Alice at R'lyeh
Footnotes

Lewis Carroll (cartoon)Lewis Carroll, who lived under the pseudonym Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a mathematician, logician, and deacon of the Anglican Church. In 1862, during a picnic in Godstow, near Oxford, Carroll narrated the story of Alice’s Adventures Underground to the ten-year-old Alice Liddell, thus unconscionably making her fictional. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (as it was retitled) was published in 1865, and revolutionised children’s literature with its nonsensical whimsy, wholly suited to a Victorian Age in which women, to appear respectable, wrapped themselves in whalebone. From his late twenties to the end of his life, Carroll wrote 98,721 letters, all of them in purple ink.

H P Lovecraft (cartoon)Howard Philips Lovecraft was a ghost-writer, amateur press enthusiast, author of weird fiction, and gentleman (of restricted means). In 1920, inspired by a dream, he recorded the kernel of an idea for a new weird tale in his commonplace book. “The Call of Cthulhu” was published in 1928, and revolutionised horror fiction with its “cosmic” viewpoint, wholly suited to a Scientific Age in which humankind was theoretically indistinguishable from insects and amoebas. In 1928, Frank Belknap Long featured Lovecraft as a character in a Weird Tales novella “The Space-Eaters”, and so, like Alice Liddell before him, Lovecraft was made fictional. (In which form he is now as indispensable a part of the Cthulhu Mythos as Great Cthulhu himself.) Throughout his lifetime, Lovecraft wrote almost 100,000 letters, signing many of them Grandpa.

The Cheshire Cat's head
Alice at R'lyeh
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Alice & HPL
Cthulhu & the Cheshire Cat