The Russian Journal and Other Selections from the Works of Lewis Carroll

The Russian Journal and Other Selections from the Works of Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll (Edited by John Francis McDermott) — 1st Edition

Publication: New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1935

Formatting: 8vo, pp. [xii], 13–252.

Condition Report: Very Good. Bound in the publisher's original sage-green cloth, with the upper board blocked in dark blue-black ink within a double-ruled rectangular frame and the spine lettered to match. The cloth across both boards remains fresh, clean, and even in colour, with sharp, unrubbed stamping to the front cover and spine. The spine extremities display light rubbing and minor fraying at the foot beside the publisher's imprint, together with a narrow band of sunning at the crown corresponding to a chip in the dust wrapper. The binding is square, tight, and structurally sound throughout. Externally, the text-block edges exhibit mild age-toning and light dust-dulling along the top edge, whilst internally the endpapers and leaves remain crisp, clean, and unmarred by foxing, with only gentle, uniform toning to the paper stock. Housed in the original unclipped pale green dust wrapper (retaining the "$3.00" price at the foot of the front flap), now protected in a removable archival sleeve. The jacket's spine panel is noticeably sun-darkened, with a chip and associated creasing at the head, light wear at the heel, and toning along the front joint, whilst the front and rear panels show modest surface rubbing, a few faint spots, and minor nicks and short closed tears along the upper edges, leaving all typography and the central vignette crisp and legible.

Catalogue Note: First trade edition, stated "First Edition" on the copyright page, representing the first commercially published and generally accessible appearance of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's 1867 Russian travel diary.

Prior to this volume, Dodgson's diary had appeared solely in an elusive privately printed edition of sixty-six copies issued in Philadelphia by the collector Morris L. Parrish in 1928 under the title Tour in 1867. A minor bibliographical curiosity of this edition is the variance between the dust wrapper, which reads from the work of Lewis Carroll in the singular, and the title and copyright pages, which read from the Works of Lewis Carroll in the plural.

The volume is illustrated with small black-and-white in-text line drawings reproduced from Dodgson's early manuscripts and family magazines, one of which, a perched parrot within a vertical frame, is repeated as the central vignette on the upper panel of the dust wrapper.

Whilst copies lacking the jacket appear in the trade with moderate regularity, examples retaining the fragile, pale green unclipped dust wrapper are distinctly uncommon on the open market.

In the summer of 1867, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—better known to the world as Lewis Carroll—embarked upon the only foreign journey of his life, travelling for nine weeks through Imperial Russia alongside his Oxford colleague, the theologian Canon Henry Parry Liddon. Recording his impressions of St Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod, Dodgson's Journal of a Tour in Russia in 1867 captures the keen eye, dry wit, and curiosity of the Victorian traveller amidst the gilded domes, bustling bazaars, and Orthodox cathedrals of Tsar Alexander II's empire.

Complementing the Russian diary, scholar John Francis McDermott brings together a rich chronological selection of Carroll's fugitive prose, parodies, puzzles, and essays that had previously remained scattered across scarce Victorian periodicals and private family magazines. From juvenilia composed for The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch to Oxford satires, mathematical knots, and his reflective essay "Alice" on the Stage, this collection offers an illuminating portrait of the multifaceted mind behind Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.