Monday, November 26, 2007

So Now You Know

Charles Ludwidge Dodgson never publicly acknowledged that he was also Lewis Carroll. He seldom signed his books, and never gave away his portrait. Dodgson did acknowledge his pen name among his friends (especially in the letters to his child-friends which he signed with that name) but publicly denied any connection with the Alice books. Hence, he regularly returned strangers' mail addressed to him as Lewis Carroll with a printed leaflet that asserted, "Mr. Dodgson is so frequently addressed by strangers on the quite unauthorized assumption that he claims or at any rate acknowledges the authorship of books not published under his name, that he has found it necessary to print this, once and for all, as an answer to all such applications. He neither claims or acknowledges any connection with any pseudonym, or with any book that is not published under his own name."