The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll Part 32

My dear E--, How often you must find yourself in want of a pin! For instance, you go into a shop, and you say to the man, "I want the largest penny bun you can let me have for a halfpenny." And perhaps the man looks stupid, and doesn't quite understand what you mean. Then how convenient it is to have a pin ready to stick into the back of his hand, while you say, "Now then! Look sharp, stupid!"... and even when you don't happen to want a pin, how often you think to yourself, "They say Interlacken is a very pretty place. I wonder what it looks like!" (That is the place that is painted on this pincushion.)

When you don't happen to want either a pin or pictures, it may just remind you of a friend who sometimes thinks of his dear little friend E--, and who is just now thinking of the day he met her on the parade, the first time she had been allowed to come out alone to look for him....

_December_ 26, 1886.

My dear E--, Though rushing, rapid rivers roar between us (if you refer to the map of England, I think you'll find that to be correct), we still remember each other, and feel a sort of shivery affection for each other....

_March_ 31, 1890.

I _do_ sympathise so heartily with you in what you say about feeling shy with children when you have to entertain them! Sometimes they are a real _terror_ to me--especially boys: little girls I can now and then get on with, when they're few enough. They easily become "de trop."

But with little _boys_ I'm out of my element altogether. I sent "Sylvie and Bruno" to an Oxford friend, and, in writing his thanks, he added, "I think I must bring my little boy to see you." So I wrote to say "_don't_,"

or words to that effect: and he wrote again that he could hardly believe his eyes when he got my note. He thought I doted on _all_ children. But I'm _not_ omnivorous!--like a pig. I pick and choose....

You are a lucky girl, and I am rather inclined to envy you, in having the leisure to read Dante--_I_ have never read a page of him; yet I am sure the "Divina Commedia" is one of the grandest books in the world--though I am _not_ sure whether the reading of it would _raise_ one's life and give it a n.o.bler purpose, or simply be a grand poetical treat. That is a question you are beginning to be able to answer: I doubt if _I_ shall ever (at least in this life) have the opportunity of reading it; my life seems to be all torn into little bits among the host of things I want to do! It seems hard to settle what to do _first. One_ piece of work, at any rate, I am clear ought to be done this year, and it will take months of hard work: I mean the second volume of "Sylvie and Bruno." I fully _mean_, if I have life and health till Xmas next, to bring it out then. When one is close on sixty years old, it seems presumptuous to count on years and years of work yet to be done....

She is rather the exception among the hundred or so of child-friends who have brightened my life. Usually the child becomes so entirely a different being as she grows into a woman, that our friendship has to change too: and _that_ it usually does by gliding down from a loving intimacy into an acquaintance that merely consists of a smile and a bow when we meet!...

_January_ 1, 1895.

... You are quite correct in saying it is a long time since you have heard from me: in fact, I find that I have not written to you since the 13th of last November. But what of that? You have access to the daily papers. Surely you can find out negatively, that I am all right! Go carefully through the list of bankruptcies; then run your eye down the police cases; and, if you fail to find my name anywhere, you can say to your mother in a tone of calm satisfaction, "Mr.

Dodgson is going on _well_."

CHAPTER XI

(THE SAME--_continued_.)

Books for children--"The Lost Plum-Cake"--"An Unexpected Guest"--Miss Isa Bowman--Interviews--"Matilda Jane"--Miss Edith Rix--Miss Kathleen Eschwege.

Lewis Carroll's own position as an author did not prevent him from taking a great interest in children's books and their writers. He had very strong ideas on what was or was not suitable in such books, but, when once his somewhat exacting taste was satisfied, he was never tired of recommending a story to his friends. His cousin, Mrs. Egerton Allen, who has herself written several charming tales for young readers, has sent me the following letter which she received from him some years ago:--

Dear Georgie,--_Many_ thanks. The book was at Ch. Ch.

I've done an unusual thing, in thanking for a book, namely, _waited to read it_. I've read it _right through_!

In fact, I found it very refreshing, when jaded with my own work at "Sylvie and Bruno" (coming out at Xmas, I hope) to lie down on the sofa and read a chapter of "Evie." I like it very much: and am so glad to have helped to bring it out. It would have been a real loss to the children of England, if you had burned the MS., as you once thought of doing....

[Ill.u.s.tration: Xie Kitchin as a Chinaman. _From a photograph by Lewis Carroll_.]

The very last words of his that appeared in print took the form of a preface to one of Mrs. Allen's tales, "The Lost Plum-Cake," (Macmillan & Co., 1898). So far as I know, this was the only occasion on which he wrote a preface for another author's book, and his remarks are doubly interesting as being his last service to the children whom he loved.

No apology, then, is needed for quoting from them here:--

Let me seize this opportunity of saying one earnest word to the mothers in whose hands this little book may chance to come, who are in the habit of taking their children to church with them. However well and reverently those dear little ones have been taught to behave, there is no doubt that so long a period of enforced quietude is a severe tax on their patience. The hymns, perhaps, tax it least: and what a pathetic beauty there is in the sweet fresh voices of the children, and how earnestly they sing! I took a little girl of six to church with me one day: they had told me she could hardly read at all--but she made me find all the places for her! And afterwards I said to her elder sister "What made you say Barbara couldn't read? Why, I heard her joining in, all through the hymn!" And the little sister gravely replied, "She knows the _tunes_, but not the _words_." Well, to return to my subject--children in church. The lessons, and the prayers, are not wholly beyond them: often they can catch little bits that come within the range of their small minds. But the sermons! It goes to one's heart to see, as I so often do, little darlings of five or six years old, forced to sit still through a weary half-hour, with nothing to do, and not one word of the sermon that they can understand. Most heartily can I sympathise with the little charity-girl who is said to have written to some friend, "I think, when I grows up, I'll never go to church no more. I think I'se getting sermons enough to last me all my life!" But need it be so? Would it be so _very_ irreverent to let your child have a story-book to read during the sermon, to while away that tedious half-hour, and to make church-going a bright and happy memory, instead of rousing the thought, "I'll never go to church no more"? I think not. For my part, I should love to see the experiment tried. I am quite sure it would be a success. My advice would be to _keep_ some books for that special purpose. I would call such books "Sunday-treats"--and your little boy or girl would soon learn to look forward with eager hope to that half-hour, once so tedious. If I were the preacher, dealing with some subject too hard for the little ones, I should love to see them all enjoying their picture-books. And if _this_ little book should ever come to be used as a "Sunday-treat"

for some sweet baby reader, I don't think it could serve a better purpose.

Lewis Carroll.

Miss M.E. Manners was another writer for children whose books pleased him. She gives an amusing account of two visits which he paid to her house in 1889:--

_An Unexpected Guest._

"Mr. Dobson wants to see you, miss."

I was in the kitchen looking after the dinner, and did not feel that I particularly wished to see anybody.

"He wants a vote, or he is an agent for a special kind of tea," thought I. "I don't know him; ask him to send a message."

Presently the maid returned--

"He says he is Mr. Dodgson, of Oxford."

"Lewis Carroll!" I exclaimed; and somebody else had to superintend the cooking that day.

My apologies were soon made and cheerfully accepted. I believe I was unconventional enough to tell the exact truth concerning my occupation, and matters were soon on a friendly footing. Indeed I may say at once that the stately college don we have heard so much about never made his appearance during our intercourse with him.

He did not talk "Alice," of course; authors don't generally _talk_ their books, I imagine; but it was undoubtedly Lewis Carroll who was present with us.

A portrait of Ellen Terry on the wall had attracted his attention, and one of the first questions he asked was, "Do you ever go to the theatre?" I explained that such things were done, occasionally, even among Quakers, but they were not considered quite orthodox.

"Oh, well, then you will not be shocked, and I may venture to produce my photographs." And out into the hall he went, and soon returned with a little black bag containing character portraits of his child-friends, Isa and Nellie Bowman.

"Isa used to be Alice until she grew too big," he said.

"Nellie was one of the oyster-fairies, and Emsie, the tiny one of all, was the Dormouse."

"When 'Alice' was first dramatised," he said, "the poem of the 'Walrus and the Carpenter' fell rather flat, for people did not know when it was finished, and did not clap in the right place; so I had to write a song for the ghosts of the oysters to sing, which made it all right."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Alice and the Dormouse. _From a photograph by Elliott & Fry_.]

He was then on his way to London, to fetch Isa to stay with him at Eastbourne. She was evidently a great favourite, and had visited him before. Of that earlier time he said:--

"When people ask me why I have never married, I tell them I have never met the young lady whom I could endure for a fortnight--but Isa and I got on so well together that I said I should keep her a month, the length of the honeymoon, and we didn't get tired of each other."

Nellie afterwards joined her sister "for a few days," but the days spread to some weeks, for the poor little dormouse developed scarlet fever, and the elder children had to be kept out of harm's way until fear of infection was over.

Of Emsie he had a funny little story to tell. He had taken her to the Aquarium, and they had been watching the seals coming up dripping out of the water. With a very pitiful look she turned to him and said, "Don't they give them any towels?" [The same little girl commiserated the bear, because it had got no tail.]

Asked to stay to dinner, he a.s.sured us that he never took anything in the middle of the day but a gla.s.s of wine and a biscuit; but he would be happy to sit down with us, which he accordingly did and kindly volunteered to carve for us. His offer was gladly accepted, but the appearance of a rather diminutive piece of neck of mutton was somewhat of a puzzle to him. He had evidently never seen such a joint in his life before, and had frankly to confess that he did not know how to set about carving it. Directions only made things worse, and he bravely cut it to pieces in entirely the wrong fashion, relating meanwhile the story of a shy young man who had been asked to carve a fowl, the joints of which had been carefully wired together beforehand by his too attentive friends.

The task and the story being both finished, our visitor gazed on the mangled remains, and remarked quaintly: "I think it is just as well I don't want anything, for I don't know where I should find it."

At least one member of the party felt she could have managed matters better; but that was a point of very little consequence.