THE LEWIS CARROLL SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA

NUMBER 64 FALL 2000

Goldfish, Death, and the Maiden

Chloe Nichols

One of the most terrifying passages in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland occurs early on when, trapped in the long, dark hallway, Alice - level- headed as usual - tries to soothe herself by reciting Isaac Watts' sermonizing fable "How Doth the Little Busy Bee". That ought to do the trick. It promises good marks - the best - at Final Judgment for all the bee-ish: the sensible, the diligent. Yet already the comic savagery of Wonderland is erupting. In actuality, she hears herself inventing:

How c\oth the little crocodile Improve bis golden tail

And pour the waters of the Nile On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin, How neatly spreads his jaws,

And welcomes little fishes in With gently smiling jaws!

This pun- and allusion-rich picture of life's end substitutes cheerfully murderous mechanism for the balancing scales of Christian work-and-reward. The indolent crocodile of Egyptian mystery kills, as a real croc does, without apparent struggle. Carroll avoids active verbs of slaughter, and only has him "welcome in" his prey. Yet the beast actually wields the power of all-condemning judgment, maintaining "every golden scale" (of justice). These are only the first of the story's fish-and-golden-scales, and the crocodile tail will twist into the tale/tail poem of the Mouse, where the claws now belong to Fury, a cur who, like the crocodile, has "nothing to do" (unlike the boring, busy bee) and will also deal judgment which is only a death sentence. Of course, Carroll tends to weight thematically the beginnings and endings of his texts. Since this doubly foreshadowed false judgment comes very early in the story, it is fitting that Carroll's sense of symmetry produces at the climax of the closing chapters a more vivid scene of judgment perverted, again conducted by a murderous death- figure, the Queen of Hearts. (Carroll referred to her as a "Fury" in his subsequent stage directions.)

Two adjacent poems of common content at the story's opening strongly suggest that the theme of death may extend throughout the story.

No one who has ever hunted through Alice's Adventures for a hidden theme has missed a treat - whatever critics say. Intuitively, we sense that Carroll, with his love of puzzles, has slipped some riddle in. Yet good analysts certainly have objected that there are already too many proposed "meanings" for Alice anyway, or that nonsense brings more pleasure when taken pure. Yet the last word in the argument may be that what so many people have found irresistible won't be resisted - as long as your take on Alice's meaning (or lack of) is as good as mine. And so, here is mine.

This version of Alice's Adventures was suggested by Alice's short flashback, in the courtroom scene, to a real- world household accident. Our terrible human secret is that everything now alive will die - and learning that darkens

every young child's life. The day my little boy found out, he got pretty quiet, then, hours later, came back to me. "Mom, I don't want to do that." I could take away most scary things - why not this?

In the same way Lewis Carroll, with his army of siblings and child-friends, most likely faced that moment vicariously — and re-faced it — many times. I suggest that Alice's Adventures is a metafiction of Alice's own black shock, offered with all the comfort which the Rev. Dodgson could muster. Is there any evidence?

Yes. First, vivid incidents from Alice's real-world past flash through her memory and spark events in Wonderland - Dinah's mousing exploits, and romping with the farmer's pup (who becomes a giant). Poems memorized at home turn inside out and reappear Wonderland-style. In the same way, during the trial of the Knave of Hearts, Alice recalls a home-front crisis so small that it is easy to overlook, as the fine essayist Susan Sherer1 has done. Sherer says, "after this scene [Alice's attempt early in the story to remember lessons], Alice almost never considers, even in passing, her waking life, [except for] reflections on Dinah". Yet in the trial scene she lucidly remembers the emotions, events, and time of overturning a globe (bowl) of goldfish and then rescuing them, flopping and gasping, from certain death on the carpet. She keeps the memory to herself, which indicates that it may signify more to her than the casually- mentioned recollections of Dinah's antics. The fish may have looked pretty - spangled toys scattered around, wriggling. (The Disneyland "Alice" attraction includes a painting of them.) Yet, Oh! To pick up every one! The dream-tale transforms and re-plays this little incident three times, in changing forms that reflect Alice's growing self-command. Through all three scenes, Alice gathers the strength to oppose head-on, and finally, the threat of death.

In the first scene, the spilling fish globe appears as the Pool of Tears, with water sloshing, frantic creatures jostling, and sudden danger. Dinah, stalking and hungry, lurks through Alice's conversation and erupts in the Mouse's "tail- tale" poem of Fury the Cat. No doubt if a real-world fishbowl had overturned in the Liddell household, Dinah would instantly have appeared, all speed, teeth and claws. A panicky, tearful Alice would have to scramble to save her fish, just as she tries with clumsy goodwill to dry and restore the creatures of the caucus race.

Much later, a more-seasoned Alice meets a second, more comic, trial - the Lobster-Quadrille (exhibited by the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle). Alice sees the dance only as a second-hand demonstration, complete with songs. The true Quadrille takes place only in the imaginations of three curious figures on the empty shingle, two capering madly, one politely looking on. In the song, fish again thrash madly through the water, but dancing, not dying. This melee soon dissolves into peaceful undersea school days, and death only threatens as a distant echo of meaning through the music. '"Won't you walk a little faster?' said a whiting to a snail" is, as Martin Gardner points out, a parody of, "Won't you come into my parlor, said a spider to a fly" - a poem of

predatory death. The cat involved this time is the Cheshire Cat, a non-combatant of Wonderland scrimmages who "looked good-natured, [but] still... had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt it ought to be treated with respect." Yet it never shows hostility. Since it presides over a royal squabble about its own execution (cleverly taking its own head off), apparently it cannot be killed.

In the second, less threatening incident, Alice remains a passive witness. That is appropriate since she has just dodged a confrontation with death, symbolized by the Queen of Hearts - who else? When the Queen had ordered the cat's execution, Alice had "passed the buck" to the Duchess. S*;ll, Alice has begun to fight the Queen secretly. She protects the gardener-cards by hiding them and lying about them. At this point, then, Alice resists death, but lacks the courage to defy it openly.

In the final incident, Alice at last becomes the active force for Life, rescuing tumbled little creatures and restoring order. In the courtroom, her sudden spurt of growth accidentally overturns the jury box, which reminds her of the real-life goldfish accident. To her the jury are not now much larger than fishes.

...she jumped up in such a hurry that she tipped over the jury-box with the edge of her skirt, upsetting all the jury- men on to the heads or the crowd below, and there they lay sprawling about, reminding her very much of a globe of goldfish she had accidentally upset the week before.

'Oh, I BEG your pardon!' she exclaimed in a tone of great dismay, and began picking them up again as quickly as she could, for the accident of the goldfish kept running in her head, and she had 3 vague sort of idea that they must be collected at once and put back into the jury-box, or they would die.

Now Alice actively takes control. Although she feels "dismay" and has a "vague sort of idea that they must be collected. . .or they would die", her response is rapid and capable. She even takes time to rearrange Bill the Lizard. The Tenniel drawing of this moment makes Alice look kindly, motherly, mature - a shadow of the future adult. Directly afterward, Alice courageously confronts and defeats the passionate Queen of Hearts, who has, of course, always represented the omnipresence of death.

I believe this interpretation works for several reasons. It gives Alice's character added depth to imagine her unselfish desperation to save helpless creatures; this insight balances her accustomed coolness. Clues at the opening of the story point to this version: Alice falls into a hole; a grave is a hole in the ground big enough to contain a body. Soon, trapped in a coffin-sized space (the White Rabbit's dressing room), she hears a digger busy outside. Here she decides glumly that she cannot get any older since she cannot get any bigger - a dark thought.

Later in the story many hints also suggest dying and death, more than the plot requires. The Mock Turtle weeps because he will soon be soup. Father William's son may be kicked downstairs. Yet nobody in Wonderland dies. It raises questions. Why should the Duchess, who is not, generally, murderous, order Alice's death? Why is the Queen

so bent on broadside execution? This can seem comic until I remember, like my little boy, that the death sentence really has no exceptions.

A happy side effect of the "fishglobe theory" is that it also accounts for some of the odd visual effects of the story. Children playing near a large crystal globe of bright swimming fish will try out the comic effects of the curved glass. Things seen through it stretch and compress. They also vanish, then reappear. Is the Cheshire Cat simply Dinah- through-the-fishglobe? Is the fishglobe a forerunner of the looking-glass of the second book? Is growing/shrinking Alice a view that a real-life sister giggled over? Did the Rev. Dodgson, fascinated by the lenses of his photography, also amuse the Liddell sisters with these curious images in the glass?

What are the advantages of this interpretation? First, it accounts for some interesting points of story construction. It connects the rabbit hole, the Pool of Tears, the "Mary Ann" incident, and the oddities of changing appearance (Alice's, the Cheshire Cat's). It tells us why metallic gold (especially seen through glass) is such an important visual image. Another advantage is a symmetry added to the structure by matching the chaos of the Pool of Tears and Caucus-race to Alice's satisfaction in restoring the jurors unharmed. The two scenes pair off nicely.

Finally, I believe that Carroll intends her terrified scramble among the fish to give her character human warmth. Alice can be cool. Restoring the jurors reveals her kindly heart. This act strengthens her resolve, so that she can finally directly confront the murderous Queen of Hearts. The confrontation takes courage, which is symbolized by her restored size. Although it seems odd to suppose that someone card-sized could frighten her, Alice's weapons are logic and experience - not strength. She rarely sees her size as a fighting advantage, so that in this situation only emotional growth (which she has accomplished) would erase her fear of the furious Queen.

This suggestion of mine puts both of them, Alice and Lewis Carroll, in a good light. There is at least enough internal evidence to consider it seriously. I am not sure, though, that it puts the Rev. Dodgson in such a good light. Nothing in it is remotely Christian.

Chloe Nichols, Ph.D. J. Frank White Academy Lincoln Memorial University

Works Cited:

"Secrecy and Autonomy in Lewis Carroll" by Susan Sherer, Philosophy and Literature Vol.20 No. 1 ( 1 996)

Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice: Alice s Adventures in Wonderland. Ed. Martin Gardner. New York: Bramhall House, 1960.

Language and Truth

in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

John Tufail, Ph.D.

I would like to examine a position that has had fairly general acceptance in contemporary Western thought amongst philosophers from a wide range of ideological and philosophical schools of thought. This is the position taken by people as disparate as Mannheim, Althusser, Ayer and Lukes1 - that although some aspects of reality are cultur- ally mediated, socially determined, irretrievably ideologi- cal in nature, others are not. I quote for example, Steven Lukes from his essay 'On the Social Determination of Truth':

i. There are no good reasons for supposing that all

criteria of truth and validity are context dependent and

variable:

ii. there are good reasons for maintaining that some

are not, that these are universal and fundamental, and

that those criteria which are context dependent are

parasitic on them...

To support this position, Lukes appeals to language as evidence of the universality of meaning with the notion of:

the existence of a common reality as a necessary pre- condition of our understanding G's language ('G' being a member of a language group other than my own). Though we need not agree about all the facts, the member of 'G' must have our distinction between truth and falsity as applied to a shared reality if we are to understand their language.

I believe that this appeal is essentially misplaced and is based on a misconception of how meaning develops in language. To illustrate this point I can turn, inevitably, to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (AW) as this very ques- tion is one which Lewis Carroll addressed extremely suc- cinctly one hundred years before Lukes raised it!

A three inch high Alice has just fallen into a pool of tears formed by a nine foot Alice. As she struggles in the pool she is overtaken by the Mouse which she attempts to engage in pleasant conversation. Failing in English, she tries again in French:

So she began again: "Ou est ma Chattel" which was the first lesson in her French lesson book. The Mouse gave a su44en leap out of the water, and seemed to quiver all over with fright. "Oh I beg your pardon!" crie4 Alice hastily, afrai'4 that she ha4 hurt the poor animal's feelings, "I quite forgot you 4'4n't like cats."

"Not like cats!" crie4 the Mouse, in a shrill passionate voice. "Woul4 you like cats if you were me?"

"Well perhaps not," sai'4 Alice, in a soothing tone: "4on't be angry about it. An4 yet I wish 1 coul4 show you our cat Dinah: I think you'4 take a fancy to cats if you coul4 only see her. She is such a 4ear quiet thing. ... An4 she is such a nice soft thing to nurse - an4 she's such a capital one rot catching mice..."

The switch from English to French here by Carroll is interesting and useful when looking at Lukes' argument.

It seems to me that Carroll is showing us that, contrary to Lukes' claim, it is not necessary for us to share a common reality in order to develop a knowledge of how another lan- guage operates - merely to develop a negotiated perceptual approximation. Thus Wittgenstein argues that such a nego- tiation of meaning does not require a 'common understand- ing' (Lukes' phrase) but a 'complicated network of superfi- cial similarities which overlap and crisscross' (Philosophi- cal Investigations).

Alice was in this manner able to communicate on the level of superficial appearances with the Mouse (note, by the way, the Platonic capital), in the sense that there was a similarity between her concept of 'cat' and that of the Mouse at the level of superficial perception / material ap- pearances. However, she remained fundamentally unable to share the Mouse's world view at the level of meaning. To Alice a cat would always be a loveable, harmless (indeed, by virtue of being an excellent mouser, extremely useful) pet. To the Mouse on the other hand it would equally re- main a dangerous, nasty, low assassin.

This is a theme to which Carroll returns on a num- ber of occasions in A W and can be seen as a central theme in this particular book. In her very next conversation with the Mouse she starts to talk about her loveable 'bright eyed terrier' and reference will be made to the episode when Alice nibbles the mushroom and finds her neck extending from her body. In this incident she meets a pigeon who iden- tifies her as a serpent: the Idea of a serpent being to a pi- geon any creature that is both all head and neck and eats eggs. To underline his point, Carroll brings Alice, the 3" tall Alice, into confrontation with a 'normally' sized puppy - an episode in which Alice's universalist (Idealistic?) view nearly brings her to grief. Yet having been nearly trampled to death by this relatively enormous animal, our heroine cannot conceive of it in any other terms than "And yet what a dear little puppy it was!"

Carroll in these episodes seems to be making a crucial distinction between perception and understanding - between the material and the essential - the point being that two people/species with different world views, different realities, would not necessarily disagree that something is perceived (a puppy, a cat or a tear for example), but their understanding of the significance of the perception would essentially differ.

This understanding/perception distinction is im- portant when one is considering the function of illustration in nonsense works, for it reflects directly on the position taken by Bacon, Spencer and Crane on the evolution and nature of language, in that it asks serious questions of their position that the illustration is purely and formally an evi- dentiary mediator between language and reality.

In The Colors of Rhetoric, Wendy Steiner puts the evidentiary case as follows:

Illustrations are pictures of the thing-world inserted into the verbal text. As pictures, Icons, they both signify and contain the characteristics of what they picture.'

But of course Carroll's books both exploit for its humorous possibilities and deny the validity of this state- ment at any but the most superficial and uncertain level.

I feel that the importance of illustration to Lewis Carroll cannot be overstated. Throughout his life he used the perceived evidential properties of illustration to brighten and clarify not only his fictional texts but also his non-fic- tional texts (in fact it is worth stating at this stage that the distinction fiction/non-fiction as applied to Carroll is a par- ticularly arbitrary one, as even his most 'academic' works employ fictive devices for their 'illustrative' possibilities.

The opening paragraph of AW contains the follow- ing quotation:

"What is the use of a book", thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"

and on a number of occasions the narrator plays on the evidentiary concept of illustration - not only in his attempt to 'legitimise' his fictive world - but also to undermine it. When Alice meets the Gryphon, for example, the narrator re- fers out from the written text by saying, "if you don't know what a Gryphon is {my emphasis}, look at the picture." The point I think to note here is the word 'is'. Carroll does not say, "if you don't know what a Gryphon looks like", he uses is - a direc- tion which implies existential import for the Gryphon. I suggest that we accept that this distinction was no mere piece of for- tuitous phrasing by Carroll - particularly in view of the earlier distinctions made be- tween material perception and Platonic ide- alism - it is a distinction which is crucial to Carroll's humour. Indeed, it is something more than humour that Carroll is achieving and Carroll's choice of the Gryphon for this particular piece of existential sleight-of-pen brings to mind his intense in- terest in Blake's illustrations during the period he was pre- paring A W. We know that Carroll was so interested in them that he had ordered special printings. We do not know but are entitled to suspect that the illustration which interested him perhaps more than others was "Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car" (1826-27) with its prominent illustra- tion of a griffon before Ezekiel's chariot. Certainly the re- ligious and poetic symbolism of the Griffon would have been well known to Carroll's contemporaries. As Stephen Pricket says in his book Words and the Word:

For Blake, Dante's bi-fold vision of the Griffin is not merely an encounter with the spirit of prophecy, but more specifically with Poetic Genius.'

This 'bi-fold vision' linking the Griffon with 'Po- etic Genius' not only reflects Blake's powerful biblical imagery, but also brings to the forefront Coleridge's insis- tence of the primacy of the Poetic in Biblical translation and interpretation and the huge influence Coleridge's neo- Platonism had on Carroll's linguistic and theological de- velopment.

Note once again how Carroll's precise use of lan- guage is an appeal to understanding rather than the visual perception of the phenomenon. In AW Carroll leaves little to chance. For later in the same work, at the trial of 'the knave', the narrator once again interjects with the statement, 'the king wore his crown over his wig (look at the frontis- piece if you want to see how he did it)' . As with the Gryphon, the appeal is to understanding (how the act was achieved) not to perception (not what it looked like).

Of course Carroll was not the only 19th century writer to use illustrations linguistically, either to enhance, or even undermine, the written text - nor even the first. Most famously Thackeray {Vanity Fair) and Dickens (no- tably in Dombey and Son where he used illustration to evade Victorian mores on adultery) also used illustration in the same linguistic manner. This challenging of illustration as purely evidentiary, essentially subservient to the written text was, if not common, at least a promi- nent feature of Victorian illustrative philosophy. Yet the prevailing view of the text/illustration relationship re- mained (and to a large extent still re- mains) that reflected by Herbert Read in his historical account of the evolu- tion of aesthetics, Icon and Idea:

"Before the word was the image, and the first recorded attempts of man to define the real are pictorial attempts, (images scratched or pecked or painted on the surfaces of rocks or caves. Our knowledge of the existence of this primal art is comparatively re- cent, and so staggering was the impact of the knowledge on the scientific mind that for some years the authen- ticity of the evidence was doubted. Even now the signifi- cance of this art, for anthropology, for aesthetics, and I would say, for philosophy, has not been sufficiently appreciated."

The presumption that the motivated sign precedes the arbitrary sign in the evolution of language is a powerful motivation in the perception that the motivated is necessar- ily secondary to the arbitrary. Yet such accounts are demon- strably selective and wrong. It ignores the fact that in so- called pre-literate societies, the arbitrary sign predominates over the motivated sign. Status and rank badges, boundary signifiers, direction indicators are all examples of the arbi- trary having precedence over the motivated. It also assumes an evolutionary theory of language based on the extremely subjective idea of a hierarchy of linguistic types; hieroglyph, cuneiform, ideogram, alphabet:

The stylised symbol of the human form, though it is so dynamic in the Franco-Cantarian and Bushman art... is a sign, and in the extreme case we are near to the Chinese ideogram or pictograph. We are at the beginning of a long evolution that led to the invention (sic) of writing. (Read, op cit)

Or see Bacon: Again, if one considers the refinement of the liberal arts.... as the discovery of the letters of the alphabet (still unadopted by the Chinese) in grammar.

We are presented with an evolutionary continuum ranging from the pictorial representation of the Bushman's art - representing a one-to-one relationship between sign and object, symbol and reality, and the arbitrary, unmoti- vated, abstracted linguistic signs of Western Culture at the other - representing a retreat from the 'real' to the intel- lectual. This is a hypothesis which is pregnant with qualita- tive implications. Yet, ironically, much of the debate about language since the Baconian revolution has been precisely to attempt to force language back into a one-to-one rela- tionship with reality. The attempt to somehow 'purify' lan- guage - return it to a 'state of grace' - was both a powerful philosophical movement throughout the 18th and much of the 19th centuries, it was, perhaps more significantly, a con- sistent theological theme. The 'plain language' movement led by Bishop Piatt and large elements of the evangelical movements saw this as the only way to ensure that the Bible was kept free of blasphemous metaphorical interpretation. It is in this historical context that Carroll's works must be seen in order to fully understand the radical nature of his works.

To return to A W, the frontispiece contains at least one other contradictory element which can be seen as chal- lenging the evidentiary nature of illustration. Every reader of AW makes the assumption that at the trial the prisoner before the court is the Knave of Hearts. This assumption is based on a number of textual and extra-textual 'evidences'; knowledge of the rhyme in question, the consequent con- textual relationship of certain key characters (the King and Queen of Hearts), who stand in the position of both victims and judges, and the two illustrations of the trial scene with their dominant use of heart symbols.

Curiously, it is the case that nowhere in the text is the prisoner before the court referred to directly as the Knave of Hearts. The only reference to a Knave of Hearts is the recitation of the nursery rhyme itself. The fact that the identity of the prisoner is rarely (if ever) queried is due to two factors. First is the unconscious 'recognition' by most readers that (most) illustrations are indeed subservi- ent to the text. Second is the accumulations of hints and associative allusions by the narrator (e.g. in the garden scene, 'The King and Queen of Hearts... and the Knave'), not the least of which is the frontispiece itself. However, although it is a full page illustration dominating the reader's con- sciousness from the outset, it is both spatially and tempo- rally removed from the trial scene. It is only when the illus- tration is examined closely that it can be seen that, of all the cards illustrated in this story, the knave is the only one whose identity is always ambiguous. In none of the illustra- tions of the knave (there are three) is he ever defined and unambiguously represented as the Knave of Hearts. Never is he shown sporting a Heart motif and, indeed, on the fron- tispiece the predominant motif is the Club.

However, it should not be forgotten that, although the knave is most consistently not named by suit during the trial, elsewhere in the book a knave is identified by suit as 'The Knave of Hearts'. This is in chapter VIII, 'The Queen's Croquet Ground'. In the procession (first) Carroll says, 'Then followed the Knave of Hearts, carrying the King's crown.' Then a few lines later; '...the Queen said severely, "Who is this?'" She said it to the Knave of Hearts...'

And immediately adjacent to these observations is an illustration depicting the Knave of Hearts carrying the crown. Now, please compare the illustration of the Knave of Hearts with the illustrations of the Knave in the trial. They are quite clearly different personae. The clothing is different (look at the hat for example and the tunic design) but far more telling are the features. Tenniel has the knave in the two Trial illustrations sporting a prominently up-turned moustache, whereas the Knave of Hearts is wearing a shorter, downturned moustache. Also the face of the Knave of Hearts (as befitting a tart thief) is considerably plumper than that of the knave on trial. There are quite clearly two distinct knaves present in the book.

To the unwary reader, the nonsense element of the Knave's trial is the fact that the normal procedures of a court of law are reversed - sentence - verdict - evidence. Yet is this nonsense? A nursery rhyme is, after all, a closed sys- tem. The Knave of Hearts, being a member of this closed system has no existence beyond being the member of the 'set' which stole the tarts. Logically the only evidence re- quired is the nursery rhyme itself - and this Carroll duly gives us at the opening of the trial. If it is the Knave of Hearts before the court, both evidence and verdict are contained within the reading of the rhyme. The only possible question arising, therefore, is whether the prisoner before the dock is the Knave of Hearts - for we know that only the Knave of Hearts can be guilty! And, as we have seen, Carroll goes to great lengths to create an ambiguity on precisely this issue.

I would suggest that there are few better examples of the dangers inherent in accepting at face value the 'evi- dentiary' properties of illustration. In this case, it can be seen that the reader's 'reading' of the illustration is deter- mined by his own expectations - that the illustration is evi- dentiary to an unambiguous text. The illustration refers not out from the text to a universe of playing cards and stolen tarts (not, of course, Carroll's creation) bui back into the body of the written text. The illustration carries an incom- plete information structure which renders it meaningless as a signifying agent without the additional information con- tained in the verbal text and the reader's external knowl- edge of the nursery rhyme. What we have are two complex but incomplete structures which are mapped onto each other in such a way that to each part of one structure there is a corresponding part in the other structure. This, of course, includes significant absences.

In his book Godel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter discusses how formal systems come to create meaning. He suggests that a pri- mary causative factor is the existence of what he terms 'iso- morphic relationships':

It is cause for joy when a mathematician discovers an isomorphism between two structures which he knows. It is often a 'bolt from the blue', and a source of wonderment. The perception of an isomorphism is a significant advance in knowledge - and I claim that it is such perceptions of isomorphism which create meanings in the minds of people. A final word on the perceptions of isomorphisms: since they come in all shapes and sizes, figuratively speaking, it is not always totally clear when you really have found an isomor- phism. Thus isomorphism is a word with all the usual vagueness of words - which is a defect but an advan- tage as well.

It is interesting that Hofstadter's book is subtitled 'A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll', for surely, few writers have so sympa- thetically summed up the wonderment and enlightenment readers of Carroll's works experience. And few have given a better rebuttal of the nature of language as upheld by those mentioned earlier in this article.

This concept of isomorphism, though, as Hofstad- ter acknowledges, is generally restricted to a discussion of mathematical structures, I feel that his concept of isomor- phic generation of meaning can by usefully and most satis- fyingly applied to the complex relationship that exists be- tween text, illustration and audience. I take Hofstadter to mean that understanding arises not through mere physical perception (Luke's error) but through a process similar to that described by Wittgenstein {op cit). Painters, illustra- tors, cartoonists, novelists and other artists utilise this pro- cess, translating the world as a complex and shifting series of signs and images. The idea of humanity's relationship with reality is thus something like a detective story in which we are given a series of more or less disconnected clues - an incomplete picture from which we form an image of suf- ficient coherence that enables us to formulate and negoti- ate our existence.

This theory is used by Umberto Eco {A Theory of Semiotics) when discussing his ideas on sign production - stressing that the recognisability of a clue is a socially learned procession in the first instance:

Recognition occurs when a given object or event, produced by nature or human action (intentionally or unintentionally) and existing in a world of facts, comes to be viewed by an addressee as the expression of a given content, either through a pre-existing and coded correlation or through the positing of a pos- sible correlation by its addressee.

Or, rather more succinctly, when posited by a cer- tain gentleman at least slightly 'known' to the readers of this esteemed journal:

Still, you know, wor4s mean mot-e than we mean io express when we use them: So a whole book ought to mean a great cjeal more than the writer meant.

X.Mannheim, Karl (1893 -1947), German/British sociologist, with a theory of language similar to Lukes', though his theories on knowledge are termed 'irrationalist' and 'relativist', so in this respect has some common ground with Carroll. Best intro: Karl Mannheim : The Development of His Thought : Philosophy, Sociology and Social Ethics, by H.E.S. Woldring

Althusser, Louis (1918 - 1990), French structuralist/Marxist philosopher whose theory of the all-pervasive influence of ideology depended on language as able to transmit information in an unproblematic way. His influence peaked in the 1970's. Best intro: Althusser : A Critical Reader, Gregory Elliott (Editor), Blackwell, 1994.

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules (1910-1989) British philosopher who is credited as the founder of the 'emotivist' school of philosophy, (see The Language of Morals, R.M. Hare, Oxford, 1952).

Lukes, Steven b. 1 94 1 , one of the foremost (if not the foremost) of the 'new wave' of philosophers in Oxford. Made his mark in the late 60's whilst at Nuffield College. Frustratingly tends to confine his ideas to papers and monologues (though he has written a definitive analysis of French sociologist and philosopher Emile Durkheim (1858-1917).

Dr John Tufail is Director of Health and Social Policy Studies at the Pracyabani Institute, London. He is currently working on a book on the philosophy and politics of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the working title of Lewis Carroll and the Dialectical Tradition, of which this article is a precis chapter. Some of the material regarding the identity of the Knave was previously published in an article in Bandersnatch #106.

The Jack of the Trial (above) and of the Croquet-Ground (below)

Dodgson's Adventures in Therapy

Jonathan Dixon

"What do you mean by that/" said the Caterpillar sternly.

"Explain yourself!"

As a counselor and psychotherapist by trade, I've always been jointly interested in, and suspicious of, attempts to apply psychological theories to literature and authors. Being a storehouse of human experience in concentrated form, the literary history of the world is a gold mine for the psychologically-oriented to explore. (The fact that psychologists rarely explore it is a topic for another, nastier essay!) On the other hand, the exploration should be done with common sense and discretion. Anyone who has read an extreme Freudian's analysis of Alice will share my inclination to become nauseated.

Recently it occurred to me to explore Charles Dodgson in the light of a certain conceptual model I use in my own counseling work and — rather to my surprise — I found that sev- eral seemingly contradictory aspects of

Lewis Carroll, and the phenom- enon of Carroll- ian studies as a whole, started falling into place and mak- ing sense.

First, some necessary background: In my training I became familiar with a person- ality assessment instrument known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI), based on the personality type model of Carl Jung. It was an eye-opener, helping me to make sense of conflicting tendencies in peoples' behavior.

The MBTI measures a person on four different scales:

EXTRAVERSION (J?).... INTRO VERSION (I)

SENSING (5) INTUITION (TV)

THINKING (7) FEELING (F)

JUDGING (J) PERCEIVING (P)

Each scale is a continuum, and is often measured as a percentage. For example, a 50% score on the Extraversion/Introversion scale would indicate a person fairly balanced in those qualities, while an 89% on the N- scale indicates a highly intuitive person. In non-technical terms, each scale can be described as follows:

Extraversion/Introversion: Contrary to popular

"They had not gone far before they and lonely on a little ledge of rock. .

belief, this does not simply refer to whether a person is outgoing or shy. Extraversion and Introversion refer to a person's basic orientation to the world. Is his mental energy mostly focused on things outside himself, or on his own thoughts, feelings, and ideas?

Sensing/Intuition: This refers to the way a person picks up information about the world. Sensing is just what it sounds like. A person strong in this area is sensitive to colors, sounds, and so on. After meeting a stranger, a strongly sensing person would be able to describe the encounter in very concrete, vivid terms.

An intuitive person, on the other hand, might not notice even obvious details. However, she would be able to describe the overall feeling of the encounter in very subtle terms: what the mood was, how it changed, and so on. Intuition tends to be holistic, sensitive to overall patterns and relationships.

Thinking/Feeling: After a person has picked up inform- ation, what does he do with it? How are decis- ions made? Thinking and Feeling are what are com- monly referred to as "head" and "heart." A think- ing person en- gages the world in a logical manner based on reason. Oth- ers might des- cribe him as "objective" or "analytical".

Feeling does not refer only to

emotion, although that plays a large part. It is very much related to nonrational impulses, "gut feelings" and values. A feeling person may be able to list a million logical reasons why he should do something, but if his gut feeling says to do the illogical thing, the feeling will win out. Often the only explanation is, "it felt right."

Judging/Perceiving: These words refer to a person's preference for orderliness and resolution. A judging person likes things structured and defined, and likes labels and categories. She is someone who plans out a detailed itinerary for a vacation. She is fastidious and likes boundaries and rules. Judging breaks things down and separates.

A strongly perceiving person gets anxious if things are too structured or defined. He improvises, and is comfortable with ambiguity and lack of resolution. He likes exceptions and diffuse boundaries. Perceiving integrates and looks for relatedness among parts.

saw the Mock Turtle sitting sad " by Jonathan Dixon

Based on the preferences expressed in a series of questions, the MBTI assigns a person to one of sixteen possible personality types — ESTP, ISTP, ENTP, and so on. These are not meant to slap simplistic labels on people, but rather are meant as a tool for self-exploration. In marriage counseling, for example, they might help a couple understand areas of conflict, as in the case of a judging husband and a perceiving wife who experience a lot of friction deciding what to do with vacation time. Each personality type has its own general description, and I've found that these can be very accurate, almost to the point of eerieness.

(One important thing to remember about the different types is that there is no judgment involved. High or low scores do not indicate positive or negative qualities. Rather, each of the eight poles has its own potential strengths and weaknesses. The ideal is to develop flexibility, and to be able to draw on each quality when appropriate. I should also note that, unlike more questionable typological systems like astrology or numerology, MBTI categories are de- scriptive, not explan- atory: instead of say- ing, "this person is a Pisces; therefore he behaves this way," the MBTI says, "this person shows these preferences; there- fore we will call him an ENFJ"). Lewis Carroll

Let's apply this model to Lewis Carroll, then. Among the 16 possible personality types, which type was Charles Dodgson?

The first two scales are fairly easy to guess. Carroll was obviously an introvert (I) who lived in his inner world of ideas, dreams, and feelings. That was his reality, where his energy tended to be focused. ("Life, what is it but a dream?") While he was active and involved in his external world of Oxford, he was still primarily a private person who seemed to prefer to create his own world away from the world.

Carroll also seems to have been intuitive (N). This is reflected in his writings, which tend not to contain much in the way c: descriptive detail. Carroll was not big on florid prose. However, his writings demonstrate the intuitive 's gift for empathy and character — sensing what is going on inside people and sizing up situations. He was not a superficial writer; he had the introverted intuitive 's gift for creating works of archetypal imagery and power.

Moving to the third scale, Thinking-Feeling, things get trickier. However, to me this scale is the key to the Carroll/Dodgson "paradox" or "dichotomy" we hear so much about.

My first thought was that Carroll must have been fairly balanced between thinking and feeling. After all, he was a logician, able to think very rationally and precisely. At the same time, however, he showed strong feeling in his works and relationships.

The more I pondered this, though, the more I began to feel that Carroll was actually very strongly an F — that this was probably his greatest imbalance. This reasoning may seem confusing on the surface, but let me explain:

People who are extreme on the Feeling scale feel a lot. Consequently, they tend toward the melancholy, romantic attitude so prevalent in Carroll's writing. This is not affectation; in fact this seemingly maudlin view of the

world is com- pletely genuine. And when com- bined with an introverted (I) and intuitive (N) nature, things get worse, for you have someone liable to drown in feeling. The INF is hypersensitive to the feelings of others

especially their suffering — and is often a

tremendously empathic and compassionate individual. This quality is obvious in Carroll's sensitive, caring attitude toward people and animals, and in the melancholy he displays in watching his child friends lose their innocence.

Extreme Fs can be tormented people, and to compensate for this it is very common for them to develop very strong thinking sides — protective shells of logic and objectivity. Thus, on the surface they often seem rational and distant. Underneath, however, feeling still reigns supreme. (The opposite is usually not true, by the way. Since people are rarely tormented by too much logic, extreme Ts tend not to develop compensating feeling sides.)

This leads to a key point in considering Lewis Carroll: while extreme Fs may be able to think very logically and rationally, their logic and rationality still exist in the service of feeling. Feeling is still primary. As a result, Fs (and NFs especially) can be very, very good at creating nonsense.

Lewis Carroll displays this thinking-in-the-

"It's all his fancy, that: he hasn'tgotno sorrow, you know.'" by Jonathan Dixon

service of feeling. Feeling is still primary. As a result, Fs (and NFs especially) can be very, very good at creating nonsense.

Lewis Carroll displays this thinking-in-the- service-of-feeling in two exemplary ways:

1 . Like NFs in general, he uses language poetically. He uses words, the building blocks of logic and rationality, as not just a means to convey information, but as sounds to stir the emotions — to the point of even making up his own. In this his writing is at times similar to music; there is meaning there, but it is a right-brained, non-rational, non- verbal meaning, like the meaning in a Bach fugue, not necessarily a left-brained, verbal meaning.

2. Carroll also carries logic and literalness to such extremes that it becomes anti-logic — non-sense — and he does this for emotional effect, usually humor, but also poignancy. (For an NF, logic is optional — "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.")

Let me give two examples of typical NF nonsense from my own life. My brother and I enjoy twisting logic to throw people for a loop. For example, we have a droll running joke that goes something like: "Hey! I have a tie exactly like yours, except it's in the form of a car and I drive it." This statement is clearly nonsensical — yet it is still completely logically valid.

Or here's a question my brother posed: "If I went and put a tea bag in the lake, would the whole lake become a very weak tea?" These sort of statements are both logical and nonsensical — depending on the arbitrary definitions one decides to bring to them. Carroll was the master of this kind of nonsense logic. In this he was actually similar to Zen teachers with their koans ("What is the sound of one hand clapping?"), for the purpose of such non-sense is to turn logic against itself, toward the purpose of making the student hit a rational brick wall and break through to a nonrational {i.e. intuitive-feeling) level of understanding. Again, thinking in the service of feeling.

On the last of the four scales, Judging-Perceiving, I would guess Carroll was fairly balanced, but tending toward J. He was notoriously fastidious and organized; yet, he could also be comfortable with ambiguity and lack of resolution, for a number of his poems don't actually end, but just stop, unresolved; or else they don't actually tell the reader what is going on, leaving one feeling one has come in in the middle of something. The fluid, dreamlike structures of the Alice books and Sylvie and Bruno also reflect a perceiver's experience of reality.

My conclusion then: Lewis Carroll was an INFJ. Having hazarded that, I proceeded to look up the INFJ description — and it fits him to a "t". Some quotes: "The small number of this type [1% of the population] is regrettable, since INFJs have an unusually strong drive to contribute to the welfare of others and genuinely enjoy helping their fellow

men. This type has great depth of personality; they are themselves complicated, and can understand and deal with complex issues and people."

"INFJs are usually good students, achievers who exhibit an unostentatious creativity. They take then- work seriously and enjoy academic activity. They can exhibit qualities of over-perfectionism and put more into a task than perhaps is justified by the nature of the task."

"INFJs are hard to get to know. They have an unusually rich inner life, but they are reserved and tend not to share their reactions except with those they trust. Because of their vulnerability through a strong facility to introject, INFJs can be hurt rather easily by others, which, perhaps, is at least one reason they tend to be private people ... They have convoluted, complex personalities which sometimes puzzle even them."

"INFJs have vivid imaginations exercised both as memory and intuition, and this can amount to genius, resulting at times in INFJs being seen as mystical. This unfettered imagination often will enable this person to compose complex and often aesthetic works of art such as music, mathematical systems, poems, plays, and novels. In a sense, the INFJ is the most poetic of all the types."

"As with all NFs, the ministry holds attraction, although the INFJ must develop an extraverted role here which requires a great deal of energy. INFJs may be attracted to writing as a profession, and often use language which contains an unusual degree of imagery. They are masters of the metaphor, and both their verbal and written communications tend to be elegant and complex. Their great talent for language usually is directed toward people, describing people and writing to communicate with people in a personalized way. INFJs who write comment often that they write with a particular person in mind; writing to a faceless, abstract audience leaves them uninspired."

"Often INFJs' expressions of affection will be subtle, taking a humorous, unexpected turn ... Their friendship circle is likely to be small, deep, and long- standing ... INFJs tend to be good friends with their children, while firm with discipline."1 CarroIIians

Let's turn now to those who respond to Carroll's writings. Which personality types love Carroll, and why? Why such a universal fascination with his works?

I will begin by guessing that most CarroIIians, like Carroll himself, tend toward the IN ends of the scales. I make this assumption for the simple reason that very extraverted (E) and sensing (S) people tend not to spend their time reading, let alone reading children's fantasy books. ESs are the ones who can't fathom CarroIIians' fascination

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with Alice: "It's just a story! It's not real!" They don't realize that to INs the imaginal world is very real, and that Humpty Dumpty is probably more real than many people met on the street. (To be fair, though, INs tend to see ESs as concrete, shallow, and unimaginative, and can't fathom their fascination with things. I wonder if more extraverted Carrollians become the collectors, while more introverted ones focus primarily on the texts?)

In light of the exploration above, it is not hard to see why Carroll should be so enduringly popular among such a variety of people, for among INFJs he seems to have been singular in his ability to hit the extremes of both the Thinking- Feeling and Judging-Perceiving poles in his writings. Thus, not only can INFJs claim him as one of their own, but so also can INTJs, INFPs, and INTPs. His writings literally have something for everyone, and this is reflected in the different areas of emphasis among Carroll scholars.

To give examples of the best of these, I think of Martin Gardner and Morton Cohen. I label them among the best because, though they have very different interests regarding Carroll, each shows a healthy respect for the other's area of study.

Martin Gardner probably shows a more TJ interest in Carroll, doing exactly what one would expect a thinking- judging Carrollian to do: he annotates and solves puzzles. He is more left-brained and intellectual in his focus. He breaks down a text word-by-word, explains jokes, and defines things.

Morton Cohen probably provides an example of an FP Carrollian. He is a biographer, more of a right-brained poet. He is interested in the feelings and motivations behind the works. He wants to know Carroll's story, to understand the human being behind the text. He looks at all aspects of Charles Dodgson's life and integrates them into a comprehensive picture.

Differences in temperament can divide as well as unite Carrollians, however, causing friction. For example, a Carrollian very high on the Thinking and Judging scales would tend to see everything in Carroll's works as a puzzle to be solved rationally, and would assume that Carroll composed his works in the same rationalist manner in which he himself reads them. An extreme FP Carrollian, on the other hand, might be a saccharine Bessie Pease Gutmann- like illustrator who responds to all the sentiment and zaniness, but completely misses the rigorous intellect also found in Carroll's works.

In this light it becomes obvious why some Carrollian debates, such as a debate about "meaning" in Carroll's work, can never be resolved: we have different types of people debating from completely different value systems, definitions, and sets of ground rules ... all the time thinking tl ey're talking about the same thing.

Meanwhile, in reality, Carroll was very likely indulging in all sets of antithetical values and ground rules at the same time. And he was doing it so successfully, melding them with such a natural ease — at least in his greatest works — that it is impossible to consider his

opposing aspects separately, one apart from another.

Such a human koan can't help but inspire fascination.

1. Quotes taken from Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates (Prometheus Nemesis Book Company, 1984).

You can take the MBTl online at www.knowyourtype.com.

The mutitalented Jonathan Dixon is a therapist practicing in Santa Fe, an artist whose designs grace this very article, and a promising sculptor (see Carollian Notes, p. 1 8).

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Sir (Arthur) John Gielgud (1904-21 May), one of the 20th century's finest actors, came by his Carrollian credits at birth as the son of Kate Terry- Lewis, who as a child posed for CLD, and as the great-nephew of Ellen Terry. He played Humpty Dumpty at Hillside preparatory school and went on to be the Mock Turtle in Jonathan Miller's 1967 TV adaptation, record a 2-hour abridged A W on audio CDs for Nimbus (NI 5046/7), and be the co- narrator on Mike Batt's 1986 Hunting of the Snark (CDSnarkl).

Charles Schultz (1922 - 12 February), creator of the beloved comic "Peanuts", often affectionately referred to Carroll's characters, particularly in his creation of the "Cheshire Beagle".

Quiz

From the Christian Science Monitor, June 29, 2000: "She put her hand in her pocket, drew out the key, and found that it fitted the keyhole. She turned the key. And then she took a deep breath and looked behind her up the long walk to see if anyone was coming. No one was. She held back the swinging curtain . . . and pushed the door, which opened slowly . . . slowly. Then she slipped through it, shut it behind her, and stood with her back against it, looking about her and breathing quite fast with excitement and wonder and delight. She was standing inside..." what?

Answer on p. 15

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Leaves from the Deanery Garden

May I make a comment on the letter from Peter Heath about the BBC Antiques Roadshow on PBS (shown in the U.K. many months ago)? The hoard of photographs '"til now unknown to the experts" is, in fact, well-known to me and others (Morton includes some in his edition of The Letters of Lewis Carroll). The "elderly geezer" is Dr. Rogers, a great-nephew of Annie Mary Ann Henley Rogers (1856- 1937), an early child-friend of Lewis Carroll. He loaned the photographs to an exhibition at Christ Church some years ago, and that is when I first saw the originals. I did some research to help with the captions. Annie was the only daughter of James Edwin Thorold Rogers (1822-90), profes- sor of political economy at Oxford. She had four brothers. The nude photograph mentioned by Peter was one of her brothers, Betram Mitford Heron Rogers (b.1860). Yes! A boy! but only one year old when the photograph was taken. I have a note of another boy nude photograph taken by Carroll in my database, a child of Professor Brodie. So maybe this will help to lay some rather out-of-date myths to rest. The Rogers collection of photographs is now on semi- permanent loan to the Library, Christ Church.

The Tumtum Tree, edited by the talented Mickey Salins, is a welcome addition to your publication; anything to encourage new Carrollians is to be applauded. However, the puzzle taken from my edition of The Alice in Wonderland Puzzle and Game Book is not by Lewis Carroll. It is, dare I say it, my own invention.

Edward Wakeling

In reference to the remarks about truth tables in the latest issue [KL 63, p. 17], this may be of interest. Bede Bundle, in his article on the history of logic in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 4, p. 559, credits Emil Post with being the first to make systematic use of truth tables in a 1920 article. Wittgenstein, at about the same time, independently made similar use of truth tables. However, this method of evaluating truth tables was known to Charles Pierce, Lewis Carroll, George Boole, and other nineteenth century mathematicians.

For a full discussion of Carroll's Game of Logic, and the closely related Venn diagrams, see Chapter 2 of my Logic Machines and Diagrams [McGraw-Hill, New York, 1958].

In the note at p. 18 of the current Knight Letter (63), about The Times'" attempt to whip up rivalry between Llandudno and Whitby, you refer to the availability of a Whitby White Rabbit Trail booklet.

I take the opportunity to remind you of Llandudno 's Alice Trail - the sub-title of my Alice 's Welsh Wonderland, writ- ten and published for last year's summer seminar of the Lewis Carroll Society (U.K.), which was held at Llandudno (having been arranged over dinner at the Plaza Hotel, New York, during our 1998 LCSNA meeting).

I still have a few copies, price £2.50 + £1 postage (Sterling cheque, only), or $5 in US bank notes (but not a $ check). You may recall that my booklet contained several rare pic- tures and lots of previously unpublished information.

Ivor Wynne Jones Pegasus, 7 1 Llandudno Road Penrhyn Bay, Llandudno LL30 3HN North Wales, U.K.

I was in Berkeley today and picked up a shockingly expensive little book called The Fantasy Literature of England. Published by Macmillan, written by a Colin Manlove! How that name haunts me. It looks great and it does have some stuff about Alice. His contention is that the English character and land- scape are responsible for the creation of the successful genre. Which is my position exactly, so I plunked down another $50. Lots of Carroll in there, of course, and Gothic literature.

Dayna and I had a good time in New York. We visited the Alice statue in Central Park (and the Queen of Hearts fountain) so we missed you all at the party. The last morning we went to the Village to have breakfast with her Sherlockian friends. Always on the lookout for anything that relates to Alice and her creator, we discovered Ricky's, a delightful emporium with a plate glass window that said, in gilded Art . Nouveau lettering: "Step Through the Looking Glass into Ricky's Wonderland". From the window display, I would guess that this is the place where queens of all kinds buy their wigs, eyelashes, makeup, etc.

Cindy (Watter)

All best,

Martin (Gardner)

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Ever since Knight Letter 42 I have kept an eye out for evidence of the importance of the number forty-two beyond CLD's writings. My best catch so far antedates AW by a few millennia. Though this passage describes one belief of ancient Egyptians about the afterlife, to me it has a Carrollian flavor beyond the prominence of The Number:

"Followers of Osiris believed that when they died they had to stand before him and have their hearts weighed on the Scales of Judgment against the feather of truth. The jackal- headed god, Anubis, did the weighing and Thoth, the baboon- headed god, recorded the result. If they failed the weighing, which they would do if they had failed to follow the forty- two commandments of Ra, they were thrown to Am-mut- the Eater of the Dead-part lion, part crocodile, and part hippo. If they passed, they stayed forever in paradise with Osiris in the Fields of Peace (the Greeks took this theme further with their Elysian Fields)." ~ Richard Craze, Hell: An Illustrated History of the Netherworld (Berkeley, California: Conari Press, 1996).

I wonder if Ra's forty-two rules were as difficult to obey as those for some of CLD's invented games!

Gary Brockman

Queries

Have you ever thought about what actually happens in those two "bookend" scenes between Alice and her sister, bracketing Wonderland? How different they are? The duplications in some wording? Why dead leaves fall onto Alice from a budding tree in Mayl

I will be interested to see if you get any Virgilian answers to that question. People notice mythic qualities to Alice - she drops underground like Persephone, and looks a good bit like a junior Circe when a piglet materializes. In the Aeneid the Cumaen Sybil, a priestess to Apollo, wrote her prophecies upon dead leaves, kept them for a time, and then carelessly let them fly through the world. This Sybil became Aeneas' guide into the underworld.

Chloe Nichols

Does anyone know if the computer solitaire game with Alice characters played by Michelle Pfeiffer's character in What Lies Beneath exists outside the world of the film? I trust my wife and I weren't hallucinating when we recognized an assembly of Alice characters on the bottom of the monitor below the digital card-faces just before "Claire Spencer's" power went off. From what I know of other films, the computer image could well have been created, with an indulgence of the designer's private interests or the crew's private jokes, solely for its moment in the film.

By the way, Knight Letter keeps topping itself.

Gary Brocklin

Would you be interested in asking your readers which Alice character they think should match which constellation? I believe it would point to the fact that Carroll did use the constellations as a reference - or unconsciously, as by going into his imagination (microcosm) he inadvertently went through to the macrocosm as the two are one and the same while we all dream this dream called life.

James B. Thomas

James is the creator of the Lewis Carroll Celestial Globes ("Far-flung", p. 23). Some of the easier pairings are given there - he'd like to know what other characters Carrollians think go with what Zodiacal constellations.

From an exchange of eMails:

I am an attorney in Ft. Worth, Texas and I am writing an article on the use of the writings of Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain in legal opinions. I was hoping you could point me to some good sources of information. I am using the usual search engines for legal research, i.e. Westlaw, but really want to go beyond merely quoting the references to Alice, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. I found your "To Stop a Bandersnatch" interesting and thought you might have some suggestions. I have had an interest in Alice and Carroll for several years.

Thank you.

St.ClairNewbernlll stclairn3@aol.com

There are a couple of articles cited in Fordyce that might be helpful:

• 82 1 : "Dreams and Law Courts" by Elizabeth Sewell in The Logic of Personal Knowledge: Essays Presented to Michael Polanyi on his Seventieth Birthday (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, 179-88)

• 958: "A Lawyer's Alice" by Glanville L. Williams in the Cambridge Law Journal (England) v.9, no. 2 (1946): 171-84.

If this person needs the impetus and influence of the legal system on Carroll and his writings, then he should refer to Lewis Carroll's Diaries, in which visits to law courts and assizes are recorded. In my footnotes I have tried to give further background by quoting the reports given in local newspapers at the time of these events, providing the names of defendants, their supposed crimes, and the outcomes and penalties given if proved guilty. There can be no doubt that Carroll was fascinated by the legal system. We must not forget that members of his extended family worked in the legal profession {e.g. Uncle Hassard was a barrister; his cousin Amy Menella Dodgson married (Sir) Charles Edward Pollock, a judge in the High Court and the last Baron of the Court of Exchequer).

Edward (Wakeling)

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Joel Birenbaum then posted the following:

• Wouldn 't it be Murder? A talk presented to the LCSNA at its first meeting in Canada, on May 12, 1990 by Joe Brabant. Toronto: Cheshire Cat Press 1999. Wood engravings by George Walker. Limited to 177 copies. Should be available from george _walker@ tvo.org

• Alice in Justice-Landby Jake Falstaff. NY: ACLU 1935

• "Alice in Mergerland ". Mergers and Acquisitions The Journal of Corporate Venture 2 (Fall 1966) 24-27

• "Medical Law & Regulation in Wonderland" by George LeMaitre. Private Practice, 8 (Nov 1976) 17, 21, 25.

• Alice's Adventures in Jurisprudentia by Peter Sloss. Belvedere, CA: Borogove Press, 1982. 87 pp.

/ find the depth of knowledge and willingness to help among our membership quite breathtaking at times. St. Clair, who is also a photographer and student of photographic history, has joined the LCSNA as a result of this dialog. Welcome!

Do you know whether Charles Dodgson wrote about America, especially the Civil War and/or America's struggles with the "Negro problem"?

mark and patty animalfarm@prodigy.net

I posted this to the LC eGroup (see p. 20) and got the following replies. Any other input would be appreciated.

As far as I know he never wrote anything publicly on this point, but in case this is of interest, he owned two books, one called Appeal to Pharaoh: the Negro problem and its radical solution (author unknown, at least to Jeffrey Stern and me), and The Pro-Slavery Argument as maintained by the most distinguished writers of the Southern States (Harper, Hammond, Sims et al.y

On 5 April 1864 he wrote in his diary, "... (met) a Mr Macfarland from Richmond (America), secretary to Mr Mason, the Confederate Commissioner. I was very glad of getting an opportunity of discussing the question of slavery, for the first time, with an actual slave-holder."

Mike (Leach)

Appeal to Pharaoh etc. was written by Carlyle McKinley (1847-1904) and was republished in 1970 by Negro Universities Press under the editorship of G. M. Pinckney.

Mark (Burstein)

I find Carroll's interest in the 'Slavery Question' (no matter how slightly referenced) of overwhelming interest. I wonder if this guy Macfarland left a diary or papers recording his recollections of his conversation with Carroll? Might be worth some enterprising US scholar chasing up. I suspect that Carroll's views on slavery would be quite complex and not merely a simple pro- or anti- response.

John Tufail

marlow: {Voice over) "And so the man went down the hole, like Alice. But there were no bunny rabbits down there. It wasn't that sort of hole. It was a rat-hole."

~ "The Singing Detective", Dennis Potter

"You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."

~ "The Matrix", A. & L. Wachowski

«? ***

X 7

"When I wasn't in the stacks or working in the rare book room, where my principal job seemed to be watering the sponges that provided a rudimentary kind of climate control in the glass-covered bookcases, I was lounging in the browsing room, which offered not only a marvelously eclectic collection of books but also the most comfortable leather chairs I've ever sunk into. It was there, one luxuriously lazy afternoon, that I read in a single sittings/Zee in Wonderland, a book I had struggled to read as a kid but to no avail. For me, the right time to read Alice turned out to be that undergraduate afternoon in the Deering Library."

~ Michael Cart

" A Clean, Well Lighted Sanctuary"

Booklist, April 15, 2000

Michael is the recipient of this year's Grolier Award for his outstanding "contribution to the stimulation and guidance of reading by children. "

*

Carmela Ciuraru asked dozens of poets to answer the question: "What poem has haunted you, provoked you, obsessed you, made you want to speak back to it?" These, she claims, are the poems rightly called "first loves", for they "are the ones that remain at the center of writers ' emotional landscapes, and no matter how widely they range as writers and readers, it is to these they return. " First Loves was published this year in book form by Scribner, and excerpted in the American Poetry Review, Nov/Dec99, Vol. 28 Issue 6. Here is Joyce Carol Oates:

There are two types of influences in the life of a writer: those influences that come so early in childhood, they seem to soak into the very marrow of our bones and to condition our interpretation of the universe thereafter; and those that come a little later, when we can exercise more control of our environment and our response to it, and have begun to be aware of the strategies of art.

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My discovery of poetry — or of verse — came when I was very young. In 1946, for my eighth birthday, my grandmother gave me a beautiful illustrated copy of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking- Glass. This book with its handsome cloth cover embossed with bizarre creatures, and the astonished Alice in their midst, was the great treasure of my childhood. This was love at first sight. (I may have fallen in love with the very concept of Book, too.) Like Alice, I plummeted headfirst down the rabbit hole and/or climbed boldly through the mirror into the looking-glass world and, in a manner of speaking, never entirely returned to real life. My heroine was this strangely assured, courageous young girl of about my age I would not have guessed was of another culture and distinctly of another economic class; I most admired her for her curiosity (which mirrored my own) and for the equanimity with which she confronted dream- and nightmare situations (as I could never have done). Within a few months I'd memorized much of both Alice books, and could recite, for anyone willing to listen, nearly all the poems.

The first Wonderland poem, which must be the first poem of my life, looks, strangely, to a contemporary adult eye, like experimental verse by (possibly) e. e. cummings or William Carlos Williams. This curiosity, which fascinated me as a child and inspired me to much imitation, is meant to replicate a mouse's long tail, dwindling down the page until its final, mordant words are set in miniature type, hardly readable. In Lewis Carroll's children's classic there is much seemingly incongruous concern with dying and death and being eaten; Wonderland is also concerned with justice, not ordinarily a concept one associates with children. But here is a seemingly playful poem that suggests the cruelty and injustice of the world as perceived by the mouse (child?) victim, helpless at the hands (or jaws) of the oppressor. The poem dramatizes a cat named Fury in his confrontation with an anonymous mouse/victim: "Fury said to / a mouse, That / he met / in the / house..." and ends with the cryptic words, '"and / condemn / you / to / death.'" Children's literature, especially in the past, didn't shrink from depictions of cruelty and sadism; Lewis Carroll, in whom the child-self abided through his celibate lifetime, understood instinctively the child's propensity to laugh at the very things that arouse anxiety, like outrageous injustice, sudden death, disappearing, being devoured. Most of the celebrated Alice poems seem whimsical unless you examine them more closely. Many depict abrupt outbursts of temper or reversals of fortune so swift they appear comic: "Be off, or I'll kick you downstairs"; " Speak roughly to your little boy, / And beat him when he sneezes; / He only does it to annoy, /

As a child as young as eight I may have been imbued with an indelible sense of playfulness and morbidity, in about equal measure. But isn't this, Lewis Carroll would inquire pleasantly, simply the way the world is?

Because he knows it teases." The more blatant the rhyme the more it appeals to childish ear; one reason why blatant rhymes offend us when we're adults and seemingly in need of more subtlety and modulation in the music of poetry.

But it was the sharply rhymed and accented "Jabberwocky" that made the most profound impression on me. For young children, whose brains are struggling to comprehend language, words are magical in any case; the magic of adults, utterly mysterious; no child can distinguish between "real" words and nonsensical or "unreal" words, and verse like Lewis Carroll's brilliant " Jabberwocky" has the effect of both arousing childish anxiety (what do these terrifying words mean?) and placating it (don't worry: you can decode the meaning by the context). In The Annotated Alice, by Martin Gardner, footnotes for "Jabberwocky" cover several pages in small type; it's considered the greatest nonsense poem in English. I was fascinated by the bizarre, secret language and by the poem's dreamlike violent action, depicted in the most hideous of John Tenniel's drawings, of a grotesque winged monster with a tail like a python and gigantic claws, confronted by a very small boy with a sword. I must have liked it, thoughtful child that I was, to be told that, "vorpal sword in hand," the young hero rested "by the Tumtum tree, /And stood awhile in thought." The entire poem is irremediably imprinted in my memory, who knows why? It's a fantasy of a child's successful defense against the (adult) unknown, perhaps. It's a parody of heroic adventure tales. But I think, for me, it was the language that most fascinated: "One, two! One, two! / And through and through / The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! / He left it dead, and with its head / He went galumphing back."

How has Lewis Carroll's verse influenced my poetry? Has there been any direct influence at all? It may be that the Alice books have more influenced my philosophical/ metaphysical perspective on life than my poetry. At the peri- phery of many of my poems and works of fiction, as in the corner of an eye, there is often an element of the grotesque or surreal. As a child as young as eight I may have been imbued with an indelible sense of playfulness and morbidity, in about equal measure. But isn't this, Lewis Carroll would inquire pleasantly, simply the way the world is?

5

Answer to Quiz, p. 1 1

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)

15

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By tLe. way, Ja.se. u.nJLe.-rtook tLis p-roJe.ct J"-st to /-z. a.n. on.Un.e. ima^e. of- " 'Alice. s A<Lve.n±u--re.s u.nJLe.-r Gr-rou-nJ? In. IEspe.-ra.nSUo! 'Xou.-r a.-<Mftinj§ f~rie.nxl,

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[KL readers may be aware that Carroll used 0^>0 0 as his return address "The Chestnuts"]

16

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Notes from the Underground

Alice 's Adventures under Ground, a "Cottage Classic" from Word-Play Publications (1892847000 he; 1892847019 pb)

Carroll's holographic Christmas present to Miss Liddell has always been treated as a mere curiosity or artifact, and has been reproduced in facsimile many times, starting with Macmillan in 1886. Now, for the first time, the story is treated on its own merits, and has thereby been typeset and bound in a single volume with a complete set of "commanding... simultaneously charming and bizarre, vintage and modern, American and universal" original drawings by the talented illustrator/former Underground cartoonist Kim Deitch. [quote from Stephanie Lovett] He uses the young Alice Liddell as his "model" throughout. This issue's covers reproduce two of the pieces.

Mark Burstein's introduction discusses not only Carroll's manuscript and tale, but expands on a comparison between the effect her Adventures had on children's literature and those the Underground comix movement had on the present state of civilization. Under Ground, at half the length of Wonderland, preserves more of the freshness and spontaneity of that day on the Isis than its later incarnation, and Deitch's charming pictures add vivid new life to the story.

It is available in several editions: trade paperback ($ 1 8); hardcover ($30); signed and numbered ($60); lettered, in a slipcase, with a small original drawing ($150); also Roman numeralled and packaged with the original art of an illustration from the book ($275-$ 1,050). Word-Play, 1 Sutter Street, San Francisco CA 94104; 415.397.3716; 415.291.8377 fax; www.word-play.com; wordplay@world passage.net.

Hochpeinliche Verhore

Edward D. Hoch, the veteran mystery writer, has collected many years of puzzle stories with some Carrollian overtones in The Velvet Touch (1885941420, $16, Crippen & Landru, www.crippenlandru.com). All fourteen stories feature professional thief Nick Velvet who for a high fee will steal only items of little or no monetary value - such as a single four of spades playing card - or (in one case) nothing at all. In eight stories he competes against or joins forces with Sandra Paris, the "White Queen", thief and mistress of bizarre crimes, who does "Impossible Things Before breakfast". The protagonists must not only perpetrate seemingly impossible thefts, solve murders and outwit each other, but discover why someone would pay dearly to procure something seemingly worthless.

~ Gary Brockman

Everything's got a moral

An article in the New York Times on July 3 rd quotes Richard Robinson, chairman of Scholastic, as saying that the new Harry Potter book "is, in some ways, in the same vein as

a classic like Alice in Wonderland. It's a classic tale of good and evil. It's about children battling for themselves and for good in a world of good and evil."

That itself is rather scary: the chairman of Scholastic either has never read AW or has so little imagination and appreciation for linguistic and moral subtleties that he thinks of it as some kind of video game.

AfterMath

In the second edition of Richard L Epstein, and

Walter A. Carnielli's Comput ability: Computable

Functions, Logic, and the Foundations of Mathematics,

Belmont; Wadsworth, 2000, there is an extensively

annotated timeline that has this entry:

1897: Methods for checking the validity of deductions in

aristotelian logic have become well-known. This year the

English mathematician and author of Alice in Wonderland,

Lewis Carroll, 1832-1898, presents three of them in his

popular text on logic, Symbolic Logic: Euler-Venn

diagrams, Carroll's diagrams and counters, and a method

of subscripts (algebraic).

~ Fran Abeles

Auction Ear

Denis Crutch, bibliographer and author, long-time member of the Lewis Carroll Society (U.K.), sometime Chairman and Editor of Bandersnatch, died last year. His Lewis Carroll collection came up for sale at Bloomsbury Book Auctions, on 15 June 2000. The sale included numerous editions of the Alice books, presentation copies, first editions, early editions, biographies, ephemera and other rarities. 3 & 4 Hardwick Street, London EC1R 4RY, U.K.; www.bloomsbury-book-auct.com; +020.7833.2636. The first TTLG, inscribed to Mary Burnett, sold for £8,625 ($13,000). The catalog for this sale (#374) is available for £10.

All Must Have Prizes

Helen Oxenbury's interpretation of AW has won her The Library Association Kate Greenaway Medal for outstanding illustration in 2000. Oxenbury had previously won the Medal in 1969 for her interpretation of Lear's "The Quangle- Wangle's Hat". Helen lives in North London with her husband John Burningham, another of this country's best-

17

known illustrators, who has himself won the Greenaway Medal twice. This year's ceremony, which took place at Imperial College, London, was part of "Under the Covers", a major conference celebrating children's books and libraries.

HeMypoBa-iana

Janet Jurist has some inexpensive Russian editions from Nina Demurova for sale:

• Hunting of the Snark: a blue "pamphlet", transl. I.Lipkin, ill. L.Zalesskii. Privately printed, 1000 copies by Krug (Moscow, 1993). $15.

• AW & TLG: transl. V.Orel, ill. V.Popova, Iskatel (Moscow, 1998). $25.

• AW & TLG: transl. & afterword by N.Demurova, ill. L.Mistratova, Yantarnyi Skaz (Kaliningrad, 1994). $25.

• AW in English: ill. E.Shukaev, preface by D.Urnov, commentaries by L.Golovchinskaya. Progress, (Moscow, 1979). $30.

• AW: transl. and afterword by N.Demurova, ill. I.Kazakova (Petrozavodsk, 1979). $25

• Nina's miniature Russian translation (KL 63, p. 19) is also still available. $40.

Contact Janet at 510 EM* St., New York NY 10028; janetl24@earthlink.net.

Carrollian Notes

Ravings from the Writing Desk of Stephanie Lovett

You can't talk long about Lewis Carroll or the LCSNA without having to remark on the diverse interests of the people who have Carroll in common. Should you doubt this, please examine the program for our Fall meeting at the University of Texas in Austin, which will offer something for everyone. Every Carrollian should be very pleased at the opportunity to visit the library of the Harry Ransom Humanities Center and to see the items that they will place on exhibit for us. You literary types will be thrilled and maybe a little astonished to learn that our second Stan Marx Memorial Lecturer will be the distinguished poet William Jay Smith. The tech-heads and anyone interested in the mechanics of language will be looking forward to our panel presentation on the achievements of Warren Weaver, whose pioneering years in machine translation may be news to those who know of him as the early bibliographer of foreign-language Alices. Collectors, computer nuts, and everyone who loves the fun side of Carroll will be glad to hear we will be spending some time on the work of Byron

Sewell, and those who are especially interested in the life of Lewis Carroll will not want to miss this opportunity to hear from Edward Wakeling. This alone should be enough to have each and every one of you on the phone getting plane tickets, without my mentioning acquiring keepsakes, seeing your friends and colleagues, and an evening get-together at the Tannenbaums'. Unlike our frequent procedure of beginning our program with lunch, this will be an all-day affair, so be sure to arrive in Austin the day before! You'll be receiving a meeting notice with more details, but plan now on being there. See you first thing on October 28!

Tentative plans for future meetings include New York (the Fales library ofN.Y.U.) on April 21, 2001, with talks by Morton Cohen, Hugues Lebailly of the Sorbonne, and mystery writer Roberta Rogow. Under discussion for the Fall '01 venue are various locations on the West Coast.

Hidden Treasure

An article just hitting the wires from the Press Association service claims "Letters written by children's author Lewis Carroll shortly before his death have been found in a locked journal and are being heralded as an im- portant literary discovery. The five letters, which are more than a century old, were found by archivists working in Alnwick Castle, Northumberland.

The letters, written in 1896 and 1897, were hid- den in a locked journal inside a casket belonging to the sev- enth Duke of Northumberland's mother, Edith. Carroll was a friend and contemporary at Oxford University of Henry George Percy, later the seventh Duke of Northumberland, and one letter is to his young daughter Muriel.

The journal was discovered by the castle's head archivist Colin Shrimpton who had to call in a locksmith to open it before finding the treasure inside.

A spokesman for the twelfth Duke said today: 'They were found in the locked journal which was in the castle archives and had not been opened because we didn't have a key. We think it is quite exciting because the final letter was written so close to his death and was actually signed Lewis Carroll, as opposed to his real name Charles Dodgson.

One of the letters is a reply to a garden party invi- tation. Three others try to persuade Lord Percy and his wife Edith to have a portrait painted of their eighth child, Mary. The final letter, written at Christmas, 1897 to the couple's thirteenth child, Muriel, with which he sent a plum cake is thought to be one of his last as he died shortly afterwards on January 14, 1898, aged 65.

Four of the five letters are signed Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. The final one to Muriel is signed Lewis Carroll.

Mark Richards, chairman of the Lewis Carroll So- ciety (U.K.), said: 'They will help to fill in certain gaps in the jigsaw of his life. He was a very prolific letter writer with some 50,000 or so letters to his name, so these ones are not very rare. What is interesting is that one of them was written so close to his death and it must have been one

18

of the last few he wrote. Also the way in which they were found locked in a journal which had been unopened for so many years is like something out of a Carroll book itself The letters are on display until the end of October at Alnwick Castle as part of an exhibition of children's lit- erature."

Return of the Monster

For those of you wondering about the fate of the model of the title character from Terry Gilliam's film Jabberwocky {KL 61, p.21), it was tracked down by police and returned to John Cleese after finding it in an antique shop in Ful^am, seven months after the theft. A police source said: "How on earth anyone managed to steal it is beyond me. It is very hard to shift and we were surprised anyone would want such an ugly looking thing. It certainly is an acquired taste, but Mr Cleese seems to like it."

Mason Dixon

Jonathan Dixon, whose admirable illustrations are known to us from his Snark (LCSNA, 1992), La Guida di Bragia {KL 61), and this issue (pp. 8-9), has "entered the brave new world of three-dimensional art and done a little clay bust of Lewis Carroll. [7" tall, photo below]. ..Not only does it seem to capture his personality and ineffable existential ambience, it actually looks like him. (Stephanie said it even looks like my drawing style, but I'm not sure what she means by that.) I'm so pleased, in fact, that I recently went to a little metal foundry here to enquire about them doing a set of bronze casts - maybe five or so." Jonathan is looking for a few Carrollians interested in buying the sculptures (at roughly $275) who could provide funding for the casting up front and who would be rewarded with one of the busts in bronze. Contact him: timurlame@yahoo.com or 1 806'/2 Hopi Road, Santa Fe NM 87505. 1 .505.983.5204.

Pun-ishment

The Independent (London), ran a feature called "Creativity" by "Loki" on June 20, 2000. The challenge was as follows:

'"The 'Drawling Master was an old conger eel, who came in once a week and taught us drawling, stretching and fainting in coils.' What other subjects were taught at Lewis Carroll's Mock Turtle's Academy?"

He constructed the following answer (names of submitters removed):

"The Huge- Vanities Department is irresponsible for Anguish Luggage and Lotterytour, including Electrocution, Debasing and Public Spiking; plus Bulletics, Cosyology and Wreckonomics. An in-depth study of Non- Sense and Non-Sensibility is taught by Twaddledee and Twaddledum and probability theory is learned from textbooks published by Random House.

The languidness syllabus includes Flinch, Looting and Rushing. The sighences include Chemisistry (for girls) and Chemikaze (for boys), also known as Fizzics. Students write a final year dissipation on "The Enblightenment", "The Disillusionment of the Monetaries" or "Oliver Crumble and The Desperation of the Manicy".

On Wetday afterspoons, there is Triggernometery, Hysteria and Jogging Free. And on Thirsty yawnings, Dumbest-thick Science or Crookery, including: Taking, Prying, Spoiling and Boasting. And on Afraid days, Engine- hearing, Slychology, Stench, Sermon and Satin, followed by High Tea (including Worm Protesting and Losing the Winter Pet).

The Full-ossify Department announces courses in Scepticism (N.B. this course might not run) and in Free Will {N.B. this course is compulsory). Then there is Joined-Up Whiting, Grin-Doctoring and a PR course including Adverse Tidings and Pubs In The City. Do cannibals study Human- Eaties?"

Report from Abroad

What could be more extraordinary than seven full days of sunshine in London? During these great days my time was filled visiting dear friends, seeing exciting places and hearing enjoyable performances. I spent a lovely afternoon with John and Edna Wilcox-Baker. John sends regards, along with the news that things are finally looking up for the Lewis Carroll Birthplace Trust. We might see him in New York next Spring. Attending the London International Antiquarian Book Fair was a special treat since most of the British and Continental book dealers rarely come to New York. Carroll material was everywhere.

The highlight of my visit was the monthly meeting of the Lewis Carroll Society at Birkbeck College (University of London). It was wonderful to see Carrollian friends whom I have known for many years, including Mark Richards, Edward Wakeling, Selwyn Goodacre, Allen White and Anne Clark Amor. I met new Carrollian friends as well, such as Jenny Woolf, who showed an interest in joining us

19

in Texas, and Caroline Luke [current executrix of the Dodgson estate] and her son William. Caroline is the daughter of Philip Jacques [CLD 's grand-nephew and former executor] and is taking an active part in the Society. Everyone was given a printed program, a great idea which was used successfully at our last Spring meeting in New York. Anne Clark Amor provided new information in her talk on Lewis Carroll's parents and forebears, a subject rarely covered. She discussed influences his parents had on him, which might have been connected with his later accomplishments. Caroline and William Luke assisted Anne by reading letters of Carroll's parents. Edward Wakeling showed slides of photos taken by Lewis Carroll at Daresbury and Selwyn Goodacre displayed some books by Archdeacon Dodgson and other relatives.

After the meeting Mark and Katherine Richards, Edward, Selwyn, Allen White and Anne took me out for a delicious tapas dinner and delightful talk. It was the best of seven white stone days.

~ Janet Jurist

Houle Be the First?

An unusual and truly stunning piece of anamorphic art has been composed by Kelly Houle. As her flyer is enclosed with this issue, I will not go into great length to describe its wonders, but a few highlights must suffice. From a distance, you see a nice lithograph which resembles nothing so much as a Cheshire Cat. Upon closer inspection, it is revealed as a collage of CLD's life and works, including photographs, letters, drawings, and so on. Now: placing it on a horizontal surface and adding the cylindrical mirror, you see a portrait of Dodgson himself reflected in it! Where did that come from?

Anamorphic (from the Greek 'Avapopfywoiq, meaning "formed again") distortions - an art form in use since the Renaissance - are images revealed by reflection in a curved mirror. In this day and age they are usually com- puter-created; Houle has miraculously produced this remarkable effect entirely by hand!

Martin Gardner wrote to her "I certainly have never seen or heard of an anamorphic picture based on a collage, and how you managed it beats me. It is now hanging on a wall with your descriptive sheet and letter on the back."

This image is available as a lithograph (mirror included) or as a hand-cut jigsaw puzzle. A visit to www.kelly houle.com reveals other, more conventional anamorphic images for sale, such as "The Golden Afternoon".

Highly recommended!

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Confessions of an eGroup Groupie

Be sure to join the wondrously informative and exciting Lewis Carroll eGroup at www. eGroups.com. It is a forum for lively online discussions, queries, and all sorts of dialog regarding Carroll, his life and work. No cost, and it's a fine way to participate in (or just observe) heated debate between scholars like Hugues Lebailly, Mike and Karoline Leach, Kate Lyon, John Tufail, and many others. A random sampling of recent threads include:

• Carroll's "Stolen Waters" and its connections to Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"

• The resemblance between one of the characters of George Macdonald's Lilith and CLD

• CLD's attitude about hell and eternal punishment

• How photographs are best displayed and reproduced - cropped as the artist intended or full-frame?

• Interpreting the photograph of "Alice Liddell in profile"

• The "Lord Newry business"

• Graphology (handwriting analysis)

Keeping current by reading it daily ("view by date") is an excellent endeavor; contrariwise, looking at the discussions "by thread" will give you insight into the enormous range of subjects which have been examined.

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Books

AW - A Classic Illustrated Edition from Chronicle Books "is brought to life by a wondrous collection of vintage illustrations gathered from the late 1 9th and early 20th century editions collected and edited by Cooper Edens". $20. 0811822745.

A new edition of The Hunting of the Snark illustrated by Mervyn Peake has been published by Methuen ($24). It includes new supplementary material, such as preparatory drawings. 0413743802. Available in U.K. count- ries and online.

Humpty Dumpty, written and illustrated by Daniel Kirk, Putnam's Sons, $16, (ages 4 to 8) - a retelling of the legend featuring a puzzle-mad boy king. 0399233326.

Humpty Dumpty by Kin Eagle, Rob Gilbert (illustrator), $16, (ages 4 to 8), Charlesbridge Publishing; 15808901 99.

Sex and Business: Ethics of Sexuality in Business and the Workplace by Shere Hite, Financial Times/Prentice Hall. $23, 0273641980. "Her central thesis seems to be that men and women experience so many problems working together because there are too few models of healthy male-female interactions in our non working lives. Hite's solution to this mindset, the adoption of a new female role model - that of Alice (as in Wonderland) - is equally bizarre."

Language Through the Looking Glass: Exploring Language and Linguistics by Marina Yaguello, Oxford 1998. 0198700059. Excellent and readable introduction, using many Carrollian examples.

The Problem of the Evil Editor is the third of Roberta Rogow's mysteries featuring a fictionalized Conan Doyle and C.L.Dodgson. Oscar Wilde plays a prominent role in this tale of murder and mayhem. St. Martin's Minotaur, $24, 0312209037. [Some title!]

Gorregpondcnfe

Zwerger's illustrated AW in French by Ed. Nord-Sud; Oxenbury's in French by Flammarion, in Dutch by Uitgave Gottmer.

"Why sex is humanity's best strategy for outwitting its constantly mutating internal predators, and answers to dozens of other riddles of human nature and culture" is the theme of The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Hu- man Nature by Matt Ridley ($15), Penguin, 1995, 0140245480. The title refers to the oft-quoted remark about running.

Performances Noted

"The Bellman's Song" by Theater Gallery, a "dance-theater rendition" of HS, Sept.'99, Minneapolis MN; AW, a musical-theater production by the American Family Theater, at the TriBeCa Performing Arts Center in New York in May; a workshop staging of "Looking-Glass", a play by Gary Jarvis which "looks back to the day eccentric professor Lewis Carroll met Alice Liddell" at the New Play Festival in Vancouver in May; A W by City Lit Theater in Chicago IL in May "Alice Through the Looking Glass" by Ballet Theater of Lancaster PA June 2-4; AW by McLean School of Ballet and Jazz, music of Dmitri Shostakovich, June 3, Annandale VA.

A multimedia "Alice@wonder.com" by the Piwacket Theatre for Children premiered the week of July 9 - 16, at the St. Louis (MO) Art Museum. "Lost in cyberspace, she encounters a host of offbeat characters, including the search engines Tweedledum and Tweedledee, a (computer) mouse-cww- Dormouse, a Caterpillar who's just a big worm (a type of computer virus) and a time-conscious White Rabbit who carries, instead of a pocket watch, an hourglass computer icon. His prop inspires a big musical number, "Waiting for the Download".

Trey Mclntyre's "Aliss in Wonderland", a "story ballet" of Alice coming to America through a big-screen TV, set to an eclectic score. A co-production of three companies, it premiered with Fort Worth / Dallas Ballet in November '99, and played at the Nashville Ballet in April '00 and then in Portland OR in June for their "American Choreo- graphers' Showcase", an annual Oregon Ballet Theatre presentation.

Hamlet by the California Shakespeare Festival (Orinda, CA, in July) costumed Ophelia as Alice, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as the Tweeedle brothers, and the Ghost as the White Knight. No one has come up with any rational explanation for this.

Exhibitions

"Curiouser and Curiouser" displays the fantastic Neutrogena Collection of textiles using an AW theme. Museum of International Folk Art (Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe), June 12 through 2001. http://www.state.nm.us/ moifa/.

"Alice Was Relieved that the Obnox- ious March Hare had Left the Party for a Few Moments Because He Was Really Getting on Her Nerves", a miniature tea-party scene by Pat Broadwin, as part of the Palo Alto (CA) Art Center's "Kids' Lit 1-0- Wonder" exhibition in June and July.

"For Children Only - Alice: Recent Paintings and Objects by DeLoss McGraw", 6 May - 21 June at the William D. Cannon Art Gallery in Carlsbad CA. Mr. McGraw in his own words "paints like a failed fifth grader" and his faux-naif renderings in opaque watercolors are questionable at best. Apparently Harper Collins is threat- ening to publish an AW with his illustrations next spring. Catalog ($15) is available from the Gallery: 1775 Dove Lane, Carlsbad CA 920098; 760.602.2021.

A corner of Wonderland was on display as part of the second annual Freehold (NJ) Garden Tour" on Sunday, June 27.

21

Media

A video of the 1983 Broadway revival of the 1932 Eva Le Gallienne / Florida Friebus AW, broadcast on PBS as part of their "Great Performances" series, and starring Richard Burton, Maureen Stapleton, Colleen Dewhurst, Donald O'Connor, Kate Burton, Nathan Lane, and Fritz Weaver: $30 from The Broadway Theatre Archive, http:// www.broadwayarchive.com/ new_title_detail.cfm?title=9; broad wayarchive@ordering.com; P.O.Box 2284, South Burlington VT 05407; 800.422.2827.

Henry Czerny and Kiefer Sutherland starred in a made-for-TV movie "After Alice", which played on HBO May 12th. Sutherland played an alcoholic cop who, after a fall, develops psychic powers and hunts a killer called the Jabberwock who has an "Alice in Wonderland" obsession.

The Disney A W, previously available on tape and laserdisc, made its DVD debut the week of 23 June.

Online

Our Lewis Carroll Home Page has been awarded a Five Star rating by Schoolzone and their "panel of over 400 expert teachers".

CCBC-Net is an electronic forum of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to "encourage awareness and discussion of issues essential to literature for children". In October 2000, our own Monica Edinger, will lead a discussion and will share her experiences with Alice in the classroom, http://www. education.wisc.edu/ccbc/listserv. htm

The ever-prolific Joyce Carol Oates' 1993 essay on teratology, originally printed in The Ontario Review, entitled "Reflections on the Grotesque" and discussing TTLG is available at http:// storm.usfca.edu/~southerr/grotesque. html.

FeverTV, an on-line interactive program from Australia, includes an animated series based on AW which is played on a weekly basis, www.fevertv.com. The pages of the English-language journal "Lewis Carroll Studies" published by the Lewis Carroll Society

of Japan are online at http://hosoi05. is.noda.sut.ac.jp/LCS/. Each paper includes a summary in Japanese at the end. Downloading the free Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.05+ will enable you to see the Japanese - but download it from Adobe: (http://www.adobe.com/ products/acrobat/support, htm 1# download), not the button on the Japan- ese site).

The company publishing the "dynamic text" version of Alice, an online teaching aid with animations and music (AX 59, p.20) is now called "Giraffics Multimedia", but still resides at www.megabrands.com/alice. The "Secrets of Lewis Carroll" section leads to such articles as "Lewis Carroll and Relativity" by John Tufail, which discusses Carroll's prescient foreshadowing in Sylvie and Bruno of Einstein's gravitational gedanken- experiment.

"Secrecy and Autonomy in Lewis Carroll" by Susan Scherer at http:// www.press.jhu.edu/demo/philosophy_ and_literature/20. 1 sherer.html

"To Stop a Bandersnatch", Mark Burst- er's college-days' ramble through the Alician academic fields, has been dandified and lightly revised: http:// www.lewiscarroll.org/bander.htm.

The search engine google (www. google.com) featured a quiz, of which the first category is "World Wide Wonderland" with Carrollian quest- ions. By the way, websters, this is the next generation of search engines and is several orders of magnitude above all the others!!

A new edition of "American McGee's Alice", an action game from Electronic Arts, will be released this Fall for use with the Quake III engine, according to articles in PC Gamer, July 2000 and The Times (London) August 5. "The no- longer sweet Alice wields a big knife, and Wonderland is a haunted hellhole." "Music" by Chris Vrenna, the ex- drummer of the band "Nine Inch Nails". Keep up with their progress at www.alice.ea.com/index_alice.html.

Articles

"Flora V. Livingston: Curator, Biblio- grapher ... Lewis Carroll Enthusiast"

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by August Imholtz in the Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol. 9 No. 4, Winter 1998.

"Feeling Flimsy and Miserable" by Joe Christopher in Mythprint: The Bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society Vol.37 No. 7, July '00 discusses neologisms from "Jabberwocky".

"Off the wall: His Studio Is Straight From Alice In Wonderland" June 15, 2000 in The Guardian (London) reports on the strange life of artist Peter Blake, who's most famous for the "Sergeant Pepper" cover (featuring CLD), and who keeps a Carroll collection at his home in Chiswick.

"Sinclair Lewis and Lewis Carroll" by Martin Bucco. The Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol.8 No.l, Fall 1999.

"T am the walrus' in Aramaic" by Ariel Sabar, Providence Journal/Bulletin, 12 May and widely reproduced on the Web describes the tribulations of his father, a Near Eastern languages specialist, who was hired by the "X- files" TV show to impersonate the voice of the Divine, speaking in Aramaic. The producers, figuring it would be amusing to have one over on the viewers, had him speak the words "I am the walrus" (which John Lennon maintained was based on the Carroll poem - see "Serendipity" in KL 51). Since "walruses are not native to the flatlands on Zakho" he had to improvise a term and thus spake "I am the dog of the sea."

"A plenum of palindromes for Lewis Carroll" by Roy A. Sorenson, Mind! v. 109 supplement, Jan 2000. The author creates "BIGBOB", an esoteric, palindromic, but presumably linguis- tically navigable nonsense "poem," consisting of a huge matrix with the word BOB in each cell.

"Philadelphia: Please Touch Museum lets children have fun while learning" by Terry Conway in The Baltimore Sun, 06/20/1999. "The Please Touch Museum is the great-granddaddy of the region's children's museums, designed for kids ages 1 to 7." See KL 63, p. 14.

Oconomowoc native Roxanne Westphal was selected as this year's

"Alice in Dairyland" according to the Cheese Register, 9 June.

A review of Karoline Leach's In the Shadow of the Dreamchild by August Imholtz in The Virginia Quarterly Review Vol. 76 No. 3, Summer, 2000.

A letter from Hal Varian in the New York Times on 15 June bemoans the number of Frenchmen "walking down the Champs-Elysee while carrying on telephone conversations" and reports that the French call this behavior "jabber-waiky".

A review of Vini-der-Pu (Winnie-the- Pooh in Yiddish), translated by Leonard Wolf, in the New York Times on 29 July mentions the tantalizing possibility of his similarly translating AW.

Talks

At MATH 2000, a four-day meeting (10-13 June 2000 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario) of all the Canadian mathematical societies, Fran Abeles gave a well-received paper entitled "Game Theory and Politics: A Note on C.L. Dodgson".

In "The Horticulturist's Alice: A Gar- den Tour of Wonderland" - a talk with slides and music describing the flora and fauna with excursions into the culture of the Victorian garden - Bob Hornback, splendidly bedecked in 19th- c. tails and an "I Love Lew C" button, expanded his thoughts, at the Strybing Arboretum on 26 July. He has also presented this to the West Coast Chapter of the LCSNA (1987), the LCSNA (1988) and it was published in the Fall 1983 issue of Pacific Horti- culture.

A panel discussion called "From Grimm Beginnings" at The Oz Centen- nial Convention, sponsored by The International Wizard of Oz Club (www.ozclub.org) and held July 20 - 23 at Indiana University in Bloomington, dealt with the literary influence of the Alice books and others on the creation of Oz. Panelists were Alison Lurie, Joel Chaston, and Jan Susina.

Things

A few things Janet Jurist recently reports purchasing on a spree in the Morgan Library gift shop (in New York or www.morganlibrary.org): "You are

Nothing But a Pack of Cards" flipbook, published by B. Shackman & Co., $3; Dover "AW Sticker Activity Book", $1 (wherein the March Hare is "tardy" and the mouse is identified as a "dor- mouse"); "AW Story Stickers" which has pictures and words that can be used separately or together, by Peaceable Kingdom Press, $3.50.

A great source of classic Disney Alice pieces, dolls, and so on is the Duirwaigh Gallery in Deleon Springs FL. http://www.duirwaighgallery.com/ DisneyGallery/Alice; Duirwaigh Gal- lery@aol.com; 904.985.2478.

The Pewter Gallery has some very offbeat Alice figurines ($11 - $18). http://www.myshoppingplace.com/ store419/mall/web_store.cgi and scroll down the left window to the A W section. 408.259.5952

"Toy Vault" has produced a cold cast resin box set containing: Alice (w/ Flamingo and Hedgehog), Humpty Dumpty, The Mad Hatter, and the Caterpillar (w/Hookah pipe and Mushroom). $30 from http://store. yahoo.com/toyvault/througlookgl 1 . html

"Shaped CDs" for children include a 31-minute AW "audio storybook". #CEAD012 from MRK Marketing, 416.640.5165. www.mrkmarketing. com. They will direct you to a retailer.

"If you are already sick of the millen- nium and more than ready for the acid crawlback, call Old Glory Distributing at 800.892.3323 for a full color jacquard blanket woven with the LP cover art for Sgt. Pepper featuring CLD, or perhaps a black light Tenniel poster is more your thing, and don't forget T-shirts: a glow-in-the-dark Cheshire Cat, resplendent tie-dyes with the caterpillar on one side and the tea party on the other, and other Wonderland designs." ~ Cindy. Or go to www.oldglory.com and enter the keyword "Wonderland".

Clay sculptor Dave Kellum, who lives in Tampa, FL, is producing a series of 12 functional sculptures (14" - 20" tall) based on Tenniel. The first piece, "Pig Baby", is a lamp; the second will be a "Pool of Tears" fountain. Event-

ually they will be for sale. See http:// www.powow.com/kellum/index.htm; canceramic@yahoo.com

Need outdoor outfitting? Try www. alices-wonderland.com.

Bud Plant 's Incredible Catalog is a treasure-trove of materials relating to the art of illustration. Such titles as The Collectible World of Mabel Lucie Atwell; Sir John Tenniel: Aspects of His Work; and an AW illustrated by Rene Cloke are to be found among books on the Pre-Raphaelites, Disney, comics, and adult "glamour" titles. If you don't own a copy of Wally Wood's playfully erotic "Malice in Wonder- land" comic it's reprinted in the book Naughty "Knotty" Wood; Mad Maga- zine's satire in Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad #6. Go to www. budplant.com or request a catalog from Bud Plant Comic Art, PO Box 1689; Grass Valley, CA 95945; 800.242. 6642.

An elegant collection of Candle Crowns™ sculpted in England by the Bronte Porcelain Company, is available from the Horchow Collection catalog. There are six Wonderland figures in this set of hand-painted candle snuffers and a lovely wooden spiral staircase made for their display. The figures are available individually ($35-40) or as a set (230); the staircase is $100. P.O.Box 620048, Dallas TX 75262; 800.456.7000.

Hand-cranked musical boxes from Sankyo ($18) are still available - the porcelain figurines, musical shadow boxes, kaleidoscopes, and so on are now discontinued. To find a local retailer, call TMC Designs in Gardena, CA at 310.516.7255.

Books on tape: "Cats: 15 Complete Stories And Poems", read by Liza Goddard and Richard Griffiths, Audio Partners, 3 hours (unabridged), $18, a collection which includes two scenes (but no segue) from A W involving the Cheshire Cat.

A beautiful-looking "celestial globe" is in progress from Greaves & Thomas of the U.K., using Tenniel drawings as the constellations: Alice (Virgo), Tweedledum and -dee (Gemini), the

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lion (Leo), a mock turtle (Taurus), and so on. Three sizes: 33" diameter on an elaborate stand where the three card gardeners will support the horizon ring; 16" diameter balanced on the end of

Father William's nose; and a 7.5" diameter paper version. Watch http:// www.greavesandthomas.co.uk/ facsimile/globealice.html or contact

them: jamesbt@greavesandthomas. co.uk; P.O. Box 190, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 4ER, England; +44 (0)208 392 6969.

Kim Deitch, from Alice's Adventures under Ground, Word-Play Publications, 2000.

See p. 1 7 for a full description.

For help in preparing this issue thanks are due to Fran Abeles, Earl Abbe, Ruth Berman, Gary Brockman, Sandor Burstein, Matt Demakos, Llisa Demetrios Burstein, Angelica Carpenter, Johanna Hurwitz, August Imholtz, Clare Imholtz, Janet Jurist, Chloe Nichols, Sandra Parker, Lucille Posner, Bea Sidaway, Stephanie Lovett, Alan Tannenbaum, Cindy Watter and Alan White.

Knight Letter is the official newsletter of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. It is published several times a year and is distributed free to all members. Subscriptions, business correspondence, and inquiries should be addressed to the Secretary, 18 Fitzharding Place, Owing Mills MD 21117. Annual membership dues are U.S. $20 (regular) and $50 (sustaining). Submissions and editorial correspondence should be sent to the Editor, Box 2006, Mill Valley CA 94942.

President: Stephanie Lovett, StephStoff@aol.com Secretary: Ellie Luchinsky, eluchin@erols.com

Editor: Mark Burstein, wrabbit@worldpassage.net Lewis Carroll Society of North America Home Page: http://www.lewiscarroll.org/

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