Written from "Ch. Ch.", Carroll's abbreviation for Christ Church.
Bound in an album titled "Lewis Carroll and Enid Stevens."
Enid Stevens married James Anderson Shawyer in 1904.
This item is part of the Arthur A. Houghton, Jr., Lewis Carroll collection. The large collection includes printed books, letters, manuscripts, puzzles and games, personal effects and ephemera, which have been cataloged separately.
Previously accessioned as AAH 507.
The letter is signed with the initials CLD. 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.
Responding to Enid about a cipher and posing some questions about it: "Oh my darling Child, how dreadfully you do puzzle me! I ca'n't make head or tail of it, at present. But I want to know one thing -- Does each symbol always have the same meaning? A cipher is no good, unless it can be read by whoever has got the key to it. But, if you make a symbol sometimes mean 'A', & sometimes 'B', & sometimes 'C', why, then nobody can read it, even with the key: for how are they to know which meaning to use?"; saying that the letters "vw" appear often in her cipher and that he therefore guesses they stand for "th", though this does not always seem to make sense: "I can't make anything of 'vw; vw;' -- It ought to be 'the the': only nobody ever says 'the the', you know!"; arranging to have tea with her on Friday.