Talk:Sylvie and Bruno

critical reaction

"Widely panned by critics"? Could someone help out with sources, please? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.12.233.21 (talk • contribs)

I've been wondering about that sentence, too, so unless it can be sourced, I moved it here to the talk poage in accordance with WP:V:

"Sylvie and Bruno has been widely panned by critics, and is not widely read today, although Carroll considered it his greatest work."

--Fritz S. (Talk) 09:48, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Not sure what the critical reaction has been, but it's obvious that S&B hasn't become an enduring classic like the Alice books and the Snark, and it's not too difficult to see why -- since in S&B the whimsy and misapplied-logic-taken-to-an-extreme of Lewis Caroll's classics are heavily diluted with a very uneven mixture of what could be considered Victorian priggishness combined with a fragmentary and convolutedly interrupted and meandering quasi-fairy-tale. There are still very appealing nuggets in the book, but the number of people willing to read through whole length of S&B to find them is somewhat limited... AnonMoos (talk) 02:03, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

article class

I changed the rating. I think this is more Start at this point. Anybody disagree? Carlo 14:34, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

improving the summaries?

The plot summary doesn't really highlight some of the more striking features of the book. There could be more on some of the social criticism aspects of the book (the mob chanting "less bread, more taxes", the epicurean marmalade connoisseurs, the carefully-chaperoned trial marriage, and the condemnation of hunting -- which was apparently very controversial when the book was first published). Also, the narrator is somewhat old (as seen in when he meets Lady Muriel on the train, where it would be kind of a violation of Victorian etiquette for Lady Muriel to introduce herself to him if he weren't old). Also, on a somewhat odd note, Carroll seems to have set up the whole wedding scene and surrounding events with great care to make it very clear that the newlyweds had no chance to have any sex before parting -- not sure why this was so important to Carroll, but it obviously was... AnonMoos (talk) 02:03, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Title Page Scan

I notice the title page scan at the head of the article does not reduce well to a thumbnail. Would converting it to a JPEG help with that? --♦♦♦Vlmastra♦♦♦ (talk) 00:52, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

I think png is actually the standard protocol for wikipedia for that reason, and that's a gif. Carlo (talk) 03:58, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

It was general problems with GIF resizing on the site (now fixed), not with that particular image... AnonMoos (talk) 01:23, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

references to this book

Just wanted to add that Deleuze's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Sense is full of references to this book and that Deleuze agreeing with the author himself, considers this to be his masterpiece. Maybe someone can add this info to the article itself. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Luisramos0 (talk • contribs) 22:20, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

It's also extensively referenced in John Crowley's Little, Big. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.108.180.242 (talk) 20:10, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

largest map

In Chapter 11 of Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Mein Herr does not "hear about how the largest map ever made on Earth was six inches to the mile" - which could not have been correct, as many Ordnance Survey town plans at 5, 10 and 10.56 feet to the mile had been published from the 1840s, and its County maps on a scale of 1:2500 (25.344 inches to the mile) of County Dublin were published in the 1870s, with the rest of the country following later, in the 1890s or early 1900s; this is a project which Dodgson "must" have known about. Summary text corrected, taken from page 169 of the book (source link added). Heraldica (talk) 06:20, 24 April 2013 (UTC)