While on the subject of the two “Alices,” I will put in a letter that he wrote mentioning his books. He was so modest about them, that it was extremely difficult to get him to say, or write, anything at all about them. I believe it was a far greater pleasure for him to know that he had pleased some child with “Alice” or “The Hunting of the Snark,” than it was to be hailed by the press and public as the first living writer for children.
“Eastbourne.
“My own darling Isa,—The full value of a copy of the French ‘Alice’ is £45: but, as you want the ‘cheapest’ kind, and as you are a great friend of mine, and as I am of a very noble, generous disposition, I have made up my mind to a great sacrifice, and have taken £3, 10s. 0d. off the price. So that you do not owe me more than £41, 10s. 0d., and this you can pay me, in gold or bank-notes as soon as you ever like. Oh dear! I wonder why I write such nonsense! Can you explain to me, my pet, how it happens that when I take up my pen to write a letter to you it won’t write sense? Do you think the rule is that when the pen finds it has to write to a nonsensical good-for-nothing child, it sets to work to write a nonsensical good-for-nothing letter? Well, now I’ll tell you the real truth. As Miss Kitty Wilson is a dear friend of yours, of course she’s a sort of a friend of mine. So I thought (in my vanity) ‘perhaps she would like to have a copy’ from the author, ‘with her name written in it.’ So I’ve sent her one—but I hope she’ll understand that I do it because she’s your friend, for, you see, I had never heard of her before: so I wouldn’t have any other reason.
“I’m still exactly ‘on the balance’ (like those scales of mine, when Nellie says ‘it won’t weigh!’) as to whether it would be wise to have my pet Isa down here! how am I to make it weigh, I wonder? Can you advise any way to do it? I’m getting on grandly with ‘Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.’ I’m afraid you’ll expect me to give you a copy of it? Well, I’ll see if I have one to spare. It won’t be out before Easter-tide, I’m afraid.
“I wonder what sort of condition the book is in that I lent you to take to America? (‘Laneton Parsonage,’ I mean). Very shabby, I expect. I find lent books never come back in good condition. However, I’ve got a second copy of this book, so you may keep it as your own. Love and kisses to any one you know who is lovely and kissable.—
“Always your loving Uncle,
“C. L. D.”
In 1876 appeared the long poem called the “Hunting of the Snark; or, An Agony in Eight Fits,” and besides those verses we have from Lewis Carroll’s pen two books called “Phantasmagoria” and “Rhyme and Reason.”
The last work of his that attained any great celebrity was “Sylvie and Bruno,” a curious romance, half fairy tale, half mathematical treatise. Mr. Dodgson was employed of late years on his “Symbolic Logic,” only one part of which has been published, and he seems to have been influenced by his studies. One can easily trace the trail of the logician in Sylvie and Bruno, and perhaps this resulted in a certain lack of “form.” However, some of the nonsense verses in this book were up to the highest level of the author’s achievement. Even as I write the verse comes to me—
“He thought he saw a kangaroo
Turning a coffee-mill;
He looked again, and found it was
A vegetable pill!
‘Were I to swallow you,’ he said,
‘I should be very ill’!”
The fascinating jingle stays in the memory when graver verse eludes all effort at recollection. I personally could repeat “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from beginning to end without hesitation, but I should find a difficulty in writing ten lines of “Hamlet” correctly.
At the beginning of “Sylvie and Bruno” is a little poem in three verses which forms an acrostic on my name. I quote it—
“Is all our life, then, but a dream,
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time’s dark resistless stream?
Bowed to the earth with bitter woe,
Or laughing at some raree-show,
We flutter idly to and fro.
Man’s little day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.”
You see that if you take the first letter of each line, or if you take the first three letters of the first line of each verse, you get the name Isa Bowman.