Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [27]
Yours affectionately
Lewis Carroll111
In contrast to the letter to his sister signed ‘C. L. Dodgson’, over the signature of ‘Lewis Carroll’ the writer engages in the kind of extravagant but weirdly perverse nonsense that characterizes so many of his letters to his child friends.
Like so much of Dodgson’s nonsense, however, this is not only a nonsense letter but a letter about nonsense. The gags depend on questions of naming and intending, and involve implausible acts of encoding and decoding. It begins with a joke about a nameless sort of nose, and then an innuendo-style allusion to Dodgson’s kissing another orifice – this time renamed – the girl’s mouth, which is here represented in code by the whispered good-bye into an ‘ear’ which is ‘just above [her] chin’. What follows is an absurd dialogue between the two men about what the girl’s behaviour means, conducted entirely in terms of single letters which are presumed to stand for unsaid, but implicitly understood, sentences. The comedy turns on verbs of construing and interpreting: ‘I know he meant’, ‘meaning of course’, ‘I couldn’t make out what he meant’ and so on. Dodgson turns his farewell to the girl on the train into a kind of everyday hermeneutic farce based on the idea of imputed, concealed and deciphered meanings, meanings that are attributed to the hissing sound (or letter) ‘S’. We are close here to the strange idea Dodgson expresses elsewhere of an innocent conversation in ordinary English which might mean something ‘horrendous’ in another language.112 The crotchety tone of the interlocutor (‘HTIDE BBEJ’) is reminiscent of the querulous creatures Alice encounters on her adventures, and what is satirized here is the confidence of both parties that they know what the other means. The letter writer is told his head is ‘MT’, but whether this language is ‘empty’ or ‘full’ of significance remains in question. The joke about telling ‘the police’ at the end declares this is all innocent fun but also tellingly invokes the idea of guilt and the law. What fascinates Dodgson in all this is the idea of nonsense as a code, a secret language which in the letter is that which he shares with his reader Edith Jebb, but which depends on meanings which they cannot fully share and which remain indecipherable, held in brackets as it were, like the interpretations of the code offered by the writer of the letter.
This is to make heavy weather of some light-hearted playing about but the joke letter makes light of some complicated interpretative manoeuvres and shows us something on which the Alice books depend: Dodgson’s assumption that children are interested in the comedy of meaning itself.
Having sent off another letter to his sister, praying for ‘present and future blessings’ for her son at his baptism, he writes a second note to Edith, addressing her as ‘My poor dear puzzled child’.
I won’t write you such a hard letter another time. And can’t you really guess what the gentleman meant when he said, ‘Your head is MT’? Suppose I were to say to you, ‘Edith my dear! My cup is MT. Will u B so kind as 2 fill it with T?’ Shouldn’t you understand what I meant? Read it loud and try again.113
We all switch linguistic registers and degrees of seriousness in our conversation and letters, especially when we shift between addressing adults and children. Nevertheless the switch in Dodgson’s case is marked to an unusual degree and plays a structural role in the way he organized his life – and writings. In his letters to his sister we hear the don and clergyman,