Page:Complete Works of Lewis Carroll.djvu/25

Rh those given to a new research into old lives lies in the fact that the man who wrote the most enchanting nonsense in the English language—a just description, surely, of the Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark—was a puttering, fussy, fastidious, didactic bachelor, who was almost painfully humorless in his relations with the grownup world around him. You can see that much unconsciously revealed in the fatuous biography written a few months after Lewis Carroll's death in 1898 by his oblivious and too respectful nephew, who was awed by what he called the "purity and refinement" of his uncle's mind. That the shadow of a disappointment fell athwart the uncle's life, his nephew did detect; but he was the kind of biographer who would go on to say: "Those who loved him would not wish to lift the veil from these dead sanctities."

You must picture Lewis Carroll as living precisely in his quarters in the Tom Quad at Christ Church, all his life neatly pigeonholed, all the letters he wrote or received in thirty-seven years elaborately summarized and catalogued, so that by the time he died there were more than 98,000 cross references in the files of his correspondence. He was the kind of man who kept a diagram showing where you sat when you dined with him and what you ate, lest he serve you the same dish when you came again. He was the kind of man who, when an issue of Jabberwocky, the school paper of a Boston seminary, published a coarse anecdote from Washington's Diary, wrote to Boston a solemn rebuke of such indelicacy. He was the kind of man who gravely stipulated that no illustrations for a book of his be drawn on Sunday and who could indite the following reproach to a friend of his:

After changing my mind several times, I have at last