Carroll, Lewis

Abstract

The Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–98), better known to the world by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an extraordinary polymath. His literary fame resides primarily on his two brilliant children's fantasies, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking‐Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), and to a lesser degree on the nonsense quest poem, The Hunting of the Snark (1876). The Alice books have had an international and persistent influence since their publication; only the Bible and Shakespeare are quoted more frequently in Anglo‐American culture. These two tales have delighted generations of children while supplying a boundless array of sophisticated puzzlement for arm‐chair philosophers of all stripes. While Carroll did not singlehandedly divert children's literature away from the sentimental, harsh, and didactic fare that was common in the early nineteenth century (as has been often claimed), his Alice books nonetheless transformed the genre, partly by their free play of invention and fantastic adventure, partly by their depiction of the direct view of a child, and partly by their avoidance of sentiment and moral indoctrination. The books are equally if not more important to adult readers, because of their gnomic but playful depths, with their nonsensical treatment of language, reality, death, and other weighty subjects through absurd plot developments, verbal wit, black humor, and free satiric play.