What do we know about this character?

[Mayerling]

Originally Posted by R Wallace

To Mayerling/Jeff

Thank for your post and for your acknowledgment up front you hadn't read my books. Nowhere in all the biographies of LC that I read did I ever read that a his field at Oxford was logic. The books that he wrote, which are considered quite good, but they were produced purely out of his interest in the subject and a wish to make a contribution to the field. They had nothing to do with his duties at the university. They're another example of the breadth of his creativity.

I'm always reluctant to quote too much from my books for people who haven't read them. But there is some time spent in The Agony on a work of his (I can't identify it right now) in which he encouraged writers to rearrange the letters of written stories until one created a new story with the greatest "intensity." Ah! An extended anagram! See "A Conundrum" in Lighthearted Friend to see a considerably more intense re-arrangement. One reader was able to solve the conundrum by finding the original material.

LC wrote a paean to his mother. Rearranging the letters to get a more intense feeling toward his mother we get (in part) "...I came to resent every word from her lips. So, a horrid freak -- a timid phony -- sneered, revolted, and showed how vile filth vanishes in foolish nonsense." More intense than the original? You betcha. No one wants to believe that a penultimate game player was playing a game with his adult readers, never mind that he was using the children to accomplish it.

Based on the lack of interest in the other thread about whether anagrams can ever be evidence, it appears that no one believes that when one finds too many anagrams in a work that perhaps there's more there than meets the eye and that they are not there by accident.

On a personal note, at age 76 and not in good health, I may soon retire from the Casebook blog. In the meantime I encourage bloggers to do their homework before they comment and read the only book that suggests LC to be JTR.

I do hope your health improves in the coming year, and you reconsider the possible exiting from the Casebook. We always actually do welcome many opinions. Besides, I actually found in your response a slight stimulation regarding your research concerning language terminology. The word "phony" appeared in the rearrangement of the paean Dodgson wrote for his mother, and I was surprised at that. I'm not a linguist by any means, but I was always under the impression that "phony" was a 20th century term, not one from the 19th century. Of course, Dodgson died in 1898, close to the conclusion of his century, but it did surprise me a bit there.

Take care of yourself and have a good year.

Jeff

[R Wallace]

To Mayerling/Jeff

Thanks for your post and I hope I piqued your interest. In preparing the books I used the Oxford English Dictionary for questionable words along with a couple of slang dictionaries of the day. They are available at the moment. But "late" 19th century (whenever that starts) is probably okay. I don't know when LC wrote the paean to his mother, but I got the sense that it was found among his things by his family after he died. It wasn't anything he published. He died in 1898 and was writing until the end. Fair question.

[dag]

A New Year anagram especially for Richard Wallace:

Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

=

Ah! Richard Wallace reasons the virulent killer haunting East End of London was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson



Best wishes

David Green

[R Wallace]

To Dag:

Very clever anagram; they're not easy to do. It's good to see another person trying to accomplish Carroll's encouragement to rearrange the letters of what one has written. The real question is whether Carroll actually did what he encouraged others to do. I think Yes; I'm guessing you think No.

Re the lack of an Index, I agree with you that it's a crime. It's clear you read the e-book version of the work. Perhaps there are e-book publishers now who retain the original page numbers; but I didn't find one at the time. The original hard copies of the works are indexed. I don't have the e-books here, but I believe the Notes were included in both e-books.