The creator of philosophical tales about the adventures of a girl named Alice became a writer by chance, while his emergence as the founder of the genre of “paradoxical literature” was entirely fitting, as paradox was at the core of his own identity.
A connoisseur of Euclidean geometry, an advocate of logical symbolism, and a master of artistic cryptography coexisted organically within the pedantic Oxford professor. In English literature, this respectable gentleman was known as Lewis Carroll, while in mathematics, he was Charles Dodgson.
The shy son of a clergyman was simultaneously a deacon and a scholar, an artist and a photographer, a romantic poet and a childless bachelor. He was also a natural left-hander, hard of hearing, a stutterer, an opium addict, and… The writer’s personal diaries have repeatedly sparked the most scandalous speculations among “yellow” researchers.
24-year-old Lewis Carroll, 1856
Born from Childhood
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (the writer pronounced his surname Dodgson without the “j” sound) was born on January 27, 1832, into a clergyman’s family in Cheshire. Charles was the third of eleven children of a parish priest from the village of Daresbury. The childhood of this enigmatic inventor was spent in the company of three brothers and seven sisters, whom he entertained with original games, self-made magazines, and his own stories.
It is known that the boy was left-handed, which was viewed as a defect in the religious society of old England. Harsh prohibitions and attempts to retrain him resulted in childhood trauma and led to unilateral deafness, stuttering, and chronic migraines, from which the writer would later seek relief through regular opium use. Carroll’s inclination for solitude might suggest to psychoanalysts a theory of possible autism.
By the age of 12, the future intellectual was educated at home, then attended a local private grammar school, followed by Rugby School, where theology and mathematics were taught, and finally, he enrolled at Oxford University. Soon, the talented bachelor won a competition and began giving lectures on mathematical subjects at Christ Church: he secured a professorship at his alma mater at the age of 23. Although Dodgson found this work tedious, it was well-paid, so he remained committed to his primary profession for over a quarter of a century. Alongside his teaching duties, the Englishman from the English Channel coast was ordained as a deacon, as religion in his country was in a “partnership” with science in the 19th century.
Posthumous portrait of Lewis Carroll by Hubert von Herkomer, based on photographs. This painting now hangs in the Great Hall of Christ Church in Oxford.
The Backstory of “Alice”
In 1856, a new dean was appointed at Christ Church College, and linguist Henry Liddell arrived in Oxford with his wife and five children. The solitary Charles became a long-time friend of this family and a personal friend of one of the dean’s daughters, Alice Liddell. The young mathematician met the future prototype of his literary heroine when she was just four years old.
At the age of 10, during a boating trip with her two sisters, Alice asked her adult friend to entertain them with another captivating story, which he spontaneously created, featuring the listeners as characters. Thus, the plot about Alice’s adventures in Wonderland emerged, which opened up for the little girl in the White Rabbit’s burrow (the author had been fascinated with exploring abandoned mines since childhood, eagerly sharing the child’s curiosity about the unknown world).
Alice was afraid of forgetting the sequence of events in the thrilling story, so she asked the storyteller to write down his thoughts on paper. After a few reminders, the author presented the “client” with a manuscript about Alice’s underground adventures. From this manuscript, his first cult book, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” was born in 1865, followed six years later by its sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass.”
The Logic of Absurdity
The writer signed his literary works with the original pseudonym Lewis Carroll: it is derived from his two real names (Charles – from his father, Lutwidge – from his mother), translated into Latin, switched around, and then translated back into English.
In everyday life, professional endeavors, scientific works, and prospective discoveries, Carroll remained Dodgson. Mathematician Charles Dodgson was ahead of his time in developing an original graphical technique for solving logical problems (which proved to be more convenient than the diagram method commonly used at the time). His method of calculating determinants is known by the mathematical term “Dodgson condensation.” Dodgson’s algebraic puzzles were even published in “Mathematical Curiosities.” His “numerical” mindset also influenced Lewis Carroll’s writing style, as he masterfully infused his multifaceted works with mysterious allegories and complex meanings. No one before him had written artistic texts in such a style.
This “higher piloting” in depicting absurdity was only accessible to an extraordinary author with brilliant ideas about the laws of logic, a rich inner world, and creative imagination. Or – a person with “expanded consciousness”: the writer, who regularly consumed opium tincture, did not see an insurmountable boundary between fantasy and reality and sought to peer into realms still inaccessible to scientific knowledge.
One of Carroll’s illustrations for the book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
If the writer could “thank” hallucinogens for the vivid images and plot actions in his stories, the ideological content of the texts remains the exceptional merit of the developed mind of the storyteller. The absurdity of the invented events does not distract the reader from the subtle allegories and encrypted subtext, in which generations of researchers have sought the “double bottom.”
In addition to the tales about Alice, the writer published seven other works featuring different characters, and all his philosophical tales, after a century and a half, continue to be dissected for relevant quotes, amaze with their wisdom on the nature of the universe, and raise doubts that were directed at children rather than adults.
“The Man with Whims”
The writer’s favorite hobbies were chess and staged photography with negative montages. Carroll collected genre photographs from other authors (he was particularly interested in child nudes) and captured young models in his own drawings and photographs. Colleagues and friends readily allowed their daughters to visit the familiar man, and at the age of 59, the captivated photographer marveled at his good fortune in his personal diary.
However, over time, his interest in the company of children negatively impacted the writer’s public image: in the 20th century, after Carroll’s death from pneumonia on January 14, 1898, the search for Freudian motives in his biography led “exposers” to accuse the “child admirer” of pedophilia. Personal records of Carroll surfaced, and after their publication, the eccentric storyteller was even attributed a sinister “alter ego” of Jack the Ripper (it was suggested that they were the same person).
Portrait of Beatrice Hatch, created by Carroll
However, the girls who spent time in the home of the solitary bachelor did not confirm any wrongdoing in his behavior, so the scandalous rumors were ultimately put to rest. According to those who knew the writer, their great contemporary was “a bit eccentric” outside of his creative work: acquaintances considered the oddball “a man with whims.”