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Commentary by Ray Dyer

The Victorian toy-shop interior, with its plentiful bric-a-brac so faithfully depicted by Tenniel's busy pencil, would seem to have been yet another treasured revenant from the childhood memories of Lewis Carroll, if not also of the artist Tenniel himself. Apart from W. H. Smith's railway station bookstalls during his Rugby School term-time journeys (see the Carroll Chronology, 1846-49), Carroll's shop preferences as an adult, from his journal entries c.1860 onwards (collected in his Diaries 10: 122) were decidedly more towards the requirements of his later pastime of photography.

The main thrust of the sheep-shopkeeper scene, alongside the obvious delightful fantasy and anthropomorphic nonsense, is Carroll's effort to instruct his readers, of all ages, into the subtleties of Logic, as generated by his Christ Church work in Mathematics. Fallacies, and the "knotty" problems involved, were his mental bread and butter, and were scattered widely through his works, as in the earlier Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where during the Mouse's long and convoluted tale (Ch. III) Alice is allowed to exclaim "A knot!… Oh, do let me help to undo it!" In his daily activities with child-friends also, he was keen to make use of any and every opportunity to correct illogical and fallacious thinking. His mature child-friend Isa Bowman, in her later reminiscences, notes that her "uncle" would, just like the Sheep Shopkeeper here, always pick up on her many innocent exclamations. These included her Eastbourne complaint that the sea made her hair "as stiff as a poker" (the fallacy of exaggeration); her letters signed with "millions of kisses," and her observation that a dropped ornament shattered into "thousands of pieces" (Bowman: 23-25).

By May 1880 Carroll would have a regular corner in the Christian-educational publication The Monthly Packet of Charlotte M. Yonge. There, under the somewhat guileful heading "Romantic Problems," he presented deductive exercises in algebra, arithmetic, geometry and logical generalities. The magazine's readers were invited to write in with their answers, which they did in large numbers, and Carroll reviewed them in the following issues. His Problems, which he entitled "Knots," continued to Knot 7, and were later collected into an independent publication, together with his often hilarious, subtle and even openly satirising responses to correspondents (Carroll, 1885).

Bibliography

Bowman, I. Lewis Carroll As I Knew Him. Ed. M. N. Cohen. New York: Dover Books, (1899) 1972.

Carroll, Lewis. Lewis Carroll’s Diaries. The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Vol. 10, Ed. Edward Wakeling. England: Lewis Carroll Society, 2007.

_____. A Tangled Tale. London: Macmillan, 1885. NB. Carroll's illustrator for this book was the young American artist Arthur Burdett Frost, 1851-1928, who produced six full-page drawings for the work. The two men had met and formed a commercial relationship in 1878, and Frost then produced an impressive series of sixty-five drawings for Carroll's Rhyme? And Reason? of 1883.

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Last modified 9 June 2021