Regular visitors to Travel Between The Pages are well aware of my appreciation for the fantastical books of Lewis Carroll. I certainly have posted enough different editions of his fabulous work over the years. But have you ever stopped to consider how Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) developed a penchant for the whimsical and fantastic. It seems that he inherited the slanted way of seeing the world from his father Charles Sr., who was clergyman for decades. Long before Alice the seven-year-old Charles Jr, who would later adopt the pen name by which he is now known, asked his father to bring home a file, a screwdriver, and a ring from a business trip in Leeds. Charles Sr. replied with a letter containing a scene that would not look out of place in one of Lewis Carroll’s novels, and it’s easy to see how this absurdist bent could have a lasting impression.
Ripon
January 6, 1840
My dearest Charles,
I am very sorry that I had not time to answer your nice little note before. You cannot think how pleased I was to receive something in your handwriting, and you may depend upon it I will not forget your commission.
As soon as I get to Leeds I shall scream out in the middle of the street…
“IRONMONGERS! IRONMONGERS!”
Six hundred men will rush out of their shops in a moment—fly, fly in all directions—ring the bells, call the constables, set the Town on fire.
“I WILL have a file and a screw driver, and a ring, and if they are not brought directly, in forty seconds, I will leave nothing but one small cat alive in the whole Town of Leeds, and I shall only leave that, because I am afraid I shall not have time to kill it.”
Then what a bawling and a tearing of hair there will be!
Pigs and babies, camels and butterflies, rolling in the gutter together—old women rushing up the chimneys and cows after them—ducks hiding themselves in coffee-cups, and fat geese trying to squeeze themselves into pencil cases. At last the Mayor of Leeds will be found in a soup plate covered up with custard, and stuck full of almonds to make him look like a sponge cake that he may escape the dreadful destruction of the Town. Oh! Where is his wife? She is safe in her own pincushion with a bit of sticking plaster on the top to hide the hump in her back, and all her dear little children, seventy-eight poor little helpless infants crammed into her mouth, and hiding themselves behind her double teeth.
Then comes a man hid in a teapot crying and roaring, “Oh, I have dropped my donkey. I put it up my nostril, and it has fallen out of the spout of the teapot into an old woman’s thimble and she will squeeze it to death when she puts her thimble on.”
At last they bring the things which I ordered, and then I spare the Town, and send off in fifty wagons, under the protection of ten thousand soldiers, a file and a screw driver and a ring as a present to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,
from his affectionate
Papa
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