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An Oxford Discovery

Cilla Bull, the Great Master’s talented assistant, went up to Oxford last autumn.  The pressure on student accommodation meant that she found herself staying in an old attic.  There she found an old trunk containing a notebook.  It appears that the Reverend Dodgson, before he succumbed to the Victorian idea of what a poem should look like, recorded his unique inspirations in another form.  Page 17 is reproduced below:

  1. Ongoing dispute
    Tweedledum and Tweedledee
    —Big black crow ends it
  2. He had a great fall
    Humpty (off the wall) Dumpty
    —Irreversible
  3. Brillig.  Slithy toves
    In the wabe, gyre and gimble
    —Outgrabing mome raths
  4. Jabberwocky!
    The frumious bandersnatch
    —Vorpal sword needed
  5. Walking close at hand
    Walrus and the carpenter
    —Oyster outlook bleak

Cilla was so moved by them that, using the last line of ‘Looking Glass’, she wrote the following:
  1. Suddenly awake
    Life—what is it but a dream
    Of queens and kittens?

Little frog

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