Gertrude Chataway

Gertrude Chataway (1866–1951) was the most important child-friend in the life of the author Lewis Carroll, after Alice Liddell. It was Gertrude who inspired his great nonsense mock-epic The Hunting of the Snark (1876), and the book is dedicated to her, and opens with a poem that uses her name as a double acrostic.[1]

A Double Acrostic by Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll wrote this unique double acrostic for Gertrude Chataway. The verses embody her name in two ways — by letters, and by syllables. This is the only double acrostic of its kind.

Carroll first became friends with Gertrude in 1875, when she was aged nine and he was forty-three, while on holiday at the English seaside resort of Sandown.[2] He made a number of pen and ink sketches of Gertrude as a young girl. He continued to correspond with her, and to spend numerous seaside holidays with her, including several when she was in her late twenties.[3]

Family

She was the daughter of James Chataway and his wife Elizabeth (née Drinkwater), and sister of James and Thomas Chataway.

References
  1. Tigges, Wim (1988). An anatomy of literary nonsense. Costerus. Vol. 67. Rodopi. p. 161. ISBN 90-5183-019-X.
  2. Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson (1898). The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll. T. Fisher Unwin. p. 379.
  3. Carpenter, Angelica Shirley (2003). Lewis Carroll: through the looking glass. Twenty-First Century Books. p. 103. ISBN 0-8225-0073-6.

Further reading
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