Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). Autograph Letter, signed

The Chestnuts, Guildford (Surrey, England), August 22, 1869. One sheet folded to make four pages, 6 1/4 x 4 in. (159 x 102 mm). Four-page autograph letter on mourning stationery, signed by Carroll to his child-friend Isabel Standen, regarding their first meeting, the previous day, in the public gardens in Reading, and describing in the third person his friend "Lewis Carroll" who wishes to send her a book (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland); with two small drawings by Carroll, of a map and of a puzzle. Creasing from when folded, small separations along same with two small repairs. An incomplete version of this letter is published in The Letters of Lewis Carroll (Cohen, Vol. I, pp. 137-38).

Lewis Carroll's first letter to 10-year old Isabel Standen (1859-1941), a child-friend he had met the previous day, and who would go on to be a lifelong correspondent and sometime photographic subject.

Carroll opens his letter writing, "Though I have only been acquainted with you for 15 minutes, yet as there is no one else in Reading I have known so long, I hope you will not mind my troubling you." Carroll was travelling by train from Oxford to Guildford, when he was delayed in Reading, and decided to spend time in the Forbury Gardens. There he met Isabel and her sister Maud, and entertained them with puzzles and games. As Isabel later recalled of the meeting, Carroll, "took me on his knee and showed me various puzzles that he always carried about with him...One puzzle he showed me was to draw three interlaced squares without taking the pen from the paper or going over the same line twice...Another was to make figures of men and women from five dots, which he did most cleverly. (Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biography, 1995, p. 399). Here, Carroll recounts their initial meeting, and his visit to a nearby bookstore, whose name he cannot remember. Seeking Isabel's help in contacting the owner, he draws a map of its location.

Carroll continues by cleverly indicating to Isabel that his dear friend, Lewis Carroll, was also present in the garden ("not a yard off"), noting that he has "known him all my life (we are the same age) & have never left him". He also tells Isabel that "Carroll" would like to send her a book--which he did two days later--a presentation copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll signs this letter "Your 15-minute friend", and in a post-script, asks if she had succeeded with the three-square puzzle game, drawing his own three interlaced squares.

Carroll would go on to photograph both Isabel and Maud in Oxford, but their relationship largely continued via correspondence. Recalling in her memoir Lewis Carroll as I Remember Him (The Queen, 1932), Isabel writes, “I am proud to think that the friendship formed when I was a child lasted long after I had ‘put away childish things’. In a letter he wrote me once (in his favourite purple ink), he said ‘I always feel specially grateful to friends who, like you, have given me a child-friendship and a woman-friendship, too. About nine out of 10, I think, of my child-friendships get shipwrecked at the critical point ‘where the stream and river meet’, and the child-friends, once so affectionate, become uninteresting acquaintances.’”

Provenance

From the collection of Justin G. Schiller

Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). Autograph Letter, signed

Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). Autograph Letter, signed