Correspondence from Alice in Wonderland creator, Lewis Carroll, discovered in Lincoln Cathedral

A letter and other documents by the creator Lewis Carroll have been discovered by archivists at Lincoln Cathedral.

The letter mentions a variety of individuals who partially inspired scenes from Carroll’s most famous work, Alice in Wonderland.

The letter was an invite to a feast to Henry Ramsden Bramley, who served as Precentor of Lincoln from 1895 to 1905. The letter included a feast seating plan and the menu for the feast – clear soup, turbot, black curry, lamb cutlets, apple soufflé and apricot cream.

For reasons unknown, on the centre of the hand-drawn seating plan is a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “The cloud-capped tower”. In the unique Shakespeare the road is delivered by the magician Prospero and refers back to the biggest works of man ultimately being temporary or illusory:

“The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the good globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve.”

Other guests on the feast were Oxford mathematician Professor Bartholomew Price and William Ranken, the Vicar of Sandford-on-Thames and likewise, because it happens, an Oxford mathematician.

Professor Price was often 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 often played chess with Carroll, might 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 an enormous chess game wherein Alice is a white pawn attempting to make her way across the board to grow to be a queen. Many of the characters within the book are chess pieces.

Fern Dawson, Curator at Lincoln Cathedral, said, “This is an incredible find, which we’re delighted to have in the gathering here on the Cathedral, however it has raised more questions than answers. 

“For example, it just isn’t known where Bramley and Carroll met; it could 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 marriage of Alice Liddle – the inspiration for ‘Alice in Wonderland’.”

Whatever the reality could also be, the find has inspired a recent festive performance of Alice in Wonderland this December on the Lincoln Arts Centre. The performance is being placed on because of the joint collaboration of the Lincoln School of Creative Arts and the University of Lincoln.