The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

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And, where great Plato paced serene,
Or Newton paused with wistful eye,
Rush to the chase with hoofs unclean
And Babel-clamour of the stye!

Be yours the pay: be theirs the praise:
We will not rob them of their due,
Nor vex the ghosts of other days
By naming them along with you.

They sought and found undying fame:
They toiled not for reward nor thanks:
Their cheeks are hot with honest shame
For you, the modern mountebanks!

"For auld lang syne" the author sent a copy of his book to Mrs.
Hargreaves (Miss Alice Liddell), accompanied by a short note.

Christ Church, _December_ 21, 1883.

Dear Mrs. Hargreaves,--Perhaps the shortest day in the year
is not _quite_ the most appropriate time for recalling the
long dreamy summer afternoons of ancient times; but anyhow
if this book gives you half as much pleasure to receive as
it does me to send, it will be a success indeed.

Wishing you all happiness at this happy season, I am,

Sincerely yours,

C. L. Dodgson.

The beginning of 1884 was chiefly occupied in Common Room business.
The Curatorship seems to have been anything but a sinecure. Besides
weightier responsibilities, it involved the care of the Common Room
Cat! In this case the "care" ultimately killed the cat--but not until
it had passed the span of life usually allotted to those animals, and
beyond which their further existence is equally a nuisance to
themselves and to every one else. As to the best way of "terminating
its sublunary existence," Mr. Dodgson consulted two surgeons, one of
whom was Sir James Paget. I do not know what method was finally
adopted, but I am sure it was one that gave no pain to pussy's nerves,
and as little as possible to her feelings.

On March 11th there was a debate in Congregation on the proposed
admission of women to some of the Honour Schools at Oxford. This was
one of the many subjects on which Mr. Dodgson wrote a pamphlet. During
the debate he made one of his few speeches, and argued strongly
against the proposal, on the score of the injury to health which it
would inflict upon the girl-undergraduates.

Later in the month he and the Rev. E.F. Sampson, Tutor of Christ
Church, paid a visit to Jersey, seeing various friends, notably the
Rev. F.H. Atkinson, an old College friend of Mr. Dodgson's, who had
helped him when he was editor of _College Rhymes_. I quote a few
lines from a letter of his to Mr. Atkinson, as showing his views on
matrimony:--

So you have been for twelve years a married man, while I am
still a lonely old bachelor! And mean to keep so, for the
matter of that. College life is by no means unmixed misery,
though married life has no doubt many charms to which I am a
stranger.

A note in his Diary on May 5th shows one of the changes in his way of
life which advancing years forced him to make:--

Wrote to -- (who had invited me to dine) to beg off, on the
ground that, in my old age, I find dinner parties more and
more fatiguing. This is quite a new departure. I much grudge
giving an evening (even if it were not tiring) to bandying
small-talk with dull people.

The next extract I give does not look much like old age!

I called on Mrs. M--. She was out; and only one maid in,
who, having come to the gate to answer the bell, found the
door blown shut on her return. The poor thing seemed really
alarmed and distressed. However, I got a man to come from a
neighbouring yard with a ladder, and got in at the
drawing-room window--a novel way of entering a friend's
house!

Oddly enough, almost exactly the same thing happened to him in 1888:
"The door blew shut, with the maid outside, and no one in the house. I
got the cook of the next house to let me go through their premises,
and with the help of a pair of steps got over the wall between the two
back-yards."

In July there appeared an article in the _St. James's Gazette_ on
the subject of "Parliamentary Elections," written by Mr. Dodgson. It
was a subject in which he was much interested, and a few years before
he had contributed a long letter on the "Purity of Elections" to the
same newspaper. I wish I had space to give both in full; as things
are, a summary and a few extracts are all I dare attempt. The writer
held that there are a great number of voters, and _pari passu_ a
great number of constituencies, that like to be on the winning side,
and whose votes are chiefly influenced by that consideration. The
ballot-box has made it practically impossible for the individual voter
to know which is going to be the winning side, but after the first few
days of a general election, one side or the other has generally got a
more or less decided advantage, and a weak-kneed constituency is
sorely tempted to swell the tide of victory.

But this is not all. The evil extends further than to the
single constituency; nay, it extends further than to a
single general election; it constitutes a feature in our
national history; it is darkly ominous for the future of
England. So long as general elections are conducted as at
present we shall be liable to oscillations of political
power, like those of 1874 and 1880, but of ever-increasing
violence--one Parliament wholly at the mercy of one
political party, the next wholly at the mercy of the
other--while the Government of the hour, joyfully hastening
to undo all that its predecessors have done, will wield a
majority so immense that the fate of every question will be
foredoomed, and debate will be a farce; in one word, we
shall be a nation living from hand to mouth, and with no
settled principle--an army, whose only marching orders will
be "Right about face!"

His remedy was that the result of each single election should be kept
secret till the general election is over:--

It surely would involve no practical difficulty to provide
that the boxes of voting papers should be sealed up by a
Government official and placed in such custody as would make
it impossible to tamper with them; and that when the last
election had been held they should be opened, the votes
counted, and the results announced.

The article on "Parliamentary Elections" proposed much more sweeping
alterations. The opening paragraph will show its general purport:--

The question, how to arrange our constituencies and conduct
our Parliamentary elections so as to make the House of
Commons, as far as possible, a true index of the state of
opinion in the nation it professes to represent, is surely
equal in importance to any that the present generation has
had to settle. And the leap in the dark, which we seem about
to take in a sudden and vast extension of the franchise,
would be robbed of half its terrors could we feel assured
that each political party will be duly represented in the
next Parliament, so that every side of a question will get a
fair hearing.

The axioms on which his scheme was based were as follows:--

(1) That each Member of Parliament should represent
approximately the same number of electors.

(2) That the minority of the two parties into which, broadly
speaking, each district may be divided, should be adequately
represented.

(3) That the waste of votes, caused by accidentally giving
one candidate more than he needs and leaving another of the
same party with less than he needs, should be, if possible,
avoided.

(4) That the process of marking a ballot-paper should be
reduced to the utmost possible simplicity, to meet the case
of voters of the very narrowest mental calibre.

(5) That the process of counting votes should be as simple
as possible.

Then came a precise proposal. I do not pause to compare it in detail
with the suggestions of Mr. Hare, Mr. Courtney, and others:--

I proceed to give a summary of rules for the method I
propose. Form districts which shall return three, four, or
more Members, in proportion to their size. Let each elector
vote for one candidate only. When the poll is closed, divide
the total number of votes by the number of Members to be
returned _plus_ one, and take the next greater integer as
"quota." Let the returning officer publish the list of
candidates, with the votes given for each, and declare as
"returned" each that has obtained the quota. If there are
still Members to return, let him name a time when all the
candidates shall appear before him; and each returned Member
may then formally assign his surplus votes to whomsoever of
the other candidates he will, while the other candidates may
in like manner assign their votes to one another.

This method would enable each of the two parties in a
district to return as many Members as it could muster
"quotas," no matter how the votes were distributed. If, for
example, 10,000 were the quota, and the "reds" mustered
30,000 votes, they could return three Members; for, suppose
they had four candidates, and that A had 22,000 votes, B
4,000, C 3,000, D 1,000, A would simply have to assign 6,000
votes to B and 6,000 to C; while D, being hopeless of
success, would naturally let C have his 1,000 also. There
would be no risk of a seat being left vacant through two
candidates of the same party sharing a quota between
them--an unwritten law would soon come to be
recognised--that the one with fewest votes should give place
to the other. And, with candidates of two opposite parties,
this difficulty could not arise at all; one or the other
could always be returned by the surplus votes of his party.

Some notes from the Diary for March, 1885, are worth reproducing
here:--

_March_ 1_st_.--Sent off two letters of literary
importance, one to Mrs. Hargreaves, to ask her consent to my
publishing the original MS. of "Alice" in facsimile (the
idea occurred to me the other day); the other to Mr. H.
Furniss, a very clever illustrator in _Punch_, asking
if he is open to proposals to draw pictures for me.

The letter to Mrs. Hargreaves, which, it will be noticed, was earlier
in date than the short note already quoted in this chapter, ran as
follows:--

My Dear Mrs. Hargreaves,--I fancy this will come to you
almost like a voice from the dead, after so many years of
silence, and yet those years have made no difference that I
can perceive in _my_ clearness of memory of the days when we
_did_ correspond. I am getting to feel what an old man's
failing memory is as to recent events and new friends, (for
instance, I made friends, only a few weeks ago, with a very
nice little maid of about twelve, and had a walk with
her--and now I can't recall either of her names!), but my
mental picture is as vivid as ever of one who was, through
so many years, my ideal child-friend. I have had scores of
child-friends since your time, but they have been quite a
different thing.

However, I did not begin this letter to say all _that_. What
I want to ask is, Would you have any objection to the
original MS. book of "Alice's Adventures" (which I suppose
you still possess) being published in facsimile? The idea of
doing so occurred to me only the other day. If, on
consideration, you come to the conclusion that you would
rather _not_ have it done, there is an end of the matter.
If, however, you give a favourable reply, I would be much
obliged if you would lend it me (registered post, I should
think, would be safest) that I may consider the
possibilities. I have not seen it for about twenty years, so
am by no means sure that the illustrations may not prove to
be so awfully bad that to reproduce them would be absurd.

There can be no doubt that I should incur the charge of
gross egoism in publishing it. But I don't care for that in
the least, knowing that I have no such motive; only I think,
considering the extraordinary popularity the books have had
(we have sold more than 120,000 of the two), there must be
many who would like to see the original form.

Always your friend,

C.L. Dodgson.

The letter to Harry Furniss elicited a most satisfactory reply. Mr.
Furniss said that he had long wished to illustrate one of Lewis
Carroll's books, and that he was quite prepared to undertake the work
("Sylvie and Bruno").

[Illustration: H. Furniss. _From a photograph_.]

Two more notes from the Diary, referring to the same month follow:--

_March 10th_.--A great Convocation assembled in the
theatre, about a proposed grant for Physiology, opposed by
many (I was one) who wish restrictions to be enacted as to
the practice of vivisection for research. Liddon made an
excellent speech against the grant, but it was carried by
412 to 244.

_March 29th_.--Never before have I had so many literary
projects on hand at once. For curiosity, I will here make a
list of them.

(1) Supplement to "Euclid and Modern Rivals."

(2) 2nd Edition of "Euc. and Mod. Rivals."

(3) A book of Math. curiosities, which I think of calling
"Pillow Problems, and other Math. Trifles." This will
contain Problems worked out in the dark, Logarithms without
Tables, Sines and angles do., a paper I am now writing on
"Infinities and Infinitesimals," condensed Long
Multiplication, and perhaps others.

(4) Euclid V.

(5) "Plain Facts for Circle-Squarers," which is nearly
complete, and gives actual proof of limits 3.14158, 3.14160.

(6) A symbolical Logic, treated by my algebraic method.

(7) "A Tangled Tale."

(8) A collection of Games and Puzzles of my devising, with
fairy pictures by Miss E.G. Thomson. This might also contain
my "Mem. Tech." for dates; my "Cipher-writing" scheme for
Letter-registration, &c., &c.

(9) Nursery Alice.

(10) Serious poems in "Phantasmagoria."

(11) "Alice's Adventures Underground."

(12) "Girl's Own Shakespeare." I have begun on "Tempest."

(13) New edition of "Parliamentary Representation."

(14) New edition of Euc. I., II.

(15) The new child's book, which Mr. Furniss is to
illustrate. I have settled on no name as yet, but it will
perhaps be "Sylvie and Bruno."

I have other shadowy ideas, _e.g._, a Geometry for
Boys, a vol. of Essays on theological points freely and
plainly treated, and a drama on "Alice" (for which Mr.
Mackenzie would write music): but the above is a fair
example of "too many irons in the fire!"

A letter written about this time to his friend, Miss Edith Rix, gives
some very good hints about how to work, all the more valuable because
he had himself successfully carried them out. The first hint was as
follows:--

When you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to
understand a thing, and still feel puzzled by it,
_stop_, you will only hurt yourself by going on. Put it
aside till the next morning; and if _then_ you can't
make it out, and have no one to explain it to you, put it
aside entirely, and go back to that part of the subject
which you _do_ understand. When I was reading
Mathematics for University honours, I would sometimes, after
working a week or two at some new book, and mastering ten or
twenty pages, get into a hopeless muddle, and find it just
as bad the next morning. My rule was _to begin the book
again_. And perhaps in another fortnight I had come to
the old difficulty with impetus enough to get over it. Or
perhaps not. I have several books that I have begun over and
over again.

My second hint shall be--Never leave an unsolved difficulty
_behind_. I mean, don't go any further in that book
till the difficulty is conquered. In this point, Mathematics
differs entirely from most other subjects. Suppose you are
reading an Italian book, and come to a hopelessly obscure
sentence--don't waste too much time on it, skip it, and go
on; you will do very well without it. But if you skip a
_mathematical_ difficulty, it is sure to crop up again:
you will find some other proof depending on it, and you will
only get deeper and deeper into the mud.

My third hint is, only go on working so long as the brain is
_quite_ clear. The moment you feel the ideas getting
confused leave off and rest, or your penalty will be that
you will never learn Mathematics _at all_!

Two more letters to the same friend are, I think, deserving of a place
here:--

Eastbourne, _Sept_. 25, 1885.

My dear Edith,--One subject you touch on--"the Resurrection
of the Body"--is very interesting to me, and I have given it
much thought (I mean long ago). _My_ conclusion was to
give up the _literal_ meaning of the _material_
body altogether. _Identity_, in some mysterious way,
there evidently is; but there is no resisting the scientific
fact that the actual _material_ usable for
_physical_ bodies has been used over and over again--so
that each atom would have several owners. The mere solitary
fact of the existence of _cannibalism_ is to my mind a
sufficient _reductio ad absurdum_ of the theory that
the particular set of atoms I shall happen to own at death
(changed every seven years, they say) will be mine in the
next life--and all the other insuperable difficulties (such
as people born with bodily defects) are swept away at once
if we accept S. Paul's "spiritual body," and his simile of
the grain of corn. I have read very little of "Sartor
Resartus," and don't know the passage you quote: but I
accept the idea of the material body being the "dress" of
the spiritual--a dress needed for material life.

Ch. Ch., _Dec_. 13, 1885.

Dear Edith,--I have been a severe sufferer from
_Logical_ puzzles of late. I got into a regular tangle
about the "import of propositions," as the ordinary logical
books declare that "all _x_ is _z_" doesn't even
_hint_ that any _x_'s exist, but merely that the
qualities are so inseparable that, if ever _x_ occurs,
_z_ must occur also. As to "some _x_ is _z_"
they are discreetly silent; and the living authorities I
have appealed to, including our Professor of Logic, take
opposite sides! Some say it means that the qualities are so
connected that, if any _x_'s _did_ exist, some
_must_ be _z_--others that it only means
compatibility, _i.e.,_ that some _might_ be
_z_, and they would go on asserting, with perfect
belief in their truthfulness, "some boots are made of
brass," even if they had all the boots in the world before
them, and knew that _none_ were so made, merely because
there is no inherent impossibility in making boots of brass!
Isn't it bewildering? I shall have to mention all this in my
great work on Logic--but _I_ shall take the line "any
writer may mean exactly what he pleases by a phrase so long
as he explains it beforehand." But I shall not venture to
assert "some boots are made of brass" till I have found a
pair! The Professor of Logic came over one day to talk about
it, and we had a long and exciting argument, the result of
which was "_x -x_"--a magnitude which you will be able
to evaluate for yourself.

C. L. Dodgson.

As an example of the good advice Mr. Dodgson used to give his young
friends, the following letter to Miss Isabel Standen will serve
excellently:--

Eastbourne, _Aug_. 4, 1885.

I can quite understand, and much sympathise with, what you
say of your feeling lonely, and not what you can honestly
call "happy." Now I am going to give you a bit of philosophy
about that--my own experience is, that _every_ new form
of life we try is, just at first, irksome rather than
pleasant. My first day or two at the sea is a little
depressing; I miss the Christ Church interests, and haven't
taken up the threads of interest here; and, just in the same
way, my first day or two, when I get back to Christ Church,
I miss the seaside pleasures, and feel with unusual
clearness the bothers of business-routine. In all such
cases, the true philosophy, I believe, is "_wait_ a
bit." Our mental nerves seem to be so adjusted that we feel
_first_ and most keenly, the _dis_-comforts of any
new form of life; but, after a bit, we get used to them, and
cease to notice them; and _then_ we have time to
realise the enjoyable features, which at first we were too
much worried to be conscious of.

Suppose you hurt your arm, and had to wear it in a sling for
a month. For the first two or three days the discomfort of
the bandage, the pressure of the sling on the neck and
shoulder, the being unable to use the arm, would be a
constant worry. You would feel as if all comfort in life
were gone; after a couple of days you would be used to the
new sensations, after a week you perhaps wouldn't notice
them at all; and life would seem just as comfortable as
ever.

So my advice is, don't think about loneliness, or happiness,
or unhappiness, for a week or two. Then "take stock" again,
and compare your feelings with what they were two weeks
previously. If they have changed, even a little, for the
better you are on the right track; if not, we may begin to
suspect the life does not suit you. But what I want
_specially_ to urge is that there's no use in comparing
one's feelings between one day and the next; you must allow
a reasonable interval, for the _direction of_ change to
show itself.

Sit on the beach, and watch the waves for a few seconds; you
say "the tide is coming in "; watch half a dozen successive
waves, and you may say "the last is the lowest; it is going
out." Wait a quarter of an hour, and compare its
_average_ place with what it was at first, and you will
say "No, it is coming in after all." ...

With love, I am always affectionately yours,

C. L. Dodgson.

The next event to chronicle in Lewis Carroll's Life is the
publication, by Messrs. Macmillan, of "A Tangled Tale," a series of
mathematical problems which had originally appeared in the _Monthly
Packet_. In addition to the problems themselves, the author added
their correct solutions, with criticisms on the solutions, correct or
otherwise, which the readers of the _Monthly Packet_ had sent in
to him. With some people this is the most popular of all his books; it
is certainly the most successful attempt he ever made to combine
mathematics and humour. The book was illustrated by Mr. A.B. Frost,
who entered most thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. One of his
pictures, "Balbus was assisting his mother-in-law to convince the
dragon," is irresistibly comic. A short quotation will better enable
the reader to understand the point of the joke:--

Balbus was waiting for them at the hotel; the journey down
had tried him, he said; so his two pupils had been the round
of the place, in search of lodgings, without the old tutor
who had been their inseparable companion from their
childhood. They had named him after the hero of their Latin
exercise-book, which overflowed with anecdotes about that
versatile genius--anecdotes whose vagueness in detail was
more than compensated by their sensational brilliance.
"Balbus has overcome all his enemies" had been marked by
their tutor, in the margin of the book, "Successful
Bravery." In this way he had tried to extract a moral from
every anecdote about Balbus--sometimes one of warning, as in
"Balbus had borrowed a healthy dragon," against which he had
written, "Rashness in Speculation "--sometimes of
encouragement, as in the words, "Influence of Sympathy in
United Action," which stood opposite to the anecdote "Balbus
was assisting his mother-in-law to convince the dragon"--and
sometimes it dwindled down to a single word, such as
"Prudence," which was all he could extract from the touching
record that "Balbus, having scorched the tail of the dragon,
went away." His pupils liked the short morals best, as it
left them more room for marginal illustrations, and in this
instance they required all the space they could get to
exhibit the rapidity of the hero's departure.

Balbus and his pupils go in search of lodgings, which are only to be
found in a certain square; at No. 52, one of the pupils supplements
the usual questions by asking the landlady if the cat scratches:--

The landlady looked round suspiciously, as if to make sure
the cat was not listening. "I will not deceive you,
gentlemen," she said. "It _do_ scratch, but not without
you pulls its whiskers! It'll never do it," she repeated
slowly, with a visible effort to recall the exact words of
some written agreement between herself and the cat, "without
you pulls its whiskers!"

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