You could have safely bet that at some point in this series of blogs I was always going to visit a certain trinity of British university dons who have done more for the literary fantasy genre worldwide than, well, any other trinity of university dons. Huge. Immense. The Ronaldo, Messi and Mbappé of children’s fantasy literature – I am talking of course about Lewis Carroll, C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien. If your bet had been an accumulator you would be quids in, too, because I shall certainly be visiting C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien at some point in the future, but for today let’s look at the grandaddy, that long-time maths professor at Christ Church Oxford, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson AKA Lewis Carroll (1832-1898).
Lewis Carroll, what an interesting character! First and foremost, he was a mathematician and long-time university scholar, specialising in geometry, algebra and logic; under his real name, he published eleven books on maths-related subjects. He was also an avid puzzler and is credited with the invention of the “word ladder” – you know it, that puzzle that involves changing one word into another, one letter at a time. He loved word play, amply displayed in his nonsense poems Jabberwocky (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876).
However, it is of course Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (commonly Alice in Wonderland) for which Lewis Carroll will be forever remembered. As we all know, it details the story of a girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole (and boy, don’t we hear that phrase a lot these days: “going down a rabbit hole”?) into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures. Carroll first outlined his story whilst out on rowing trips on the Thames near Oxford which he often undertook with members of the Liddell family (Henry Liddell being the Dean at Christ Church).
When he told the story to Henry’s daughter Alice Liddell, she begged him to write it down, which he duly did and then passed the manuscript to another friend and mentor, the novelist George MacDonald. The enthusiasm of the MacDonald children for the story encouraged Carroll to seek publication, and so he approached Macmillan Publishers, who loved it. After the possible alternative titles were rejected – Alice Among the Fairies and Alice’s Golden Hour – the work was finally published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 (followed up of course by Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There in 1871). The rest, as they say, is history.
The artist John Tenniel provided a brilliant set of wood-engraved illustrations for the book, of which we can see a gallery of some of the universally familiar characters here:
