Gertrude Chataway
Annie Gertrude Chataway (1866–1951, married name Atkinson) 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]
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
[edit]She was the daughter of James Chataway and his wife Elizabeth (née Drinkwater), and sister of James and Thomas Chataway.
In 1907 she married the architect Thomas Dinham Atkinson (1864–1948).[4]
References
[edit]- ↑ Tigges, Wim (1988). An anatomy of literary nonsense. Costerus. Vol. 67. Rodopi. p. 161. ISBN 90-5183-019-X.
- ↑ Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson (1898). The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll. T. Fisher Unwin. p. 379.
- ↑ Carpenter, Angelica Shirley (2003). Lewis Carroll: through the looking glass. Twenty-First Century Books. p. 103. ISBN 0-8225-0073-6.
- ↑ Cohen, Morton Norton; Lancelyn Green, Roger, eds. (1979). The letters of Lewis Carroll. Vol. 1. London: Macmillan. p. 230. ISBN 0-333-08979-0.
Further reading
[edit]- The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (Gutenberg e-book).