What was Lewis Carroll's real name? Ten interesting facts about Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll (Great Britain, 27.1.1832 - 14.1.1898) - English children's writer, mathematician, logician.
Real name: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
Under the name Lewis Carroll, English mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson became known throughout the world as the creator of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, one of the most popular books for children.
Born January 27, 1832 in Daresbury near Warrington (Cheshire) in the family of a parish priest. He was the third child and eldest son in a family of four boys and seven girls. As a boy, Dodgson invented games, composed stories and rhymes, and drew pictures for his younger brothers and sisters.
Dodgson's education until the age of twelve is handled by his father.
1844-1846 – studies at Richmond Grammar School.
1846-1850 - studies at Rugby School, a privileged closed educational institution that causes hostility in Dodgson. However, here he shows outstanding abilities in mathematics and classical languages.
1850 – enrolled at Christ Church College, Oxford University and moves to Oxford.
1851 – wins the Boulter Scholarship competition.
1852 – awarded first class honors in mathematics and second class in classical languages and ancient literatures. Thanks to his achievements, he is allowed to do scientific work.
1855 - Dodgson was offered a professorship at his college, the traditional condition of which in those years was taking holy orders and a vow of celibacy. Dodgson fears that due to his ordination he will have to give up his favorite activities - photography and going to the theater.
1856, among other things, was also the year Mr. Dodgson began his studies in photography. During his passion for this art form (he stopped filming in 1880 for unknown reasons), he created about 3,000 photographs, of which less than 1,000 have survived.
1858 – “The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically,” 2nd ed. 1868.
1860 – “Notes on algebraic planimetry” (A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry).
1861 – Dodgson is ordained deacon, the first intermediate step towards becoming a priest. However, changes in university status eliminate the need for further steps in this direction.
July 1, 1862 - on a walk near Godstow, on the upper Thames, with the children of Liddell, the Dean of Christ Church College, Lorina, Alice (Alice), Edith and Canon Duckworth, Dodgson tells a story that Alice - a favorite who has become the heroine of improvisations - asks to be written down. He does this over the next few months. Then, on the advice of Henry Kingsley and J. MacDonald, he rewrote the book for a wider range of readers, adding several more stories previously told to the Liddell children.
1865 - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is published under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll (first the English name Charles Lutwidge was Latinized into Carolus Ludovicus, and then both names were swapped and were again anglicized).
1867 – scientific work “An Elementary Treatise on Determinants”.
In the same year, Dodgson left England for the first and last time and made a very unusual trip to Russia for those times. Visits Calais, Brussels, Potsdam, Danzig, Koenigsberg along the way, spends a month in Russia, returns to England via Vilna, Warsaw, Ems, Paris. In Russia, Dodgson visits St. Petersburg and its environs, Moscow, Sergiev Posad, and a fair in Nizhny Novgorod.
1871 - A sequel to Alice (also based on earlier stories and later stories told to the young Liddells at Charlton Kings, near Cheltenham, in April 1863) is published, entitled Through the Looking-Glass. Glass and What Alice Found There, year given 1872). Both books are illustrated by D. Tenniel (1820-1914), who followed Dodgson's exact instructions.
1876 – poetic epic in the genre of nonsense “The Hunting of the Snark”.
1879 – scientific work “Euclid and His Modern Rivals”.
1883 – collection of poems “Poems? Meaning?" (Rhyme? And Reason?).
1888 – scientific work “Mathematical Curiosities” (Curiosa Mathematica, 2nd ed. 1893).
1889 – novel “Sylvie and Bruno” (Sylvie and Bruno).
1893 - the second volume of the novel “Sylvia and Bruno” - “The Conclusion of Sylvie and Bruno” (Sylvie and Bruno Concluded). Both volumes are distinguished by the complexity of their composition and the mixture of elements of realistic storytelling and fairy tales.
1896 – scientific work “Symbolic Logic”.
1898 – collection of poems “Three Sunsets”.
January 14, 1898 - Charles Lutwidge Dodgson died at his sister's house in Guildford of pneumonia, two weeks shy of 66 years of age. Buried in Guilford Cemetery.
Mathematician Dodgson
Dodgson's mathematical works did not leave any noticeable mark on the history of mathematics. His mathematical education was limited to knowledge of several books of the “Elements” of the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid, the foundations of linear algebra, mathematical analysis and probability theory; this was clearly not enough to work at the “cutting edge” of mathematical science of the 19th century, which was experiencing a period of rapid development (the theory of the French mathematician Galois, non-Euclidean geometry of the Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky and the Hungarian mathematician Janusz Bolyai, mathematical physics, qualitative theory of differential equations, etc.) . Dodgson’s essentially complete isolation from the scientific world also had an effect: apart from short visits to London, Bath and to his sisters, Dodgson spent all his time in Oxford, and only in 1867 his usual way of life was disrupted by a trip to distant Russia (impressions from this trip Dodgson outlined it in the famous “Russian Diary”). Recently, Dodgson's mathematical legacy has attracted increasing attention from researchers who have discovered his unexpected mathematical discoveries that have remained unclaimed.
Dodgson's achievements in the field of mathematical logic were far ahead of their time. He developed a graphical technique for solving logical problems, more convenient than the diagrams of the mathematician, mechanic, physicist and astronomer Leonhard Euler or the English logician John Venn. Dodgson achieved particular skill in solving the so-called “sorites”. Sorites is a logical problem, which is a chain of syllogisms in which the withdrawn conclusion of one syllogism serves as the premise of another (in addition, the remaining premises are mixed; “sorites” in Greek means “heap”). C. L. Dodgson outlined his achievements in the field of mathematical logic in the two-volume “Symbolic Logic” (the second volume was recently found in the form of galleys in the archive of Dodgson’s scientific opponent) and, in a simplified version for children, in the “Logic Game”.
Writer Lewis Carroll
The unique originality of Carroll's style is due to the trinity of his literary gift of thinking as a mathematician and sophisticated logic. Contrary to the popular belief that Carroll, along with Edward Lear, can be considered the founder of “nonsense poetry,” Lewis Carroll actually created a different genre of “paradoxical literature”: his characters do not violate logic, but, on the contrary, follow it, taking logic to the point of absurdity.
Carroll Lewis's most significant literary works are rightfully considered to be two fairy tales about Alice - "Alice in Wonderland" (1865) and "Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Saw There" (1871), usually called "Alice Through the Looking Glass" for brevity. Bold experiments with language, the many subtle logical and philosophical questions raised in the tales of Alice, the polysemy (“polysemanticism”) of the statements of characters and situations make Carroll’s “children’s” works a favorite reading of the “gray-haired sages.”
Features of Carroll's unique style are clearly noticeable in other works of Carroll: “Sylvie and Bruno”, “The Hunting of the Snark”, “Midnight Problems”, “The Knot Story”, “What the Turtle Said to Achilles”, “Allen Brown and Carr”, “ Euclid and his modern rivals,” letters to children.
L. Carroll was one of the first English photographers. His works are distinguished by naturalness and poetry, especially photographs of children. At the famous international photography exhibition “The Human Race” (1956), English photographers of the 19th century were represented by a single photograph by Lewis Carroll.
In Russia, Carroll has been widely known since the end of the last century. Fairy tales about Alice have been repeatedly (and with varying degrees of success) translated and retold into Russian, in particular by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. But one of the best translations was carried out by Boris Vladimirovich Zakhoder. The stories invented by Carroll are loved not only by children, but also by adults.
Birth of the pseudonym "Carroll Lewis"
Magazine publisher and writer Edmund Yates advised Dodgson to come up with a pseudonym, and in Dodgson's Diaries an entry appears dated February 11, 1865: “Wrote to Mr. Yates, offering him a choice of pseudonyms:
1) Edgar Cutwellis [the name Edgar Cutwellis is obtained by rearranging the letters from Charles Lutwidge].
2) Edgard W. C. Westhill [the method of obtaining a pseudonym is the same as in the previous case].
3) Louis Carroll [Louis from Lutwidge - Ludwick - Louis, Carroll from Charles].
4) Lewis Carroll [by the same principle of “translation” of the names Charles Lutwidge into Latin and the reverse “translation” from Latin into English].”
The choice fell on Lewis Carroll. Since then, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson signed all his “serious” mathematical and logical works with his real name, and all his literary works with a pseudonym, stubbornly refusing to recognize the identity of Dodgson and Carroll.
In the indissoluble union of the modest and somewhat prim Dodgson and the flamboyant Carroll, the former clearly lost to the latter: the writer Lewis Carroll was a better mathematician and logician than the Oxford “don” Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
The works of Lewis Carroll
A significant number of books and pamphlets on mathematics and logic indicate that Dodgson was a conscientious member of the learned community. Among them are Algebraic Analysis of the Fifth Book of Euclid (The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically, 1858 and 1868), Notes on Algebraic Planimetry (A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry, 1860), An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, 1867 ) and Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879), Mathematical Curiosities (Curiosa Mathematica, 1888 and 1893), Symbolic Logic (1896).
Children interested Dodgson from a young age; As a boy, he invented games, composed stories and poems, and drew pictures for his younger brothers and sisters. Dodgson’s unusually strong attachment to children (and girls almost ousted boys from his circle of friends) puzzled his contemporaries, while the latest critics and biographers do not cease to multiply the number of psychological investigations of the writer’s personality.
Of Dodgson's childhood friends, the most famous were those with whom he became friends earlier than anyone else - the children of Liddell, the dean of his college: Harry, Lorina, Alice (Alice), Edith, Rhoda and Violet. Alice was a favorite, and soon became the heroine of the improvisations with which Dodgson entertained his young friends on river walks or at home, in front of the camera. He told the most extraordinary story to Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell and Canon Duckworth on July 4, 1862 near Godstow, on the upper Thames. Alice asked Dodgson to write down this story on paper, which he did over the next few months. Then, on the advice of Henry Kingsley and J. MacDonald, he rewrote the book for a wider range of readers, adding several more stories previously told to the Liddell children, and in July 1865 he published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. A sequel, also from earlier stories and later stories told to the young Liddells at Charlton Kings, near Cheltenham, in April 1863, appeared at Christmas 1871 (1872) under the title Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Seen There. What Alice Found There). Both books were illustrated by D. Tenniel (1820–1914), who followed Dodgson's exact instructions.
Both Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass talk about events that happen as if in a dream. Breaking down the narrative into episodes allows the writer to include stories that play on common sayings and proverbs, such as “the smile of the Cheshire Cat” or “the mad hatter,” or play on situations in games such as croquet or cards. Through the Looking Glass has a greater unity of plot compared to Wonderland. Here Alice finds herself in a mirrored world and becomes a participant in a chess game, where the White Queen's pawn (this is Alice) reaches the eighth square and turns into a queen. This book also features popular nursery rhyme characters, notably Humpty Dumpty, who interprets “made-up” words in “Jabberwocky” with a comically professorial air.
Dodgson was good at humorous poetry, and he published some of the poems from the Alice books in the Comic Times (a supplement to the Times newspaper) in 1855 and in Train magazine in 1856. He published many more poetry collections in these and other periodicals, such as College Rhimes and Punch, anonymously or under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll (the English name Charles Lutwidge was first Latinized to become Carolus Ludovicus, and then the two names were reversed and were again anglicized). This pseudonym was used to sign both books about Alice and the collections of poems Phantasmagoria (Phantasmagoria, 1869), Poems? Meaning? (Rhyme? And Reason?, 1883) and Three Sunsets (1898). The poetic epic in the genre of nonsense, The Hunting of the Snark (1876), also became famous. The novel Sylvie and Bruno (Sylvie and Bruno, 1889) and its second volume, The Conclusion of Sylvie and Bruno (Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893) are distinguished by the complexity of their composition and the mixing of elements of a realistic narrative and a fairy tale.
The wonderful world of Lewis Carroll has captivated both adults and children for almost one hundred and fifty years. Books about Alice are read all over the world. And even more surprising is their creator, a serious mathematician and pedant on the one hand and a dreamer, the best friend of children, on the other.
Carroll's books are a fairy tale intertwined with reality, a world of fiction and the grotesque. Alice's journey is a path along which the imagination of a person freely glides, free from the burdens of “adult” life, which is why the characters encountered along the way and the adventures experienced by Alice are so close to children. Alice's universe, created in a momentary impulse, shocked the whole world. Probably no work of art in the world has as many readers, imitators and haters as the works of Lewis Carroll. Sending Alice down the rabbit hole, the author did not even imagine where his imagination would lead the little heroine, and certainly did not know how his fairy tale would resonate in the hearts of millions of people.
Alice's journey to Wonderland and the mysterious Through the Looking Glass takes place as if in a dream. The travels themselves can hardly be called a logically complete narrative. It is rather a series of bright, sometimes absurd, sometimes funny and touching events and memorable meetings with characters. A new literary technique - breaking up the narrative into episodes - made it possible to reflect the flavor of British life, take a fresh look at traditional English hobbies such as croquet and card games, and play on popular sayings and proverbs. Both books contain many nursery rhymes, the characters of which later became very popular.
According to critics, Lewis Carroll was especially good at humorous poems. He published his poetry separately in popular periodicals such as The Times, Train, and College Rhimes. A luminary of mathematical science, the author of serious scientific works, he did not dare to publish his “frivolous” works under his own name. Then Charles Latwidge Dodgson turned into Lewis Carroll. This pseudonym appeared on both books about Alice’s adventures and on numerous collections of poems. Lewis Carroll is also the author of The Hunting of the Snark, a poem in the heat of the absurd, and the novels Sylvia and Bruno and The Conclusion of Sylvia and Bruno.
Carroll's creations are a mixture of parody and fairy tale. Traveling through the pages of his works, we find ourselves in an incredible world of fantasy, so close to both our dreams and the realities of our everyday life.
Charles Lutwidge (Lutwidge) Dodgson(Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) - English children's writer, mathematician, logician and photographer. Known under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.
Born on January 27, 1832 in Dairesbury near Warrington, Cheshire, in the family of a priest. In the Dodgson family, men were, as a rule, either army officers or clergymen (one of his great-grandfathers, Charles, rose to the rank of bishop, his grandfather, again Charles, was an army captain, and his eldest son, also Charles, was the father of the writer ). Charles Lutwidge was the third child and eldest son in a family of four boys and seven girls.
Young Dodgson was educated until the age of twelve by his father, a brilliant mathematician who was predicted to have a remarkable academic career, but chose to become a rural pastor. Charles’s “reading lists,” compiled together with his father, have survived, telling us about the boy’s solid intellect. After the family moved in 1843 to the village of Croft-on-Tees, in the north of Yorkshire, the boy was assigned to Richmond Grammar School. From childhood, he entertained his family with magic tricks, puppet shows, and poems he wrote for homemade home newspapers (“Useful and Edifying Poetry,” 1845). A year and a half later, Charles entered Rugby School, where he studied for four years (from 1846 to 1850), showing outstanding abilities in mathematics and theology.
In May 1850, Charles Dodgson was enrolled at Christ Church College, Oxford University, and moved to Oxford in January of the following year. However, in Oxford, after only two days, he received unfavorable news from home - his mother had died of inflammation of the brain (possibly meningitis or stroke).
Charles studied well. Having won the Boulter Scholarship competition in 1851 and received first-class honors in mathematics and second-class honors in classical languages and ancient literature in 1852, the young man was admitted to scientific work and also received the right to lecture in the Christian church, which he subsequently enjoyed for 26 years. . In 1854 he graduated with a bachelor's degree from Oxford, where subsequently, after receiving his master's degree (1857), he worked, including the position of professor of mathematics (1855-1881).
Dr. Dodgson lived in a small house with turrets and was one of the landmarks of Oxford. His appearance and manner of speech were remarkable: slight asymmetry of the face, poor hearing (he was deaf in one ear), and a strong stutter. He delivered lectures in an abrupt, even, lifeless tone. He avoided making acquaintances and spent hours wandering around the neighborhood. He had several favorite activities to which he devoted all his free time. Dodgson worked very hard - he got up at dawn and sat down at his desk. In order not to interrupt his work, he ate almost nothing during the day. A glass of sherry, a few cookies - and back to the desk.
Even at a young age, Dodgson drew a lot, tried himself in poetry, wrote stories, sending his works to various magazines. Between 1854 and 1856 His works, mostly humorous and satirical, have appeared in national publications (Comic Times, The Train, Whitby Gazette and Oxford Critic). In 1856, a short romantic poem, “Loneliness,” appeared in The Train under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.
He invented his pseudonym in the following way: he “translated” the name Charles Lutwidge into Latin (it turned out Carolus Ludovicus), and then returned the “truly English” appearance to the Latin version. Carroll signed all his literary (“frivolous”) experiments with a pseudonym, and put his real name only in the titles of mathematical works (“Notes on plane algebraic geometry,” 1860, “Information from the theory of determinants,” 1866). Among a number of Dodgson's mathematical works, the work “Euclid and His Modern Rivals” (the last author's edition - 1879) stands out.
In 1861, Carroll took holy orders and became a deacon of the Church of England; This event, as well as the statute of Oxford Christ Church College, according to which professors had no right to marry, forced Carroll to abandon his vague matrimonial plans. At Oxford he met Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church College, and eventually became a friend of the Liddell family. It was easiest for him to find a common language with the dean’s daughters - Alice, Lorina and Edith; In general, Carroll got along with children much faster and easier than with adults - this was the case with the children of George MacDonald and the offspring of Alfred Tennyson.
Young Charles Dodgson was approximately six feet tall, slender and handsome, with curly brown hair and blue eyes, but it is believed that due to his stuttering, he had difficulty communicating with adults, but with children he relaxed, became free and fast in his speech.
It was the acquaintance and friendship with the Liddell sisters that led to the birth of the fairy tale “Alice in Wonderland” (1865), which instantly made Carroll famous. The first edition of Alice was illustrated by the artist John Tenniel, whose illustrations are considered classics today.
The incredible commercial success of the first Alice book changed Dodgson's life. Since Lewis Carroll became quite famous throughout the world, his mailbox was flooded with letters from admirers, and he began to earn very significant sums of money. However, Dodgson never abandoned his modest life and church positions.
In 1867, Charles left England for the first and last time and made a very unusual trip to Russia for those times. Along the way I visited Calais, Brussels, Potsdam, Danzig, Koenigsberg, spent a month in Russia, returned to England via Vilna, Warsaw, Ems, Paris. In Russia, Dodgson visited St. Petersburg and its environs, Moscow, Sergiev Posad, and a fair in Nizhny Novgorod.
The first fairy tale was followed by a second book, “Alice Through the Looking Glass” (1871), whose gloomy content reflected the death of Carroll’s father (1868) and the many years of depression that followed.
What is remarkable about Alice's adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which have become the most famous children's books? On the one hand, this is a fascinating story for children with descriptions of travel to fantasy worlds with whimsical heroes who have forever become idols of children - who doesn’t know the March Hare or the Red Queen, the Quasi Turtle or the Cheshire Cat, Humpty Dumpty? The combination of imagination and absurdity makes the author’s style inimitable, the author’s ingenious imagination and play on words brings us finds that play on common sayings and proverbs, surreal situations break the usual stereotypes. At the same time, famous physicists and mathematicians (including M. Gardner) were surprised to discover a lot of scientific paradoxes in children's books, and episodes of Alice's adventures were often discussed in scientific articles.
Five years later, The Hunting of the Snark (1876), a fantasy poem describing the adventures of a bizarre crew of variously misfit creatures and one beaver, was published and was Carroll's last widely known work. Interestingly, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti was convinced that the poem was written about him.
Carroll's interests are multifaceted. The end of the 70s and 1880s are characterized by the fact that Carroll publishes collections of riddles and games (“Doublets”, 1879; “Logic Game”, 1886; “Mathematical Curiosities”, 1888-1893), writes poetry (the collection “Poems? Meaning?”, 1883). Carroll went down in literary history as the writer of “nonsense,” including rhymes for children in which their name was “baked” and acrostics.
In addition to mathematics and literature, Carroll devoted a lot of time to photography. Although he was an amateur photographer, a number of his photographs were included, so to speak, in the annals of world photographic chronicles: these are photographs of Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, actress Ellen Terry and many others. Carroll was especially good at taking pictures of children. However, in the early 80s, he abandoned photography, declaring that he was “tired” of this hobby. Carroll is considered one of the most famous photographers of the second half of the 19th century.
Carroll continued to write - on December 12, 1889, the first part of the novel “Sylvie and Bruno” was published, and at the end of 1893 the second, but literary critics reacted lukewarmly to the work.
Lewis Carroll died in Guildford, Surry County, on January 14, 1898, at the home of his seven sisters, from pneumonia that broke out after influenza. He was less than sixty-six years old. In January 1898, most of Carroll's handwritten legacy was burned by his brothers Wilfred and Skeffington, who did not know what to do with the piles of papers that their “learned brother” left behind in the rooms at Christ Church College. In that fire, not only manuscripts disappeared, but also some of the negatives, drawings, manuscripts, pages of a multi-volume diary, bags of letters written to the strange Doctor Dodgson by friends, acquaintances, ordinary people, children. The turn came to the library of three thousand books (literally fantastic literature) - the books were sold at auction and distributed to private libraries, but the catalog of that library was preserved.
Carroll's Alice in Wonderland was included in the list of twelve "most English" objects and phenomena compiled by the UK Ministry of Culture, Sport and Media. Films and cartoons are made based on this cult work, games and musical performances are held. The book has been translated into dozens of languages (more than 130) and has had a great influence on many authors.
Based on materials from Wikipedia, site jabberwocky.ru
Lewis Carroll was born in the village of Daresbury in the English county of Cheshire on January 27, 1832. His father was the parish priest, and he was involved in the education of Lewis, as well as his other children. In total, four boys and seven girls were born into the Carroll family. Lewis showed himself to be a fairly smart and quick-witted student.
Carroll was left-handed, which was not as calmly accepted by religious people in the nineteenth century as it is now. The boy was forbidden to write with his left hand and was forced to use his right, which caused psychological trauma and led to a slight stutter. Some researchers claim that Lewis Carroll is autistic, but there is no exact information about this.
At the age of twelve, Lewis began studying at a private grammar school located near Richmond. He liked the teachers and classmates, as well as the atmosphere in the small educational institution. However, in 1845 the boy was transferred to the fashionable public school of Rugby, where great importance was attached to the physical training of boys and instilling in them Christian values.
Young Carroll liked this school much less, but he studied well there for four years and even demonstrated good abilities in theology and mathematics.
In 1850, the young man entered Christ Church College at Oxford University. In general, he was not a very good student, but he still showed outstanding mathematical abilities. A few years later, Lewis received his bachelor's degree, and then began giving his own lectures on mathematics at Christ Church. He did this for more than two and a half decades: work as a lecturer brought Carroll good income, although he found it very boring.
Since educational institutions in those days were closely interconnected with religious organizations, upon assuming the position of lecturer, Lewis was obliged to take holy orders. In order not to work in the parish, he agreed to accept the rank of deacon, renouncing his powers as a priest. While still in college, Carroll began writing short stories and poetry, and it was then that he came up with this pseudonym (in fact, the writer's real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson).
The Creation of Alice
In 1856, Christ Church College changed its dean. The philologist and lexicographer Henry Liddell, along with his wife and five children, came to Oxford to work in this position. Lewis Carroll soon became friends with the Liddell family and became their faithful friend for many years. It was one of the couple’s daughters, Alice, who was four years old in 1856, who became the prototype for the well-known Alice from Carroll’s most famous works.
First edition of the book “Alice in Wonderland” The writer often told Henry Liddell's children funny tales, the characters and events of which he composed on the fly. One day in the summer of 1862, during a boat trip, little Alice Liddell asked Lewis to once again compose an interesting story for her and her sisters Lorina and Edith. Carroll got down to business with pleasure and told the girls an exciting tale about the adventures of a little girl who fell through the White Rabbit's hole into the Underground Country.
Alice Lidell - prototype of the famous fairy-tale character To make it more interesting for girls to listen to, he made the main character similar to Alice in character, and also added characteristic features of Edith and Lorina to some of the secondary characters. Little Liddell was delighted with the story and demanded that the writer write it down on paper. Carroll did this only after several reminders and solemnly handed Alice a manuscript entitled "Alice's Adventures Underground." Somewhat later, he took this first story as the basis for his famous books.
Books
Lewis Carroll wrote his cult works “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass” in 1865 and 1871, respectively. His style of writing books was not similar to any of the writing styles that existed at that time. As a very creative person, with a rich imagination and inner world, as well as an outstanding mathematician with an excellent understanding of logic, he created a special genre of “paradoxical literature.”
Illustration for the fairy tale “Alice in Wonderland” His characters and the situations in which they find themselves are not at all intended to amaze the reader with absurdity and absurdity. In fact, they all follow a certain logic, and this logic itself is taken to the point of absurdity. In an unusual, sometimes even anecdotal form, Lewis Carroll subtly and elegantly touches on many philosophical issues, talks about life, the world and our place in it. As a result, the books turned out to be not only entertaining reading for children, but also wise fairy tales for adults.
Carroll's unique style appears in his other works, although they were not as popular as the Alice stories: "The Hunting of the Snark", "Sylvie and Bruno", "The Knot Stories", "Midnight Problems", "Euclid and His modern rivals", "What the tortoise said to Achilles", "Allen Brown and Carr".
Writer Lewis Carroll Some argue that Lewis Carroll and his world would not have been so extraordinary if the writer had not consumed opium on a regular basis (he suffered from severe migraines and also still had a noticeable stutter). However, at that time, opium tincture was a popular medicine for many diseases; it was used even for mild headaches.
Contemporaries said that the writer was “a man with quirks.” He led a fairly active social life, but at the same time suffered from the need to meet certain social expectations and desperately longed to return to childhood, where everything was simpler and he could remain himself in any situation. For some time he even suffered from insomnia, and spent all his free time on numerous studies. He truly believed in going beyond the reality we know and tried to comprehend something more than the science of his time could offer.
Mathematics
Charles Dodgson was indeed a gifted mathematician: perhaps this is partly why the riddles of his texts are so complex and varied. When the author was not writing his masterpiece books, he was often engaged in mathematical work. Of course, he did not rank with Evariste Galois, Nikolai Lobachevsky or Janusz Bolyai, however, as modern researchers note, he made discoveries in the field of mathematical logic that were ahead of his time.
Mathematician Lewis Carroll Lewis Carroll developed his own graphical technique for finding solutions to logical problems, which was much more convenient than the diagrams used at that time. In addition, the storyteller masterfully solved “sorites” - special logical problems consisting of a sequence of syllogisms, the removal of the conclusions of one of which becomes a prerequisite for the other, while all the remaining premises in such a problem were mixed.
Photo
Another serious hobby of the writer, from which only his own fairy tales and heroes could distract him, was photography. The style of his photography is attributed to the style of pictorialism, characterized by a staged style of filming and editing of negatives.
Lewis Carroll loved photographing children most of all. He was well acquainted with another popular photographer of those times, Oscar Reilander. It was Oscar who made one of the best photographic portraits of the writer, which later became a classic of photography in the mid-1860s.
Personal life
The writer led a very active social life, including often being seen in the company of various representatives of the fair sex. Since at the same time he held the title of professor and deacon, the family tried in every possible way to reason with Lewis, who did not want to settle down, or at least hide the stories of his stormy adventures. Therefore, after Carroll’s death, his life story was carefully retouched: contemporaries sought to create the image of a good-natured storyteller who loved children very much. Subsequently, this desire of theirs played a cruel joke on Lewis’s biography.
Carroll really loved children, including little girls, the daughters of friends and colleagues, from time to time in his social circle. Unfortunately, Carroll never found a woman on whom he could try on the status of “wife” and who would bear him his own children. Therefore, in the 20th century, when it became very fashionable to turn the biographies of famous people upside down and look for Freudian motives in their behavior, the storyteller began to be accused of such a crime as pedophilia. Some particularly ardent supporters of this idea even tried to prove that Lewis Carroll and Jack the Ripper are one and the same person.
No evidence for such theories was found. Moreover: all the letters and stories of contemporaries, in which the writer was presented as a lover of little girls, were subsequently exposed. Thus, Ruth Gamlen stated that the writer invited a “shy child of about 12” Isa Bowman to visit, while in reality the girl at that time was at least 18 years old. The situation is similar with Carroll’s other allegedly young girlfriends, who were in fact fully adults.
Death
The writer died on January 14, 1898, the cause of death was pneumonia. His grave is located in Guildford, in Ascension Cemetery.
Charles Lutwidge (Lutwidge) Dodgson, a wonderful English children's writer, an excellent mathematician, logician, a brilliant photographer and an inexhaustible inventor. Born on January 27, 1832 in Dairsbury near Warrington, Cheshire, in the family of a priest. In the Dodgson family, men were, as a rule, either army officers or clergymen (one of his great-grandfathers, Charles, rose to the rank of bishop, his grandfather, again Charles, was an army captain, and his eldest son, also Charles, was the father of the writer ). Charles Lutwidge was the third child and eldest son in a family of four boys and seven girls.
Young Dodgson was educated until the age of twelve by his father, a brilliant mathematician who was destined for a remarkable academic career, but chose to become a rural pastor. Charles’s “reading lists,” compiled together with his father, have survived, telling us about the boy’s solid intellect. After the family moved in 1843 to the village of Croft-on-Tees, in the north of Yorkshire, the boy was assigned to Richmond Grammar School. From childhood, he entertained his family with magic tricks, puppet shows, and poems he wrote for homemade home newspapers (“Useful and Edifying Poetry,” 1845). A year and a half later, Charles entered Rugby School, where he studied for four years (from 1846 to 1850), showing outstanding abilities in mathematics and theology.
In May 1850, Charles Dodgson was enrolled at Christ Church College, Oxford University, and moved to Oxford in January of the following year. However, in Oxford, after only two days, he receives unfavorable news from home - his mother is dying of inflammation of the brain (possibly meningitis or a stroke).
Charles studied well. Having won the competition for a Boulter scholarship in 1851 and received first-class honors in mathematics and second-class honors in classical languages and ancient literatures in 1852, the young man was admitted to scientific work and also received the right to lecture in the Christian church, which he subsequently enjoyed for 26 years. In 1854 he graduated with a bachelor's degree from Oxford, where subsequently, after receiving his master's degree (1857), he worked, including the position of professor of mathematics (1855-1881).
Dr. Dodgson lived in a small house with turrets and was one of the landmarks of Oxford. His appearance and manner of speech were remarkable: slight asymmetry of the face, poor hearing (he was deaf in one ear), and a strong stutter. Charles delivered his lectures in a clipped, flat, lifeless tone. He avoided making acquaintances and spent hours wandering around the neighborhood. He had several favorite activities to which he devoted all his free time. Dodgson worked very hard - he got up at dawn and sat down at his desk. In order not to interrupt his work, he ate almost nothing during the day. A glass of sherry, a few cookies - and back to the desk.
Lewis Carroll Even at a young age, Dodgson drew a lot, tried his pen in poetry, wrote stories, sending his works to various magazines. Between 1854 and 1856 His works, mostly humorous and satirical, have appeared in national publications (Comic Times, The Train, Whitby Gazette and Oxford Critic). In 1856, a short romantic poem, “Solitude,” appeared in The Train under the pseudonym “Lewis Carroll.”
He invented his pseudonym in the following way: he “translated” the name Charles Lutwidge into Latin (it turned out Carolus Ludovicus), and then returned the “truly English” appearance to the Latin version. Carroll signed all his literary (“frivolous”) experiments with a pseudonym, and put his real name only in the titles of mathematical works (“Notes on plane algebraic geometry”, 1860, “Information from the theory of determinants”, 1866). Among a number of Dodgson's mathematical works, the work “Euclid and His Modern Rivals” (the last author's edition - 1879) stands out.
In 1861, Carroll took holy orders and became a deacon of the Church of England; This event, as well as the statute of Oxford Christ Church College, according to which professors had no right to marry, forced Carroll to abandon his vague matrimonial plans. At Oxford he met Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church College, and eventually became a friend of the Liddell family. It was easiest for him to find a common language with the dean’s daughters - Alice, Lorina and Edith; In general, Carroll got along with children much faster and easier than with adults - this was the case with the children of George MacDonald and the offspring of Alfred Tennyson.
Young Charles Dodgson was approximately six feet tall, slender and handsome, with curly brown hair and blue eyes, but it is believed that due to his stuttering, he had difficulty communicating with adults, but with children he relaxed, became free and fast in his speech.
It was the acquaintance and friendship with the Liddell sisters that led to the birth of the fairy tale “Alice in Wonderland” (1865), which instantly made Carroll famous. The first edition of Alice was illustrated by the artist John Tenniel, whose illustrations are considered classics today.
Lewis Carroll The incredible commercial success of the first Alice book changed Dodgson's life, as Lewis Carroll became quite famous all over the world, his mailbox was flooded with letters from admirers, and he began to earn very significant sums of money. However, Dodgson never abandoned his modest life and church positions.
In 1867, Charles left England for the first and last time and made a very unusual trip to Russia for those times. Visits Calais, Brussels, Potsdam, Danzig, Koenigsberg along the way, spends a month in Russia, returns to England via Vilna, Warsaw, Ems, Paris. In Russia, Dodgson visits St. Petersburg and its environs, Moscow, Sergiev Posad, and a fair in Nizhny Novgorod.
The first fairy tale was followed by a second book, “Alice Through the Looking Glass” (1871), the gloomy content of which was reflected in the death of Carroll’s father (1868) and the many years of depression that followed.
What is remarkable about Alice's adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which have become the most famous children's books? On the one hand, this is a fascinating story for children with descriptions of travel to fantasy worlds with whimsical heroes who have forever become idols of children - who doesn’t know the March Hare or the Red Queen, the Quasi Turtle or the Cheshire Cat, Humpty Dumpty? The combination of imagination and absurdity makes the author’s style inimitable, the author’s ingenious imagination and play on words brings us finds that play on common sayings and proverbs, surreal situations break the usual stereotypes. At the same time, famous physicists and mathematicians (including M. Gardner) were surprised to discover a lot of scientific paradoxes in children's books, and episodes of Alice's adventures were often discussed in scientific articles.
Five years later, The Hunting of the Snark (1876), a fantasy poem describing the adventures of a bizarre crew of variously misfit creatures and one beaver, was published and was Carroll's last widely known work. Interestingly, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti was convinced that the poem was written about him.
Carroll's interests are multifaceted. The end of the 70s and 1880s are characterized by the fact that Carroll publishes collections of riddles and games (“Doublets”, 1879; “Logic Game”, 1886; “Mathematical Curiosities”, 1888-1893), writes poetry (the collection “Poems? Meaning?”, 1883). Carroll went down in literary history as the writer of “nonsense,” including rhymes for children in which their name was “baked” and acrostics.
In addition to mathematics and literature, Carroll devoted a lot of time to photography. Although he was an amateur photographer, a number of his photographs were included, so to speak, in the annals of world photographic chronicles: these are photographs of Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, actress Ellen Terry and many others. Carroll was especially good at taking pictures of children. However, in the early 80s, he abandoned photography, declaring that he was “tired” of this hobby. Carroll is considered one of the most famous photographers of the second half of the 19th century.
Carroll continued to write - on December 12, 1889, the first part of the novel “Sylvie and Bruno” was published, and at the end of 1893 the second, but literary critics reacted lukewarmly to the work.
Lewis Carroll died in Guildford, Surry County, on January 14, 1898, at the home of his seven sisters, from pneumonia that broke out after influenza. He was less than sixty-six years old. In January 1898, most of Carroll's handwritten legacy was burned by his brothers Wilfred and Skeffington, who did not know what to do with the piles of papers that their “learned brother” left behind in the rooms at Christ Church College. In that fire, not only manuscripts disappeared, but also some of the negatives, drawings, manuscripts, pages of a multi-volume diary, bags of letters written to the strange Doctor Dodgson by friends, acquaintances, ordinary people, children. The turn came to the library of three thousand books (literally fantastic literature) - the books were sold at auction and distributed to private libraries, but the catalog of that library was preserved.
Carroll's Alice in Wonderland was included in the list of twelve "most English" objects and phenomena compiled by the UK Ministry of Culture, Sport and Media. Films and cartoons are made based on this cult work, games and musical performances are held. The book has been translated into dozens of languages (more than 130) and has had a great influence on many authors.
Lewis Carroll. Self-portrait
Biography
He also published many scientific works on mathematics under his own name. One of his hobbies was photography.
Friendship with girls
Lewis Carroll was a bachelor. In the past, it was believed that he was not friends with members of the opposite sex, making an exception for actress Ellen Terry.
Carroll's greatest joy came from his friendships with little girls. “I love children (not boys),” he once wrote.
...Girls (unlike boys) seemed amazingly beautiful to him without clothes. Sometimes he drew or photographed them naked - of course, with the permission of their mothers.
Carroll himself considered his friendships with girls completely innocent; there is no reason to doubt that this was the case. Moreover, in the numerous memories that his little girlfriends later left about him, there is not a hint of any violation of decency.
"Carroll's Myth"
The information, as well as the quotes posted below, are taken from the article by A. Borisenko and N. Demurova “Lewis Carroll: Myths and Metamorphoses,” which, in turn, is based on the works of Guy Lebeily and Caroline Leach ( Hugues Lebaily And Caroline Leach).
In recent decades, it turned out that most of his “little” girlfriends were over 14, many 16-18 years old and older. Carroll's girlfriends often underestimated their ages in their memoirs. For example, actress Isa Bowman writes in her memoirs
As a child, I often amused myself by drawing caricatures, and one day, when he was writing letters, I began to sketch him on the back of an envelope. Now I don’t remember what the drawing looked like - it was probably a nasty cartoon - but suddenly he turned around and saw what I was doing. He jumped up and blushed terribly, which scared me very much. Then he grabbed my unfortunate sketch and, tearing it to shreds, silently threw it into the fire. (...) I was then no more than ten or eleven years old, but even now this episode stands before my eyes, as if it all happened yesterday...
In reality, she was at least 13 years old.
Another “young girlfriend” of Carroll, Ruth Gamlen, in her memoirs, reports how in 1892, Carroll’s parents invited Carroll to dinner with Isa, who was visiting him at that time. There Isa is described as a "shy child of about twelve", in fact in 1892 she was 18 years old.
Carroll himself also called the word “child” not only little girls, but also women 20-30 years old. Thus, in 1894 he wrote:
One of the main joys of my - surprisingly happy - life stems from the affection of my little friends. Twenty or thirty years ago I would have said that ten was the ideal age; now the age of twenty to twenty-five seems preferable to me. Some of my dear girls are thirty or more: I think that an old man of sixty-two has a right to still consider them children.
Research has shown that more than half of the “girls” with whom he corresponded were over 14 years old; Of the 870 comments he made about acting, 720 were about adult actors and only 150 about children.
In Victorian England at the end of the 19th century, girls under 14 were considered asexual. Carroll's friendship with them was, from the point of view of the morality of that time, a completely innocent quirk. On the other hand, being too close to a young woman (especially in private) was strictly condemned. This could have caused Carroll to declare his acquaintances the women and girls “little girls”, and to underestimate their age.
Bibliography
- “Useful and edifying poetry” ()
- "Algebraic analysis of the Fifth Book of Euclid" ()
- "Information from the theory of determinants" (
