Lewis carrol (1832-1898)

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known to the world by his pen-name Lewis Carroll, was born on 12 January 1832 in Daresbury in northwest England. He was the first of eleven children. As a child Charles would entertain his brothers and sisters with invented games and puzzles, put on marionette shows and stories. He was to continue to be an entertainer of children for the rest of his life. Still, the influence of his father, a rector in the Anglican Church, who loved classics and mathematics, was strong too, and Charles followed in his father's footsteps in all ways except that of becoming an active churchman. Instead, after being educated in public schools, where he always won numerous prizes and awards, he went on to Christ Church College of Oxford University in 1850, where he would remain for the rest of his life. There he lived the exemplary life of an Oxford don, teaching and writing books on mathematics and carrying out his duties with the utmost precision and care. He was, by all accounts, a most fastidious and conservative man. Rules and propriety were everything to him. His students would never have described their teacher as humorous or personable. But this exemplary life was only part of the picture. He had another side to him: his great love of children and childhood. He saw his childhood as the happiest time of his life. As an adult, he truly enjoyed the company of small children. What is more, his friendship with them hardly ever lasted past puberty, because 'the child-friends, once so affectionate, became uninteresting acquaintances, whom I have no wish to see again.'

There was one child in particular whom he loved above all - Alice Liddell, one of the three daughters of the dean of Christ Church, Henry Liddell. In April 1856 Dodgson was invited to the Deanery gardens to photograph the three Liddell sisters, including the three-year-old Alice. This photography session was not a success - the three little girls would not sit still - but Charles and the Liddell girls became friends. As always, Dodgson took on the role of children's entertainer with his stories, games and puzzles. He also took the children on many outings. One outing, on 4 July 1862, has become legendary. Dodgson himself wrote of that summer day: “I made an expedition up the river with the three Liddells, we had tea on the bank there, and did not reach Christ Church till half-past eight.... on which occasion I told them the fairy tale of Alice's Adventures Underground, which I undertook; to write out for Alice.” This was the afternoon which saw the beginnings of what was to become Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, first published in 1865, and together with its companion volume (1871) destined to become one of the best-loved books in English literature and an odd masterpiece of Victorian writing. Besides all the millions of children who have loved these books, they have inspired many of the best modem writers, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, the French Surrealists and Vladimir Nabokov. The poet W.H. Auden explained how a children's book could be so appealing to adults by saying that “there are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children. After all, every adult has been a child. “

In the Alice books Lewis Carroll manages to see the upper-class Victorian world of severe rules and order through the child’s eyes. In both of these books, Alice is constantly meeting rather bossy adults who tell her to repeat her lessons, recite poems (one of the standard activities of Victorian schoolchildren) and respond to difficult, often absurd, questions. But for all this harassment and bossing around, Alice stands her ground. She may be confused by the absurdities of the adult world and she may even cry, but she is never stupid or helpless or sweetly innocent, and in the end she becomes Queen Alice. Besides these absurd adults, who appear in the form of chess pieces, mythological beasts, fairy-tale characters and so on, Alice must face terrible changes. She herself grows in bizarre ways after drinking from bottles labelled 'drink me' or after eating pieces of a magic mushroom; and death and the threat of being eaten are constants in these books which at times take on the semblance of nightmares. Lewis Carroll's acute representation of childhood without a trace of the moralism so characteristic of much of Victorian writing for both children and adults, revolutionized the writing of children's books. The various song scattered through the stories are sometimes parodies, as, for example, The White Knight’s Song, but more often they are classic examples of nonsense verse. Poems such as Jabberwocky exhibit a mathematician’s fondness for puzzles combined with a literary person’s fondness for word games.

Even though the great success of the Alice books brought Lewis Carroll fame and financial rewards, his life changed little, except for the fact that he now had the chance to frequent and photograph the famous artists and writers of his day, such as Ruskin, Tennyson and the Rossettis. As always, he continued to prefer the company of little girls and to carry out as punctiliously and properly as ever his duties at Christ Church College. He died of influenza in 1898.