“CARROLL, Lewis” [ pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge DODGSON]. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

“CARROLL, Lewis” [pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge DODGSON]. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. London: Macmillan & Co. “1872” [i.e. December 1871].

8vo. Original red cloth, covers with pictorial roundels and triple-line borders in gilt, spine lettered in gilt, dark green endpapers, gilt edges; pp. [xii], 224, [4], frontispiece (with tissue guard) and 49 in-text illustrations by John Tenniel; original spine relaid with some loss to extremities, inner hinges repaired with matching paper, gilt a little dulled (especially to spine), light stains to cloth, extremities slightly worn; occasional thumb marks and stains, a few tiny hole to penultimate leaf and rear free endpaper (where cuttings were previously attached, neat repairs with conservation tape); overall a good copy in the original cloth; contemporary presentation inscription “Mary Beatrice Walker from her affectionate Cousin C. Isabella Chesshyre. Christmas 1871” in ink to half-title (see below); bookbinder’s ticket “Bound by Burn & Co” to rear pastedown.

First edition, first issue with “wade” for “wabe” on p. 21, presented as a Christmas gift in 1871 only weeks after publication, offered with a small collection of contemporary printed and manuscript material relating to the book.

Published in December 1871, in an edition of 9,000 copies, the first edition of Through the Looking-Glass was, like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland six years earlier, issued in time for the Christmas market, while bearing the following year’s date on its title page. This example is particularly pleasing in bearing a gift inscription dated “Christmas 1871”: a neat demonstration of the bibliographical point. Carroll himself received his own copy on 6 December. The inscription also casts light on a family tragedy. The recipient, Mary Beatrice Walker, the youngest daughter of John Edward Walker and Mary Frederica Bury, was eleven years old in December 1871. On the evening of Sunday 29 October 1871, her eldest brother Francis, aged 21, had committed suicide in his rooms at Balliol College (No. 4 staircase, back quadrangle) by shooting himself through the heart. Carroll’s book was given, and inscribed, by Mary’s cousin Catherina Isabella Chesshyre (b. 1834).

Loosely inserted in the book is a folded sheet (c. 18 x 22.5 cm) containing, in a previous owner’s neat hand, a manuscript copy of the poem “The Vulture and the Husbandman” (first published in The Light Green, 1872), together with an original cutting of another poem, “Waggawocky” (Punch, March 16, 1872, p. 115), and a further original cutting of Joseph Swain’s illustration “The Monster Slain” (Punch, ibid., pp. 113-4) – all three parodies of passages from Through the Looking-Glass.

“The Vulture” closely follows the meter and stanza form of Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (recited to Alice by Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Chapter IV), and was written by A. C. Hamilton, editor of The Light Green (according to Charles Whibley, “perhaps the most brilliant periodical which the University of Cambridge has produced”). Carroll’s dark, witty poem relates the story of a walrus and carpenter who, out walking, come across a group of oysters. Persuaded by the walrus, the oysters dutifully follow and are eventually eaten. Hamilton’s poem, prefaced by Johnson’s definition of a vulture (“a rapacious and obscene bird, which destroys its prey by “plucking” it limb from limb…”), describes the agonies of a Cambridge viva-voce examination in similar terms, the eponymous Vulture and Husbandman representing the examining professors, with the ill-fated undergraduates as the oysters.

The other two insertions refer, by way of Carroll, to the Tichborne case, a legal scandal that gripped Victorian Britain during the 1860s and 70s. Arthur Orton, otherwise known as Thomas Castro, had claimed to be the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy in the County of Hampshire. After failing to convince the courts, he was convicted of perjury and served a fourteen-year prison sentence. Dicken’s satirised the case in Bleak House (as the “Jarndyce and Jarndyce” case). Swain’s illustration “The Monster Slain” depicts the monster of perjury and injustice dead, slain by the sword of truth and justice. In the present cutting from Punch, the satirical amended quotation from “Jabberwocky” has been trimmed away, leaving only the illustration and title. The accompanying “Waggawocky” is an overt parody of Carroll’s poem.

Williams, Madan, Green & Crutch 84; Lovett & Lovett 13.

SKU: 2124090