3 Review(s)

This volume contains almost all the letters that Charles Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll) wrote to his publisher during a professional relationship that spanned the last thirty-five years of the Victorian era, a time when the reading public expanded a hundredfold, when the techniques of mass book production were being shaped, and when laws governing copyright and bookselling were first forged in the English-speaking world. Dodgson's correspondence touched critically on all these issues, and is a fascinating record of the contemporary evolution of publishing as well as of the production and distribution of his own immensely popular children's books and other works. At the same time it charts the growth of the House of Macmillan from modest beginnings to its status as a leading publisher. Professor Cohen and Professor Gandolfo have provided a useful introduction and explanatory notes to the letters.