ABSTRACT
Lewis Carroll was a man of many interests and accomplishments: a mathematics don at Christ Church, Oxford, a Church of England priest, a pioneer photographer and an ardent theatregoer. Elizabeth Menella,Minna Quin, about whom Carroll wrote to Mary Manners on 7 February 1892 encouraging her to visit the pantomime in which Menella was appearing. Carroll described Menella as the daughter of Menella Wilcox, a sort of cousin of him, who had married Francis Stranistrate Smythe Quin and produced five daughters who were brought up in Ireland. Soliciting favours for relatives and friends was common practice in the nineteenth century and Lewis Carroll was certainly no exception, especially when it came to aspiring actresses. It was a measure of the advances in attitudes towards the theatre that in 1894 Carroll, Terry and presumably Minna herself could regard advancing a young woman's stage career as a Christian deed.
