How does Alice in Wonderland reflect Lewis Carroll's life?

Answer 1

In many ways. Some of them are:

a) Lewis Carroll had a very bizarre relationship to food - he didn't eat much and was appalled by other peoples' appetites. This shows in Alice In Wonderland, where food is mentioned with negative connotation - it makes Alice grow to various sizes, which makes her feel very uncomfortable. Also, in the chapter about the Mad Tea-Party, the Dormouse tells a story about some people and Alice asks what they lived off, to which he answers "treacle". Alice says this can't be true, for living solely off treacle would make them sick. The Dormouse replies "So they were. Very sick".

b) Lewis Carroll had sleeping problems and may have suffered from insomnia. In the chapter about The Mad Tea-Party, the Dormouse has trouble staying awake and wants to sleep all the time.

c) Lewis Carroll had an enourmous love for young girls - he wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for Alice Liddell, an 11-year-old girl. Furthermore, Lewis Carroll is from the Victorean Era, therefore lived in a society with a feminine ruler (the queen), and in his stories, girls and women are almost always the main characters.

d) Lastly, Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of Charles Dodgson. In the book, Alice has trouble finding out who she is, and she seeks her own idenity. Parallels could be drawn between those facts.

There are many more reflections, lots of them are mathematical but I won't go in to that too much, but Charles Dodgson was a very conservative person, and his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, was a liberal. In the book he subtly lets the reader know, that he didn't approve of quaternions (a four-dimensional number), which also reflects on how mathematics developed in the 1800's. Anyway, like I said, I won't go in to that, one needs to now a lot about complex numbers and quaternions to understand the mathematics in it.