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Lewis Carroll (Excerpted from Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia)
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Charles Ludwidge Dodgson, a little know professor mathematics as Oxford University, became world famous as the pseudonymous Lewis Carroll, author of several classics of children’s literature. Born in Daresbury, Cheshire, Carroll grew up in a large family, the members of which served as the captive audience for such early nonsense writings as The Rectory and Umbrella and Mischmasch. Ordained deacon in 1861, Carroll spent practically all of his bachelor life at Oxford. Among his scholarly writings are Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879) and Curiosa Mathematica (1888). Carroll’s greatest and most enduring achievements, however, are those unique works of fantasy, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1872), both illustrated by John Tenniel. Carroll developed these stories from ones he told to Alice, Lorina and Edith Liddell during a boat trip on July 4, 186. Characters such as the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Red Queen and the White Rabbit have become know the world over. Carroll’s Alice books have won the admiration of a diversity of readers, from Queen Victoria to James Joyce. Carroll also wrote many humorous verse, the most popular being The Hunting of the Snark (1876). His best poems, however, are embedded with the two Alice books and include “The Jabberwocky” and “The Walrus and the Carpenter. His interest in spiritualism helped motivate him to write a bizarre novel entitled Sylvie and Bruno and its sequel Sylvie and Bruno Concluded . The stories attempt to show what might happen if fairies actually existed and interacted with human beings. Frustrated by his inability to draw, Carroll took up photography in 1856, when cameras had been available to the public for a only a few years. His avocation quickly turned into a passionate devotion that lasted fro nearly twenty years, during which time Carroll developed into one of the most skillful portrait photographers of the periods. Obsessed with the theme of lost childhood, he was able to free youthful innocence through hundreds of photographs of young girls. He also sought out at photographed many eminent me and women, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ellen Terry, and Alfred Tennyson. Although most critics agree that Carroll’s Alice books are complex works more suited to adult than to children, the fact remains that the works themselves are obsessed with the ideal of the girl child. Carroll, who never liked little boys, sees the prepubescent girl at the embodiment of innocence and spirituality. Even his photographs of nude little girls exhibit a remarkable angelic chastity. Alice’s fantastic voyages into Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land reveal Carroll’s keen understanding of human dream work, anticipating the symbolic landscape of twentieth –century absurdism. Within Alice’s world are masterpieces of satire, wit, and startling, exotic logic. In Wonderland, time stand stands still: it is always six o’clock; tea time and Alice can never grow old in that dream world. Deep beneath the rational world, Wonderland has its own logic, best expressed by the Cheshire Cat: “we’re all mad.” Carroll was a most fastidious man who dedicated himself to imposing order and form upon the chaos of experience. Mathematics and logic were thus enormous comforts which provided him with an immaculate, regulated world. His fascination with puzzles was an extension of this concern, for puzzles allowed answers to even the most complex questions. Behind all of Carroll’s creations is his sense of life as an enormous puzzle, one to be worked out to the end and perhaps never completely solved. He could, however, create his own universe, complex but controlled, puzzling but rational. James Joyce thus appropriately addressed Carroll in Finnegans Wake as “Dodfather, Dodgson and Coo,” Dodgson as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. |
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