ABSTRACT
Derek Hudson has called Sylvie and Bruno, Lewis Carroll's last major children's book, “one of the most interesting failures in English literature.” 1 Most literary critics have agreed with this critical assessment and, consequently, surprisingly little has been written about this ambitious, two-volume novel. But, as Morton Cohen has observed in Lewis Carroll: A Biography while the Sylvie and Bruno books may lack the humor of the Alice books for children and may not be outstanding examples of a nineteenth-century society novel for adults, “they are much else and not to be undervalued.” 2 Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and its companion volume Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893) lack the consistent brilliance and wit of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) or Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Yet, in many ways, they can be viewed as Carroll's most complex, most theoretical, as well as most unread books. A growing critical interest has emerged concerning children's texts by authors who engage in “cross-writing,” in that they appeal to the dual audiences of children and adults. The interest is perhaps best exemplified by the special issue of Children's Literature on “Cross-Writing Child and Adult” (1997), edited by U.C. Knoepflmacher and Mitzi Myers, and the collection of essays in Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults (1999), edited by Sandra L. Beckett. Consequently, it is surprising that more critics have not examined Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno. Many critics acknowledge that the two Alice books are excellent examples of books that engage a dual audience of children and adults; however, some now argue that for most contemporary readers, the Alice books' appeal primarily to adults, rather than children. But as Edmund Miller observes, while Sylvie and Bruno is a “flawed work, it is also unique in that it is the only one in which the author consistently attempts to address an adult audience.” 3 By trying to combine a children's fairy tale simultaneously with an adult romance, Carroll was consciously writing a text that would appeal to both groups of readers.
