Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was the third of eleven children and the eldest son of the
Reverend Charles Dodgson and Frances Jane Lutwidge. The younger Charles Dodgson
was left-handed and spoke with a stutter, an affliction from which he would suffer his
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whole life. With eight younger siblings, he very early developed the knack of amusing
children, an ability he would keep as an adult. For their amusement, he wrote and drew little magazines that demonstrated the whimsy later seen in his Alice books. Some of the
verses in the Alice books received their first auditions in these family magazines.
At age twelve, Dodgson attended Richmond Grammar School, and the following year,
the famous public school at Rugby. Nearly four years at Rugby, which he later recalled
with displeasure, prepared him for Oxford University: He entered Christ Church College
there on January 24, 1851. He distinguished himself in mathematics and classics, though
difficulty with philosophy and history kept him in the lower third of his class. On December 18, 1854, he received his A.B. with first-class honors in mathematics. He stayed on at Christ Church as a tutor and lecturer. At this time his earliest stories and poems appeared in periodicals at Oxford and Whitby.
Early in 1856 Dodgson acquired his first camera, then a relatively rare and compli-
cated device restricted to use by specialists. A large number of his photographs, mostly of young girls, survive, and one historian of photography has declared Dodgson the most
outstanding child photographer of the nineteenth century. A month after he had purchased the camera, one young model, the four-year-old daughter of an Oxford dean, caught
Dodgson’s eye. Her name was Alice Liddell. Six years later he would extemporize, on a
boating expedition, a story about Alice that was to become the famous Alice stories. However, until then, Dodgson’s energies went into his vocations of mathematics and the
clergy: He published his first book on mathematics in 1860, and he was ordained a deacon just before Christmas of 1861.
By February of 1863, Dodgson had committed to paper the story from the 1862 excur-
sion with the Liddell sisters. He published it in 1865 (though it did not appear until 1866) as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Dodgson used the pseudonym Lewis Carroll for his publications, a name seemingly derived from the names Lutwidge and Charles. In 1867,
Dodgson made the only voyage of his lifetime away from England, touring the Continent
(mostly Russia). He had already begun his sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which appeared near Christmas, 1871, as Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice
Found There. When his father died in 1868, Dodgson moved his siblings to Guildford, and he moved into rooms at Tom Quad, Oxford, where he remained the rest of his life. In 1881
his income from writing was sufficient for him to resign his lectureship in mathematics, although he remained at Oxford. The following year he was elected curator of the Senior
Common room, a post he held for ten years. He continued writing until his death in 1898, though he never equaled the success of the Alice books.
Analysis
Lewis Carroll’s first great contribution to children’s literature is that he freed it from the heavy didacticism of previous children’s books. The second is his legitimating of nonsense in children’s literature, though in this claim he is preceded by fellow Victorian Ed-56
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ward Lear, whose A Book of Nonsense (1846) preceded the Alice books by two decades. It is perhaps in his nonsense that one can see the connection between Reverend Dodgson,
the mathematician, and Lewis Carroll, the writer. Nonsense is self-referential; that is, it lacks “sense,” if sense means a relationship to the world outside the work of nonsense. It is thus like certain mathematical systems or logic games. Carroll’s works are in fact games, which is one of the reasons for their appeal to children.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll’s first novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, successfully creates and maintains a dream consciousness. Its dreamlike quality is revealed not merely in its conventional ending, with Alice waking up to discover her adventures in Wonderland
were “all a dream”; its episodic movements are dreamlike in that one episode melts into
the other and has no necessarily logical connection to the previous. Identities constantly shift: A baby turns into a pig; the Cheshire Cat fades away into a grin. Because the logic of dreams, like the logic of Wonderland, is closed, internal, and self-referential, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland resists interpretations that attempt to “explain” the novel by connecting its elements to structures outside it, such as biographical, historical, psychoanalytic, or political interpretations.
The story begins with Alice drowsing while her sister reads a boring book. Alice’s at-
tention is arrested by a white rabbit, which she follows, only to fall down a rabbit hole, where she finds a world where nothing is like the world she left. When she eats and drinks the Wonderland foods, she changes drastically in size, becoming small as a mouse, then
large as a house. When small, she finds her way into a garden, where she meets a caterpillar, rescues a baby from a mean duchess, attends a mad tea party, plays croquet with the Queen of Hearts, listens to a mock turtle’s life story, and attends the trial of the Knave of Hearts. When the angry subjects of the Queen rush at Alice, she awakens to find them to
be only, in the real world, falling leaves.
The novel is narrated in the third person, but with limited omniscience, allowing the
reader to view Wonderland from Alice’s perspective. The creation of the Alice character
(though it must be remembered that she is modeled on a real girl of the author’s acquaintance) is one of Carroll’s most stunning achievements. It is seen immediately in the opening paragraph, which presents her thoughts as she peers into a book her sister is reading; the book bores her because it has no pictures or conversations. This is clearly a child’s perspective. Even Alice’s precipitous changes in size reflect the point of view of children who are given contradictory messages: that they are too big for some things and too little for others. Alice is the most fully realized of the characters in the book, all others being func-tionally flat. The flatness of the characters is essential to the humor of the book, particularly the slapstick elements, for the whimsy of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare dunk-
ing the Dormouse in a teapot is lost if we sympathize with the Dormouse as a real
character with feelings.
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Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
Carroll’s second novel is a sequel to the first, with the same main character. This time the “wonderland” is the looking-glass world, the world one sees when one looks in a mirror, a reverse image of the real world. As a photographer who needed to visualize finished photographs from their negative images, Carroll had an intuitive understanding of the implications of a “reverse” world. The consciousness of his “abnormality” of being a left-
handed boy may also have played into the creation of Through the Looking-Glass and
What Alice Found There.
In the novel’s opening chapter, Alice passes through a mirror to find a house precisely
the reverse of her own. She goes out into the garden, where she meets the Red Queen, then to the surrounding country, where she encounters strange insects, Tweedledee and
Tweedledum, the White Queen, Humpty Dumpty, the lion and the unicorn, and the White
Knight. In chapter 9, Alice becomes queen, and she upsets the board of chess pieces in a tra
nsition from dream to waking precisely like that of the first Alice book. The transition is handled in two truncated chapters, one of fifty-nine words, in which Alice shakes the Red Queen, and one of only six words, in which the Red Queen turns out to be Alice’s kitten, and she is awake. The final chapter is an epilogue, in which Alice poses an unanswered
question on the relation of dream to reality.
Sylvie and Bruno
Carroll’s last two novels were not as successful commercially as the Alice books, and,
according to their earliest critics, they were unsuccessful artistically as well. Carroll continues to play with dreams and reality in the Sylvie and Bruno books, but this time waking and dream realities are interlaced in alternating chapters. In place of Wonderland or the looking-glass world, Sylvie and Bruno puts forth “the eerie state,” in which one becomes aware of fairies. Thus, Sylvie and Bruno has two parallel plots: In the waking world, which Carroll’s introduction calls “the ordinary state,” there is a love triangle. The noble and selfless Dr. Arthur Forester loves Lady Muriel Orme but believes that she loves her cousin,
Captain Eric Linden. The cousins, in fact, become engaged, but there is a grave religious impediment: Eric is not a Christian. The novel ends with Arthur accepting a medical post in India so as not to stand in Eric’s way. Simultaneously in the fairy or “eerie” realm parallel to the human one of Arthur, Eric, and Muriel, Sylvie and Bruno are innocent fairy children of the Warden of Outland. This plot is a version of the ancient myth and fairy-tale motif of the disguised god or king. The Warden temporarily abandons his rule in order to
travel the kingdom disguised as a beggar. In his absence, his wicked brother Sibimet conspires with his wife and selfish son Uggug to take over Outland.
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
In the sequel to Sylvie and Bruno, the interactions between the fairy realm of Outland and the human realm of Arthur and Muriel are more causally connected, as Sylvie and
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Bruno work “behind the scenes” to bring the true lovers together. Sylvie, in fact, appears to be the fairyland identity of Muriel. Through the invisible ministry of Sylvie and Bruno, Arthur and Muriel are married, but shortly after the wedding Arthur must go off to combat a plague in a nearby town. Muriel reads a false account of the death of Arthur from the
plague, and Arthur, ironically, is rescued by Eric, who has come to accept the Christian faith and sees his assistance to a would-be rival as divinely directed. Meanwhile, the Warden (Arthur’s counterpart) returns to Outland, thwarts Sibimet (Eric’s counterpart), who repents, and regains his kingdom.
Perhaps it is no surprise that the human characters in both Sylvie and Bruno books are
the least believable. They are the hackneyed stock characters of sentimental romance,
though no worse than others of the same genre. As in the Alice books, the title characters, Sylvie and Bruno, are the more remarkable creations, though readers may have difficulty
with the cloying baby talk of the fairies and the effusive affection they lavish on one another. Sylvie and Bruno are emblems of childlike innocence, which Carroll also tried to
capture in the Alice books and in his photography.
John R. Holmes
Other major works
short fiction: “Bruno’s Revenge,” 1867.
poetry: Phantasmagoria, and Other Poems, 1869; The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits, 1876; Rhyme? and Reason? , 1883; Three Sunsets, and Other Poems, 1898; For “The Train”: Five Poems and a Tale, 1932; The Collected Verse of Lewis Carroll, 1932 (also known as The Humorous Verse of Lewis Carroll, 1960).
nonfiction: A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry, 1860; An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, 1867; Euclid and His Modern Rivals, 1879; Twelve Months in a Curatorship, 1884; Three Months in a Curatorship, 1886; The Game of Logic, 1887; Curiosa Mathematica, Part I: A New Theory of Parallels, 1888; Curiosa Mathematica, Part II: Pillow Problems Thought During Wakeful Hours, 1893; Symbolic Logic, Part I: Elementary, 1896; Feeding the Mind, 1907; The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, 1954; The Unknown Lewis Carroll, 1961; The Magic of Lewis Carroll, 1973; The Letters of Lewis Carroll, 1979
(Morton N. Cohen, editor); The Oxford Pamphlets, Leaflets, and Circulars of Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson, Vol. 1, 1993; The Mathematical Pamphlets of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Related Pieces, 1994.
children’s literature: A Tangled Tale, 1885; “The Rectory Umbrella” and
“Mischmasch,” 1932; The Pig-Tale, 1975.
Bibliography
Blake, Kathleen. Play, Games, and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974. Very insightful study of Carroll’s work focuses
primarily on the Alice books, Sylvie and Bruno, and The Hunting of the Snark. Empha-59
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sis is placed on systems of logic and language constructions. Supplemented by an
index.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. New York:
Chelsea House, 2006. Collection of essays about the novel includes analysis of Alice’s
identity, elements of folklore and fairy tales in the work, and its treatment of love and death. Includes bibliography and index.
Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice. Introduction and notes by Martin Gardner. 1960.
Definitive ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Features abundant marginal notes that
explain references in the Alice tales and The Hunting of the Snark, linking them to Carroll’s life, events and controversies in Victorian England, and mathematics. Also in-
cludes reproductions of the works’ original illustrations.
Cohen, Morton N. Lewis Carroll: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1995. De-
tailed work by an author who devoted more than three decades to Carroll scholarship.
Using Carroll’s letters and diaries, Cohen has provided what many regard as a defini-
tive biography. Illustrated with more than one hundred of Carroll’s photographs and
drawings.
Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson. The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll. New York: Century, 1899. As Carroll’s nephew, Collingwood had firsthand knowledge of his uncle’s life,
and this biographical work is accordingly full of anecdotes. The letters quoted in the
text often exemplify Carroll’s dexterity with humor.
De la Mare, Walter. Lewis Carroll. London: Faber & Faber, 1932. Well-written volume places Carroll in historical context and analyzes the different genres he utilized. Contains a detailed discussion of the two Alice books and a brief treatment of other works.
Supplemented by an index and a bibliography.
Gray, Donald J., ed. Alice in Wonderland. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Provides an ideal starting point for those interested in examining Carroll’s novel. In addition to extensive background and critical essays, includes helpful annotations on the two Alice
novels. Many of the best essays from other collections are reprinted here, making this a reference work of first resort.
Jones, Jo Elwyn, and J. Francis Gladstone. The Alice Companion: A Guide to Lewis
Carroll’s Alice Books. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Full of information and commentary on the people and places that make up Carroll’s and Alice Lid-
dell’s world in mid-nineteenth century Oxford. Also an excellent source of informa-
tion regarding the extensive literature on this period in Carroll’s life.
_______. The Red King’s Dream: Or, Lewis Carroll in Wonderland. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. Places Carroll within his life and times through the discussion of his literary milieu, friends, and influences. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Leach, Karoline. In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis
&
nbsp; Carroll. Chester Springs, Pa.: Peter Owen, 1999. Uses findings from new research to argue that many of the long-standing assumptions about Carroll—concerning his ex-60
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clusively child-centered and unworldly life, his legendary obsession with Alice Lid-
dell, and his supposedly unnatural sexuality—are nothing more than myths.
Pudney, John. Lewis Carroll and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. Historical study of Carroll and his culture is both insightful and broad in scope. Features more than one hundred illustrations as well as a chronology, a select bibliography, and an
index.
Thomas, Donald. Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background. London: John Murray,
1996. Thomas surmises the formative influences on Carroll’s personality and intellect
as he describes Victorian England. An invaluable guide for readers who want to under-
stand how manners and ideas changed during Carroll’s lifetime.
61
ANGELA CARTER
Born: Eastbourne, Sussex, England; May 7, 1940
Died: London, England; February 16, 1992
Also known as: Angela Olive Stalker
Principal long fiction
Shadow Dance, 1966 (also known as Honeybuzzard, 1967)
The Magic Toyshop, 1967
Several Perceptions, 1968
Heroes and Villains, 1969
Love, 1971 (revised 1987)
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, 1972 (also known as The War
of Dreams, 1974)
The Passion of New Eve, 1977
Nights at the Circus, 1984
Wise Children, 1991
Other literary forms
Angela Carter is nearly as well known for her short fiction as she is for her novels. Her short-story collections include Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), Black Venus (1985; also known as Saints and Strangers, 1986), the highly praised The Bloody Chamber, and Other Stories (1979), which contains her transformations of familiar fairy tales into adult tales with erotic overtones, and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders
(1993). She also wrote a number of fantastic stories for children, including Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady (1970), The Donkey Prince (1970), and a translated adaptation of the works of Charles Perrault, The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977). In 1978, she published her first book of nonfiction, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography, a feminist study of the Marquis de Sade that remains controversial among both literary and feminist critics. Other nonfiction essays by Carter have been published by British journals; Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (1982) is a collection of her journalistic pieces, and Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings (1997) reprints other essays and reviews. She also wrote a screenplay adaptation of her novel The Magic Toyshop (1987) and cowrote, with Neil Jordan, the screenplay for the British film The Company of Wolves (1984), based on her short story of the same title.
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