DELIGHTFUL SATURDAYS WITH MY FAVORITE AUTHORS AND POETS (63)

LEWIS CARROLL.

( IMAGE AND INFO : WIKIPEDIA)

Lewis Carroll, a popular English Author, who rose to fame with Alice in Wonderland, was born as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on 27 January 1832 at Daresbury, Cheshire, England. He was not only an author but also a well known poet and a mathematician. He also authored Alice in Wonderland’s sequel,Through the Looking-Glass (1871) and poems like Jabberwocky (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876) which came to be classified under the category of Literary Nonsense.

Carroll, who was raised in a high-church Anglican family, had a long-standing association with Christ Church, Oxford, where he spent the most of his life as a researcher and educator. Though Carroll consistently denied it, Alice Liddell, the daughter of Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church, is largely acknowledged as the original inspiration for Alice in Wonderland.

Between 1879 and 1881, Carroll, a puzzle enthusiast, published his word ladder puzzle in his weekly column for Vanity Fair magazine under the name “Doublets.” A memorial stone for Carroll was unveiled in 1982 at Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. Many regions of the world have organisations devoted to promoting and appreciating his works.

Charles Dodgson, alias, Lewis Carroll was the oldest of the eleven children born to Charles Dodgson (sr). His great grandfather was also called Charles Dodgson. This is so confusing, right? Lewis Carroll’s father was enrolled in Westminster School and then to Christ Church, Oxford. According to his family tradition, he went on to receive Holy Orders. He received a double first in mathematics, which may have been the beginning of a distinguished academic career. Instead, he wed Frances Jane Lutwidge, his first cousin, in 1830 and went on to become a village minister.

Caroll and his family shifted to their new residence in the spacious rectory of Croft-on-Tees, Yorkshire, when he turned 11. They continued to live here for the next 25 years. Charles’ father was a prominent and very orthodox Church of England clergyman who later rose to the position of Archdeacon of Richmond[9] and actively participated, at times with considerable influence, in the bitter religious battles that tore the church apart. He tried his best to instil such views in his children. He was high-church, inclined toward Anglo-Catholicism, a fan of John Henry Newman and the Tractarian movement. But Charles came to have mixed feelings about the principles of his father and the Church of England as a whole.

As a child, he was initially homeschooled and when he was just 7, he started reading books like as The Pilgrim’s Progressand had trouble while speaking. He also stammered like his siblings. At the age of 12, he started attending Richmond Grammar School (now part of Richmond School) in Richmond, North Yorkshire and later, joined Rugby School in 1846, which left him some bitter memories of getting bullied by senior students.

He wrote:

“I cannot say … that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again … I can honestly say that if I could have been … secure from annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would have been comparative trifles to bear.”

He graduated from Rugby at the end of 1849 and entered Christ Church, his father’s former college, at the University of Oxford in May of that same year. He moved into residence in January 1851 after having to wait for rooms to become available in the college. Only two days had passed since he arrived at Oxford when he was called to return home. At age 47, his mother had passed away from “inflammation of the brain” (perhaps meningitis or a stroke).

He graduated with first-class honours in mathematics moderates in 1852, and soon after, his father’s longtime friend Canon Edward Pusey nominated him for a studentship. He graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in 1854 after receiving first-class honours in the Final Honours School of Mathematics, placing first on the list. [He continued to study and teach at Christ Church, but the next year he failed an essential scholarship exam due to his self-admitted inability to put effort into his studies. Nevertheless, his aptitude for math earned him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship in 1855, which he held for the following 26 years.

His most popular works :

Literature

La Guida di Bragia, a Ballad Opera for the Marionette Theatre (around 1850)

“Miss Jones”, comic song (1862)

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869)

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (includes “Jabberwocky” and “The Walrus and the Carpenter”) (1871)

The Hunting of the Snark (1876)

Rhyme? And Reason? (1883) – shares some contents with the 1869 collection, including the long poem “Phantasmagoria”

A Tangled Tale (1885)

Sylvie and Bruno (1889)

The Nursery “Alice” (1890)

Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893)

Pillow Problems (1893)

What the Tortoise Said to Achilles (1895)

Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898)

The Manlet (1903)

Mathematics:

A Syllabus of Plane Algebraic Geometry (1860)

The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically (1858 and 1868)

An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equations.

Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1879), both literary and mathematical in style.

Symbolic Logic Part I

Symbolic Logic Part II (published posthumously)

The Alphabet Cipher (1868)

The Game of Logic (1887)

Curiosa Mathematica I (1888)

Curiosa Mathematica II (1892)

A discussion of the various methods of procedure in conducting elections (1873), Suggestions as to the best method of taking votes, where more than two issues are to be voted on (1874), A method of taking votes on more than two issues (1876), collected as The Theory of Committees and Elections, edited, analysed, and published in 1958 by Duncan Black.

Other Works :

Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection

Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing

Notes by an Oxford Chiel

The Principles of Parliamentary Representation (1884)

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