Carroll Attempts to Regain the Trust of the Mother of a Child-Friend

Christ Church, Oxford, June 15, 1893. One sheet folded to make four pages, 7 1/8 x 4 1/2 in. (181 x 114 mm). Three-page autograph letter, signed by Carroll in grey ink, to Mrs. Sarah Elizabeth Blakemore, mother of his child-friend Edith Rose "Dolly" Blakemore, attempting to smooth over a disturbance in their friendship: "I have just read over again, in order to answer it, your last letter...I would not answer it at once, but let Time (the great soother of all the roughness of life) help to erase the annoyance I fear I have caused you by mentioning I had handed on, for the benefit of hospital-children, a Xmas card which you say was painted by a niece of yours...I think friendship is a matter of one's feelings, not of one's outer life, & I trust it does not really depend on such external aids..." Tipped into red cloth-covered boards (8vo), spine lettered in gilt; original postal envelope, signed by Carroll, mounted on front blank, gift inscription, dated 1969 below same.

Autograph letter from Lewis Carroll to Sarah Elizabeth Blakemore, mother of Edith Rose "Dolly” Blakemore (1872-1947)--one of Carroll's child-friends whose relationship lasted into adulthood. Here Carroll attempts to smooth over a disturbance in their friendship after Carroll regifted a Christmas card from the Blakemore's, donated for the benefit of hospitalized children.

Carroll first met five-year-old Edith Blakemore during his annual holiday in Eastbourne, East Sussex, in August 1877. The daughter of Sarah and Villiers Blakemore, a Birmingham merchant and publisher, Edith and her family summered at the seaside resort town, where Carroll met them near the beach. Carroll was immediately taken by the child, and wrote in his journal that very same evening, "I have made friends with quite the brightest child, and nearly the prettiest...She seemed to be on springs, and was dancing incessantly to the music...her eyes literally glitter...the mother (was) quiet and pleasant...Dolly is fascinating, I hope to see her again." (Cohen, The Letters of Lewis Carroll, 1979, Vol. I, p. 281 n. 2). Of the nearly 200 child-friends that Carroll had known throughout his life, he held Edith in the highest esteem, writing in an 1890 letter (not included), that she was "rather the exception among the hundred or so child-friends who have brightened my life." She would later pass her Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate, and became known as an amateur actress (see Cohen, Letters..., Vol. I, pp. 280-281).