Mit Letter

THE LEWIS CARROLL SOCIETY)! OF NORTH AMERICA

NUMBER 34 SUMMER 1990

Profile:

Fran Abeles

Knowing Fran's interest in
Carroll, a colleague and member of the Mod-
ern Language Association showed her an item
about the work of Ed Guiliano and the
Society's publications. The connection
made, Fran became a member of the Society
in the late '70's.

She writes, "I think my interest in Carroll
was predetermined at the outset of my aca-
demic career. Not willing to give up two
years, I wrote my doctoral dissertation in
Germany while my husband, Ernest, was on
active military duty there as a physician.
Returning to Columbia University, thesis in
hand, I still had course work to complete. So,
I was a "looking-glass" student.

By the end of 1975 we had three small
children and were absorbed with bedtime
reading. Who were some of the children's
favorite authors? Beatrix Potter and Lewis
Carroll."

Fran writes and speaks about Carroll's
mathematical side extensively. She has pub-
lished articles in professional journals on his
linear algebra, mathematics of politics, pro-
portional representation, ranking systems,
cryptography, logic, and Alice's multiplica-
tion. An essay on his mathematical-political
papers appeared in Lewis Carroll : A Celebra-
tion. Speaking engagements this past year
have taken her to Quebec, Cambridge, and

Continued on page 3

Osborne Collection Plays Host to
Society's First Canadian Meeting

When one thinks of Toronto, many things come to mind: the "Needle" dominating the skyline
of this great city on Lake Ontario, the Toronto Blue Jays, the distinguished colleges of the
University of Toronto, and much more. For the members of the Lewis Carroll Society of North
America, however, Toronto has long held two fascinations: the Osborne Collection of Early
Children's Books at the Toronto Public Library and the presence of Joseph A. Brabant, one of
the great North American collectors. Many of
our members, of course, had visited Toronto
on earlier occasions, but on May 12, 1990,
more than fifty members and guests gathered
at the Osborne on St. George Street after a de-
lightful lunch, once again in the Janet Jurist
tradition, at Gaston's restaurant. And here, in
brief, is what happened.

Our president, Prof. Edward Guiliano,
opened the general meeting by thanking Ms.
Margaret Mahoney, Head of the Osborne
Collection, for inviting us. After a very brief
summary of the society (financial matters,
publications, past & future meetings, etc.)
Prof. Guiliano turned the floor over to Ms.
Mahoney. She discussed the history of the
Osborne Collection beginning with the visit
of Edgar Osborne, an Englishman, to the

Margaret Mahoney

Joseph Brabant

Toronto Public Library many years ago.

He was so impressed by the services the
library provided to its patrons that he decided
to give the the library a collection of
children's books representative of books read
by, or to, children in England. The collection
numbers among its treasures a Plantin
Aesopus. Later additions to the collection
brought works of the Brothers Grimm, Col-
lodi, and, of course, Lewis Carroll.

It is a fine and living collection. Ms. Ma-
honey concluded her remarks by commenting
on some of the items displayed in the cases
along the walls of the meeting room. She
pointed out many interesting facts about the
books, games, letters, and woodblocks (the
original blocks for the Sylvie & Bruno books
and for The Hunting of the Snark). The first
item exhibited, for example, was an 1874
edition of Alice' s Adventures in Wonderland
inscribed "May, 1876." On the inside front
cover one sees the armorial book-plate of the
Duchess of York's library. Ms. Mahoney
noted that the word "May" refers not to the
month but to the nickname of Princess Victo-
ria Mary of Teck, future wife of King George
V.

Our next speaker, Mr. Joseph A. Brabant,
who contributed several splendid items from
Continued on page 2

Arthur A. Houghton, Jr.
1906-1990

Arthur Houghton, Jr., the first Honorary
Member of the LCSN, passed away on April
4th.

It was at Mr. Houghton's estate on
Maryland's Eastern Shore that the LCSNA
had one of its first and most significant meet-
ings. Mr. Houghton had invited the members
to spend the day at his magnificent house and
share in the treasures of his collection, which
not only included the marvelous Carroll col-
lection now at the Pierpont Morgan Library,
but many other breath-taking books and
manuscripts from his English literary trove.

And, it was there that the Society learned
of the missing "Wasp in a Wig" chapter from
Through the Looking Glass, which was in the
possession of a collector known only to John
Fleming, also present that day. After a few
false starts, the Society was given permission
to publish the missing chapter, and made its
first world-wide news.

Mr. Houghton was generous in time and
funds, contributing to many worthwhile
causes. He helped create Lincoln Center in
New York and was president of the Metro-
politan Museum of Art. His Lewis Carroll
collection at the Morgan is a monument to his
love for Carroll and the people who also
appreciate his works.

CARROLLIAN NOTES

National Geographic, Oct. 1989, page 540:
Julia Margaret Cameron's photo of Alice
Liddell as Pamona.

At the end of January, Sotheby's in New York
sold the Bradley Martin copy of TTLG with
two original pencil sketches by Tenniel for the
hammer price of $32,000.

Musician's Committee for Anti-Nuclear Leg-
islation presented a Marathon Musical in
Berkeley, CA, on February 18. At 3:30,
"Alice, A Cabaret" by Seymour Barab was on
schedule: ". . .verses of Lewis Carroll from
Alice' s Adventures in Wonderland, set as
spoken songs in the tradition of European
Cabaret. Tom Johnston, Narrator; Nicholas
Anderson, Cello; Jeffrey Anderson, Piano."

The College of Notre Dame, Belmont, CA,
presented "The Voyeur and His Muse: Lewis
Carroll & Alice," a lecture with slides by
Professors Shirley and Del Morrison on Feb.
21 . "Explore Carroll's personal conflicts and
his use of the little girl as a muse for his
creativity," said the flyer.

Seattle's municipal subway is scheduled to
open next September 1 5th. Its Westlake sta-
tion will have a 1 0 by 35 foot porcelain mural
featuring Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor,
Donald Duck, and Alice.

Beer lovers: Bandersnatch Milk Stout is
bottled and sold by the Bandersnatch Brew
Pub, 125 E. 5th Street, Tempe, AZ.

— Sandor Bur stein

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White Knight at the Met

A Wonderland Chess set designed in
1932 was one of the features of an exhibition
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York this spring.

Made of white and tan-tinted pipe clay
and painted wood, the pieces were designed
and crafted by Sorcha Boru. Each piece is an
exact copy of the Tenniel drawings in the
Alice books, and the set includes Alice, the
Red Queen and King, the White Rabbit, the
Mad Hatter, the White Knight, Father Wil-
liam, Humpty Dumpty, the Dormouse, the
Dodo, the Lion, and the Unicorn.

JVlEETING (continued from page I)

his private collection to the Osborne exhibit, deliv-
ered a most interesting, and perhaps our first, inter-
active lecture. Its title, "Wouldn't It Be Murder?,"
comes from Chapter VI, "Pig and Pepper," of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. After Alice
catches the child from the fleeing Duchess, she
says, "If I don't take this child away with me,
they're sure to kill it in a day or two. Wouldn't it be
murder to leave it behind?" Would it? Joe Brabant,
himself a lawyer by profession, asked us, the audi-
ence, to serve as jury and answer that question after
he, acting as judge, summed up the case.

If (and there will be a lot of ifs) Alice had left
the child behind and if it dies, would Alice be guilty
of murder? In order for it to be murder, Alice would
have had to have intended to kill the child. If there
was an absence of intent, we shall have to consider
whether Alice would have been guilty of man-
slaughter. The key point is that if one accepts the
care of someone else's child, then one has a duty to
that child and cannot neglect it. Joe illustrated this
point by citing an infamous case of neglect (we
might say child abuse) decided near Oxford a few
years before the creation of Alice.

Before reaching our verdict, however, we

were presented by Judge Brabant with two de-
fenses we needed to consider. The first was Alice's
age: if she was under seven years of age, she could
not be guilty of a crime. This point involved some
complicated calculations, natal and otherwise, on
the pan of our learned judge. The second defense
revolves around the question of whether the victim
was a human child or a pig — not so simple a ques-
tion as it might seem. The child does turn into a pig
(many, in fact, do), but when did the metamorpho-
sis take place? If the victim was still human when
Alice obtained him, then she could be guilty; if he
has already become a pig, Alice need only fear the
RSPCA.

While we considered our verdict (though
some called for "sentence first, verdict after").
Judge Brabant reviewed for us some of the more
famous quotations from the Alice books in the his-
tory of English jurisprudence. As could have been
anticipated, we found Alice not guilty. A packed
jury? Surely — there were 42 of us!

Douglas Chambers, Professor of English at
the University of Toronto, concluded our program
with a richly illustrated lecture on "Alice and the
'Girl with Lilacs'." The girl in question is the girl
in a painting Arthur Hughes, a Pre-Raphaelite,
painted for and sold to Lewis Carroll. The painting,

it so happens, is owned by an art museum in
Toronto, but is not on permanent display.

Dr. Chambers showed us a great number of
illustrations of Hughes' work, focusing on his
illustrations of children's literature. He explored
the relationship between Hughes, George
Mac Donald, and Carroll in the artistic world of the
Pre-Raphaelites. He covered such topics as the
idealistic rendering of children in Hughes' work,
his similarities with and differences from Blake,
and his influence on Carroll's own drawing, espe-
cially his drawings of Alice for the original Under-
ground manuscript. Hair style, often highly styl-
ized, offered a consistent point of comparison.

Each of the three speakers showed how much
there still is to learn about Carroll's works. And
we, as a society, by meeting in Toronto, finally
realized the vision Stan Marx had at our first
meeting when he insisted that we call ourselves the
Lewis Carroll Society of North America.

For members attending the meeting, Joe Bra-
bant generously produced a beautiful keepsake
consisting of two pages of the forthcoming Chesh-
ire Cat Press edition of Through the Looking-Glass
exquisitely printed on hand-made paper by Bill
Poole of Poole Hall Press, Grimsby, Ontario, and
with illustrations by George Walker.

Of Books

& Things

(Editor's Note: There has been such a flood of
Carrol Han publications in the last year that we find
it impossible to do justice to them in the limited
space of the Knight Letter. We will try to bring you
up to date on the latest — and some we missed).

Alice in Orbit ?

The New York Times Magazine of February
11, 1990, carried a feature article entitled
"The Search for The Beginning of Time." It
noted that Malcolm Longair, the Astronomer
Royal of Scotland, has written, "With respect-
ful apologies to Lewis Carroll, a whimsical
(though highly technical) book about the
world's most extraordinary looking glass and
entitled it Alice and the Space Telescope. His
Alice encounters Humpty Dumpty, who has
been put together again by the people at the
National Aeronautics and Space Administra-
tion . . . ." Available through Johns Hopkins
Press, Baltimore, MD for $29.95.

Through the Looking-Glass.
Illustrated by Malcolm Ashman.

Published by Dragon's World Ltd.,
Limpsfield, Surrey, England. Illustrations
depict people in Victorian costumes. £9.95.

A recent exhibition in Guildford produced a
catalogue entitled Lewis Carroll in the Guild-
ford Muniment Room, compiled by Shirley
Cork. £4.50.

The Alice Concordance.
By Daryl Colquhoun.

Published by the Language Laboratory, Uni-
versity of Adelaide, Australia. Every word in
the two books has been counted and identified
as to place, line, page, etc. Copies may be
obtained through the Carroll Foundation,
P.O. Box 304 Remington, 3031 VIC, Mel-
bourne, Australia. $9.85 plus postage.

Painting the Roses White.
By Barbara Wenzel.

McCulloch Publishing, 348 Drummond

Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia.
$22.95. A book on gardening.

Once Upon a Recipe.
By Karen Greene.

New Hope Press, New Hope, PA, 18938. A
cookbook that includes "Curiouser and Curi-
ouser Casserole" and "Muchness Tomato
Biscuits." Illustrated with AIW drawings and
quotations.

Terry Descendant
Records Alice

Not a book, but a recording: Sir John
Gielgud's impeccable rendition in an
abridged recording of AIW on two digital
compact disks (Nimbus NI 5046-7). Accom-
panying background music includes Men-
delssohn symphonies, with Sir John interpret-
ing all the characters, including singing
"Soup of the Evening" and "The Lobster Qua-
drille." In 1877, Carroll inscribed a copy of
Alice to Gielgud's mother, Katie Terry (niece
to Ellen).

New Essays on
Children's Literature

Don't Tell the Grown-Ups.
By Alison Lurie.

Little Brown & Co. $19.95. A collection of
essays that focuses on such writers as
Greenaway, Nesbit and others, includ-
ing Lewis Carroll. The theme is that
"Great works of literature . . . express
ideas and emotions not generally ap-
proved of, even recognized, at the
time," according to the author. Lurie
shows how the Alice books can be seen
as political and social satire, and that
Carroll's contemporaries failed to rec-
ognize the character of Alice as rebel-
lious.

Cartoon from The New Yorker
January 15, 1990)

PROFILE (continued from page 1)
Louisville. Accompanied by her husband,
who somehow finds time to leave his busy
orthopaedic surgical practice, Fran searches
out places offering exceptional food and fine
wines. Currently, she is editing The Mathe-
matical Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll for the
Society.

In 1984, Fran accepted an offer from Ste-
vens Institute, her college, and the State of
New Jersey to "retool" in computer science,
receiving a Master's degree in 1986, the same
year her son graduated from high school. A
professor of mathematics and computer sci-
ence at Kean College of New Jersey, where
she heads the department's graduate program,
Fran is a member of several mathematical and
computing societies and a consultant for
school districts. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate
of Barnard College, she has been a National
Science Foundation Fellow and a Visiting
Member of The Courant Institute of Mathe-
matical Sciences at NYU. Fran is the Book
Editor of Modern Logic and is currently or-
ganizing a conference on the history of mathe-
matics at the University of Victoria, where,
she is told, Queen Victoria is alive and well.

Lewis Carroll's Alice.
Charles & Stephanie Lovett

Meckler, 1990. $65.00.

Alice on Stage.
Charles C. Lovett.

Meckler, 1990. $42.50.

A review of these two significant volumes

will appear in the next issue of Knight Letter.

V///W1-K.

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■\ Alice meets Dorothy]-

From our Far-flung

Correspondents

Alice in Wonderland, performed by the Mad
Hatters, a group of Hunter College (New
York City) drama students under the direction
of Pat Sternberg, April-May, 1990.

"Take care of the sense and the sounds will
take care of themselves." This advice by the
Duchess was assiduously heeded by The Mad
Hatters, a group of Hunter College drama
students, as they romped through the scenes
of a charming production of Alice in Wonder-
land. Led by Professor Pat Sternberg, the
students performed an abridged version of the
Eva Le Gallienne Alice. Although the script,
which was a hodge-podge of AIW and TTLG,
left something to be desired, the performance
more than compensated. It was obvious that
the young thespians were thoroughly enjoy-
ing their roles and were playing them in true
Carrollian spirit. This pleasure was projected
to the audience. In an interview after the play,
Professor Sternberg said that each perform-
ance was different since the cast members
were ever discovering new aspects of the
characters they played. Yet another dramatic
production of Alice in Wonderland, but a de-
lightful one.

— Janet Jurist

The Law Library of the Library of Congress
recently received a gift copy of State Slavery
Statutes in microfiche and an accompanying
565-page guide from University Publications
of America. The gift was presented by August
Imholtz, Jr., senior editor of UPA and a past
president of the LCSNA.

Boonville, California, is a tiny isolated com-
munity in the coastal forest region of northern
California. It is so far off the beaten track that
the inhabitants have developed their own
dialect called Boontling. Nonetheless, on
March 29-31, local children performed Alice
in Wonderland, with a musical background.
No reviews, yet.

Fran Abeles is the co-author of "Some Victo-
rian Periodic Polyalphabetic Ciphers," which
appeared in the April issue of Cryptologia. It
centers on Carroll's Telegraph Cypher, and
its antecedents.

From Japan, via LCSNA member Yoshiyuki
Momma, comes the news that a Tokyo book-
shop sold Jeffrey Stern's Carroll collection
for over $800,000.00.

Auction Action

The fall meeting on Oct. 20 will see the
Society's second auction of Carrollian books,
ephemera, etc. Be sure to take this chance to
clean your closets and weed out duplicates.
At the last auction, lots of ephemeral items
sold especially well, so remember, no item is
too small (or too big). Be creative, be gener-
ous, and send your donations (by August 15)
to Auction coordinator Alan Tannenbaum at
P. O. Box 283, Washington Grove, MD. Bids
can be placed by mail, but it's more fun to be
there, so join us in Baltimore !

Australia's Carroll Foundation is having an
Alice Ball this summer, to launch the touring
exhibition "Alice 125." It will include more
than 125 translations of Alice, a world record
for a book by a single author. Alice Liddell's
personal memorabilia will also be shown,
along with images of Alice by 125 Australian
artists. The date is July 4th, and it will be held
at the Melbourne Town Hall. For further in-
formation, write to: Carroll Foundation,.
Flemington Town Hall, 30 Bellair Street,
Flemington 303 1 VIC, Australia.

For assistance in preparing this issue, we would like to thank Sandor Burstein, Richard M. Boothe, Lucille Posner, Janet Jurist, and Mary Miles

Minter.

Knight Letter is the official newsletter of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America and is distributed free to all members.

Subscriptions, business correspondence and inquiries should be addressed to the Secretary, LCSNA, 617 Rockford Road, Silver

Spring, MD 20902. Submissions and editorial correspondence should be sent to: Stan Marx, 15 Sinclair Martin Drive, Roslyn, NY

1 1576. Designed by Jack Golden. Produced by Charles & Stephanie Lovett.

Lewis Carroll Society
of North America
617 Rockford Road
Silver Spring, MD 20902