A letter and other documents by the author Lewis Carroll have been discovered by archivists at Lincoln Cathedral.
The letter mentions a number of people who partially inspired scenes from Carroll’s most famous work, Alice in Wonderland.
The letter was an invitation to a dinner party to Henry Ramsden Bramley, who served as Precentor of Lincoln from 1895 to 1905. The letter included a dinner party seating plan and the menu for the dinner party - clear soup, turbot, black curry, lamb cutlets, apple soufflé and apricot cream.
For reasons unknown, at the centre of the hand-drawn seating plan is a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “The cloud-capped tower”. In the original Shakespeare the line is delivered by the magician Prospero and refers to the greatest works of man ultimately being temporary or illusory:
"The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve."
Other guests at the dinner party were Oxford mathematician Professor Bartholomew Price and William Ranken, the Vicar of Sandford-on-Thames and also, as it happens, an Oxford mathematician.
Professor Price was known as “Bat” on the grounds that his lectures flew over the heads of most who attended them. It is he that Carroll is referring to when the Mad Hatter recites the poem “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Bat”.
By contrast Ranken, who regularly played chess with Carroll, may well have served as partial inspiration for the second of the Alice books, Through the Looking Glass, which is themed around a chess game.
The story is framed as a huge chess game in which Alice is a white pawn attempting to make her way across the board to become a queen. Many of the characters in the book are chess pieces.
Fern Dawson, Curator at Lincoln Cathedral, said, “This is an amazing find, which we are delighted to have in the collection here at the Cathedral, but it has raised more questions than answers.
“For example, it is not known where Bramley and Carroll met; it may have been at Oxford University, or through the mutual acquaintance of famous composer and organist Sir John Stainer, who played the organ at Westminster Abbey for the wedding of Alice Liddle – the inspiration for ‘Alice in Wonderland’.”
Whatever the truth may be, the find has inspired a new festive performance of Alice in Wonderland this December at the Lincoln Arts Centre. The performance is being put on thanks to the joint collaboration of the Lincoln School of Creative Arts and the University of Lincoln.
