CARROLL, Lewis

CARROLL, Lewis [1832–98]. Pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. English mathematician and writer, born at Daresbury, Cheshire, and educated at Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford, where he spent the rest of his life. His most famous book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), developed from a story he told one afternoon to the three daughters of the Greek scholar H. G. Liddell, Dean of Christ Church. Alice, named after one of them, continued her adventures in Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Carroll wrote other books for children, including a long poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ (1876). He published several mathematical works, but was not distinguished academically. He never married, and found pleasure in the company of little girls, with whom he lost his shyness. He was also an inventor of puzzles, games, ciphers, and mnemonics, and an amateur pioneer in photography. Carroll was a master of fantasy and his stories have their own logic. Young readers seem untroubled by such tensions and anxieties as forgetting one's name and calls for beheading offenders, while the adult reader enjoys the commentary on human absurdities and the manipulation of language. Carroll used the PUN and coined NEOLOGISMS, including what he called ‘portmanteau words’ like chortle (combining chuckle and snort). See BLEND. He played games with idioms, using such expressions as ‘beating time’ (to music) in a literal sense. He reshaped such animals of fable or rhetoric as the Gryphon, March Hare, and Cheshire Cat, and invented such new ones as the Bandersnatch and the Boojum. As a parodist, he made NONSENSE poems out of well-known moral verses. His success as a children's author was aided by the illustrations of John Tenniel. Analysts of his works have made theological and psychoanalytical interpretations of his fantasies; students of language may find his genius more evident in Humpty-Dumpty's comment on people and words: ‘The question is, which is to be master–that's all.’ See BLEND, DOUBLET, HUMOUR, JOKE, NONSENSE.