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Author | Lewis Carroll |
---|---|
Illustrator | Harry Furniss |
Language | English |
Genre | Fantasy |
Publisher | Macmillan and Co. |
Publication date | 13 December 1889 29 December 1893 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Media type | |
Pages | xxiii + 400pp xxxi + 423pp |
OCLC | 644529814 |
823.8 | |
LC Class | PR4611 .S9 |
Sylvie and Bruno, first published in 1889, and its second volume Sylvie and Bruno Concluded published in 1893, form the last novel by Lewis Carroll published during his lifetime. Both volumes were illustrated by Harry Furniss.
The novel has two main plots: one set in the real world at the time the book was published (the Victorian era), the other in the fantasy world of Fairyland. While the latter plot is a fairy tale with many nonsense elements and poems, similar to Carroll's Alice books, the story set in Victorian Britain is a social novel, with its characters discussing various concepts and aspects of religion, society, philosophy and morality.
Two short pieces, "Fairy Sylvie" and "Bruno's Revenge", originally appeared in Aunt Judy's Magazine in 1867. Some years later, in 1873 or 1874, Carroll had the idea to use these as the core for a longer story. [1] Much of the rest of the novel he compiled from notes of ideas and dialogue which he had collected over the years (and which he called "litterature" in the introduction to the first volume).
Carroll initially intended for the novel to be published in one volume. However, due to its length, it was divided into two volumes, published in 1889 and 1893. [2]
The novel is not nearly as well known as the Alice books. It was very poorly received and did not have many reprintings; modern commentators note that it lacks much of Carroll's characteristic humour. The poem The Mad Gardener's Song , widely reprinted elsewhere, is the best-known part of the book.[ citation needed ]
The introductory poem contains a double acrostic on the name "Isa Bowman", one of Carroll's child friends. [3] [4]
There are two strands to the plot: the conspiracy against the Warden of Outland, instigated by the Sub-Warden and Chancellor, and the love of a young doctor, Arthur, for Lady Muriel.
Unlike Lewis Carroll's Alice books, Sylvie and Bruno has never been praised by critics. It sold just 13,000 copies in its early editions. [6] "The Mad Gardener's Song", a poem that appears in instalments throughout the book, is often described as the only well-received part of the work. [7] [8]
The famous writer J. R. R. Tolkien was fond of the novel, and it is believed to have influenced his novella Roverandom. [9] [10] [11]
The watch used by Sylvie and Bruno has been described as an early type of time machine, making Sylvie and Bruno an early example of time travel fiction; Lisa Yaszek noted that "The explosion of such stories during this era [1889 onward] might come from the fact that people were beginning to standardize time, and orient themselves to clocks more frequently." [12]
In 2011, Richard Jenkyns of Prospect described Carroll's use of baby talk in the book as "embarrassing." [13]
In 2014, Mari Ness wrote "Carroll abruptly shifts from one world to the other often without sense or reason or letting the reader know what’s going on. This is meant, I think, to convey the thin line between reality and dream, and to accent the narrator’s confusion—since he himself is often not at all sure what is going on. In practice, it comes across as muddled and annoying – mostly because the tones of the two narratives are so completely different. [...] Carroll seems to forget what he is writing, and where he is in the story. This might be deliberate, but that doesn’t quite explain apparent slip-ups such as the way the narrator suddenly knows Lady Muriel’s name before anyone has brought it up; the narration suddenly telling us Sylvie’s thoughts even though the narrator has no way of knowing what these thoughts are, not to mention this is distracting. Other bits leap from here to there without much meaning or connection or recollection of what happened earlier [...] Carroll later noted that he wrote the rest of the book in odd moments here and there, more or less jotting them down when he thought of scenes. This is all very well, but what Carroll blatantly forgot to do was to try to connect all of these odd moments."
Ness does praise some aspects, such as the Professor's Lecture, and says that "here and there I can catch glimpses of the zany, surreal humor of the Alice books. But even at their best moments, and there are few of those, the Sylvie and Bruno books never really hit those heights." She noted the similarities to George MacDonald's Adela Cathcart (1864) and posited that the failure of Sylvie and Bruno caused other authors not to attempt to write similar books aimed at both a child and adult audience. [14]
Writing in The Forward in 2015, Benjamin Ivry criticised what he saw as antisemitic content in Sylvie and Bruno, for example, the depiction of a tailor (a stereotypically Jewish occupation in Victorian England) who accepts the doubling of his payment owed every year. [15]
Iolanthe; or, The Peer and the Peri is a comic opera with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert, first performed in 1882. It is one of the Savoy operas and is the seventh of fourteen operatic collaborations by Gilbert and Sullivan. In the opera, the fairy Iolanthe has been banished from fairyland because she married a mortal; this is forbidden by fairy law. Her son, Strephon, is an Arcadian shepherd who wants to marry Phyllis, a Ward of Chancery. All the members of the House of Peers also want to marry Phyllis. When Phyllis sees Strephon hugging a young woman, she assumes the worst and sets off a climactic confrontation between the peers and the fairies. The opera satirises many aspects of British government, law and society. The confrontation between the fairies and the peers is a version of one of Gilbert's favourite themes: a tranquil civilisation of women is disrupted by a male-dominated world through the discovery of mortal love.
Granville George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville,, styled Lord Leveson until 1846, was a British Liberal statesman and diplomat from the Leveson-Gower family. He is best remembered for his service as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
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Harry Furniss was a British illustrator. He established his career on the Illustrated London News before moving to Punch. He also illustrated Lewis Carroll's novel Sylvie and Bruno.
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The Midnight Folk is a children's fantasy novel by John Masefield first published in 1927. It is about a boy, Kay Harker, who sets out to discover what became of a fortune stolen from his seafaring great grandfather Aston Tirrold Harker. The treasure is also sought by a coven of witches who are seeking it for their own ends. Kay's governess Sylvia Daisy Pouncer is a member of the coven. The witches are led or guided by the wizard Abner Brown.
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The Man Upstairs is a collection of short stories by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 23 January 1914 by Methuen & Co., London. Most of the stories had previously appeared in magazines, generally Strand Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan or Collier's Weekly in the United States. Although the book was not published in the US, many of the stories were eventually made available to US readers in The Uncollected Wodehouse (1976) and The Swoop! and Other Stories (1979).
Tottles was a character in a poem from Lewis Carroll's novel Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), the second volume following on from Sylvie and Bruno (1889). The poem What Tottles Meant is recited in Chapter 13. The poem recounts how the newlywed Mr. Tottles is impoverished by trying to keep up with his mother-in-law's expectations. His name echoes the Victorian slang tottle, a facetious mispronunciation of total, meaning a bill from a restaurant or tradesman.
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MurielMURE-ee-əl is a feminine given name in the English language.
Lady Muriel Evelyn Vernon Paget CBE DStJ was a British philanthropist and humanitarian relief worker, initially based in London, and later in Eastern and Central Europe. She was made an OBE in 1918 and promoted to CBE in 1938. She received awards in recognition of her humanitarian work from the governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Imperial Russia. In 1916 she was invested as a Dame of Grace of the Order of St John.
"The Doll That Came Straight From Fairyland" is a short story for children published in 1898 by the suffragist and children's fairytale writer Evelyn Sharp. The first edition was published by John Lane in London, England, in All The Way To Fairyland with seven other short stories.
ISIRTA plays, A-C
Sir Richard Arthur Surtees Paget, 2nd Baronet was a British barrister and amateur scientific investigator, who specialised in speech science and the origin of speech. Following the publication of his book on these topics, Human Speech, in 1930, Paget worked for the remaining decades of his life on a new type of signing system for the deaf, which became the Paget Gorman Sign System.
"The Mad Gardener's Song" is a poem by Lewis Carroll that appears in his book Sylvie and Bruno.