How little we really know of Lewis Carroll, pun-master, nonsense rhymer, genius, most recognized for his work as author of Alice In Wonderland. Born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born on the 27th of January, 1832 in Daresbury, in county Cheshire, England, Charleses', was an Anglican rector who frequently held services on barges for those who lived on the river that ran through Daresbury County in Englad. The Dodgson family was all Anglican, and High Church (in America, this would be High Episcopal so high that it borders on Catholicism.) The cloth, was in the family blood. Young Charles’s great grandfather had risen as far as Bishop of Elphin.
When the elder Dodgson was named Rector of Croft in 1843, Charles, age eleven and his family moved to the more spacious rectory at Croft-on-Tees in Yorkshire. The oldest son of eleven children, it was assumed that Charles would be ordained in the family tradition. From an early age, his parents tutored in religion, Latin, and mathematics. To this day, Dodgson's theorems are widely used in modern mathematics and texts and his work as a mathematician parallels his work as an author of children's books. This, by no means, was where Dodgson's influence ends: he also ranks as one of the top photographers of the Victorian Era, right alongside Julia Margeret Cameron and Oscar Gustav Rejlander.
The elder Dodgson, later Archdeacon of Ripon, was an active participant in the Oxford Movement, and was on friendly terms with Canon Pusey, “one of the most elaborate forms of a doomed species.” – who preached one of the main tracts of the Oxford Movement, entitled “National Apostasy” at St. Mary’s, Oxford, in 1833. Charles’s father was largely influential in the Movement and admired Newman and other Tractarians and was High Church tending toward Anglo-Catholicism. vIn February, 1852, he preached a sermon, published as “Ritual Worship,” that caused great uproar. It was clear from his sermon that he believed firmly in the principles of Apostolic Descent, baptism, absolution, and Holy Communion and the ‘real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.’
Despite the schism in the church between the liberals and the Tractarians, Oxford remained true to tradition and up until 1870, if one wanted to matriculate, it was necessary to be a member of the church and to swear to uphold the Thirty Nine Articles.
Guided by the influence of his family and Canon Pusey and Bishop Wilberforce’s, young Charles Dodgson was ( inevitably) ordained Deacon at Christ Church, Oxford on December 22, 1862. Canon Pusey once remarked, “I love my grief better than any hollow joy.” The mood at Oxford was palpable: “The undercurrent of guilt and sorrow that pulses through the lives of the best men is not sufficiently accounted for by their anachronistic education, or even by the great incubus of other worldly religion that hung over them; there was a real guilt and a real sorrow…even more poignantly – the crucifixion of their fellow man.”
Dodgson did not go on to become rector for myriad reasons. His love of the theater and attendance at plays and musicals was not considered conduct becoming of a minister, and he was not willing to give up either his photography or love of theatre. After petitioning the Dean and expressing his wish not to continue on to become a rector (in part, because of his stutter and later, seizures) Dodgson was allowed to remain a deacon and maintain his post as a Mathematics Don. Dodgson stayed at Christ - forty-seven years - until his unexpected death from pneumonia in 1898.
Article comments
1 - Lono
nice peace. I find Alice in Wonderland to be the greatest book ever, and I'll stake my literature degree on it! To me, the backstory of all of it makes it so much more interesting. People don't know it is a pen name, or that he was a mathmetician, or that he was a preacher, or that there really was an Alice (Alice Little). Also, not commonly known is that the entire second book of Alice is actually a chess game being played.
2 - Eric Olsen
another great one Sadi, I thought I knew a fair amount about CD, but I didn't understand the religious angle at all. Thanks!
3 - sadi
if you want, you can check out my other work re; lewis carroll/charges dodgson. some of it is posted here, and you can also check my other site at www.grandmal.blogspot.com, or get it from the home page of my site www.sottovocce.blogspot.com. I'm working on a biography of Carroll. Yes, about the young girl Alice; her last name is spelled Liddell and pronounced "little" as you wrote. She was also one of his models for his photography, along with his favorite Xie Kitchen, who i can show you pics of as well.
i'm very fortunate in that i have an ORIGINAL FIRST edition of Alices's Adventures Underground, all handwritten and drawn by Carroll and even signed to a young girl named Ada, who featured in his work as well. It's amazing to own something that he actually wrote in -- i'm always a bit in awe when i take it out of it's very protective wrapping. Let me know if you want to see more of my work on Carroll. You can also buy my book, Biography & Source Studies, volume 5, editor Fred Karl, that has a long piece on Carroll. But do check out the posts here on Blogcritics that i have written about Carroll. If you're interested in him, then i have a ton of information that you might find interesting. he is also ranked as one of many epileptic geniuses, alng side Alfred Noble, Pythagorus, Oppenheimer, Poe, Rimbaud, Socrates, Napoleon, Alexander the GReat etc etc. - there is a strong connection between temporal lobe epilepsy (the kind Carroll had) and genius - which is the topic of my NEXT book. I'll be posting bits of it here as it comes along.
Thaniks for reading and for your comments. If you want, you can get a mimeograph of the original edition thorugh Amazon by lookng up Alice's Adventures Underground, which is all in his handwriting and is a facsimile of hte original edition that i have.
let me know if you want more...
cheers, - sadi