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Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898)
Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of the English writer and mathematician
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, most famous throughout the world for his books
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking
Glass (1872), which he wrote to entertain Alice Liddell, daughter
of the Dean of Christ Church. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland follow Alice
down a rabbit hole in search of the white rabbit who is very late for a
tea party, where she meets a cast of strange creatures including the Queen
of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat, the March Hare and the Mad Hatter. In
Through the Looking Glass, Alice walks through a looking-glass into
a strange looking-glass world, and finds herself as a white pawn in a
real-life chess game where all the pieces have come to life. These
stories portray an extraordinary dream-inspired world, a memorable cast of
anthropomorphised animals and characters drawn with an extreme mixture of
wit and weirdness, and brilliant word play and logic pushed beyond the
limit. To enter the world of Alice is to enter a surreal world where
words take on different meanings and nothing is quite as it seems.
Carroll was also an inventor of
puzzles, games, ciphers, mnemonics for remembering names and dates,
poetical acrostics, a system for writing in the dark, and he improved the
game of backgammon. His writing was original and
inventive, and added words to the English language, such as chortle, a portmanteau word that combines
"snort" and "chuckle." He played games with
idioms, using such expressions as "beating time" (to music) in a literal
sense. He reshaped animals of fable or rhetoric such as the March
Hare, or Cheshire Cat, and invented new ones like the Bandersnatch and
the Boojum. Carroll invented his pen name by
translating his first two names into the Latin "Carolus Lodovicus" and
then anglicizing it into "Lewis Carroll."
Carroll was the eldest son and third child in a family of seven girls and
four boys, all of whom stuttered. His mother (Frances Jane Lutwidge)
and father (Charles Dodgson) were first cousins, and unusually religious.
At the time of Carroll's birth in the old parsonage at Daresbury, an isolated
country village with lots of children, his father was the perpetual curate
there until 1843 when he
became the rector of Croft in Yorkshire, a post he held most of his life
until he became Archdeacon of Richmond and one of the Canons of Ripon
Cathedral. Carroll's father was a distinguished scholar whose favorite study
was mathematics.
Carroll began at an early age to entertain himself and his family with magic tricks,
marionette shows, and poems, parody, word-play and puzzles written for homemade newspapers
and the family magazine. He made a train with railway stations in
the Rectory garden; he did conjuring in a brown wig and a long white robe;
he made a troupe of marionettes and a stage with the aid of the family and
a village carpenter; he wrote all the plays for it himself, and
manipulated the strings. He made pets of snails and toads, and tried
to promote modern warfare among earthworms by giving them small pieces of
clay pipe for weapons.
As a child, he took an early interest in
mathematics. When he was told that logarithms was too difficult for a
child to understand, he responded "Yes, but please explain." He
was educated by his father until age 12, then attended Mr. Tate's school
at Richmond in Yorkshire where he excelled in his studies, becoming a
champion of the weak and small against the schoolyard bullies. He earned the reputation of
being "a boy who knew how to use his fists in a righteous cause." After
contributing a story to the school magazine, Dr. Tate wrote to Carroll's
father that Charles "had a very uncommon share of genius, and you may fairly
anticipate for him a bright career." Carroll endured several
illnesses as a child, one of which left him deaf in one ear.
From 1846 to 1850 Carroll
attended Rugby School, then graduated from his father's college,
University of Oxford, in 1854, coming out at the head of the class in his
mathematical finals, second in classics, and was awarded the Butler
Scholarship. He was made a "Master of the House" and a senior
student (fellow), then obtained his master of arts degree in
1857. Throughout his career, Carroll consistently distinguished
himself with honors and respect from his peers and
mentors alike. He wrote, "I am getting tired of being congratulated on
various subjects; there seems to be no end of it. If I had shot the
Dean I could hardly have had more said about it." At the time of his
studentship, ordination was a necessary prerequisite to lecture at Oxford
in mathematics, and according to its terms, Carroll was to remain
unmarried and proceed to holy orders. In 1861 he was ordained a
deacon in the Church of England, but never took priest's orders. Had
he gone on to become a priest he could have married and been appointed to
a parish by the college. Only heads of houses were free both to
marry and to continue in residence. Considering marriage, he decided
he was content to remain a bachelor, partly because his stammer made
preaching difficult, partly because he felt himself unsuited for parish
work, and partly because he had discovered other interests. Though
he never wholly overcame his stutter, he did preach from time to time,
often to the servants of the college but he enjoyed most preaching to
children.
Carroll had a keen interest
in photography, and he is remembered as a fine photographer of children,
adults, and the great celebrities of his day, such as the actress Ellen
Terry, the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet-painter Dante Gabriel
Roseetti, and many others. His particular penchant for photographing
young girls is now viewed with some amount of quite unfounded suspicion.
He photographed children in every possible costume and situation, finally
making nude studies of them. Various attempts have been made to
prove that his friendships with little girls were some sort of
subconscious substitute for a married life, that he showed signs of
jealousy when his favorites told him they were engaged to be married, and
contemplated marriage with Alice Liddell, but there is little or no
evidence to back up such theorizing. In fact, Carroll dropped his
acquaintance with Alice Liddell when she was 12, as he did with most of
his young friends. Carroll was uncomfortable in the company of
adults and is said to have spoken without stuttering only to young girls,
many of whom he entertained, corresponded with, and photographed.
Carroll's association with children grew naturally enough out of his
position as an eldest son with eight younger brothers and sisters, so it
is not surprising that he should begin to entertain the children of Henry
George Liddell, dean of Christ Church, especially since they were the only
children in Christ Church. But Alice Liddell and her sisters
Lorina and Edith were not the first of Carroll's child friends. They
had been preceded or were overlapped by the children of the writer George
Macdonald, the sons of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and various other
acquaintances. It was not uncommon for Carroll to send a sick child
in the hospital one of his books in an attempt to cheer them up. He
always kept a large assortment of musical boxes and an organette which had
to be fed with paper tunes, clockwork bears, mice, frogs, games and
puzzles of all sorts for the amusement of his child guests. In 1880,
Carroll abandoned his photographic hobby altogether, feeling it was taking
up too much time that might be better spent.
Properly chaperoned by their
governess, Miss Prickett (nicknamed "pricks" -- "one of the thorny kind,"
and so the prototype of the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass),
the three girls paid many visits to the young mathematics lecturer in his
college rooms. As a man, Carroll was tall, thin and dark, with
delicate features, smooth skin, and thick curly hair. As Alice
remembered in 1932, they used to sit on the big sofa on each side of him,
while he told them stories, illustrating them by drawings as he went
along. In 1862, Carroll and his friend Robinson Duckworth, fellow of
Trinity, rowed the three children up the Thames from Oxford to Godstow,
picnicked on the bank, and returned to Christ Church late in the evening,
on which occasion Carroll told the girls the fairy-tale of Alice's
Adventures Underground. At the end of the trip, inspired by the
story, Alice started to cry, and asked Carroll to write out Alice's
adventures for her, which he did. The novelist Henry Kingsley, while
visiting the deanery, chanced to pick up the story from the drawing room
table, and urged Carroll to publish it. Carroll consulted his friend
George Macdonald, author of some of the best children's stories of the
period, who then took it home to read to his children, and his son
Greville, aged six, declared that he "wished there were 60,000 volumes of
it." The book was such a success, that six years later Carroll
decided to write a sequel to it, and Through the Looking Glass
later became the most popular children's book in England. Carroll
shied away from publicity and wrote, "Mr. C. L. Dodgson ...neither claims
nor acknowledges any connection with any pseudonym or with any book not
published under his own name."
Carroll remained at the
University of Oxford until 1881 as a member of the faculty, lecturing on
mathematics and writing articles and books on geometry, determinants, the
mathematics of tournaments and elections, and recreational logic. As
a mathematician, Carroll was conservative and derivative. As a
logician, he was more interested in logic as a game than as an instrument
for testing reason. He became a confirmed and exacting bachelor, who
labeled and filed all his papers and letters, and asked perfection of the
artists who illustrated his books, even requesting one of them, E.
Gertrude Thomson, not to do any work for him on Sundays. He rose
early every morning, and worked hard all day. He did a great deal of
entertaining, and made charts of where his guests sat at table, and kept
track of menus in his diary so that people would not have the same dishes
too frequently. He was full of a tremendous reverence for sacred
subjects, and would leave a theatre if a joke on such matters was made in
the play. He was considered to be somewhat eccentric and fussy. He
wrote no less than 48 letters of complaint to the steward at Christ Church
while he taught there about everything from odors in the rooms to the
choice of meat for dinner. But from around 1865 until his death in
1898, Carroll was known for his child friends, and his hobbies and
inventions, rather than his abilities as a mathematician, lecturer and
scholar.
Carroll's comic fantasy and children's works also include The Hunting of the Snark
(1876), a narrative nonsense poem set at sea which is rivaled only by the
best of Edward Lear, and which has since been turned into a moderately
successful musical; A Tangled Tale (1885), designed to interest
children in mathematics; two collections of humorous verse; and the two
parts of Sylvie and Bruno (1889, 1893), and Sylvie and Bruno
Concluded (1893). Sylvie and Bruno never reached the
popularity of the Alice books and has been described as "one of the most
interesting failures in English literature." This elaborate
combination of fairy-tale, social novel and collection of ethical
discussions is unduly neglected and ridiculed. It presents the
truest available portrait of Carroll. According to Carroll,
Silvie and Bruno is full of the ideals and sentiments "he held most
dear."
Carroll died of bronchitis/influenza in his sisters' home in Guildford on January 14,
1898. He lies buried in The Mount Cemetery, Guildford. His
memory is kept alive by perpetual public endowment of a cot
in the Children's Hospital, Great Ormond Street, London.
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Copyright © 2003-2008 Gunnar Bengtsson, Poetry Connection. All Rights Reserved.
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