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  • "Respiciendo prudens":Lewis Carroll's Juvenilia
  • Jan Susina (bio)

Long before he adopted his famous pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson began his writing career entertaining family members. Many readers of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) are aware that it stemmed from the manuscript Alice's Adventures Under Ground (1863), which Carroll composed for Alice Liddell and her sisters after they requested that he record the story he had told them during the memorable boat trip of 4 July 1862. But Carroll's apprenticeship as a children's author began long before that golden afternoon; it had its origin seventeen years earlier in a series of remarkable family magazines that he wrote and edited between 1845, when he was 13, and 1862. Four of Carroll's magazines, Useful and Instructive Poetry, The Rectory Magazine, The Rectory Umbrella, and Mischmasch, have been preserved and reprinted, but beyond acknowledging their existence, few critics have bothered to examine the family publications that were so instrumental in Carroll's development as a writer. Yet these early works are the fertile soil from which his later and best-known children's books have grown.

Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, Carroll's nephew and first biographer, suggests in The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898) that Carroll began composing verses in Latin in 1844; one such verse appears in his diary as early as 25 November 1844 when Carroll was twelve (23). Carroll published his first story, "The Unknown One," in the Richmond School magazine one year later in 1845, although no copy has survived. Collingwood speculates that "The Unknown One"—an appropriate title for a seemingly lost story—"was probably of the sensational type in which small boys usually revel" (24). Collingwood based this assumption on sensational serial fictions Carroll wrote as an adolescent ; these include the seven-part " Crundle Castle" in The Rectory Magazine (1845), written at thirteen, and the eight-part "The Walking-Stick of Destiny" in The Rectory Umbrella (1849-50), written at seventeen and eighteen.

Collingwood observes that Carroll amused himself during school breaks by editing local magazines, local in that "their circulation was confined to the inmates of the Croft Rectory" (31). In the final piece in The Rectory Umbrella, "The Poet's Farewell," Carroll presents an epic list of his previous literary projects:

First in age, but not in merit,   Stands the Rectr'y Magazine;All its wit thou dost inherit,   Though the Comet came between.Novelty was in its favour,   And mellifluous its lays,All, with eager plaudits, gave a   Vote of honour in its praise.

Next in order comes the Comet,   Like some vague and feverish dream,Gladly, gladly turn I from it,   To behold thy rising beam!When I first began to edit,   In the Rect'ry Magazine

Each one wrote therein who read it,   Each one read who wrote therein.When the Comet next I started,   They grew lazy as a drone:Gradually all departed,   Leaving me to write alone.But in thee—let future ages   Mark the fact which I record,No one helped me in thy pages,   Even with a single word!

(80)

In the preface to the last of his private publications, Mischmasch (1855), the twenty-three-year old Carroll provides what he terms "a brief history of our former domestic magazines in this family, their origin, aim, progress, and ultimate fate" (89). Carroll evaluates the eight family publications that constitute the body of his youthful oeuvre: Useful and Instructive Poetry, The Rectory Magazine, The Comet, The Rosebud, The Star, The Will-O'-Wisp, The Rectory Umbrella, and Mischmasch.1 The final publication in Carroll's apprenticeship as a writer, Mischmasch, as the title suggests a "hodgepodge" of material dated from 1855 to 1862, is altogether different in form and content from his earlier literary attempts. Mischmasch is not so much juvenilia as a transitional work composed by a talented Oxford undergraduate in his twenties. Carroll there reworks and recycles bits and pieces of his previous writing to produce his first publication beyond the confines of his family. He was no longer satisfied with writing for local family magazines and suggests as much in his evaluation of Mischmasch: "the best of its...

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