SYLVIE AND BRUNO
BY
LEWIS CARROLL
WITH FORTY-SIX ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
HARRY FURNISS
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1890
The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved
Presswork by John Wilson and Son,
University Press.
Is all our Life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time’s dark resistless stream?
Bowed to the earth with bitter woe,
Or laughing at some raree-show,
We flutter idly to and fro.
Man’s little Day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.
PREFACE.
One little picture in this book, the Magic Locket,at p. 77, was drawn by ‘Miss Alice Havers.’ I didnot state this on the title-page, since it seemed onlydue, to the artist of all these (to my mind) wonderfulpictures, that his name should stand there alone.
The descriptions, at pp. 386, 387, of Sunday asspent by children of the last generation, are quotedverbatim from a speech made to me by a child-friendand a letter written to me by a lady-friend.
The Chapters, headed ‘Fairy Sylvie’ and ‘Bruno’sRevenge,’ are a reprint, with a few alterations, of alittle fairy-tale which I wrote in the year 1867, at therequest of the late Mrs. Gatty, for ‘Aunt Judy’sMagazine,’ which she was then editing.
It was in 1874, I believe, that the idea first occurredto me of making it the nucleus of a longer story. Asthe years went on, I jotted down, at odd moments,all sorts of odd ideas, and fragments of dialogue, thatoccurred to me—who knows how?—with a transitorysuddenness that left me no choice but eitherto record them then and there, or to abandon themto oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to theirxsource these random flashes of thought—as beingsuggested by the book one was reading, or struckout from the ‘flint’ of one’s own mind by the ‘steel’of a friend’s chance remark—but they had also away of their own, of occurring, à propos of nothing—specimensof that hopelessly illogical phenomenon,‘an effect without a cause.’ Such, for example, wasthe last line of ‘The Hunting of the Snark,’ whichcame into my head (as I have already related in‘The Theatre’ for April, 1887) quite suddenly, duringa solitary walk: and such, again, have been passageswhich occurred in dreams, and which I cannot traceto any antecedent cause whatever. There are atleast two instances of such dream-suggestions inthis book—one, my Lady’s remark, ‘it often runsin families, just as a love for pastry does’, at p. 88;the other, Eric Lindon’s badinage about having beenin domestic service, at p. 332.
And thus it came to pass that I found myself