Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (281 page)

One of the first things a little girl learned in her intercourse with Lewis Carroll was to be methodical and orderly, as he was himself, in the arrangement of papers, photographs, and books; he kept lists and registers of everything.
Miss Hatch tells of a wonderful letter register of his own invention “that not only recorded the names of his correspondents and the dates of their letters, but also noted the contents of each communication, so that in a few seconds he could tell you what you had written to him about on a certain day in years gone by.

“Another register contained a list of every menu supplied to every guest who dined at Mr.
Dodgson’s table.
Yet,” she explains, “his dinners were simple enough, never more than two courses.
But everything that he did must be done in the most perfect manner possible, and the same care and attention would be given to other people’s affairs, if in any way he could assist or give them pleasure.

“If he took you up to London to see a play, you were no sooner seated in the railway carriage than a game was produced from his bag and all the occupants were invited to join in playing a kind of ‘Halma’ or ‘draughts’ of his own invention, on the little wooden board that had been specially made at his design for railway use, with ‘men’ warranted not to tumble down, because they fitted into little holes in the board.”

Children, little girls especially, remember through life the numberless small kindnesses that are shown to them.
Is it any wonder, then, that the name of Lewis Carroll is held in such loving memory by the scores of little girls he drew about him?
Beatrice Hatch was only one among many to feel the warmth of his love.
This quiet, almost solitary, man whose home was in the shadow of a great college, whose daily life was such a long walk of dull routine, could yet find time to make his own sunshine and to draw others into the light of it.

But the children did
their
part too.
He grew dependent on them as the years rolled on; a fairy circle of girls was always drawing him to them, and he was made one of them.
They told him their childish secrets feeling sure of a ready sympathy and a quick appreciation.
He seemed to know his way instinctively to a girl’s heart; she felt for him an affection, half of comradeship, half of reverence, for there was something inspiring in the fearless carriage of the head, the clear, serene look in the eyes, that seemed to pierce far ahead upon the path over which their own young feet were stumbling, perhaps.

With the passing of the years, some of the seven sisters married, and a fair crop of nieces and nephews shot up around him, also some small cousins in whom he took a deep interest.
It is to one of these that he dedicated his poem called “Matilda Jane,” in honor of the doll who bore the name, which meant nothing in the world to such an unresponsive bit of doll-dom.

 Matilda Jane, you never look

At any toy or picture book;

I show you pretty things in vain,

You must be blind, Matilda Jane!

I ask you riddles, tell you tales,

But all our conversation fails;

You never answer me again,

I fear you’re dumb, Matilda Jane!

Matilda, darling, when I call,

You never seem to hear at all;

I shout with all my might and main,

But you’re
so
deaf, Matilda Jane!

Matilda Jane, you needn’t mind,

For though you’re deaf and dumb and blind,

There’s some one loves you, it is plain,

And that is
me
, Matilda Jane!

A little tender-hearted, ungrammatical, motherly “
me
”—how well the writer knew the small “Bessie” whose affection for this doll inspired the verses!

In after years when more serious work held him close to his study, and he made a point of declining all invitations, he took care that no small girl should be put on his black list.
“If,” says Miss Hatch, “you were very anxious to get him to come to your house on any particular day, the only chance was
not
to
invite
him, but only to inform him that you would be at home; otherwise he would say ‘As you have
invited
me, I cannot come, for I have made a rule to decline all
invitations
, but I will come the next day,’” and in answer to an invitation to tea, he wrote her in his whimsical way:

“What an awful proposition!
To drink tea from four to six would tax the constitution even of a hardened tea-drinker.
For me, who hardly ever touches it, it would probably be fatal.”

If only we could read half the clever letters which passed between Lewis Carroll and his girl friends, what a volume of wit and humor, of sound common sense, of clever nonsense we should find!
Yet behind it all, that underlying seriousness which made his friendship so precious to those who were so fortunate as to possess it.
The “little girl” whose loving picture of him tells us so much lived near him all her life; she felt his influence in all the little things that go to make up a child’s day, long after the real childhood had passed her by.
And so with all the girls who knew and loved him, and even those to whom his name was but a suggestion of what he really was.

Surely this fairy ring of girls encircles the English-speaking world, the girls whom Lewis Carroll loved, the hundreds he knew, the millions he had never seen.

CHAPTER XIII.

“ALICE” ON THE STAGE AND OFF.

When the question of dramatizing the “Alice” books was placed before the author, by Mr.
Savile Clarke, who was to undertake the work, he consented gladly enough.
It was to be an operetta of two acts; the libretto, or story part, by Mr.
Clarke himself, the music by Mr.
Walter Slaughter, and the only condition Lewis Carroll made was that nothing should be written or acted which should in any way be unsuitable for children.

Of course, everything was done under his eye, and he wrote an extra song for the ghosts of the
Oysters
, who had been eaten by the
Walrus
and the
Carpenter
; he also finished that poetic gem, “’Tis the Voice of the Lobster.”

“’Tis the voice of the Lobster,” I heard him declare,

“You baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.”

As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose,

Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.

When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark

And talks with the utmost contempt of a shark;

But when the tide rises and sharks are around,

His words have a timid and tremulous sound.

I passed by his garden, and marked with one eye

How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie:

The Panther took pie, crust and gravy and meat,

While the Owl had the dish, for his share of the treat.

When the pie was all finished, the Owl—as a boon

Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon;

While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,

And concluded the banquet——

That is how the poem originally ended, but musically that would never do, so the last two lines were altered in this fashion:

“But the Panther obtained both the fork and the knife,

So when
he
lost his temper, the Owl lost his life,”

and a rousing little song it made.

The play was produced at the Prince of Wales’ Theater, during Christmas week of 1886, where it was a great success.
Lewis Carroll himself specially praises the Wonderland act, notably the Mad Tea Party.
The
Hatter
was finely done by Mr.
Sidney Harcourt, the
Dormouse
by little Dorothy d’Alcourt, aged six-and-a-half, and Phœbe Carlo, he tells us, was a “splendid
Alice
.”

He went many times to see his “dream child” on the stage, and was always very kind to the little actresses, whose dainty work made
his
work such a success.
Phœbe Carlo became a very privileged young person and enjoyed many treats of his giving, to say nothing of a personal gift of a copy of “Alice” from the delighted author.

After the London season, the play was taken through the English provinces and was much appreciated wherever it went.
On one occasion a company gave a week’s performance at Brighton, and Lewis Carroll happening to be there one afternoon, came across three of the small actresses down on the beach and spent several hours with them.
“Happy, healthy little girls” he called them, and no doubt that beautiful afternoon they had the time of their lives.

These children, he found—and he had made the subject quite a study—had been acting every day in the week, and twice on the day before he met them, and yet were energetic enough to get up each morning at seven for a sea bath, to run races on the pier, and to be quite ready for another performance that night.

On December 26, 1888, there was an elaborate revival of “Alice” at the Royal Globe Theater.
In the
London Times
the next morning appeared this notice:

“‘Alice in Wonderland,’ having failed to exhaust its popularity at the Prince of Wales’ Theater, has been revived at the Globe for a series of matinées during the holiday season.
Many members of the old cast remain in the bill, but a new ‘Alice’ is presented in Miss Isa Bowman, who is not only a wonderful actress for her years, but also a nimble dancer.

“In its new surroundings the fantastic scenes of the story—so cleverly transferred from the book to the stage by Mr.
Savile Clarke—lose nothing of their original brightness and humor.
‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass’ have the rare charm of freshness for children and for their elders, and the many strange personages concerned—the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Hatter, the Dormouse, the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle, the Red and White Kings and Queens, the Walrus, Humpty-Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and all the rest of them—being seen at home, so to speak, and not on parade as in an ordinary pantomime.
Even the dreaded Jabberwock pays an unconventional visit to the company from the ‘flies,’ and his appearance will not be readily forgotten.
As before, Mr.
Walter Slaughter’s music is an agreeable element to the performance....”

The programme of this performance certainly spreads a feast before the children’s eyes.
First of all, think of a forest in autumn!
(They had to change the season a little to get the bright colours of red and yellow.) Here it is that
Alice
falls asleep and the Elves sing to her.
Then there is the awakening in Wonderland—such a Wonderland as few children dreamed of.
And then all our favorites appear and do just the things we always thought they would do if they had the chance.
The
Cheshire Cat
grins and vanishes, and then the grin appears without the cat, and then the cat grows behind the grin, and everything is so impossible and wonderful that one shivers with delight.
There is a good old fairy tale that every child knows; it is called “Oh!
if I could but shiver!”
and everyone who really enjoys a fairy tale understands the feeling—the delight of shivering—to see the Jabberwock pass before you in all his terrifying, delicious ugliness, flapping his huge wings, rolling his bulging eyes, and opening and shutting those dreadful jaws of his; and yet to know he isn’t “
really, real
” any more than Sir John Tenniel’s picture of him in the dear old “Alice” book at home, that you can actually go with
Alice
straight into Wonderland and back again, safe and sound, and really see what happened just as she did, and actually squeeze through into Looking-Glass Land, all made so delightfully possible by clever scenery and acting.

A more charming, dainty little “Alice” never danced herself into the heart of anyone as Isa Bowman did into the heart of Lewis Carroll.
She came into his life when all of his best-beloved children had passed forever beyond the portals of childhood, never to return; loved more in these later days for the memory of what they had been.
But here was a child who aroused all the associations of earlier years, who had made “Alice” real again, whose clever acting gave just that dreamlike, elfin touch which the real Alice of Long Ago had suggested; a sweet-natured, lovable, most attractive child, the child perhaps who won his deepest affections because she came to him when the others had vanished, and clung to him in the twilight.

There must have been several little Bowmans.
We know of four little sisters—Isa, Emsie, Nellie, and Maggie, and Master Charles Bowman was the
Cheshire Cat
in the revival of “Alice in Wonderland,” and to all of these—we are considering the girls of course, the boy never counted—Lewis Carroll showed his sweetest, most lovable side.
They called him “Uncle,” and a more devoted uncle they could not possibly have found.
As for Isa herself, there was a special niche all her own; she was, as he often told her, “
his
little girl,” and in a loving memoir of him she has given to the world of children a beautiful picture of what he really was.

There was something in the grip of his firm white hands, in his glance so deeply sympathetic, so tender and kind, that always stirred the little girl just as her sharp eyes noted a certain peculiarity in his walk.
His stammer also impressed her, for it generally came when he least expected it, and though he tried all his life to cure it, he never succeeded.

His shyness, too, was very noticeable, not so much with children, except just at first until he knew them well, but with grown people he was, as she put it, “almost old-maidishly prim in his manner.”
This shyness was shown in many ways, particularly in a morbid horror of having his picture taken.
As fond as he was of taking other people, he dreaded seeing his own photograph among strangers, and once when Isa herself made a caricature of him, he suddenly got up from his seat, took the drawing out of her hands, tore it in small pieces and threw it into the fire without a word; then he caught the frightened little girl in his strong arms and kissed her passionately, his face, at first so flushed and angry, softening with a tender light.

Many and many a happy time she spent with him at Oxford.
He found rooms for her just outside the college gates, and a nice comfortable dame to take charge of her.
The long happy days were spent in his rooms, and every night at nine she was taken over to the little house in St.
Aldates (“St.
Olds”) and put to bed by the landlady.

In the morning the deep notes of “Great Tom” woke her and then began another lovely day with her “Uncle.”
She speaks of two tiny turret rooms, one on each side of his staircase in Christ Church.
“He used to tell me,” she writes, “that when I grew up and became married, he would give me the two little rooms, so that if I ever disagreed with my husband, we could each of us retire to a turret until we had made up our quarrel.”

She, too, was fascinated by his collection of music-boxes, the finest, she thought, to be found anywhere in the world.
“There were big black ebony boxes with glass tops, through which you could see all the works.
There was a big box with a handle, which it was quite hard exercise for a little girl to turn, and there must have been twenty or thirty little ones which could only play one tune.
Sometimes one of the musical boxes would not play properly and then I always got tremendously excited.
Uncle used to go to a drawer in the table and produce a box of little screw-drivers and punches, and while I sat on his knee, he would unscrew the lid and take out the wheels to see what was the matter.
He must have been a clever mechanist, for the result was always the same—after a longer or shorter period, the music began again.
Sometimes, when the musical boxes had played all their tunes, he used to put them in the box backwards, and was as pleased as I was at the comic effect of the music ‘standing on its head,’ as he phrased it.

“There was another and very wonderful toy which he sometimes produced for me, and this was known as ‘The Bat.’
The ceilings of the rooms in which he lived were very high, indeed, and admirably suited for the purposes of ‘The Bat.’
It was an ingeniously constructed toy of gauze and wire, which actually flew about the room like a bat.
It was worked by a piece of twisted elastic, and it could fly for about half a minute.
I was always a little afraid of this toy because it was too lifelike, but there was a fearful joy in it.
When the music boxes began to pall, he would get up from his chair and look at me with a knowing smile.
I always knew what was coming, even before he began to speak, and I used to dance up and down in tremendous anticipation.

“‘Isa, my darling,’ he would say, ‘once upon a time there was someone called Bob, the Bat!
and he lived in the top left-hand drawer of the writing table.
What could he do when Uncle wound him up?’”

“And then I would squeak out breathlessly: ‘He could really
fly
!’”

And Bob the Bat had many wonderful adventures.
She tells us how, on a hot summer morning when the window was wide open, Bob flew out into the garden and landed in a bowl of salad that one of the servants was carrying to someone’s room.
The poor fellow was so frightened by this sudden apparition that he promptly dropped the bowl, breaking it into countless pieces.

Lewis Carroll never liked “his little girl” to exaggerate.
“I remember,” she tells us, “how annoyed he once was when, after a morning’s sea bathing at Eastbourne, I exclaimed: ‘Oh, this salt water, it always makes my hair as stiff as a poker!’

“He impressed upon me quite irritably that no little girl’s hair could ever possibly get as
stiff as a poker
.
‘If you had said “as stiff as wires” it would have been more like it, but even that would have been an exaggeration.’
And then seeing I was a little frightened, he drew for me a picture of ‘The little girl called Isa, whose hair turned into pokers because she was always exaggerating things.’