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Ten Minutes for Tea. There was a darkroom jampacked with photographic materials (Dodgson was one of the most talented amateur photographers of his day) ; mousetraps of his own design with sliding doors and "humane" compartments for drowning; boxes of notepaper in five different sizes for letters of reply ("Let me see," he would say, "for this letter I will use number three size; that should meet the case exactly"); clockwork bears, mice, frogs and bats. Stacked on the shelves were copies of the scores of pamphlets he loved to write, their titles ranging from Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter Writing to The Formulae of Plane Geometry and Suggestions as to the Best Method of Taking Votes where More than Two Issues Are to Be Voted On.
When his visitors were seated, the tall, timid don (invariably dressed in black clericals) would produce a memorandum book, quickly draw a diagram of the room, and note in it precisely the position of each chair and its occupant's name. If he nervously pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, a cascade of carefully graded pennies, shillings and half crowns was likely to stream onto the floor. At this, he would hurriedly fill the teapot and pace up & down swinging it, for ten minutes exactly —"he claimed the tea was better so."
Men without Women. "Men cut off from the influence of women," says Author Lennon, with a faculty for understatement that any Briton might envy, "seem nearly always to develop eccentricities." The psychiatrist who felt that the country of Wonderland was "a continuous threat to the integrity of the body" was simply putting in the wrong nutshell the Reverend Dodgson's own anxiety about the dangers of everyday life. Son of a stern archdeacon, eldest of eleven children, only two of whom married and nine of whom were girls, young Charles seems never to have got over the belief that there was "something ugly and even cruel in masculinity." And "masculinity after all," remarks Author Lennon precisely, "is half of sex."
The Rev. Mr. Dodgson loved romance — but all he did about it was write a sad little satire about a young man who, on seeing a sign reading "Shop of Romance-ment," joyfully became an apprentice —only to find that the sign really read "Shop of Roman Cement." He loved the theater — but when he met beautiful Actress Irene Vanbrugh he could think of nothing to talk about but the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. Of dazzling Actress Ellen Terry he made what was probably the most passionate declaration of his life: "I can imagine no more delightful occupation" he said, "than brushing Ellen Terry's hair!"