Transcript of Sylvie and Bruno
Preface of Sylveon Bruno by Lewis Carroll. One little picture in this book, the magic locker at page 77, was drawn by Miss Alice Havers. I did not state this on the title page, since it seemed only due to the artist of all these to my mind wonderful pictures that his name should stand there alone. The descriptions at page 386, 387 of Sunday, as spent by children of the last generation, are quoted verbatim from a speech made to me by a child friend and a letter written to me by a lady friend. The chapters headed Fairy Sylvie and Bruno's Revenge are a reprint with a few alterations of a little fairy tale which I wrote in the year 1867, at the request of the late Mrs. Gatti for Aunt Judy's Magazine which she was then editing. It was 1874 I believe that the idea first occurred to me of making it the nucleus of a longer story. As the years went on I jotted down at odd moments all sorts of odd ideas and fragments of dialogue that occurred to me. Who knows how? With a transitory suddenness that left me no choice but either to record them then and there or to abandon them to oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to their source these random flashes of thought as being suggested by the book one was reading or struck out from the flint of one's own mind by the steel of a friend's chance remark, but they had also a way of their own, of occurring, a pro source of nothing, specimens of that hopelessly illogical phenomenon, an effect without a cause. Such, for example, was the last line of The Hunting of the Snark which came into my head as I have already related in The Theatre for April 1887, quite suddenly during a solitary walk and such again have been passages which occurred in dreams and which I cannot trace to any antecedent cause whatever. There are at least two instances of such dream suggestions in this book. One my lady's remark, it often runs in families just as a love for pastry does, at page 88, the other Eric Lindon's badinage about having been in domestic service at page 332. And thus it came to pass that I found myself at last in possession of a huge unwieldy mass of literature, if the reader will kindly excuse the spelling, which only needed stringing together upon the thread of a consecutive story to constitute the book I hoped to write. Only, the task at first seemed absolutely hopeless and gave me a far clearer idea than I ever had before of the meaning of the word chaos. And I think it must have been ten years or more before I had succeeded in classifying these odds and ends sufficiently to see what sort of story they indicated, for the story had to grow out of the incidents, not the incidents out of the