Sylvie and Bruno was published by Macmillan in two volumes: Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), both illustrated by Harry Furniss. The combined work is Carroll’s longest and strangest: a novel that shifts without warning between a realistic Victorian setting (with adult characters discussing religion, science, and love) and a fairy-tale world (where the children Sylvie and Bruno have adventures involving a tyrannical uncle who has usurped their father’s throne).
The novel failed with the public that had adored Alice: it is overlong, tonally inconsistent, and often preachy (Carroll uses the realistic sections to deliver extended discussions of Christian theology). But it fascinates critics for several reasons: its narrative structure anticipates modernist experiments in multiple-reality fiction; its “eerie state” (Carroll’s term for the transitional consciousness between waking and fairy worlds) prefigures later science fiction concepts of parallel dimensions; and its treatment of Sylvie’s love — tender, protective, maternal — reveals Carroll’s emotional life more directly than anything else he wrote.
The fairy sections contain flashes of Alice-quality invention: the Professor’s Other-map (a map at 1:1 scale, covering the country it represents); the gravity-defying train; and Bruno’s linguistic confusions. But they compete with Victorian sentimentality in a way that the Alice books never permitted.
Collecting Sylvie and Bruno
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1889): Cloth binding, illustrated by Harry Furniss.
Market values:
- First edition, Volume 1 (1889): $200–$600
- First edition, Volume 2 (1893): $200–$600
- Complete two-volume set: $500–$1,500
- Good condition (single volume): $100–$300