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The Lewis Carroll Collection at Christ Church
The Lewis Carroll Collection
Christ Church holds three distinct collections of material relating to Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Ludwidge Dodgson. These collections include a wide variety of material, from autograph letters and a wealth of manuscripts, original photographic prints, proof sheets and presentation copies, to a large number of editions of the “Alice” books in different languages.
Illustrated editions include 19th century black and white etchings and a huge range of 20th century illustrations. Some illustrators are famous in their own right, like Salvador Dali, Ralph Steadman and Barry Moser. The collections also include an impressive array of secondary material (biographies, books about various aspects of Carroll’s work, etc.) and are available for the use of researchers upon application to the Library.
The whole corpus of the Lewis Carroll collection is currently the object of intense study and scrutiny, being reviewed and catalogued. This is a work in progress. A significant part of the Lewis Carroll collection has now been digitized. More will follow in due course. This project aims to provide an enhanced experience for viewers, allowing them to flip the pages, zoom in, and read very detailed descriptions. The digitized part of the Lewis Carroll collection has been organized in the following sections:
The Making of ‘Alice’
Other Works by Lewis Carroll
Miscellaneous Carroll Material
Photography
Carroll Friends and ContemporariesAccess to all fully digitized resources is made available both through the college website, or directly via the Digital Bodleian portal. Crucially for research, our digitized items are integrated with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), a set of software standards established and adhered to by an ever expanding community of libraries and cultural heritage institutions, including the British Library, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cambridge University Library, Harvard University Library, MIT, Stanford University, Trinity College Dublin, the Vatican and Yale University. All this gives scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to image-based resources hosted around the world.
Source: http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/library-and-archives/lewis-carroll-collection-0
Snark related links are offered in “Other Works by Lewis Carroll“. At present the links also lead to scans of Henry Holiday’s illustrations.
I like Edward Wakeling’s detailed description of Holiday’s illustrations. The Ocean Chart is not mentioned. That is no mistake: That chart quite probably isn’t an illustration by Henry Holiday. My own collection of scans does contain the Ocean Chart, as it is about all illustrations to The Hunting of the Snark. That includes the illustration not made by Henry Holiday.
Sir Henry Lee
Sharpening a Spade
When the crew of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark is making preparations for seeking that impossible creature, we read that “the Boots and the Broker were sharpening a spade”. This action is so outlandish that the editor and commentator (Martin Gardner) remarks ad locum: “Why in the world were they sharpening a spade?” (Gardner 2006: 44.)
Source: The Semantics and Semiotics of Sharpening a Spade: A possible Explanation of Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, Line 273; by Ezequiel Ferriol, 2017
Sharpening a spade is not outlandish. I saw farmers and gardeners doing that. Sharpening the spade before digging makes work easier. I think that Gardener simply asked what the Boots and the Broker wanted to do with a spade.
Quite probably the Boots and the Broker sharpened a spade because they were going to dig.
Fr ɖ Snarc wz a Būjm, y si
“Jst ɖ ples fr a Snarc!” ɖ Belmn craid,
Az h landd hiz cru wɖ cer,
S’portñ ć man on ɖ top v ɖ tîd
Bî a fngr intwînd in hiz her.“Jst ɖ ples fr a Snarc! I hv sd it twîs.
Ɖt alon śd incurij ɖ cru.
Jst ɖ ples fr a Snarc! I hv sd it ʈrîs.
Ẃt I tel y ʈri tîmz z tru.”…
Grandville’s Monsters
The big beast perhaps gave birth to a Boojum.
(John Tufail made me aware of this illustration by J. J. Grandville.)
Thomas Cranmer
As for The Hunting of the Snark, I think that this is the most important finding of my Snark hunt.
The Dream Book of Mr. Pyridine
From Mahendra Singh’s The Dream Book of Mr. Pyridine
Snark Puppetery
Charlotte Emerson’s Shadow Cranky
This is the beautiful result of a 1st year university project to create a video to go alongside a given prose. Charlotte Emerson made a shadow cranky, animating Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. She uploeded it to YouTube on 2016-05-12.
There is no sound. It’s up to you to add it.
The Image Breakers
- [left]: The Banker after his encounter with the Bandersnatch, depicted in Henry Holiday’s illustration (woodcut by Joseph Swain) to the chapter The Banker’s Fate in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.
- [right]: a slightly horizontally compressed rendering of The Imagebreakers (1566-1568, aka Allegory of Iconoclasm), an etching by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder.
Monsters
Monstrances
The Ocean Chart
Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876) has been published “with nine illustrations by Henry Holiday”. But there are ten illustrations. One possible explanation: The Ocean-Chart (aka the Bellman’s map) has been made neither by Henry Holiday nor by Joseph Swain, but by a typesetter.
In the more recent British history, the map has been used by Britain’s contemporary Bellmen before 2016-06-23 to present their understanding of the impact of the Brexit to the rest of the crew. Admittedly, by now the majority of Britains understand the trouble they put themselves into. But as pride and face-saving of course is much more important than something profane like a healthy economy and rational thinking, that map won’t be updated.
2017-09-29
Matte Painting by Matt Scheuerman
Matte painting by Matthew Scheuerman (see also interview by Richard Cave) for Michael McNeff‘s movie
![](http://snrk.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/McNeffsSnark.jpg)