BIB_ID
80990
Accession number
MA 4564
Creator
Carroll, Lewis, 1832-1898.
Display Date
Oxford, 1877 November 24.
Credit line
Purchased on the Fellows Fund, 1971.
Description
1 item (4 pages) ; 18.1 x 11.2 cm
Notes
Written from "Ch. Ch.", Carroll's abbreviation for Christ Church.
Written in purple ink.
The letter is signed C. L. Dodgson. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson adopted the pseudonym "Lewis Carroll" in 1856 when publishing a poem in "The Train." He used the pseudonym when publishing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and other works, but wrote under his given name, Charles Dodgson, when publishing mathematical works and in daily life. For administrative purposes, all manuscripts are collated under the name Lewis Carroll.
Written in purple ink.
The letter is signed C. L. Dodgson. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson adopted the pseudonym "Lewis Carroll" in 1856 when publishing a poem in "The Train." He used the pseudonym when publishing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and other works, but wrote under his given name, Charles Dodgson, when publishing mathematical works and in daily life. For administrative purposes, all manuscripts are collated under the name Lewis Carroll.
Provenance
Formerly in the Reginald Allen Collection.
Summary
Telling her that he received letters this morning from three girls, Katie, Lucy and Agnes, who he calls the "Three Furies"; instructing her to "hold my letters up to the looking-glass to read them, and then you will see that the 'words of unmeant bitterness' [a reference to Coleridge's 'Christabel'] all go the other way in their inner meaning"; recalling a day he had spent with her: "And for the walk to Magdalen Bridge in the moonlight I shall ever be grateful to you. I should never have done it alone, & the memory of it is quite a little oasis -- or shall we say a sandwich? -- in my monotonous life here"; telling her that that the "young-lady Club" do three essays a month, "not 330 as I supposed"; listing last month's essay topics (religious feeling in sixteenth-century England, Sir Walter Scott's treatment of historical characters and proper diets for poor people) and asking Wilcox "Won't even this tempt you to volunteer to be their 'Examiner'? Aren't they ambitious young ladies?".
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