 English
logician, mathematician and novelist, best-known
for his classic fantasy novels ALICE'S ADVENTURES
IN WONDERLAND (1865) and its sequel THROUGH THE
LOOKING-GLASS, AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE (1871).
Carroll used the surrealistic settings of his
fantasy world to question the norms of the Victorian
age in a way that many critics considered his
work subversive. Unlike other children's books
of the time, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
did not try to teach a moral message. Carroll
also wrote poetry which have remained open to
all explanations of meaning.
Carroll was born
at Daresbury in Cheshire into a wealthy family.
He attended a Yorkshire grammar school and Rugby.
At Christ Church, Oxford, he studied mathematics
and worked from 1855 to 1881 as a lecturer (tutor).
Carroll's career in education was troubled by
a bad stammer. He lectured and taught with difficulty
and he also preached only occasionally after his
ordination in 1861.
In spite of his
stammer, Carroll was able to speak easily to children,
whom he loved to photograph, especially small
girls. During one picnic he started to tell a
long story to Alice Liddell (died in 1934), who
was the daughter of Henry George Liddell, the
head of his Oxford College. Carroll wrote down
the story and the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
was born. - (SEE ALSO: Other adventures inside
the Earth - Giacomo Casanova's Icosameron, 1788;
Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth.)
The friendship
with the Liddell family ended abruptly, and Carroll
turned his attention to other young girls. He
spent his holidays in Eastbourne, and recorded
in his diary discussions with his new friends.
The sequel Through
the Looking Glass, appeared in 1871, and is
perhaps more often quoted than the first, featuring
the poems Jabberwocky and The Walrus
and the Carpenter. Artist John Tenniel refused
to illustrate one chapter in Through the Looking
Glass because he thought that it was ridiculous.
The chapter was published later in 1872 as The
Wasp in a Wig. Carroll himself always wished
to be an artist and as a boy he illustrated all
the manuscript magazines which he made for his
younger brothers and sisters. Carroll's original
drawings for Alice's Adventures Underground
were published in 1961.
Carroll also wrote
humorous verse, such as The Hunting of the
Snark and mathematical works. The author's
life and work has become a constant area for psychological
speculation. According to Carl Jung, "a typical
infantile motif is the dream of growing infinitely
small or infinitely big, or being transformed
from one to the other - as you find, for instance,
in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland."
(in Man and His Symbols, 1964) Physicists
have drawn parallels between features of quantum
reality and the world of Carroll. Many non-physicist
have echoed Alice's 'I can't believe that!' when
confronted with phenomena like cats that are both
alive and dead at the same time ('Schrödinger's
cat') or with particles that change their identities
for no apparent reason.
At the time of
their publication, Alice's adventures were considered
children's literature, but now his stories are
generally viewed in a different light. As Virginia
Woolf remarked, "the two Alices are
not books for children; they are the only books
in which we become children". In the 1960s
hippies were attracted to their surrealistic world,
and Carroll's characters gave inspiration to such
songs as Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit' and
The Beatles's 'I am a Walrus'. Fredric Brown used
Carroll's characters and lyrics in his novel Night
of the Jabberwock (1950). In the 1990s Jeff
Noon continued Alice's adventures in Automated
Alice, in which she is transported to the
modern world.
 Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland (1865) - originally
published as Alice's Adventures Under Ground.
The story centres on the seven-year-old Alice,
who falls asleep in a meadow, and dreams that
she plunges down a rabbit hole. She finds herself
first too large and then too small. She meets
such strange characters as Cheshire Cat, the
Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the King and
Queen of Hearts, and experiences wondrous, often
bizarre adventures, trying to reason in numerous
discussions that do not follow the daylight
logic. Finally she loses her temper, bringing
down this dream world and wakes up.
For further
information: Lewis Carroll Home page, The
Lewis Carroll Society - For further reading:
Lewis Carroll by Walter de la Mare (1930); The
Story of Lewis Carroll by Roger Lancelyn Green
(1949); Lewis Carroll by Derek Hudson (1954,
rev. 1976); The Annotated Alice (1960); The
Annotated Snark (1962); Aspects of Alice, ed.
by Robert Phillips (1971); The Philosopher's
Alice by Peter Heath (1974); Lewis Carroll and
His World by John Pudney (1976); Beyond the
Looking Class by Colin Gordon (1982); Play,
Games and Sport by Kathleen Blake (1984); The
Alice Concordance by Daryl Colquhoun (1986);
Lewis Carroll by Richard Michael Kelly (1990);
The Red King's Dream by Jo Elwyn Jones and J.
Francis Gladstone (1995); Automated Alice by
Jeff Noon (1996) -
Other writers
connected with Oxford in the nineteenth and
early twentieth century: Mathew Arnold,
Max Beerbohm, Hilaire Belloc, Vera Brittain,
Rhoda Broughton, John Buchan,Richard Burton,
James Elroy Fleeker, J.A. Froude, John Galsworthy,
Robert Graves, Winifred Holtby, Gerald Manley
Hopkins, Thomas Hughes, Henry James, Francis
Kilvert, Andrew Lang, T.E. Lawrence, C.S. Lewis,
Rose Macaulay, Compton Mackenzie, William Morris,
J.H. Newman, Walter Pater, Arthur Quiller-Couch,
Thomas De Quincey, Charles Reade, John Ruskin,
Dorothy Sayers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Algernon
Swinburne, J.R.R. Tolkien, Oscar Wilde.
Selected works:
| Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland, 1865.. - several movie versions:
animated Disney feature in 1951; Alice (1951)
Dennis Potter's first interpretation concerning
the relationship between Carroll/Dodgson and
Alice Liddell; Alice (Neco z Alenky), Swiss/UK/West
German live-action/stop-motion-animated movie
in 1988, dir. by Jan Svankmajer, and others
|
| Bruno's Revenge,
1867 |
| Phantasmagoria
and Other Poems, 1869 |
| Through the
Looking-Glass, 1871 - tv-film 1960, performed
as stage musical in 1960, dir. Alan Handley,
based loosely on the two Alice books and L.
Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz |
| The Hunting
of the Snark, 1876 |
| The Wasp in
a Wig: The "Suppressed" Episode
of Through the Looking Class, 1877 |
| Rhyme? and
Reason?, 1883 |
| Sylvie and
Bruno, 1889 |
| The Nursery
"Alice", 1889 |
| Sylvie and
Bruno Concluded, 1893 |
| Three Sunsets
and Other Poems, 1898 |
| For the Train:
Five poems and a Tale, 1932 |
| The Rectory
Umbrella and Mischmasch, 1932 |
| The Complete
Works of Lewis Carroll, 1939 |
| The Poems
of Lewis Carroll, 1973 |
|
