Ray Dyer has traced Tennyson's growing importance to Lewis Carroll, as he came to fill the role of father-figure, as well as becoming the younger writer's admired "poet-bard." After a cooling off in their relations, Carroll seems to have become reconciled to the distance between them. The real Tennyson is largely missing from this part of the chronology, to be replaced by hints of the internalised Tennyson who continued to influence him. Note the form of multi-volume citations below. Diaries I: 51-52 note 1 appears as follows: Diaries I: 51-52n1. [Click on the illustrations to enlarge them, and for more information about them where available. — JB]

A Watershed: Early 1877

As the year opened, a resurgent Lewis Carroll was emerging from the preceding years of frustrations with Tennyson. This would be a period of many London theatre trips and other happy relationships and pastimes. Connections with Tennyson would be indirect or even simply implied.

1877. Monday 1 January. "The year begins at Guildford - warm and rainy." This is followed by Carroll's opening prayer for the New Year, expressing only a moderately expressed hope for personal improvement, with no hint of the intense soul-wringing of recent years nor of the intense personal therapy of the Sandown years, from 1873-76. By Thursday of this week he was already noting his first trip that year to London, to visit cousins and friends. By Saturday 13 January he was again "up to town," to see the Dubourgs and to take their daughter Evelyn (b. 1861) - his lifetime friend "Evey", later the married Mrs. R. G. Alexander - to see the play Goody Two Shoes at the Adelphi theatre. The young actress Carrie Coote (b. 1870) played Columbine, and Carroll noted her as a future prospect to play the part of Alice on the stage. Another young actress, Constance Gilchrist (b. 1865), he saw as "one of the most beautiful children, in face and figure," that he could ever recall seeing (Diaries 7: 11, 13, 14n8). Over the next two years Carroll would continue to follow her performances, and to visit and photograph her.

A scene from the performance. Carrie Coote
would be the child performer on the right.

1877. Tuesday 3 April. With his colleague and friend Frank Sampson Carroll took the train from Guildford to Eastbourne for the Burlington Hotel on the Channel coast. Best available rail routes, whether via Horsham or Dorking, were all well to the east of Godalming and would not pass close to any sensitive "Tennyson downland." On Wednesday the two walked to nearby Beachy Head, though Carroll recorded no mention of any possible sighting of the Isle of Wight, in the distance to the west from the 534ft. high promontory of the famous white cliffs. On Saturday 7 April Carroll was "on the Promenade," and later declaring Eastbourne to be "certainly a good seaside place," (Diaries 7: 27-28). The dye was cast and would not subsequently alter for Lewis Carroll's final 21 years of long summer vacations.

The Eastbourne Years, up to 1889

1877. In late June and early July Lewis Carroll's entries in his private journal give some further clues as to his by now much improved equilibrium. He copied a drawing of the very young child Beatrice Duckworth (b. 1874) "from my Sandown sketch-book". A week later a railway-carriage companion was a married woman whom he recalled meeting in 1874 at the house of Dr. Herbert Giraud of Shanklin, Isle of Wight (45-46). Such unguarded disclosures of previously sensitive places indicate the extent to which he had now moved on from the conscious and unconscious employment of internal defences such as concealment, disguise and self-censorship during his previous phase of intermittent melancholy, which seems to have been largely derived from his difficulties with the Poet Laureate.

Frederic Leighton's The Music Lesson, exhibited in 1877.

Carroll's restored and more Romantic leanings at this period were well shown on Monday 2 July when he travelled from Guildford to Oxford "via London, in order to visit the Westminster Aquarium … and the Royal Academy." The subject of interest was again the young actress Constance "Connie" Gilchrist and her celebrated skipping-rope dance. Carroll reported that he "took Connie with me to the R. A." where she enjoyed "Mr. Leighton's pictures of herself!" (Diaries 7: 46) — these were Leighton's At A Reading-Desk: A Study, in a distinctly Eastern setting; and Music Lesson. Carroll's wider interest in "The Victorian Cult of the Child of Beauty" has been discussed elsewhere (Dyer 2015: 486; 2016: lii-liii n8), and would remain a prime mover in his many future Eastbourne visits. Frederic Leighton's paintings would continue to interest and excite Carroll's attention and journal entries up to the mid-1880s.

1877. Tuesday 10 July. As early as 7.10 in the morning Lewis Carroll left Christ Church, Oxford for Guildford by train via Reading. At 1.07 that afternoon he took the train again "with Henrietta [his youngest sister, then a bracingly independent thirty-four years of age] for Eastbourne," arriving at 3.28 for Grosvenor House, no. 44 Grand Parade. Other lodgers he met there included Emma Louisa "Louie" Waddy (c. 12 years of age) and her sisters, his first Eastbourne child friends, (Diaries 7: 48). Carroll's apparent symptomatic affection for girls named Louisa and "Louie," including his own younger sister Louisa Dodgson, followed by Louisa Keane, Louie Taylor and perhaps others, has been discussed elsewhere (Dyer 2015: xxiii-xxvii, n4); his affection for the third weekday, Tuesday, his "favourite" day, was noted in the same source (179-180, n11). Here at Eastbourne the weekday preference had already shown itself as being chosen twice, on April 3 and now at July 10, almost talisman-like, to mark the inauguration of his new and henceforward permanent and restorative summer break.

1878. Tuesday January 8 The Lewis Carroll "favourite" weekday. On this day, and doubtless with prior arrangement, Carroll went to the London home of the Hull family, known to him from Eastbourne the previous year. His purpose was to take Agnes (10) and younger sisters to the Adelphi Pantomime, after which he dined and slept at their family home. His verdict, which answered his secretly recorded longing, was that the children "are if possible more charming than ever" (Dyer 2015: 7, 93). The Hull parents were almost exact contemporaries of Carroll, and their children would increasingly come to dominate the next few years of his endless romantic soul-searching and unfulfilled personal yearnings. However, after settling his various difficulties over Tennyson, Carroll was in a better condition to pass through any further emotional disappointments, this time with a rapidly developing Agnes Hull [ see 1882 for brief summary].

1878. Monday 28 January. After a lapse of fifteen years or so Carroll's journal notes two names of significance in the affairs with Tennyson - Carroll-Tennyson Chronology Part II "Mrs. Weld and Agnes," who called on him at Christ Church and were "staying in Oxford for a week or so," (7: 99). Charles Richard Weld (1813-1869) had died, and the other Weld's would soon relocate from London to popular Norham Gardens, Oxford, though not without some eventual annoyance to Lewis Carroll [see 1897], who hated being lionised every bit as much as did Tennyson.

1878. Saturday 11 May. A notable theatre outing by Carroll shows a newly matured preferred age for female friends to accompany him. Leaving Christ Church at 2.15 p.m. for London he "Put up at the 'United'" and began the collecting of Beatrice Fearon (b. 1862), actress Lizzie Coote (b. 1862) and Miss Lloyd, eldest daughter of the Bishop of Oxford and an older friend of Carroll's, who first appeared in his journal in 1866 and thereafter became very useful to him in his various arrangements with younger girlfriends. The play of interest was Olivia at the Court Theatre, with the central character played by Ellen Terrry. Other young friends who Carroll had sought for the evening were carefully listed: Evelyn Dubourg (b. 1861), Maud (b. 1858) and Gwendolen (b. 1860) Cecil, both daughters of the Marquis of Salisbury; Honor Brooke (b. 1862), Julia Arnold (b. 1862) and Maud Fearon (b. 1864). The seven to ten year olds of the earlier "Lorina and Alice Liddell-Agnes Weld" period, c. 1856-63, were now showing a distinct maturation to sixteen and seventeen years or more, and may be taken as reflecting Carroll's own progressive inner maturation in this final and extended phase of his life. A further decade on would see his late-life and carefully disguised heroine "Lady Muriel" - in the Sylvie and Bruno saga - as by then exceeding twenty years of age. [See also 1883].

1878. Carroll begins attending the musical comedy plays of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. He appears to have been drawn in by actress friend Marion "Polly" Terry. In October 1877 she played in W.S. Gilbert's farce "Engaged" at the Haymarket Theatre, and Carroll had paid a call upon her in London that same week. On Tuesday 15 January, after an afternoon attendance of "Robin Hood" with Beatrice and Maud Fearon, he went unaccompanied to see "Gilbert's play "Engaged" …a good bit of extravagant nonsense, and Marion Terry's mock heroics are delicious…." (7: 78, 96-7).

1878. Carroll formed a very stable and successful relationship, of some seven years duration with new illustrator Arthur Burdett Frost, who lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic whilst illustrating for Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. On Wednesday 24 April Carroll travelled to Haverstock Hill in London "and paid a long visit to Mr. Frost," who showed some pictures which Carroll had commissioned and now found "deliciously funny and extremely well drawn" (106). [1881, 1883]. Just a few weeks earlier, on Tuesday 2 April, an evidently gleeful Carroll had announced to his journal that he "sent back to Linley Sambourne, with approval, his first drawing. I now have three artists drawing for me" (7: 103-104). The third was Walter Crane, though of these only A. B. Frost would eventually stay with Carroll (Cohen & Wakeling, 2003).

1878. Monday 9 September. Carroll briefly returned to the water, rowing for the "first time at Eastbourne", (7: 136). Walking had remained the most frequent active pursuit, on the Pier and the Promenade daily, and with an almost regular long haul out to Beachy Head - the promontory of which continued to have the (still unmentioned) view to the distantly ambivalent Isle of Wight.

1879. New Year found Carroll as guest at the home of his old college friend and close contemporary Henry Alexander Barclay (1833-1888), of Sussex Square, Brighton. The whole first week of January was dominated by pantomime season and theatre trips. On Tuesday 7 January he arranged yet one more of his "favourite" times, taking fourteen year old Ethel Barclay to see the Terry family and Lewis family (Kate Terry, actress) where "We stayed for lunch." In the evening he treated Mrs. Drury, her daughter Mary "Minnie" Frances (b. 1859) and Ethel Barclay to ""Hamlet" at the Lyceum", where Henry Irving "rather spoiled Hamlet by his extraordinary English." (7: 155-7). Carroll did of course acknowledge that "Ellen Terry as Ophelia was simply perfect" and "The play is superbly "mounted."

Ellen Terry as Ophelia, by Anna Lea Merritt.

Lewis Carroll's lengthy and on-off though instructive friendship with actress Dame Ellen Terry had begun in the summer of 1856, when she was a nine year old child actress and he, contrary to his Christ Church College rules, was already avidly attending the London theatres. He became a great friend of the whole Terry family, ingratiating himself much after the manner of his early dealings with Tennyson [1857], by discovering their address and presenting himself at the family home. He cautiously distanced himself from Ellen Terry for twelve years from May 1867 during the break from her first husband, the artist George Frederick Watts, and more especially after the subsequent births of her two children out of wedlock. However, his essentially forgiving nature had no problem in renewing the friendship once Ellen Terry remarried. On March 12 1879 Carroll "Heard from Florence Terry that her sister Ellen (now Mrs. Wardell) would like to meet me again: so I shall go and call." This he did on Wednesday 18 June that year when again passing through London. He found the actress friend "as charming as ever…was much pleased with her husband [and] also liked her two children, Edith [b. 1869] and Eddie [b. 1872]…" (7: 164 & n309; 181). Any assessment of these final years of continued mutual neglect between Lewis Carroll and Tennyson must acknowledge that both sides were responsible for and accepting of the eventual and prolonged situation, though Carroll here shows at least a continued propensity for forgiving, and for a renewal of rapport with his own various persona non grata.

1879. Wednesday 15 January. Whilst still at Guildford for the winter vacation period, Carroll "Walked to Godalming" and made a call on the retired Reverend Richard John Sparkes. No mention is made of taking a local train for nearby Witley or Haslemere, already known to him, nor of any desire to walk in the direction of the 919ft/280m high Black Down, the highest hill of the Sussex Downs, where Tennyson had made Aldworth House, on the eastern slope: "Green Sussex fading into blue, with one grey glimpse of sea." (Book of The Road, 1996: 79, citing Tennyson).

1879. Tuesday 11 February. Carroll "Took the whole of Euclid and His Modern Rivals, corrected, to the press…," further evidence of his return to a broadly based level of confidence and productivity in his now renewed life. By Thursday 10 April Carroll returned with his younger sister Margaret to Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, to see their sister Mary and husband Rev. Charles Collingwood who were holidaying there. Five days later, with no further details recorded, he left Margaret with the Collingwoods and returned to Guildford. His rail journey [see 1876] would have passed the sensitive Sussex Downs of the new Tennyson house, though Carroll would have known that the Laureate at that time of year was usually at Farringford, Freshwater, on the distant seaward side of the Isle of Wight. That was sufficiently far from Carroll's relations at Ventnor. Geography, here intimately related to Tennyson, was playing a somewhat large part in Lewis Carroll's life and movements at this extended time throughout the 1870s.

1880. Saturday 10 January. Carroll travelled to London, meeting his sister Henrietta and later collecting Agnes Hull from her Kensington home for the Lyceum to see "The Merchant of Venice" - "a real treat to both of us." On Tuesday 30 March he was in London with sisters Fanny and Henrietta for the Grosvenor Gallery where Edward Burne-Jones had "drawings [which were] the gem of the gallery … and … many lovely things by [Frederic] Leighton." Leighton's pictures included The Pozzo Corner, Venice, Garden At Capri, and Steps of The Bargello, Florence. Carroll and Leighton would begin a correspondence in June this year. (7: 236, 253, 277n504). Tennyson would publish his Ballads and Other Poems.

1880. Sunday 11 April. Carroll records beginning "a few investigations" on the subject of "Miracles - why have they ceased?" Such weighty theology had lain largely dormant with him since Lewis Carroll Chronology 1856, when he had first read Alton Locke the novel by Charles Kingsley. These deeper issues would resurface again and again over the Eastbourne years, as Carroll worked to include them in his final planned Sylvie and Bruno fairy tale with its disguised Victorian human social and romantic sagas. That large work of summation for much of his life would be mostly accomplished at Eastbourne, during the summers of 1881-1889, and with a final redaction phase at 1889-1893 (Dyer 2015: Schematic Gestation, xliv-xlvi & 287-289).

1880. May this year saw two new encounters of Lewis Carroll with significant Victorian adult women. On Friday 21 in Oxford he called upon his friends the Thomas Arnolds, and was introduced to Mrs. Cecilia Mary Pope née Tennyson, daughter of Horatio Tennyson of Tenby. The following Wednesday, 26 May, whilst at the St. Giles Oxford home of elderly Rev. Edmund Ffoulkes, Carroll "met Miss [Elizabeth] Wordsworth," (1840-1932), first Principal of Oxford's Lady Margaret Hall, and later founder of St. Hughes Hall in 1886. (Diaries 7: 271, 273). Carroll's contacts with the two women, as with others such as writers Mrs. Anne Isabella Ritchie née Thackeray and Mrs. Mary Augusta Humphrey Ward née Arnold, would continue, from a busy social "diary" which was fast becoming legion.

1880. Monday 31 May opened a small window onto Lewis Carroll's generally ambivalent attitudes towards powerful masculine Victorian figures. Knowing that his old headmaster of Rugby School, Dr. Archibald Campbell Tait, now Archbishop of Canterbury, was visiting his formative Balliol College, Carroll [as the Rev. C. L. Dodgson] requested that Tait call in at Christ Church to be photographed. This duly happened and "he brought with him his two daughters, very pleasant girls," (273 n497). Equally well known that week would have been the news that Balliol College was presenting a Greek play by Oscar Wilde, and that the poet Laureate Tennyson was to visit and attend on Thursday 3 June. Wilde's biographer notes that the popular and controversial aesthete's play was indeed attended in Oxford that week by Tennyson (Ellmann, 1987: 102). Coincidentally, Lewis Carroll's journal shows unusually brief entries at that time: "June 3. (Th). Oxford to Guildford." The next entry was "June 9. (W). Back again, arriving at night, after Gaudy." (Diaries 7: 275).

1880. Carroll's Eastbourne stay this year was from Friday 23 July to Saturday 9 October, beginning two weeks earlier and ending one week later than in 1879. In August he read Fallen Leaves, the progressive novel of Wilkie Collins dealing with extra-marital relationships. He found it "clever and interesting ... not really improper, but, I think, moral in tone. Still, it goes dangerously near the line..." On 1 September he took Jessie Hull (b. 1871) "to the "Library" and bought her the mechanical swimming frog." Such toys he elsewhere notes as being priced at 1 to 2 guineas, making them £300 - £600 today [gold standard conversion]. Small wonder the Hull children became spoiled [1882]. On Monday 13 he gave seventeen year old Alice Hull "an hour's lesson in "Stocks"", but on Wednesday 15, the notable day of Alice Liddell's marriage at Westminster Abbey, his journal has no entry, a hiatus commented upon by the modern editor (7: 285, 291, 296 and n535). Carroll had his own propensity for going "dangerously near the line", as seen with his persistent and ultimately all but disastrous efforts with a reluctant and finally evasive Tennyson. Here Carroll's behaviour appears to have been of the reverse, in ignoring a previously close friendship. On Monday 27 September he was again out on the water, rowing for an hour with his two nephews [see 1878 Eastbourne; 1876 Sandown].

Tennyson in 1881, from a painting
by John Everett Millais.

1881. Saturday 1 January, at Guildford, Carroll's journal opens with a standard and brief New Year's resolution. The year would see a new edition of his Phantasmagoria [1869] published by Macmillan, and with illustrations by A. B. Frost [1878]. Tennyson's venture into drama for the stage saw the appearance of the play "The Cup", which opened at the London Lyceum on January 3, starring Ellen Terry with Henry Irving. Carroll travelled to London on Monday 17 January to see the new paintings at the studio of Frederick Leighton, where he was accompanied by twelve year old Evie Hull. Leighton's "Idyll" was "a lovely picture of two females seated on a bank with a shepherd playing to them." That evening Carroll took Agnes Hull, then thirteen years old, to the Lyceum to see the new Tennyson play, with Ellen Terry "as Camma…the perfection of grace." Carroll had by now adopted use of the title "Mrs. Wardell" for the famous actress, and he went to great lengths to ensure that his adolescent companion that evening would receive an after-performance visit and small present from her. He would return on 18 April with his colleague Sampson, to see Tennyson's play - and Ellen Terry - again (Diaries 7: 317-8, 326-7).

1881. Saturday 25 June. Carroll and his Christ Church colleague Sampson revisited the Isle of Wight, staying at Sandown and visiting the home of Dr. Giraud, chemist and botanist, in Shanklin. Carroll returned to Guildford on Tuesday 28 June. On Wednesday 5 July he took the train to Eastbourne via London, arriving in his "old quarters" at 7, Lushington Road for the fifth consecutive summer (Diaries 7: 350). For Sunday 24 July his journal records the hope of rereading Difficulties of Belief in Connexion with The Creation and The Fall 1855, by Thomas Rawson Birks (1810-1883). On Saturday 24 September Carroll and Sampson made a party of four with Alice (eighteen) and Agnes Hull (fourteen years old) for the evening concert at Devonshire Park. On the Sunday morning he took Marion Richards (b. 1870) to church with him [ where he always had two seats reserved in the pew, at two guineas per annum]. The next day, Monday, he and Sampson took all four Hull girls to the "Regatta fireworks at night". Tuesday 27 September was another of his favourite Tuesdays, despite it being the end of the Hull family's stay that year. What was pleasing to Carroll, and an essential element in his required gradual approach to separations, was that it began early in the morning with Evie Hull (13 years old) calling at his lodgings "for my early walk", followed by Alice, Agnes and Evie all calling before 2 p. m. "to wish goodbye." Thereafter he and his friend Sampson walked "to the light-house beyond Beachy Head - a quite lovely day." (7: 362-4).

When Carroll's separations had been abrupt - as with the telegram news of the early death of his mother in his nineteenth birthday month; the later coolness of Tennyson in 1864, and the telegram news in 1868 of the sudden death of his father, Lewis Carroll had shown himself quite unprepared to continue "as normal." In both the earlier and last cases his private journal had suffered abrupt and extended closure. The middle instance, of Tennyson and the concurrent wider difficulties with Alice Liddell, was a far more complex and extended period in his life. Here at Eastbourne, Carroll's resilience would be tested again, with regard to Agnes Hull in 1882.

"What I look like when I'm lecturing." a sketch by
Carroll. Source: Collingwood 425.

1881. Tuesday 18 October. Despite the resurgence of a threatened emotional conflict in his life Lewis Carroll was now able to make a major and positive reshaping of his affairs. On this day he chose to formally resign his Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship held since January 1856, a decision to terminate which he now noted as "an important step in life." His intention was to free himself for other productive works, which he itemised as being in the causes of Mathematical education; innocent recreation for children, and "though so utterly unworthy of being allowed to take up such work," the cause of religious thought (Diaries 7: 371). By December this year, impetuous as ever, he was already making a start, with a lengthy controversial letter on Church affairs and Ritualism published in the St. James's Gazette (Diaries 7:388-92 n669, and strangely signed "Lewis Carroll" despite the obvious attention to adult matters).

1882. Thursday 6 July. Carroll travelled to Bristol where he and his friend Sampson boarded the vessel Solway en route for Greenock via Belfast. The sea "was very rough" and he was seasick, understandably not expressing any of the earlier enthusiasm he had shown for rough waters [see 1876, 1884]. From Greenock he went to the Royal Hotel, Edinburgh, where he would renew his friendship with Sir Noel Paton and view the latest painting, In Die Malo showing Christ as a warrior receiving arms from the angels. Carroll's return voyage to London, on the S. S. Marmion, was notable for its "smooth passage," a possible further nail in the coffin of any future self-flagellation with his very personal "rough water therapy" [1876].

1882. Tuesday 22 August. An agonising journal entry at Eastbourne showed that Carroll had "reluctantly come to the conclusion that the four Hulls … do not in the least care for my company, or for me.... Such friends are hardly worth having." He related how "Yesterday I joined Agnes and Evie in the road, but they gave themselves airs so much that I declined to go further, and went another way." Sadly he concluded, "It happened to be exactly five years … since I first met them." A month later, on Tuesday 26 September, Carroll made his most frank and heartfelt disclosure, in sharp contrast to his more guarded reticence with respect to any feelings in the interminable though more controlled affair over Tennyson. This particular instance is however instructive, showing him deliberately employing defensive avoidance in both cases. Thus, the next day he recorded that "In order to avoid meeting any Hulls again (they leave today) I spent the day at Hastings," an added candour compared to his sparse report of the similar absence and avoidance [1880, June 3] from Oxford during the visit there by Tennyson. The more recent break-down of friendship with the Hull family he finally noted as "the fennel" in his "goblet of life" [Longfellow I: 260], which "gives a bitter taste" (Diaries 7: 462-3, 474-5). Eastbourne summer idylls, however, would remain, and are taken as an indication that rebuttals from child-friends were felt at a more superficial level of his being than was the case with assumed father-figures, poet-bards, Laureates and similar elevated entities in his romantically curious and very full life.

1883. A new and enlarged collection of Carroll's satirical and humorous poems, Rhyme? And Reason? appears, illustrated by Frost [1878, 1881]. The year saw Tennyson accepting a Barony, and Carroll renewing his own contacts with his other greatly admired living poet, Christina Rossetti. On Thursday 29 March Carroll and Sampson briefly returned again [1881] to the Isle of Wight, putting up at "Miss Sanders, Carlton Villa," Shanklin, on the side of the Isle furthest from Freshwater and the Tennyson house. He visited Dr. Giraud; walked between Shanklin and Sandown; went to the parish church twice on Sunday, returning to Guildford on the Monday (Diaries 7: 525-6). On Tuesday 22 May, at Christ Church, his journal shows him attending a recitation with Miss Lloyd and her friend Miss Deane, then "back by Magdalen Tower in the moonlight," revealing a late revenant of his balmy days of atmospheric romantic poetry with Tennyson in 1857-58. That it was no passing coincidence was shown by a further noting of "Magdalen by moonlight" on Saturday 17 November with a friend from Eastbourne, fifteen-year-old Margie Dymes (Diaries 7: 535 and Diaries 8: 62; see 1878 May 11 for Carroll's new preferred age for girl-friends). At Eastbourne, walking out to Beachy Head had continued to attract Carroll, as on September 12 and 30, with the ever-present possibility of varied and ambivalent memories of a distantly visible Isle of Wight.

Beachy Head, painted by
landscape artist Wilfrid Ball.

1884. Tuesday 25 March. Carroll took the train from Oxford to Southampton and then the boat to Jersey (Diaries 8: 96). He reported no sickness "though it was a little rough", again with no hint of his previous endorsement of the effect of such rough waters [1876, 1882 July].

1885. March 3-6 found Carroll making definite moves to employ new illustrator Harry Furniss for the planned children's fairy tale Sylvie and Bruno. He also heard from Mrs. Hargreaves - his early child-friend "(Alice Liddell that was)" - who consented to his publishing the private and unique volume which he had hand-written and finally sent to her in late 1864 (see the main Lewis Carroll Chronology; Diaries 8: 170; Carroll, 1886). On Thursday 19 March Agnes Weld and Mrs Pope née Tennyson [see 1880] "came for tea and photos" (Diaries 8: 178). Carroll's interest in the married woman - as a likely new potential source of Tennyson family gossip regarding her famous uncle - inevitably intrigues us, and he continued to liaise with her: on 23 April at her home, and on 7 May "for a walk, as arranged…." However, the planned return to his rooms for tea "she did not seem to desire." (Diaries 8: 196). It would be a year to the month before he would report his next and further unsuccessful effort to call upon Mrs. Pope. Rather more successful this year were his interactions with the very different living poet of stature, Christina Rossetti.

1886. Tennyson this year would publish Locksley Hall: Sixty Years After. Lewis Carroll's attention also returned to "serious poems", with his Friday 26 February "all day" meeting to discuss "drawings" with his new illustrator Emily Gertrude Thomson (8: 260). [See 1898]. On 3 May at Oxford Carroll called upon his Tennyson associate Mrs. Pope, but was afterwards unable to "get the door answered" at the home of Mrs. Weld, Tennyson's sister-in-law. Undeterred as usual, by Sunday 23 May, returning from church, he "Walked Agnes Weld home" and stayed "to chat" with Mrs. Weld (Diaries 8: 272, 275). June saw Carroll providing a series of voluntary lectures on logic at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, partly to work out his novel ideas on "Logic for Ladies" which soon provided the pamphlet publication The Game of Logic (285n, 478 & n479). December brought a high point for Carroll, with the appearance of his prequel Alice's Adventures Under Ground; and with the debut at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London, of Henry Savile Clarke's stage production of Alice in Wonderland. For Tennyson the year had become tragic, with the death of his younger son, Lionel (1854-1886).

1887. On Friday 7 January Carroll went "To town" to see his London publisher Macmillan, and to inscribe in the numerous gift copies of the recent Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Quite a number of these were to be sent to married women, mothers, as well as children. Tennyson's sister-in-law Mrs. Weld, known since 1857, and now living in Oxford, received one. On Saturday 7 May Carroll "Fell in with Agnes Weld," and took a walk with her during which they discussed mutually known people. Only the old and recently deceased mathematician Alfred H. Brotherton was worthy of mention by our private journal writer (Diaries 8: 313n516, 332). By December Carroll was able to view the appearance of the People's Edition - "the cheap edition" as he noted - of his two famous "Alice" books, with the price of six shillings each now reduced to two shillings and sixpence/half a crown [about £37 at today's £1/gold sovereign/£300 conversion rate]. They were distinctively bound in green pictorial cloth to distinguish them from the standard editions (Diaries 8: 369n606).

1888. Tuesday 3 January. Carroll noted his visit to child-friend grown to adult, Julia Arnold, then Mrs. Leonard Huxley of the family of prominent and gifted Darwinian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. Julia lived at Godalming, Surrey, not far from Black Down, Sussex and the Tennyson summer home, and had long been a firm favourite of Carroll's [See 1894]. On 3 February Carroll "Took Agnes Weld for a walk," followed by the popular "tea" in his rooms. The unmarried Agnes was then close to forty, and clearly a very comfortable social companion for the older man. By August this year Carroll would be noting his revived interest in the theme of "Little Red Riding Hood," which had featured the young Agnes Weld, niece of Tennyson, as long ago as 1857 (see Tennyson Chronology Part II). A previously unpublished letter from Carroll, dated 30 April to his friend Lucy Walters (b. 1856), touched upon the theme of "lionising," which had also troubled Tennyson so much. Carroll now implored his friend to not be angry with him, since he could not help hating "being made a lion of." (Diaries 8: 392-3n638). The theme would continue to intrude into the life of Lewis Carroll [1897].

Eastbourne Station, completed in 1886.

1888. At Eastbourne on 4 and 10 October Carroll walked alone to distant Beachy Head. The earlier walk was taken when child-friend Isa Bowman had returned to London after spending five weeks with Carroll that summer. The latter walk appeared to be part of a summation of his seaside stay: "Took a last walk to Beachy Head" (Diaries 8: 428), leaving us to puzzle over possible deeper meanings within his complex of guarded private experiences, memories and future hopes. Tennyson had been seriously ill this year, which had prompted him to hurriedly produce what he knew might well be his final reflection on life [ December 1889]. Carroll's skill at social networking suggests he would have known, whilst choosing not to comment.

1889. On Friday 11 January Carroll attended a London musical concert by Sir Charles Hallé. Amongst his large group of young actresses and guests were "Two Misses Lewis, from Haslemere…[who] staid night at Chestnuts [Guildford]" (Diaries 8: 442). Haslemere, on the railway south from Guildford to Godalming, then to Chichester and Portsmouth, was in easy walking distance to Kingsley Green and Fernhurst, close to Black Down and the Tennyson summer house. Coincidence? Or Carroll's opportunistic geography again? A Miss Helen Lewis was later noted by Carroll at Eastbourne that year (Diaries 8: 474, July 17), though not thereafter in his journal. In early June he spent three days as guest of Lord and Lady Salisbury - the Robert Arthur Talbot Cecil family of Hatfield House. Carroll's evident delight with the company and acquaintance of such notable society is shown by his lengthy and detailed listing of more than thirty persons of rank and interest (8: 461-467). By the end of this year Carroll would succeed in publishing the first half of his lengthy story Sylvie and Bruno. Tennysonian themes were readily found in Carroll's earlier Alice books, as shown in Lewis Carroll and Disguise, for example in the Red and White Knights and the symbolism of roses in Through The Looking Glass, Chapter 8. In the later fairy story Carroll devoted a whole chapter to his nonsense poem "Peter and Paul" included in which are the lines: "One can't be too deliberate," said Paul, "in parting with one's pelf. With bills, as you correctly state, I'm punctuality itself.... The word "pelf" from the Old French "pelfre" for "spoil" was an alternative to "filthy lucre" as a contemptuous term for money. Tennyson had the line "She dropt the goose and caught the pelf" (= the golden egg) in "The Goose" of 1842. Carroll's further apparent borrowings of "goose" and "geese"= fools, from Tennyson and others, were examined elsewhere (Dyer , 417-8n12).

1889. Saturday 27 August. At Eastbourne a new and rapidly ageing Lewis Carroll begins to appear in his regular journal entries. He went, as so frequently over the past decade or more of summers, to Beachy Head. Apparently for the first time he used the assistance of "the omnibus for going to, and returning from, the foot of the hill." (Diaries 8: 478). Possibly the time and energy thereby saved was to facilitate his climb to the top, to enjoy once more the superb views including that to the distant Isle of Wight. The journal offers no further detail there, leaving open the possibility that he did not make the climb. Had encroaching age and infirmity finally allowed Carroll to find acceptance, and to lay to rest any residual pain over Tennyson? A summation of his character traits would suggest yes, though with the caveat that he would not admit it, even to his very private journal.

Links to related material

Bibliography

Book of the Road. London: Reader's Digest Association, 1996.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Macmillan: London, 1886.

_____. Lewis Carroll Diaries. The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Edited by Edward Wakeling. Vols. 7, 8. England: Lewis Carroll Society, 2003, 2004.

_____ . Sylvie and Bruno. Macmillan: London, 1889.

Cohen, M. N. and Wakeling, E. (Eds). Lewis Carroll and His Illustrators: Collaborations and Correspondence, 1865-1898. London: Macmillan & Cornell Univ. Press: Ithaca NY, 2003.

[Illustration source] Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson. The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll. New York: Century, 1899. Internet Archive. Contributed by the Library of Congress. Web. 6 September 2022.

Dyer, Ray. Lady Muriel. The Victorian Romance by Lewis Carroll. Scholar's Annotated Edition. Leicester: Troubador, 2016.

._____. Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno With Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. Scholar's Annotated Edition. 2 vols in 1. Leicester: Troubador, 2015.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Poems. 2 vols. Boston: Ticknor, Reid & Fields, DCCCLIII (1853). [Note: Longfellow's works were known to Lewis Carroll from at least as early as 1862. In "The Goblet of Life" the American poet had the lines: "… filled with waters, that upstart,/When the deep fountains of the heart,/By strong convulsions rent apart,/Are running all to waste/… With fennel is it wreathed and crowned … And give a bitter taste…" (I: 260-261).]


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Part Five

Created 5 September 2022