Early Books

The Wasp in a Wig: A “Suppressed” Episode of Through The Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

By Lewis Carroll.

New York: Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 1977.

John Tenniel declined to illustrate this episode in Looking-Glass, in which Alice encounters an aged and grumpy wasp who complains about how he lost the yellow curls of his youth and is now mocked for wearing a wig. Carroll's first biographer, his nephew Stuart Collingwood, records that Tenniel told Carroll that "a wasp in a wig is altogether beyond the appliances of art."

The episode originally occurred just before Chapter IX. In 1974, the galley proofs of this long-lost episode of Looking-Glass came up for sale at Sotheby's in London, where they were purchased for what now seems the incredibly low price of about $4,000. This book is its first publication.

Exhibit item 2.8