Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet, mathematician, photographer and reluctant Anglican deacon. His most notable works are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, some of the most important examples of Victorian literature. He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark are classified in the genre of literary nonsense. Some of Alice's nonsensical wonderland logic reflects his published work on mathematical logic.
Carroll came from a family of high-church Anglicans and pursued his clerical training at Christ Church, Oxford, where he lived for most of his life as a scholar, teacher and Anglican deacon. Alice Liddell – a daughter of Henry Liddell, the Dean of Christ Church – is widely identified as the original inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, although Carroll always denied this.
An avid puzzler, Carroll created the word ladder puzzle, which he called "Doublets", which was published in Vanity Fair magazine between 1879 and 1881. In 1982 a memorial stone to Carroll was unveiled at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. There are societies in many parts of the world dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works.
Early life
Dodgson's family background was predominantly northern English, conservative, and high-church Anglican. Most of his male ancestors were army officers or Anglican clergy. His great-grandfather, Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become the Bishop of Elphin in rural Ireland. His paternal grandfather, also named Charles, was an army captain fatality of the Irish rebellion of 1803, when his two sons were hardly more than babies. The elder of these sons, yet another Charles Dodgson, was Carroll's father. He went to Rugby School and then to Christ Church, a constituent college of the University of Oxford. He reverted to the other family tradition and took holy orders. He was mathematically gifted and won a double first degree, which could have been the prelude to a brilliant academic career. Instead, he became a country parson.Dodgson was born on 27 January 1832 at All Saints' Vicarage in Daresbury, Cheshire, the oldest boy and the third oldest of 11 children. When he was 11, his father was given the living of Croft-on-Tees, Yorkshire, and the whole family moved to the spacious rectory. This remained their home for the next 25 years. Charles' father was an active and highly conservative cleric of the Church of England who later became the Archdeacon of Richmond and involved himself, sometimes influentially, in the intense religious disputes that were dividing the church. He was high-church, inclining toward Anglo-Catholicism, an admirer of John Henry Newman and the Tractarian movement, and did his best to instil such views in his children. However, Charles developed an ambivalent relationship with his father's values and with the Church of England as a whole.
During his early youth, Dodgson was educated at home. His "reading lists" preserved in the family archives testify to a precocious intellect: at the age of seven, he was reading books such as The Pilgrim's Progress. He also spoke with a stammer, a condition shared by most of his siblings, that often inhibited his social life throughout his years. At the age of twelve he was sent to Richmond School in Richmond, North Yorkshire. In 1846, Dodgson entered Rugby School, where he was evidently unhappy, as he wrote some years after leaving: "I cannot say... that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again... I can honestly say that if I could have been... secure from annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would have been comparative trifles to bear." He did not claim he suffered from bullying, but cited little boys as the main targets of older bullies at Rugby. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, Dodgson's nephew, wrote that "even though it is hard for those who have only known him as the gentle and retiring don to believe it, it is nevertheless true that long after he left school, his name was remembered as that of a boy who knew well how to use his fists in defence of a righteous cause", which is the protection of the smaller boys.
Scholastically, Dodgson excelled with apparent ease. "I have not had a more promising boy at his age since I came to Rugby", observed mathematics master R. B. Mayor. Francis Walkingame's The Tutor's Assistant; Being a Compendium of Arithmetic – the mathematics textbook that the young Dodgson used – still survives and it contained an inscription in Latin, which translates to: "This book belongs to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson: hands off!" Some pages also included annotations such as the one found on p. 129, where he wrote "Not a fair question in decimals" next to a question. He left Rugby at the end of 1849 and matriculated at the University of Oxford in May 1850 as a member of his father's old college, Christ Church. After waiting for rooms in college to become available, he went into residence in January 1851. He had been at Oxford only two days when he received a summons home. His mother had died of "inflammation of the brain" – perhaps meningitis or a stroke – at the age of 47.
His early academic career veered between high promise and irresistible distraction. He did not always work hard, but was exceptionally gifted, and achievement came easily to him. In 1852, he obtained first-class honours in mathematics moderations and was soon afterwards nominated to a studentship by his father's old friend Canon Edward Pusey. In 1854, he obtained first-class honours in the Final Honours School of Mathematics, standing first on the list, and thus graduated as Bachelor of Arts. He remained at Christ Church studying and teaching, but the next year he failed an important scholarship exam through his self-confessed inability to apply himself to study. Even so, his talent as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship in 1855, which he continued to hold for the next 26 years. Despite early unhappiness, Dodgson remained at Christ Church, in various capacities, until his death, including that of sub-librarian of the Christ Church library, where his office was close to the deanery, where Alice Liddell lived.
Character and appearance
Health problems
The young adult Charles Dodgson was about tall and slender, and he had curly brown hair and blue or grey eyes. He was described in later life as somewhat asymmetrical, and as carrying himself rather stiffly and awkwardly, although this might be on account of a knee injury sustained in middle age. As a very young child, he suffered a fever that left him deaf in one ear. At the age of 17, he suffered a severe attack of whooping cough, which was probably responsible for his chronically weak chest in later life. In early childhood, he acquired a stammer, which he referred to as his "hesitation"; it remained throughout his life.The stammer has always been a significant part of the image of Dodgson. While one apocryphal story says that he stammered only in adult company and was free and fluent with children, there is no evidence to support this idea. Many children of his acquaintance remembered the stammer, while many adults failed to notice it. Dodgson himself seems to have been far more acutely aware of it than most people whom he met; it is said that he caricatured himself as the Dodo in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, referring to his difficulty in pronouncing his last name, but this is one of the many supposed facts often repeated for which no first-hand evidence remains. He did indeed refer to himself as a dodo, but whether or not this reference was to his stammer is simply speculation.
Dodgson's stammer did trouble him, but it was never so debilitating that it prevented him from applying his other personal qualities to do well in society. He lived in a time when people commonly devised their own amusements and when singing and recitation were required social skills, and the young Dodgson was well equipped to be an engaging entertainer. He could reportedly sing at a passable level and was not afraid to do so before an audience. He was also adept at mimicry and storytelling, and reputedly quite good at charades.
Social connections
In the interim between his early published writings and the success of the Alice books, Dodgson began to move in the pre-Raphaelite social circle. He first met John Ruskin in 1857 and became friendly with him. Around 1863, he developed a close relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his family. He would often take pictures of the family in the garden of the Rossetti's house in Chelsea, London. He also knew William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Arthur Hughes, among other artists. He knew fairy-tale author George MacDonald well – it was the enthusiastic reception of Alice by the young MacDonald children that persuaded him to submit the work for publication.Politics, religion, and philosophy
In broad terms, Dodgson has traditionally been regarded as politically, religiously, and personally conservative. Martin Gardner labels Dodgson as a Tory who was "awed by lords and inclined to be snobbish towards inferiors". William Tuckwell, in his Reminiscences of Oxford, regarded him as "austere, shy, precise, absorbed in mathematical reverie, watchfully tenacious of his dignity, stiffly conservative in political, theological, social theory, his life mapped out in squares like Alice's landscape". Having failed to obtain exemption from the college's standard requirement for dons at the time, Dodgson was ordained a deacon in the Church of England on 22 December 1861. In The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, the editor states that "his Diary is full of such modest depreciations of himself and his work, interspersed with earnest prayers that God would forgive him the past, and help him to perform His holy will in the future." When a friend asked him about his religious views, Dodgson wrote in response that he was a member of the Church of England, but "doubt if he was fully a 'High Churchman. He added:Dodgson expressed interest in other fields. He was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research, and one of his letters suggests that he accepted as real what was then called "thought reading". Dodgson wrote some studies of various philosophical arguments. In 1895, he developed a philosophical regressus-argument on deductive reasoning in his article "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles", which appeared in one of the early volumes of Mind. The article was reprinted in the same journal a hundred years later in 1995, with a subsequent article by Simon Blackburn titled "Practical Tortoise Raising".