In 1974 the London auctioneering firm of Sotheby Parke Bernet and Company listed, inconspicuously, the following item in their June 3 catalog:
Dodgson (C.L.) “Lewis Carroll.” Galley proofs for a suppressed portion of “Through the Looking-Glass,” slip 64–67 and portions of 63 and 68, with autograph revisions in black ink and note in the author’s purple ink that the extensive passage is to be omitted.
The present portion contains an incident in which Alice meets a bad-tempered wasp, incorporating a poem of five stanzas, beginning “When I was young, my ringlets waved.” It was to have appeared following “A very few steps brought her to the edge of the brook” on page 183 of the first edition. The proofs were bought at the sale of the author’s furniture, personal effects, and library, Oxford, 1898, and are apparently unrecorded and unpublished.
The word “apparently” in the last sentence was an understatement. Not only had the suppressed portion not been published, but Carroll experts did not even know it had been set in type, let alone preserved. The discovery that it still existed was an event of major significance to Carrollians—indeed, to all
students of English literature. Now, more than one hundred years after Through the Looking-Glass
was first set in type, the long-lost episode receives its first major publication.
Until 1974 nothing was known about the missing portion beyond what Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, a nephew of Lewis Carroll, had said about it in his 1898 biography of his uncle, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll.
Collingwood wrote:
The story, as originally written, contained thirteen chapters, but the published book consisted of twelve only. The omitted chapter introduced a wasp, in the character of a judge or barrister, I suppose, since Mr. Tenniel wrote that “a wasp
in a wig
is altogether beyond the appliances of art.” Apart from difficulties of illustration, the “wasp” chapter was not considered to be up to the level of the rest of the book, and this was probably the principal reason of its being left out.
These remarks were followed by a facsimile of a letter, dated June 1, 1870, that John Tenniel had sent to Carroll. (The letter is here reproduced on pages 281–83.) In Tenniel’s sketch for the railway carriage scene, Alice sits opposite a goat and a man dressed in white paper while the Guard observes Alice through opera glasses. In his final drawing Tenniel gave the man in the paper hat the face of Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister he so often caricatured in Punch.
Carroll accepted both of Tenniel’s suggestions. The “old lady,” presumably a character in the original version of Chapter 3, vanished from the chapter and from Tenniel’s illustration, and the Wasp vanished from the book. In The Annotated Alice
my note on this ends: “Alas, nothing of the missing chapter has survived.” Collingwood himself had not read the episode. We know this because he assumed, mistakenly as it turned out, that if the Wasp wore a wig he must have been a judge or lawyer.
Carroll left no record of his own final opinion of the episode or the poem it contained. He did, however, carefully preserve the galleys, and it seems likely that he intended to do something
with them someday. It was Carroll himself, remember, who decided to publish his first version of Alice in Wonderland,
the manuscript he had hand-lettered and illustrated for Alice Liddell. Many of his early poems, printed in obscure periodicals or not published at all, found their way eventually into his books. Even if Carroll had no specific plans for making use of the Wasp episode or its poem, it is hard to believe he would not have been pleased to know it would find eventual publication.
After Carroll’s death in 1898 the galleys were bought by an unknown person and—for the present at least—we know little about who owned them until Sotheby’s put them up for auction. They are not listed in the 1898 catalogs of Carroll’s effects, apparently because they were included in a miscellaneous lot of unidentified items. “The property of a gentleman” is how Sotheby’s labeled them in its catalog. Sotheby’s does not disclose the identities of vendors who desire to remain anonymous, but they tell me that the galleys had been passed on to the vendor by an older member of his family.
The galleys were bought by John Fleming, a Manhattan rare book dealer, for Norman Armour, Jr., also of New York City. It was Mr. Armour’s gracious consent to permit publication of these galleys that makes this book possible. What more need be said in the way of thanks?
Facsimile of Tenniel’s letter to Dodgson, with a transcription.
My dear Dodgson.
I think that when the jump
occurs in the Railway scene you might very well make Alice lay hold of the Goat’s beard
as being the object nearest to her hand—instead of the old lady’s hair. The jerk would naturally throw them together.
Don’t think me brutal, but I am bound to say that the ‘wasp’
chapter doesn’t interest me in the least, & I can’t see my way to a picture. If you want to shorten the book, I can’t help thinking—with all submission—that there
is your opportunity.
In an agony of haste
Yours sincerely
J. Tenniel.
Portsdown Road.
June 1, 1870