In appearance Carroll was handsome and asymmetric – two facts that may have contributed to his interest in mirror reflections. One shoulder was higher than the other, his smile was slightly askew, and the level of his eyes not quite the same. He was of moderate height, thin,  carrying himself stiffly erect and walking with a peculiar jerky gait. He was affected with one deaf ear and a stammer that trembled his upper lip. Although ordained a deacon (by Bishop Wilberforce) he seldom preached because of his speech defect and he never went on to holy orders. There is no doubt about the depth and sincerity of his Church of England views. He was orthodox in all respects save his inability to believe in eternal damnation.

Martin Gardner

From his father he developed an early love of nonsense. A letter from Archdeacon Dodgson, away in Leeds, to his eight-year-old son, for example, reads:

Then what a bawling & a tearing of hair there will be ! Pigs and babies, camels and Butterflies, rolling in the gutter together – old women rushing up chimnies & cows after them – ducks hiding themselves in coffee cups and fat geese trying to squeeze themselves into pencil cases – at last the Mayor of Leeds will be found in a soup plate covered up with custard & stuck full of almonds to make him look like a sponge cake that he may escape  the dreadful destruction of the town.

Jackie Wullschlager

It was as a young graduate at Christ Church that he began to keep meticulous diaries, to file and index every letter he ever received, and to record the menu offered to every guest entertained in his rooms. He was fussy, prim, zealous and rough on himself. In his diary he lists his faults as ‘failing to clear arrears of lecture work every evening’. ‘I pray to God to help me to begin a life of more regular and better habits’ is a frequent refrain; overhearing ‘a painful amount of open jesting and flippancy on sacred topics’ is a typical complaint.

JW

Many Carrollian scholars have surmised, and with good reason, that Carroll intended the White Knight to be a caricature of himself. Like the knight, Carroll had shaggy hair, mild blue eyes, a kind and gentle face. Like the knight, his mind seemed to function best when it saw things in topsy-turvy fashion. Like the knight,he was fond of curious gadgets and a “great hand at inventing things.” He was forever “thinking of a way” to do this or that differently. Many of his inventions, like the knight’s blotting-paper pudding, were very clever but unlikely ever to be made ( though some turned out to be not so useless when other reinvented them decades later).

MG

Until recently, an almost perfect consensus reigned in Carroll scholarship; Carroll/Dodgson was considered explained, diagnosed, his strange life an open book with little about it that was either deep or mysterious. He was the shy and virginal clergyman who stumbled into genius through intense love of a child; the man with no life whose transparent, barely registered existence held only one story: that of his tragic but ultimately  innocent  deviancy, his ultimate failure to engage with adulthood. The belief amounted to an axiom, an unquestioned truth all adhered to; and as a result biographical and literary investigation was almost nil. In contrast to other comparable literary disciplines, debate was sparse and the spectrum of opinnion extraordinarily narrow. There was no perceived need to look for new answers, since all was presumed known and understood.

Christopher Hollingsworth

 

…Dodgson’s personal code of conduct was so strict that, while sympathetic to those who felt otherwise, he himself considered widowers were wrong to remarry.

Anne Clark

 

Everything he did was regarded as essentially quaint, prim, or deviant simply because he said or did it…He was routinely presented as a man who avoided adult relationships, even though his women friends dominated large sections of his life and were a primary source of pleasure for him and sometimes a scandal for his society. Sometimes the prism of this mythic image could truly turn light back upon itself and make black into white. One biographer confronted by the reality of Dodgson’s own words on the subject of remarriage after divorce or widowhood metamorphosed them into their diametrical opposite. This is what Dodgson actually said: “those who object to all remarriage, even after the death of a husband or wife, take a view that seems to me at variance with scripture as well as with common sense” (Carroll, “Marriage”)…

CH

Charles Dodgson’s family’s incursive destruction of his papers immediately after his death, and their steady refusal to allow evidence to be made public, meant that the first hand biographical evidence remained almost non-existent until the second half of this present century. In a separate but ultimately linked development, a massive and almost irresistible myth surrounding the name “Lewis Carroll” had begun to develop even while Dodgson still lived. In the fallow space left by the lack of prima facie evidence, and the silence of his family, this myth grew in an unprecedented and powerful way. When early biographers wrote their studies of Lewis Carroll, lacking almost all first hand evidence, they had little choice but to fill their books with the stuff of this myth. And thus very early on it became dignified by an apparent scholastic pedigree. Later biographers took their lead and repeated these supposedly already verified “facts”.

Karoline Leach

The man who emerges from the pages of Dodgson’s diary and from his own extensive correspondence is not a “simple-hearted”, naive dreamer of children, not a shy asexual recluse, loathing little boys, obsessed with little girls and unable to function in an adult world. The legend is true insofar that his preferred companions were always female, but he never hated boys or men, in fact he enjoyed several important men and boy-friendships in his life. And, despite frequent self-caricature as a “hermit”, and despite its frequent repetition in biography, he was never any kind of a recluse. His diary makes it clear that he was almost addicted to company — particularly female company — and he never had any shortage of this in his life. In fact certain times were characterised for him by an almost obsessive socialising, hurrying about London visiting artists and writers and business associates, and his innumerable female friends, making more than half a dozen calls a day and fitting in theatre-visits and invitations to dine in between. Myth has just preferred to have it otherwise.

KL

In defiance of everything that is presently believed, and beneath the misleading and infantilising appellation, his women-friendships were numerous. There were married women like Constance Burch, widows like Edith Shute and Sarah Blakemore, and single girls like Theo Heaphy, May Miller and “darling Isa” Bowman. These women were an integral part of his life, a potent source of companionship and comfort. They went on theatre trips with him, or dined tete-à-tete with him in his rooms, sometimes nursed him when he was ill, mended his clothes, shared his lodgings for extended periods. Some of them modelled for his camera, in what he called “outré” costume, long after leaving their childhood behind.

KL

Il était Roparant, et les Vliqueux tarands
Allaient en gibroyant et en brimbulkdriquant
Jusque-là où la rourghe est à rouarghe à ramgmbde et rangmbde à rouarghambde:
Tous les falomitards étaient les chats-huants
Et les Ghoré Uk’hatis dans le Grabugeument

Antonin Artaud’s translation of the first verse of ‘Jabberwocky’

I have not  produced a translation of ‘Jabberwocky’. I tried to translate a fragment of it, but it bored me. I never liked this poem, which always struck me as an affected infantilism…I do not like poems or languages of the surface which smell of happy leisures and of intellectual success.

Antonin Artaud

‘Jabberwocky’ is an interesting extended exercise in communicative possibilities. At a first reading Alice ‘couldn’t make it out at all’ but reflects ‘”Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas only I don’t exactly know what they are! However,  somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate – ’” With Humpty Dumpty’s help, however,  she makes great strides in comprehension, as does the reader. The explanation that ‘slithy’ is ‘like a portmanteau’ in comprehending the two words ‘lithe and slimy’ harks forward to a favourite technique of James Joyce. ‘Jabberwocky’ reminds us that we can apprehend meaning of sorts merely from implied syntactical structures and from verbal assiciation.

Michael Irwin

 

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

All mimsey were the borogroves

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll

All old Dadgerson’s dodges one conning one’s copying and that’s what wonderland’s wanderlad’ll flaunt to the fair.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

In Lewis Carroll, “nonsense” draws its importance from the fact that it constitutes in and of itself the vital solution to a profound contradiction between the acceptance of faith and the exercise of reason, on the one hand, and on the other between a keen poetic awareness and rigorous professional duties. The characteristic of this subjective solution is to be coupled with an objective solution, one that is precisely poetic in nature: the mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.

André Breton

 

Il était grilheure; les slictueux toves

Gyraient sur l’alloinde et vriblaient;

Tout flivoreux allaient les borogoves;

Les verchons fourgus bourniflaient

Henri Parisot’s translation of the first verse of ‘Jabberwocky’

 

Carroll’s view of character had always run counter to conventional Victorian notions. In the Alice books, character had been reduced to two-dimensions: playing cards, disembodied smiles (though Alice herself is elastic, to say the least).

Thomas Christensen