Lewis Carroll - SpeedyLook encyclopedia

Youth

The destiny gives birth to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in 1832, of a Pasteur father, within a family of eleven children of which two only married. All were like him left-handed and, like him, bégayaient. Safe from a presbytery isolated like a strong castle, these anomalies, shared by a welded community, made it possible Charles to develop a personality of endowed child, out of the standards, in a protective cocoon.

The Psychanalyste American John Skinner estimates that the Gaucherie is at the origin of this Obsession of the inversion which constitutes one of the dominant topics of Lewis Carroll. In On other side of the mirror , time as well as space is reversed. One writes with back, one suffers initially, one is wounded then. In this odd world, it is necessary to move away from the goal to reach it.

Charles Dodgson, in his ripe age, was to often take pleasure to mystify his corresponding young people by beginning his letters with the signature and by finishing them by the beginning.

As for the stammering, it would be perhaps at the origin of famous “the portemanteau words” with double significance. Haste to be expressed, combined with its speech impediment, would have led the child to melt two words in only one involuntarily.

Very flivoreux

“made waves the borogoves,

verchons Them fourgus bourniflaient. ”

On other side of the mirror , Bredoulocheux , poem, translation of Henri Parisot.

The explanation is provided by it by Humpty-Dumpty in On the other side of the mirror : “It is like a bag, see you well: there are three significances contained in only one word… Flivoreux, that means at the same time frivolous and unhappy… The verchon is a kind of green pig; but with regard to fourgus, I do not have an absolute certainty. I believe that it is a digest of the three participles: misled, mislaid, lost. ”

The shock will be all the more strong when this young personality faces normality - other children - at the school of Richmond then to the public school of Rugby in 1845. It will have of it a dreadful memory because of the brimades that a timidity or an incommunicability born of its anomalies attracted to him.

Family reviews

Taking into account the time and medium, his/her parents were irreproachable. A father full with dignity, altruist, perfect with regard to his wife and of her children. A nice, good, unimportant mother whose soft voice never pronounced a word higher than the other.

Those which he liked and a whole social system that he had been malséant to dispute drew up against any attempt to rebel. It will thus adopt the behavior, the faith, the ideas morals, the prejudices of his father and until the taste of this one for mathematics.

By compensation, a reinforcement of its personality will result in an increased expression of its gifts, by literary creation. During his holidays, the young Charles Dodgson will have fun to publish local reviews.

Of course, they handwritten and were reserved to the hosts of the presbytery of Croft-one-Tees, in the Yorkshire, the residence which will shelter the family during twenty-five years. Their lives were short: the Review of the presbytery , the Comet , the Rosebud , the Star , Will-o'-the-wisp , the Umbrella of the presbytery and Muddle . the Umbrella of the presbytery , re-examined appeared about 1849, was illustrated drawings pointing out those of Edward Lear which the Book off nonsense enjoyed then a very great vogue. Edward Lear put at it in scene singular creatures which could suggest in Charles Dodgson the idea of Snark, creature carrollienne almost invisible and dreaded.

These youthful literary attempts reveal the virtuosity of Charles to handle the words and the events and its very original provision for the Nonsense. It will even make build a puppet theater by the carpenter of the village and will write parts to animate it: Tragedy of the king John , Guided It di Bragia , 1849-1850.

The professor

“A character guindé, always vêtu of a black frock coat hardly open on a false collar of ecclesiastic, walking a face with the fine features and the accents melancholic persons. Its courses, that it output mechanically, caused especially the trouble”.

Such is the memory that, about 1930, former students of the course of mathematics professed by the reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson preserved.

When in 1855 the former student of Christ Church College of Oxford becomes teaching there, Charles Dodgson is brutally projected in the world of the adults. More nobody with whom to play or dream, more nobody with whom to communicate.

Badly at ease among the adults, it spawning time little with his/her colleagues. Without friends, maintaining only the relations, this single person saunters, solitary, by the streets. Distant with respect to its young male pupils who do not interest it, it remains to him of other exit to only escape in the magic garden from the nonsense, to cross the mirror.

It is at that time that is born truly Lewis Carroll. Safe from the frock coat of the reverend Dodgson, the enchanter will make appear poems and articles in magazines.

The photographer

In 1856, he collaborates in particular with the magazine The Train whose writer, Edmund Yates, will choose among four pseudonyms suggested by Charles Dodgson that of Lewis Carroll .

This same year, crossed by the presentiment of what will be later the spectacle Cinématographique, he writes in his newspaper: “I think that it would be an good idea to make paint on the plates of a Magic lantern characters of a play which one could read aloud: a species of puppet show”.

It will buy its first Camera in London on March 18th, 1856. A few days later, it goes in the garden of the Liddell senior to Christ Church College to photograph the cathedral. It finds there the three Liddell young girls whose Alice, her future inspirer, and take them for model.

Quickly, he excels in the art of the Photographie and becomes a famous photographer. Its favorite subject will remain the little girls but it also photographs knowledge: painters, writers, scientists as well as landscapes, statues and even of the skeletons, by anatomical curiosity.

This passion will last until 1880 and will give rise to some three thousand stereotypes of which a thousand survived time and voluntary destruction.

Little girls

His/her colleagues and fellow-citizens would have been well confused to discover what the wall cupboards of its library dissimulated.

“Ah, these wall cupboards! That treasures they contained, for the delight of the children! Mechanical bears, dancing headstocks, of the toys whose mechanical bat of its invention and plays of any nature emerged from there without end, with profusion! ”

Memories of a ex-small girl, Ethel Arnold.

The same man who published erudite mathematical works and inflicted tedious courses like the rain, never travelled without a stock of plays which it unpacked in the compartment of the train to make knowledge with small partners of meeting. He never went to the beach without safety pin whom he distributed to the unknown little girls who hesitated to splash in water and to waste their dress.

These toys, plays and other attentions were intended to tie friendships maintained then by a poetic but insistent correspondence. Friendships of which the goal was to obtain the benevolence of the parents and the authorization of a walk without hood. Purely platonic friendships or loves!

He invented plays, charades, told long stories or took along his boyfriends to the theater to London to distract them. The crowning of their relation was the photographic sitting, which was not free from sensual connotation when the small sizes are undressed behind a fragile folding screen to put on dresses of princesses: sublimated characters fixed by his objective before the awkward age does not return them to him indifferent or that suitabilities do not move away them from him.

Apart from perspicacious Mrs Liddell, the mother of Alice and one of her sisters, neither colleagues, nor knowledge considered suspect the mania of Charles Dodgson to attend little girls exclusively. At most one found ridiculous this interest for the children. What would one think today of such a behavior, pure but ambiguous?

Another ignored aspect of its strange personality: each night, it benefitted from insomnia to dialog with its corresponding privileged but especially with its Diary. Its reading reveals the boiling of its imagination which it calmed by lucky finds: arithmetic inventions, charades, enigmas, acrostics, plays and strange projects. A plan of table to avoid the scuffle of the guests, a method to shave without soap, a rule to find the day of the week of any day of the month, the project of improvement of a vélocimane…

Conservative by his daily behavior and his policy option, his creations and his aspect handyman of genius reveal an astonishing practical and modernistic spirit.

The writer

Adventures of Alice to the countries of the wonders

The time of the masterpiece, it was “in the middle of a summer all out of gold”, the day of July 4th, 1862. The place, a boat on the river, Isis, in which was liked. The presence of a colleague, Duckworth, having disarmed the vigilance of Mrs Liddell, it entrusted to them Alice and her two sisters, Lorina and Edith.

Alice, then ten years old, was single and very platonic love of Charles Dodgson. He courted it by means of riddles or of made up beautiful stories to his use.

The history which he told over his shoulder with Alice, sitting behind him in the boat, was impromptu with brilliance while handling the oar. When liked asked him to write for it its history, it achieves its masterpiece: an illustrated manuscript of the “Adventures of Alice under ground”, preciously penmanship and. It will offer it to its inspirer, Alice Liddell, on November 26th, 1864.

Charles Dodgson will write a second version, the Adventures of Alice to the country of the wonders , intended for a publication in bookstore. He will go to London in January 1864 to convince John Tenniel to create the illustrations of Alice. Their collaboration will not be without tears: no detail will escape meticulous criticism from Charles Dodgson. It will dedicate the first specimens for friends in July 1865. Success will be immediate.

In Christmas 1888, it will begin a third version Alice told with the small children . The first specimens will be distributed at the end of 1889.

While writing Alice, Lewis Carroll placed himself under the sign of fairyhood but it preserves only appearance of it. Not fairies but characters of the marvellous universe: king, queen, dwarf, witch, messenger, gifted animals of a behavior and a human language. To a pleiad of strange characters the parts of a set of failures are added, charts to be played alive. Wink with its readers, of the charming characters borrowed from the nursery rhymes of its childhood: Humpty-Dumpty, the Tweedledum twins and Tweedledee.

If Lewis Carroll falls under a tradition, it is to fold it with its inspiration: verbal plays, songs, riddles mark out the account. In many connections its work is surprisingly daring. The characters do not seem to accept the metamorphoses answering a healthy logic - as that of pumpkin becoming fits with body - and seek on the contrary to escape from it. The parody is one of the keys which opens to the reader the universe of Alice.

The characters make to some extent the opposite of what one awaits from them. It is the inversion, one second key of the country of the wonders. The third key is the Nonsense , a kind that Lewis Carroll handles in a brilliant way. The nonsense pretends to let hope for with the reader a logical explanation treacherously then horn its practices of thought.

“I give him one of them: they gave me two of them,

You, you gave us three of them or more;

But however returned to them, with them,

Although one could not dispute the equity of the division.”

Alice with the country of the wonders , deposition of white rabbit to the lawsuit of the knave of hearts.

Alice is overhanging in the country of the wonders as Charles Dodgson was it in reality. She makes very with wrong way or hitch of what is suitable on a social plan. She is always too large or too small and is aware of her maladjustment. The white queen straightforwardly shows it to live with back and advises to him to learn how to accept the impossible one. But contrary to Charles Dodgson who underwent reality, Alice dares to rebel against that of the anormality. She is bold and serene, the idealized projection of her author.

On the other side of the mirror and what Alice found there

The subject is provided by the adventures of a little girl who succeeded in crossing a mirror. This mysterious object that is the mirror was always related to the magic and plays a rather worrying part in the tales. It is the image of a perfect accuracy to appear the line of demarcation between the worlds outside and interior.

Just like Alice with the country of the wonders , On other side of the mirror is if not a pure account of dream, at least a fantastic history of which the atmosphere is intensely oneiric. Others before him had confused in their works the imaginary one and reality, but Lewis Carroll has the merit to have created an original mixture of onirism and logic.

“It opened the way with a literary Genre absolutely new, in which the psychological facts are treated like objective facts… The non-existent one, the animals which speak, the human beings in impossible situations, all is regarded as admitted and the Rêve is not disturbed”, not said Florence Becker Lennon.

The volume published in 1871 met to him also an immense success. The compliments had been enough to turn a less solid head. However, Lewis Carroll wrote with a correspondent: “I never read anything on myself, nor on my books”.

It would be perhaps excessive of speaking about influence between Lewis Carroll and the representatives about such or such contemporary literary movement. But it is not impossible that Alfred Jarry thought of Humpty-Dumpty when it imagined his Ubu . Constantly employed at poetic ends, the pun can have also played a central role in the development of the work of Raymond Roussel.

The invention carrollienne of the “portemanteau words” was used with excess by James Joyce in Ulysses or Finnegan' S Wake . This last somewhat complicated the play by borrowing its terms from various languages.

The nonsense will have also been one within the large competences of poetry Dadaïste and Surréaliste. Admirable the Big game of Benjamin Péret, a wonder of the poetic absurdity, is one of the masterpieces of the time of surrealism.

Hunting for Snark

In 1876 Hunting appears in Snark which is one of the best successes in worms of Lewis Carroll and one of its capital works. The readers wanted to see there an allegory, some of popularity and others of happiness, but it always supported not to have wanted to give no particular direction to it: “As for the significance of Snark, I am afraid well to have wanted to say only ineptitudes! he with an American friend wrote. However, you see, the words do not mean only what we have the intention to express when we employ them… Thus, any satisfactory significance that one can find in my book, I accept it with joy as being the significance of this one. The best than one gave me is due to a lady… who affirms than the poem is an allegory representing the research of happiness. I think that is due admirably to many regards - in particular concerning the bathing huts: when people are tired of the life and can find happiness neither in the cities nor in the books, then they are ruent towards the beaches, in order to see what the bathing huts will be able to do for them”.

Lewis Carroll stated to have composed Hunting for Snark while starting with the last one towards which came to him to mind at the time of a walk and while going up towards the beginning of the poem which constituted item by item during the two following years.

A topic which strikes, it is that of the lapse of memory, the loss of the name and the identity. The character of the baker forgot on the forty-two strike trunks, marked with his name, which he also forgot. When it starts to tell its sad history, the impatience of the captain, who fears a too long confidence, encourages it to jump forty years. These figures evoke the age of Charles Dodgson at this period!

In spite of the breath of imagination désopilante which traverses it from one end to another, Hunting for Snark is not a merry poem. The search which he reports, in the final analysis, turns badly. The destruction of the baker, at the moment of his meeting with terrible Boojum, invisible to the other characters, leaves an impression of faintness. Bringing the poem closer to the first comedies of Charlie Chaplin, one sees there “a tragedy of frustration and failure. ”

There is incontestably a share of social satire in the absurdity lawsuit of the Rêve of the lawyer who resembles much a parody of real lawsuit.

During a discussion, Charles Dodgson declared nevertheless that he was “initially an English and then a preserving ”. He does not seem to be shocked by the shameless exploitation of the workers of his time. Its exquisite sensitivity functioned only inside the narrow limits of the social class to which it belonged: the middle-class right-thinking person.

The year when Alice appeared, the English Parliament named a commission to inquire into the employment of the children. It noted that of any young children worked of the paddle up to one hour late for tisseries, workshops of pottery in parts without air, frozen the winter, choking the summer. Perhaps of were such things too horrible to consider for Charles Dodgson?

Sylvie and Bruno

In the foreword of Sylvie and Bruno , published 1889, chief of work which testifies to a technique entirely renewed compared to Alice, Lewis Carroll proclaims her desire to open a new literary way.

The audacity is large for the time of the construction of two intrigues, the dream constantly coupled with reality. The key objective of the narrator is to cross the wall of reality to reach the kingdom of the dream: he sees one of the characters of his dream penetrating in the real life. Lewis Carroll creates the effect of duplication of her characters.

The interest also lies in the juxtaposition of the two intrigues. The originality of Lewis Carroll does not consist in unifying dream and reality but reconstituting a unit starting from the initial multiplicity.

In its foreword, which he says to us of the construction of his book: a core which grows bigger little by little, an enormous mass of “litiérature” ( litter , refuse) very little handy, an aggregate of fragmentary writings of which nothing says that they will never form a whole. The novel is not any more this harmonious totality where the breath of the inspiration is expressed. The finished romantic one is demystified in an ironic way and for all to say sacrilege for the time victorienne.

This text will be its last creation.

Life in Oxford

The reader of Alice is unaware of almost all the behavior of Charles Dodgson in his daily life of citizen of Oxford. He devoted, between 1865 and 1896, a dozen writings touching with problems having agitated the local life. They bring tasty information on the thought of Charles Dodgson.

The New Method off Evaluation Applied to pi (1865). A sarcastic criticism of the pay rise granted to a professor of Greek, culprit to the eyes of the Dodgson conservative, to politicize his courses in a liberal direction.

Its conformism is expressed through its savage reserve with the reform project making it possible to deliver university degrees with the women without coming to reside at the university… what upset its practices… Of the coeds resident (1896).

From a feather soaked in a wild humor, it will ridicule by the absurdity of the projects of architectural transformations in progress with Christ Church College. He will address to the Liddell senior, to father of Alice, an anonymous lampoon the Belfry of Christ Church (1872), a meticulous demolition, on paper, of the monument.

The Irony, the Sarcastic remark, the Paradoxe break out in seven anonymous writings. The author devotes to it to true a bizuthage Establishment oxfordien being caught some with his modernism and his tagging along of the ideas to the mode.

Nothing let guess Lewis Carroll, the enchanter. Itself was revealed, never not referring to its work as a public. He finishes, in his last years, by returning with the mention “unknown” the letters that one addressed to him in the name of Lewis Carroll.

The successes gained with - outside of Oxford were not likely any to improve the thin regard granted to the mathematician. The Littérature for children, from which Alice could not escape, was a minor kind, vaguely frivolous. To illustrate itself in this kind amounted for Charles Dodgson marking a little more its marginality. The glance of a company victorienne imposed the unvoiced comment on the Dodgson-Carroll duality.

This country of the wonders on which it reigned as a Master in his dreamed life, all would prohibit the threshold in its lived life of it to him. Perhaps he repeated the words of hope exchanged by Alice and the cat of Cheshire:

“- I do not worry too much about the place… provided that I arrive some share.

- You can be certain to arrive there provided only that you walk

long enough. ”

French editions

Lewis Carroll, Works , Editions Robert Laffont, Collection Books, 1989.

Vol. 1: the Adventures of Alice under ground, the Adventures of Alice to the country of the wonders, On the other side of the mirror and what Alice found there, newspapers, … Vol. 2: Hunting for Snark, Sylvie and Bruno, …

Lewis Carroll, the Adventures of Alice to the countries of the wonders, On the other side of the mirror and what Alice found there , Editions Diane de Selliers, illustrations Pat Andrea, translation Henri Parisot, 2 vol. and 1 fasc., 2006.

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