Monday, 8 February 2021

Signed Books: ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND by Lewis Carroll

I know a great many Carrollians with very fine collections – the finest there are! – so I hesitate to show this copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from my bookshelves...

It is not, I fear, at all prepossessing: being rather battered and dog-eared with a repaired spine; nor is it a particularly early edition (a copy from Twenty-First Thousand printing, dated 1870, five years after the book’s first publication) but it does have one redeeming feature in that it is inscribed and signed by –– the Author...

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (otherwise known as ‘Lewis Carroll’) collected child-friends the way other Victorians collected butterflies and, since any collection (whether of butterflies or children) deserves to be accurately labelled with name-and-date-of-capture, I can share with you at least some information about the identity of the young dedicatee of this copy.

I am helped by consulting Mr Dodgson’s Diaries (as edited by Edward Wakeling and published by The Lewis Carroll Society) which contains the following detail from his entry for 10 October 1870:

Oct: 10. (M). At Guildford … At Margate I made many very pleasant acquaintances, chiefly on account of being attracted by their children: very few turned out to be above the commercial class, the one drawback of Margate society. Among the younger of my friends were Clara and Alice Maud Bristed (children of the chemist), Alice, Florence, and Constance Arnot (from Thurloe Square), Ada, Sophie and Daisy Butler, (address unknown), and Catherina, Frederika and Florence, children of a Mr. Bremer of Tulse Hill (near Herne Hill)…

The editor notes: ‘The Arnot family are not identified, nor are the Butler family, but an inscribed copy of Alice presented to Ada Chambers Butler survives (Sibley Collection).’

‘Sibley Collection’! As Humpty Dumpty remarked: “There’s glory for you!”

Mind you, I can't help wondering what little Ada thought when she read in Chapter II of Alice's Adventures, the passage where Alice, trapped in the long hall of many locked doors, speculates on whether she might have been changed into another child of her acquaintance...