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DODGSON (CHARLES LUTWIDGE) Autograph letter signed (C.L. Dodgson"), to "My dear Mayo", refusing point blank to meet his nephew: Christ Church, Oxford, 1 May 1893
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DODGSON (CHARLES LUTWIDGE)
Footnotes
ʻFEW THINGS SO INTENSELY DISAGREEABLE TO ME AS BEING INTRODUCED TO "ADMIRERS" IN THE CAPACITY OF AN AUTHOR' – Lewis Carroll refuses to meet an undergraduate fan. Dodgson had retired from his lectureship at Christ Church in 1881 to devote more time to his writing projects, and even by 1893 the list of work to be done was extensive and included Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (published at the end of that year), three volumes of Symbolic Logic, as well as other writing projects. Although Dodgson had pursued literary celebrities such as Tennyson when younger, by this time his circle of friends was relatively fixed and most social invitations were declined; nor was he ever one to mix easily with undergraduates on a social basis.
The recipient of this letter was Dodgson's Christ Church contemporary, Robert Mayo, who was a month younger than Dodgson and matriculated in 1851. The nephew can be identified as John Pym Mayo, youngest child of his brother Charles Thomas Mayo, who was born in 1872 and an undergraduate at Balliol at this time. We are most grateful to Edward Wakeling for furnishing this information: see also his edition of Lewis Carroll's Diaries (1993-2007) and his Lewis Carroll: The Man and His Circle (2015). Our letter is not published in The Letters of Lewis Carroll, edited by Morton N. Cohen (1979). See illustration on preceding page.





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