonderland to be released on
March 5, 2010, it seems logical to
expect that there will be related
events and pieces.

Wheels of Wonderland is an inter-
active theatrical spectacle — a
production of Alice in Wonderland
performed entirely on bicycles —
celebrating human-powered magic
of all shapes and sizes. Featuring
the Austin (Texas) Bike Zoo, a va-
riety of local performers and many
creative cycling characters, this
free event takes place May 2, 3, 9,
and 10 in various Austin parks.

The March Hare Restaurant in
Poughkeepsie, New York, has its
address, fortuitously, on Dutchess
(sic) Turnpike.

The Falkirk Cultural Center of San
Rafael, California, held its annual
Alice in Wonderland Spring Faire
on Saturday, April 4, as well as
Mad Hatter's Tea Parties on Satur-
day and Sunday, April 18 and 19.

On March 28, guests of the Okizu
Foundation went Through the
Looking Glass and experienced
Wonderland in living color. The
15th annual "Art Inspiring Hope"
gala was held at the Festival Pa-
vilion at Fort Mason Center in
San Francisco, where many of
the 460 guests chose to show off
their whimsical attire. Millennia
the Robot greeted guests as they
arrived and, expressing compli-
ments on their handsome ap-
parel, guided them through to a
topsy-turvy world, where they were
alternately too small or too big,
and were perplexed by important
questions such as which side of
the stuffed mushrooms to bite
first or whether the Walrus and
the Carpenter had left any oysters
to slurp. The Mad Hatter Bar
anchored the room, with wildly
colored specialty cocktails to set
the mood. The purchase of 'Drink
Me' raffle botdes offered the
chance to win a wall-size personal
looking glass, a fabulous tea party
for eight (mad or otherwise), or
a royal outing package fit for a

Red Queen. After scooping up
treats and prizes in the silent auc-
tion, petting white rabbits, and
dancing with the robot, the whole
ensemble proceeded through a
hedge filled with roses painted
red to the Queen's Castle garden
and a meal fit for a king (oops — a
Queen or it's off with your head).
After a rousing live auction and
an incredibly enthusiastic show of
support for "Send-a-Kid to Camp,"
there was dancing to the sounds of
Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Famer Dave
Mason, to round out the Wonder-
land adventure.

Sponsored by Los Angeles Japa-
nese-style doll shop The Valley of
the Dolls, a Mad Tea Party took
place at Royal/T Cafe ("LA's first
Japanese-style cosplay [costume
roleplay] cafe") in Culver City,
California, on March 21.

In New Orleans on Sunday, Feb-
ruary 22, Mardi Gras marchers
"Krewe Do Craft" presented Alice
in Craftyland. Their handmade
throws were designed to delight
Alice in Wonderland lovers and
all who came. Krewe Do Craft is
a New Orleans-based marching
Krewe that focuses on creating
unique, handmade, and environ-
mentally conscious throws.

From May to December 2009, the
Parish of Lyndhurst, New Forest,
England, where Alice Hargreaves
and her husband lived for nearly
50 years, will celebrate "Alice in
Lyndhurst" with tea parties, cricket,
walks, festivals, plays, and exhibits.

"Artifacts of Childhood: 700 Years
of Children's Books" (September
27, 2008, to January 17, 2009)
explored the Newberry Library's
little-known collection of books
and manuscripts created for and
by children. The exhibition fea-
tured such treasures as the first
illustrated edition oi Aesop's Fables
(1485); the first edition of AA/W;
a nineteenth-century collect-
ible story. La Fille de L'Exile, that
is similar in format to Pokemon
cards; and ABCs from 1544 to

1992. These and other materials
allowed exhibit visitors to traverse
time, space, and cultures to trace
continuity and change within the
history of children's books, to ex-
amine changing attitudes towards
children and childhood, and to
understand the importance of the
study of the history of childhood
through children's books.

Celebrating children's poetry
from the seventeenth century to
the present day, "Twinkle Twinkle
Litde Bat: 400 Years of Children's
Poetry" (April 1 to June 28) at the
British Library featured key poets
and poems from the library's col-
lections.

As part of the festivities and events
celebrating Charles Darwin's
200th birthday this year is "Endless
Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural
Science and the Visual Arts" at the
Yale Center for British Art (Febru-
ary 12 to May 3) and The Fitzwil-
liam Museum (June 16 to October
4) . Among the photographs on
display will be Lewis Carroll's
1859 portrait of his Oxford friend
Reginald Southey, posing with the
skulls and skeletons of a man and
a monkey, inspired by Darwin's
theories of evolution.

MOVIES (Sf TELEVISION

A young girl follows a white rodent
through a tiny door down a long
tunnel to a distorted mirror-land
of wonders, including flowers that
come alive, her only companion
there being a wise talking cat who
can disappear, leaving only his tail.
She is there to rescue her parents,
who are trapped on the other side
of a looking-glass. Hmm. Based on
Neil Caiman's eponymous novel,
the new animated movie Coraline
is far darker than Carroll's similar
journey, yet very much enjoyable
(for 8 and up), and references
abound.

On The Simpsons episode "Krusty
Gets Kancelled," originally aired
on May 13, 1993, Krusty the
Clown, in a bid for ratings, gets a

ventriloquist's dummy, to whom
he says, "Hey, Alphonse, I've got
a riddle for you: Why is a raven
like a writing desk?" Regrettably,
the dummy is destroyed before we
find out the answer.

Did you know Scooby-Doo had
cousins named Scooby-Dum and
Scooby-Dee?

Euan Ferguson's "The lost art of
thinking on your feet" in April 19's
The Guardian/ Observer reviews the
BBC television show The Speaker,
2l reality-TV show based on the
art of public speaking. Unfortu-
nately even the winners were not
all that good: "As for poor, sweet
Fahmida, who in the playoff had
to talk about Alice in Wonderland
(again, much preparation time,
with books and pamphlets)... she
ended a tale which could have
been told by a toddler with 'And
so that is the lovely lovely lovely
story of Alice in the Wonderland. By
Lewis Calwell.'"

On BBC's Channel 4, Chef Heston
Blumethal's new series recreates
famous dishes of the past and
adapts them for the 21st century.
On March 3, he created some
Victorian dishes and set up a mad
tea-party inspired by AA/W

The Flog It television program
about collecting, antiques, etc. on
March 10 on England's BBC2 in-
cluded a feature on Carroll's child-
hood home at Croft-on-Tees with
reference to his photographs.

Disney's Academy Award-nomi-
nated Donald in Mathmagic Land
(1959) is now out on DVD. While
members of the Disney Movie
Club (or savvy online shoppers)
have been able to get the regular
version for a year or so, a "Class-
room Edition" has just been re-
leased to the public. One amusing
sequence has Donald — on a chess-
board — dressed (and bewigged)
as Alice.

"Inspired by Lewis Carroll's classic
tale, Daniel Diaz Torres's Alice in
Wondertown (First Run Features,

1990 [now on DVD] ) is an ab-
surdist comedy and an allegory
with a dark political undercurrent.
Alice is a drama teacher who goes
on a cultural mission to a small
town where the most bizarre oc-
currences are commonplace. Mir-
rors become doors, circus animals
walk the streets, and it seems any-
thing could happen — but every-
one except Alicia seems resigned
to the situation. She discovers
before long that the town's popu-
lation is made up of officials and
workers who have been fired for
violating rules minor or illusion-
ary, and now cannot find their way
out of this strange town."

Alice meets Hello Kitty meets MAC
Cosmetics. Or something... In the
commercial for MAC Cosmetics 's
Hello Kitty collection, directed by
artist/photographer/ director Floria
Sigismondi, Alice wakes up in a giant
pile of pink fluff, follows a black cat
down a winding path, through a
garden of roses and red jewels, and
down a fuzzy pink hole to a dark
place where she cavorts with bare-
chested male dancers wearing tight-
leather pants and large black Hello
Kitty heads. Yes, really.

PERFORMING ARTS

Pages 56-57 of the January 2009
issue oi American Theatre shovj two
color photographs from a new
adaptation of AA/Wpresented in
fall 2008 at the PlayGround The-
atre in Miami Shores, FL. There is
also brief commentary from three
members of the production team.

"The Cheshire Cat Walk," a ten-
minute disco-tinged jazz improvi-
sation written by Chick Corea and
played by him (on synthesizer)
and trumpeter Maynard Ferguson
on Ferguson's hard-to-find 1976
Columbia LP Primal Scream (re-
leased on CD in 2007), now also
can be heard on YouTube.

"A tea party and theatrical review
in honor of the new queen of
Wonderland depicts her legend-
ary adventures with a cast of the

finest acrobats, jugglers, danc-
ers, and musicians any world has
ever known!" Wanderlust Circus's
performance of Wonderland Circus
took place April 24 and 25, and
May 1 and 2 at Portland's Bos-
sanova Ballroom.

April 24 through May 30, "Alice of
the House of Carroll grabs you by the
throat and kicks you down the rab-
bit hole into a wonderland filled
with maniacs and thieves and
where love melds with aggression.
...The National Pastime Theater
lifts Alice out of her comfortable
place in children's theater and
thrusts her onto the city streets of
late 19th century Chicago. Like
our world today, Chicago at that
time was a world that needed to
rebuild. Alice, a pleasant little girl,
pulses with an instability that is
common to everyone and, in par-
ticular, to a world, like ours, that
seems to be disappearing down a
rabbit hole. THIS SHOW IS NOT
FOR CHILDREN OF ANY AGE."

"Alice's adventures in Wonderland
have never before been told like
this... with clowns, acrobats, jug-
glers, and musicians. When Alice
searches for a way back home,
she will meet the caterpillar, the
white rabbit, and she will have to
escape from the dreaded Queen
of Hearts. You may think you know
this classic story, but hold on to
your hats, because this world pre-
miere created by master clown Jeff
Raz of Cirque Du Soleil for the
Advanced Training Program of the
Clown Conservatory and produced
by Active Arts will be the wildest,
craziest trip to Wonderland you've
ever taken!" The show was per-
formed from April 18 to May 3 at
the Julia Morgan Center in Berke-
ley, California, and from May 9 to
May 17 at the Front Row Theater
in San Ramon, California.

"Shrug off the squareness of reality
and fall into a swingin' re-imagina-
tion of Lewis Carroll's classic tale
of nonsense and fantasy. Come
along with Alice as she discovers
what wonders lie behind the velvet

rope at Wonderland's nightclub,
The Looking Glass." An explora-
tion of divergent art influences,
Through The Looking Glass: The
Burlesque Alice In Wonderland mixed
jazz with classical, Indian, and
exotic music to set the mood as
dancers mixed ballet, tap, contem-
porary, and jazz dance into a whirl-
wind of whimsy and bawdy beauty,
performed at Seattle's The Triple
Door, March 24, 25, and 26.

"...A post-modern trip through
the worlds of Wonderland and
quantum mechanics. ...[it] follows
Alice through the ten-dimensions
of time and space as she searches
for identity in an uncertain world.
With help from characters such as
the Schizophrenic Cat, the Syphi-
litic Worm and Tofurky, Alice finds
her place in a post-9/11 world by
learning to understand quantum
physics, human sexuality, and the
power of choice." Wonderland In
Alice: The Uncertainty Principle ran
February 4-28 at the Dionysus
Theatre Complex's L'il Peach
Theatre in New York City.

"Tumble down the rabbit hole into
a nonsensical world of riddle and
rhyme, using two uniquely Ameri-
can artistic styles: musical theater
and jazz! Alice's journey into
Wonderland features favorites like
the Mad Hatter, Caterpillar and
Queen of Hearts, reborn through
jazz styles from Davis to Monk."
Portland's Northwest Children's
Theater and School performed
this original musical adaptation
from January 23 to February 15.

The Texas Radio Theatre Com-
pany performed an audio adapta-
tion of AA/Win November 2008
at the Dallas Public Library. The
Mad Tea Party scene can be viewed
online, with Shannon Atkinson
as Alice, David Grant as the Door-
Mouse [sic], Clark Hackney (who
seems to be channeling Ed Wynn)
as the Hatter, and Reg Piatt as the
March Hare. Live sound effects,
a la old-time radio, added to the
mayhem.

A dramatization oi AAIW, perform-
ed by Sarah Jane Holm and Roy
Hudd, was broadcast on the U.K.'s
BBC Radio 7 on April 9 and 10.

Wonderland: Alice's New Musical Ad-
venture WvW have its world premiere
at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts
Center, November 24, 2009, to Jan-
uary 3, 2010. "With a chaotic Won-
derland in danger of disappearing
into nothingness, only a modern-
day Alice can restore balance and
joy. Journey with her from NYC to
a strange-yet-familiar place where
she must reclaim her daughter and
defeat the Queen of Hearts."

THINGS

Potter Style has put out an AATW
500-piece jigsaw puzzle designed
to look like a book. The illustra-
don, based on Linda Sunshine's All
Things Alice, is a collage of images
by Tenniel, Jessie Wilcox Smith,
and Margaret Tarrant ($15).

Bad Monkey Productions offers
greeting cards featuring new il-
lustrations by David Delamare of
"The Caterpillar," "The Tea Party,"
and "Presenting the Thimble,"
as well as limited edition prints
of these and other Alice-inspired
images. Bad Monkey offers a
10% retail discount on all print
and card orders (not just AATW-
themed items) made by members
of LCSNA. To claim your discount,
place a shopping cart order at
www.daviddelamare.com and when
checking out, type "my prize"
(without quotation marks) in the
customer code box.

Available in several bright colors.
Mocha's giant plastic teacup stool
is perfect for indoor or outdoor
mad tea parties.

Folli FoUie's website displays their
cute but oh-so-pricey "Alice" and
"Wonderland" collections of de-
signer purses.

If you look carefully at the crowd
of zombie-like authors in Joshua
Kemble's very clever "Attack of
Literacy" t-shirt, you can see Lewis