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Authors: Lewis Carroll
Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (261 page)
I had a daily governess, a dear old soul, who used to come every morning to teach me.
I disliked particularly the large—lettered copies which she used to set me; and as I confided this to Mr.
Dodgson, he came and gave me some copies himself.
The only ones which I can remember were "Patience and water-gruel cure gout" (I always wondered what "gout" might be) and "Little girls should be seen and not heard" (which I thought unkind).
These were written many times over, and I had to present the pages to him, without one blot or smudge, at the end of the week.
One of the Fellows of Magdalen College at that time was a Mr.
Saul, a friend of my father's and of Mr.
Dodgson, and a great lover of music—his rooms were full of musical instruments of every sort.
Mr.
Dodgson and father and I all went one afternoon to pay him a visit.
At that time he was much interested in the big drum, and we found him when we arrived in full practice, with his music-book open before him.
He made us all join in the concert.
Father undertook the 'cello, and Mr.
Dodgson hunted up a comb and some paper, and, amidst much fun and laughter, the walls echoed with the finished roll, or shake, of the big drum—a roll that was Mr.
Saul's delight.
My father died on August 27, 1897, and Mr.
Dodgson on January 14, 1898.
And we, who are left behind in this cold, weary world can only hope we may some day meet them again.
Till then, oh!
Father, and my dear old childhood's friend,
requiescalis in pace!
LEWIS CARROLL IN WONDERLAND AND AT HOME by Belle Moses
CONTENTS
SCHOOL DAYS AT RICHMOND AND RUGBY.
HOME LIFE DURING THE HOLIDAYS.
OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP AND HONORS.
UP AND DOWN THE RIVER WITH THE REAL ALICE.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND AND WHAT SHE DID THERE.
LEWIS CARROLL AT HOME AND ABROAD.
MORE OF “ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS.”
“HUNTING THE SNARK” AND OTHER POEMS.
INTRODUCTION.
Lewis Carroll discovered a new country, simply by rowing up and down the river, and telling a story to the accompaniment of dipping oars and rippling waters, as the boat glided through.
It is not everyone who can discover a country, people it with marvelous, fanciful shapes, and give it a place in our mental geography.
But Lewis Carroll was not “everyone”—in fact he was like no one else to the many who called him friend.
He had the magic power of creating something out of nothing, and gave to the eager children who had tired of “Aunt Louisa’s Picture Books,” and “Garlands of Poetry,” something to think about, to guess about, and to talk about.
If he had written nothing else but “Alice in Wonderland,” that one book would have been quite enough to make him famous, but his pen was never idle, and the world of children has much for which to thank him.
How much, and for what, the following pages will strive to tell, and if they succeed in conveying to their readers half the charm that lay in the life of this man, who did so much for others, they will not have been written in vain.
In telling the story of his life I am indebted to many, for courtesy and assistance.
I wish specially to thank my brother, Montrose J.
Moses.
Columbia Library, Astor Library, St.
Agnes Branch of the Public Library, and Miss Brown, of the Traveling Library, have all been exceedingly kind and helpful.
To Messrs.
E.
P.
Dutton and Company I extend my thanks for permission to quote from Miss Isa Bowman’s interesting reminiscences, and to the American and English editors of
The Strand
I am also indebted for a similar courtesy.
Belle Moses.
New York,
October, 1910
.
CHAPTER I.
THERE WAS ONCE A LITTLE BOY.
There was once a little boy whose name was
not
Lewis Carroll.
He was christened Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, in the parish church of Daresbury, England, where he was born, on January 27, 1832.
A little out-of-the-way village was Daresbury, a name derived from a word meaning oak, and Daresbury was certainly famous for its beautiful oaks.
The christening of Baby Charles must have been a very happy occasion.
To begin with, the tiny boy was the first child of what proved to be a “numerous family,” and the officiating clergyman was the proud papa.
The name of Charles had been bestowed upon the eldest son for generations of Dodgsons, who had carried it honorably through the line, handing it down untarnished to this latest Charles, in the parish church at Daresbury.
The Dodgsons could doubtless trace their descent much further back than a great-great-grandfather, being a race of gentlemen and scholars, but the Rev.
Christopher Dodgson, who lived quite a century before Baby Charles saw the light, is the earliest ancestor we hear of, and he held a living in Yorkshire.
In those days, a clergyman was dependent upon some noble patron for his living, a living meaning the parish of which he had charge and the salary he received for his work, and so when the Rev.
Christopher’s eldest son Charles also took holy orders, he had for
his
patron the Duke of Northumberland, who gave him the living of Elsden in Northumberland, a cold, bleak, barren country.
The Rev.
Charles took what fell to his lot with much philosophy and a saving sense of humor.
He suffered terribly from the cold despite the fact that he snuggled down between two feather beds in the big parlor, which was no doubt the best room in a most uncomfortable house.
It was all he could do to keep from freezing, for the doors were rarely closed against the winds that howled around them.
The good clergyman was firmly convinced that the end of the world would come by frost instead of fire.
Even when safely in bed, he never felt
quite
comfortable unless his head was wrapped in three nightcaps, while he twisted a pair of stockings, like a cravat, around his suffering throat.
He generally wore two shirts at a time, as washing was cheap, and rarely took off his coat and his boots.
This uncomplaining, jovial clergyman finally received his reward.
King George III bestowed upon him the See of Elphin, which means that he was made bishop, and had no more hardships to bear.
This gentleman, who was the great-grandfather of our Charles, had four children; Elizabeth Anne, the only daughter, married a certain Charles Lutwidge of Holmrook in Cumberland.
There were two sons who died quite young, and Charles, the eldest, entered the army and rose to the rank of captain in the 4th Dragoon Guards.
He lost his life in the performance of a perilous duty, leaving behind him two sons; Charles, the elder, turned back into the ways of his ancestors and became a clergyman, and Hassard, who studied law, had a brilliant career.
This last Charles, in 1830, married his cousin, Frances Jane Lutwidge, and in 1832 we find him baptizing another little Charles, in the parish church at Daresbury, his eldest son, and consequently his pride and hope.
The living at Daresbury was the beginning of a long life of service to the Church.
The father of our Charles rose to be one of the foremost clergymen of his time, a man of wide learning, of deep piety, and of great charity, beloved by rich and poor.
Though of somewhat sober nature, in moments of recreation he could throw off his cares like a boy, delighting his friends by his wit and humor, and the rare gift of telling anecdotes, a gift his son inherited in full measure, long before he took the name of “Lewis Carroll,” some twenty years after he was received into the fold of the parish church at Daresbury.
Little Charles headed the list of eleven young Dodgsons, and the mother of this infant brigade was a woman in a thousand.
We all know what mothers are; then we can imagine this one, so kind and gentle that never a harsh word was known to pass her lips, and may be able to trace her quiet, helpful influence on the character of our Boy, just as we see her delicate features reproduced in many of his later pictures.
A boy must be a poor specimen, indeed, if such a father and mother could not bring out the best in him.
Saddled as he was, with the responsibility of being the oldest of eleven, and consequently an example held up to younger brothers and sisters, Charles was grave and serious beyond his years.
Only an eldest child can appreciate what a responsibility this really is.
You mustn’t do “so and so” for fear one of the younger ones might do likewise!
If his parents had not been very remarkable people, this same Charles might have developed into a virtuous little prig.
“Good Brother Charles who never does wrong” might have grown into a terrible bugbear to the other small Dodgsons, had he not been brimful of fun and humor himself.
As it was he soon became their leader in all their games and plays, and the quiet parsonage on the glebe farm, full a mile and a half from even the small traffic of the village, rang at least with the echoes of laughter and chatter from these youngsters with strong healthy lungs.
We cannot be quite sure whether they were good children or bad children, for time somehow throws a halo around childhood, but let us hope they were “jes’ middlin’.”
We cannot bear to think of all those prim little saints, with ramrods down their backs, sitting sedately of a Sunday in the family pew—perhaps it took two family pews to hold them—with folded hands and pious expressions.
We can’t believe these Dodgsons were so silly; they were reverent little souls doubtless, and probably were not bad in church, but oh!
let us hope they got into mischief sometimes.
There was plenty of room for it in the big farm parsonage.
“An island farm ’mid seas of corn,
Swayed by the wand’ring breath of morn.
The happy spot where I was born,”
wrote Lewis Carroll many years after, when “Alice in Wonderland” had made him famous.
Glebe farms were very common in England; they consisted of large tracts of land surrounding the parsonage, which the pastor was at liberty to cultivate for his own use, or to eke out his often scanty income, and as the parsonage at Daresbury was comparatively small, and the glebe or farm lands fairly large, we can be sure these boys and girls loved to be out of doors, and little Charlie at a very early age began to number some queer companions among his intimate friends.
His small hands burrowing in the soft, damp earth, brought up squirming, wriggling things—earthworms, snails, and the like.
He made pets of them, studying their habits in his “small boy” way, and having long, serious talks with them, lying on the ground beside them as they crawled around him.
An ant-hill was to him a tiny town, and many a long hour the child must have spent busying himself in their small affairs, settling imaginary disputes, helping the workers, supplying provisions in the way of crumbs, and thus early beginning to understand the ways of the woodland things about which he loved to write in after years.
He had, for boon companions, certain toads, with whom he held animated conversations, and it is said that he really taught earthworms the art of warfare by supplying them with small pieces of pipe with which to fight.
He did not, like Hiawatha in the legend, “Learn of ev’ry bird its language,” but he invented a language of his own, in which no doubt he discoursed wisely to the toads and snails who had time to listen; he learned to speak this language quite fluently, so that in later years when eager children clustered about him, and with wide eyes and peals of laughter listened to his nonsense verses, full of the queerest words they ever heard, they could still understand from the very tones of his voice exactly what he meant.
Indeed, when little Charles Lutwidge Dodgson grew up to be Lewis Carroll, he worked this funny language of his by equally funny rules, so that, as he said, “a perfectly balanced mind could understand it.”
Of course, there were other companions for the Dodgson children—cats and dogs, and horses and cows, and in the village of Warrington, seven miles away, there were children to be found of their own size and age, but Daresbury itself was very lonely.
A canal ran through the far end of the parish, and here bargemen used to ply to and fro, carrying produce and fodder to the near-by towns.
Mr.
Dodgson took a keen interest in these men who seemed to have no settled place of worship.
In a quiet, persuasive way he suggested to Sir Francis Egerton, a large landholder of the country, that it would be nice to turn one of the barges into a chapel, describing how it could be done for a hundred pounds, well knowing, clever man, that he was talking to a most interested listener; for a few weeks later he received a letter from Sir Francis telling him that the chapel was ready.
In this odd little church, the first of its kind, Mr.
Dodgson preached every Sunday evening.
But at Daresbury itself life was very monotonous; even the passing of a cart was a great event, and going away was a great adventure.
There was one never-to-be-forgotten occasion when the family went off on a holiday jaunt to Beaumaris.
Railroads were then very rare things, so they made the journey in three days by coach, allowing also three days for the return trip.
It was great fun traveling in one of those old-time coaches with all the luggage strapped behind, and all the bright young faces atop, and four fast-trotting horses dashing over the ground, and a nice long holiday with fine summer weather to look forward to.
But in winter, in those days, traveling was a serious matter; only a favored few could squeeze into the body of the coach; the others still sat atop, muffled to the chin, yet numb with the cold, as the horses went faster and faster, and the wind whistled by, and one’s breath froze on the way.
Let us hope the little Dodgsons went in the summer time.
Daresbury must have been a beautiful place, with its pleasant walks, its fine meadows, its deep secluded woods, and best of all, those wonderful oak trees which the boy loved to climb, and under whose shade he would lie by the hour, filling his head with all those quaint fancies which he has since given to the world.
He was a clever little fellow, eager to learn, and from the first his father superintended his education, being himself a scholar of very high order.
He had the English idea of sending his eldest son along the path he himself had trod; first to a public school, then to Oxford, and finally into the Church, if the boy had any leaning that way.
Education in those days began early, and not by way of the kindergarten; the small boy had scarcely lost his baby lisp before he was put to the study of Latin and Greek, and Charles, besides, developed a passion for mathematics.
It is told that when a very small boy he showed his father a book of logarithms, asking him to explain it, but Mr.
Dodgson mildly though firmly refused.
“You are too young to understand such a difficult subject,” he replied; “a few years later you will enjoy the study—wait a while.”
“
But
,” persisted the boy, his mind firmly bent on obtaining information, “please explain.”
Whether the father complied with his request is not recorded, but we rather believe that explanations were set aside for the time.
Certain it is, they were demanded again and again, for the boy soon developed a wonderful head for figures and signs, a knowledge which grew with the years, as we shall see later.
When he was still quite a little boy, his mother and father went to Hull to visit Mrs.
Dodgson’s father who had been ill.
The children, some five or six in number—the entire eleven had not yet arrived—were left in the care of an accommodating aunt, but Charles, being the eldest, received a letter from his mother in which he took much pride, his one idea being to keep it out of the clutches of his little sisters, whose hands were always ready for mischief.
He wrote upon the back of the note, forbidding them to touch his property, explaining cunningly that it was covered with slimy pitch, a most uncomfortable warning, but it was “the ounce of prevention,” for the letter has been handed down to us, and a sweet, cheery letter it was, so full of mother-love and care, and tender pride in the little brood at home.
No wonder he prized it!
This is probably the first letter he ever received, and it takes very little imagination to picture the important air with which he carried it about, and the care with which he hoarded it through all the years.
There is a dear little picture of our Boy taken when he was eight years old.
Photography was not yet in use, so this black print of him is the copy of a silhouette which was the way people had their “pictures taken” in those days.
It was always a profile picture, and little Charles’s finely shaped head, with its slightly bulging forehead and delicate features, stands sharply outlined.
We have also a silhouette of Mrs.
Dodgson, and the resemblance between the two is very marked.