Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll was British and lived in England his whole life, so the American Civil War didn't have much impact on him.

When the war started in 1861, Carroll was a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University and was friends with the college Dean and his family, the Liddells.

In 1862 he went on a rowing trip with a friend and the three daughters of the Liddell family; Lorina, Edith and Alice. To entertain them, he made up the story of Alice in Wonderland.

In 1865, which is the year the war ended, he published the story as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to much acclaim and great success.

Between 1861 and 1865 he lived his normal life; he lectured to his students, wrote books and papers on mathematics, worked as a deacon at the college's church and entertained himself with his hobby of photography.

To see an interesting timeline showing Carroll's life and major world events, follow the related link below.

No, he wasn't.

Alice in Wonderland was influenced by numerous things. One was a girl named Alice Liddell, who was the daughter of one of Lewis' acquaintances. Lewis told her stories and had a relationship which to this day is still question.

He made up Alice in Wonderland to entertain Alice and her sisters during a rowing trip, so we can assume the he was in full control of his faculties at the time, as it is unlikely that he would be so reckless as to take a group of children boating whilst feverish or suffering hallucinations.

Carroll's character in Alice in Wonderland was named after Liddell and the story was edited by him later on, when he was preparing the story for publication.

There is no evidence at all that he suffered hallucinations, either self inflicted or due to illness, at any stage during the writing process.

Alice wishes she could shut up like a telescope in the first chapter of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which is called Down the Rabbit-Hole. She has found the little door that leads to the beautiful garden and wants to go there, but is too large to get through the door, so she wishes she could shrink enough to fit through.

Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head though the doorway; 'and even if my head would go through,' thought poor Alice, 'it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only know how to begin.' For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.

Lewis Carroll is credited with a huge number of famous quotations. It is said (though not proved) that he is the most quoted person in the English language after Shakespeare.

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has over one hundred entries by Lewis Carroll. Here are just some of them:

He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed.

With his name painted clearly on each:

But, since he omitted to mention the fact,

They were all left behind on the beach.

'Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice.

If everybody minded their own business,' said the Duchess in a hoarse a growl, 'the world would go round a deal faster than it does.'

Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.

You see it's like a portmanteau - there are two meanings packed up into one word.

He's an Anglo-Saxon Messenger - and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes.

'I'm sure nobody walks much faster than I do!'

'He can't do that,' said the King, 'or else he'd have been here first.'

Lewis Carroll first created the Alice story whilst on a rowing trip on the River Isis, near Oxford, England.

He was in Oxford when he wrote down the story, which he called Alice's Adventures Under Ground.

He expanded the story for publication, also whilst in Oxford. This is the version which we know today; Alice's Adventures In Wonderland.

Lewis Carroll wrote You Are Old Father William as a parody of Robert Southey's The Old Man's Comforts And How He Gained Them.

The Old Man's Comforts is precisely the sort of improving verse which Alice (in Wonderland) would have been expected to learn and recite in her lessons.

Much of the point of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is to poke fun at the very earnest attitude of both Victorian education and literature, and to subvert their intentions to turn children into better people. Instead, Carroll hoped to encourage children to have fun and enjoy words and literature for their own sake.

You Are Old Father William is a very clear example of this. Compare the first two verses of each poem:

Southey

You are old, Father William, the young man cried,

The few locks which are left you are grey;

You are hale, Father William, a hearty old man,

Now tell me the reason I pray.

In the days of my youth, Father William replied,

I remember'd that youth would fly fast,

And abused not my health and my vigour at first

That I never might need them at last.

Carroll

"You are old, Father William," the young man said,

"And your hair has become very white;

And yet you incessantly stand on your head---

Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,

"I feared it might injure the brain;

But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,

Why, I do it again and again."

In Southey's poem the young man admires his elder, and seeks an explanation as to how William has been so successful, presumably with a view to following the same path himself. Whereas the youth in Carroll's rhyme appears to be admonishing William for his foolishness. Southey's poem continues, in a very earnest tone with the ways in which William has had the good sense to preserve his health (with an implicit suggestion that we, as readers would do well to do the same) but Carroll's verse does no such thing. It is full of silliness and joie de vivre.'We don't want moral lessons,' Carroll's poem seems to say, 'we want head stands!'

In this way Carroll is rebelling against the stifling attitude that Victorians had towards children, and supplying them instead with fun and laughter.