Books: The Juvenile Carroll

USEFUL AND INSTRUCTIVE POETRY (45 pp.] —Lewis Carroll—Macmillan ($2.50).

The juvenile Jenkins was jumping with joy, As he sported him over the sandy lea; In his small fat hand there was many a toy And many a cake in his mouth had, he . . .

Some 20 years before he sat on a sunny riverbank spinning the tale of Alice in Wonderland for the benefit of three entranced little girls, the man who became immortal as Lewis Carroll wrote these lines for his brother and sister (aged seven and five) at a rectory at Croft. During the years that followed, as he grew up to become a clergyman, a teacher and a mathematician, the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson kept his alter ego, Carroll, well hidden from disapproving adult eyes. Carroll the storyteller preferred to save his voice for only the very young. In this slim volume, readers will have a chance to judge Lewis Carroll's earliest efforts to please his young listeners. All 16 poems, now published together for the first time in the U.S., were written and illustrated by him when he was only 13.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about them is that most of them read very much like the works of a 13-year-old—precocious, well-behaved and well-read beyond his years but a teen-ager nonetheless. Dedicated Carrollians will find few clues of the greatness to come. The Headstrong Man who . . . stood on high Upon a lofty wall; And every one who passed him by, Called out "I fear you'll fall."

might be a preview of Humpty Dumpty or that even greater exponent of waywardness, Father William. But where Carroll's Humpty crashed to his fate in magnificent indifference and Father William went right on standing on his head, the Headstrong Man is easily brought to earth with a thrown handful of sand and a thoroughly sententious Victorian moral:

"If headstrong men will stand like me, Nor yield to good advice, All that they can expect will be, To get sand in their eyes."

Such other blunt moral precepts as "Don't get drunk" or "Keep your wits about you," added to several poems, suggest the testy future schoolmaster. But in one impious song of fraternal friction, there is a glimpse of the irreverence that shocked many a later-Victorian reader:

"Sister! do not rouse my wrath, I'd make you into mutton broth As easily as kill a moth."

To which the moral is appended: "Never stew your sister."

Here and there in his earliest work, the teen-age poet experiments with the echoes of Byron and Coleridge that gave grace to such later ethereal nonsense as the White Knight's song in Through the Looking-Glass—a minor classic if read through half-closed eyes in a willing suspension of common sense. In Clara, young Carroll writes:

With rays of light through the murky night She makes the dark as noon, Oh! would I were a screech owl now, To woo the yellow moon!