Symbolic Logic: Part 1 Elementary (Association Copy, Inscribed by Author)

CARROLL, Lewis [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson]. Symbolic Logic: Part I, Elementary. London & New York: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1897.

Small 8vo (12mo). Original brown publisher's cloth. Author and title stamped in black to front cover. xxxi, [1], 199, [1], plus 3 pp. of publisher's advertisements. Fourth edition (Second Thousand). Presentation copy, inscribed by the author to the half-title page: "Muriel Taylor, from the Author. [1897]." Provenance: association copy, inscribed to Muriel Taylor, said to have been an influence on the character of Lady Muriel in Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893).

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898) — Lewis Carroll to the reading public, but for more than a quarter-century a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, under his own name — regarded logic not as a professional sideline to his fiction but as a genuine and lifelong intellectual passion. Symbolic Logic: Part I, Elementary was first published in 1896 and reprinted rapidly across several editions within the same year and the next, evidence of a real popular appetite for what Dodgson intended, in his own words, as "a most interesting mental recreation." The book introduces Carroll's distinctive diagrammatic method for representing logical propositions and syllogisms — a system of biliteral and triliteral squares filled with coloured counters, a visual and playful alternative to the more austere Venn diagrams that were becoming standard in contemporary logical instruction, and one entirely characteristic of the mind that had already given the world the Cheshire Cat's grin and the Mad Hatter's tea party as instruments of serious intellectual play.

Dodgson intended Symbolic Logic as only the first of a projected three-part work — Part II, "Advanced," and Part III, "Transcendental," were promised in the book's own advertisement matter, "should life, and health, and opportunity, be granted" to their author. Neither further part appeared in his lifetime; Dodgson died in January 1898, less than a year after this fourth edition was printed, and it fell to later scholars — most substantially William Warren Bartley III, whose 1977 edition reconstructed a version of Part II from Dodgson's surviving manuscripts and logical papers — to give readers any sense of what the completed project might have become.

This particular copy carries a presentation inscription to Muriel Taylor, whom family and provenance tradition associate with Carroll's later fiction, and in particular with the character of Lady Muriel Orme in Sylvie and Bruno and its sequel. Dodgson's practice of drawing his fictional children and young women directly from the "child-friends" of his real acquaintance is well documented elsewhere in his work — the introductory poem to Sylvie and Bruno itself conceals a double acrostic spelling out the name of Isa Bowman, another of his real-life child companions — and association copies of this kind, connecting Dodgson's private circle directly to the characters of his fiction, are prized by collectors precisely for the intimate light they shed on the relationship between the author's life and his invented worlds.

Very good. Hardcover boards in very good condition, some weathering along edges and spine creases, minor delamination at upper edge on rear face. Contents very good; endpapers show age toning to free leaves at front and rear. Text block shows some age toning along top edge, with some foxing along all edges.

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Catalogue Number: HH000001