“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 de
voted 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.’
“‘I nearly died of laughing’ was another expression that he particularly disliked; in fact, any form of exaggeration generally called from him a reproof, though he was sometimes content to make fun. For instance, my sisters and I had sent him ‘millions of kisses’ in a letter.’ Here is his answer:
“‘Ch. Ch. Oxford. Ap. 14, 1890.
“‘My own Darling:
“‘It’s all very well for you and Nellie and Emsie to write in millions of hugs and kisses, but please consider the time it would occupy your poor old very busy uncle! Try hugging and kissing Emsie for a minute by the watch and I don’t think you’ll manage it more than 20 times a minute. “Millions” must mean two millions at least.’”
Then follows a characteristic example in arithmetic:
20)2,000,000
hugs and kisses.
60)100,000
minutes.
12)1,666
hours.
6)138
days (at twelve hours a day).
23
weeks.
“I couldn’t go on hugging and kissing more than 12 hours a day; and I wouldn’t like to spend Sundays that way. So you see it would take 23 weeks of hard work. Really, my dear child, I cannot spare the time.
“Why haven’t I written since my last letter? Why, how could I have written since the last time I did write? Now you just try it with kissing. Go and kiss Nellie, from me, several times, and take care to manage it so as to have kissed her since the last time you did kiss her. Now go back to your place and I’ll question you.
“‘Have you kissed her several times?’
“‘Yes, darling Uncle.’
“‘What o’clock was it when you gave her the last kiss?’
“‘Five minutes past 10, Uncle.’
“‘Very well, now, have you kissed her since?’
“‘Well—I—ahem! ahem! ahem! (excuse me, Uncle, I’ve got a bad cough) I—think—that—I—that is, you know, I—’
“‘Yes, I see! “Isa” begins with “I,” and it seems to me as if she was going to end with “I” this time!’”
The rest of the letter refers to Isa’s visit to America, when she went to play the little Duke of York in “Richard III.”
“Mind you don’t write me from there,” he warns her. “Please, please, no more horrid letters from you! I do hate them so! And as for kissing them when I get them, why, I’d just as soon kiss—kiss—kiss—you, you tiresome thing! So there now!
“Thank you very much for those 2 photographs—I liked them—hum—pretty well. I can’t honestly say I thought them the very best I had ever seen.
“Please give my kindest regards to your mother, and ½ of a kiss to Nellie, and 1⁄200 of a kiss to Emsie, 1⁄2000000 of a kiss to yourself. So with fondest love, I am, my darling,
“Your loving Uncle,
“C. L. Dodgson.”
And at the end of this letter, teeming with fun and laughter, could anything be sweeter than this postscript?
“I’ve thought about that little prayer you asked me to write for Nellie and Emsie. But I would like
first to have the words of the one I wrote for you, and the words of what they say now, if they say any. And then I will pray to our Heavenly Father to help me to write a prayer that will be really fit for them to use.”
In letter-writing, and even in his story-telling, Lewis Carroll made frequent use of italics. His own speech was so emphatic that his writing would have looked odd without them, and many of his cleverest bits of nonsense would have been lost but for their aid.
Another time Isa ended a letter to him with “All join me in lufs and kisses.” Now Miss Isa was away on a visit and had no one near to join her in such a message, but that is what she would have put had she been at home, and this is the letter he wrote in reply:
“7 Lushington Road, Eastbourne,
“Aug. 30, ’90.
“Oh, you naughty, naughty, bad, wicked little girl! You forgot to put a stamp on your letter, and your poor old Uncle had to pay Twopence! His last Twopence! Think of that. I shall punish you severely for this, once I get you here. So tremble! Do you hear? Be good enough to tremble!
“I’ve only time for one question to-day. Who in the world are the ‘all’ that join you in ‘lufs and kisses’? Weren’t you fancying you were at home and sending messages (as people constantly do) from Nellie and Emsie, without their having given any? It isn’t a good plan—that sending messages people haven’t given. I don’t mean it’s in the least untruthful, because everybody knows how commonly they are sent without having been given; but it lessens the pleasure of receiving messages. My sisters write to me ‘with best love from all.’ I know it isn’t true, so don’t value it much. The other day the husband of one of my ‘child-friends’ (who always writes ‘your loving’) wrote to me and ended with ‘Ethel joins me in kindest regards.’ In my answer I said (of course in fun)—‘I am not going to send Ethel kindest regards, so I won’t send her any message at all.’ Then she wrote to say she didn’t even know he was writing. ‘Of course I would have sent best love,’ and she added that she had given her husband a piece of her mind. Poor Husband!
Complete Works of Lewis Carroll Page 169
