G- Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland (some v,some b), Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There (some v,some b), The Hunting of the Snark (some v,some b)
Not yet rated - Sylvie and Bruno
Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898) was an Oxford don whose life is as much of a study in contrasts as is his work. He was a competent instructor but suffered from shyness and a stutter. He was most comfortable around children, particularly young girls. His affection for children seems to have been intense but genuinely innocent. He put a great deal of effort into amusing these child-friends with stories, puzzles and games. Most of his best-loved works started as extemporaneous stories that these children requested he write down for them.
While he also wrote at length on mathematics and logic, Dodgson is best known for the highly imaginative works that he wrote under the pen name of Lewis Carroll. These nonsense works will amuse young children, but are complex enough, and full enough of clever ideas and allusions, that teens and adults can continue to appreciate them. Carroll's nonsense has its own perverse internal logic, which is perhaps why his stories are so enduring. His works are frequently quoted in fiction and film, and scientists have even borrowed his creations for analogies illustrating cosmology and particle theory.
The Lewis Carroll Society of North America maintains the Lewis Carroll Home Page, which contains biographies, online texts and other Carrolliana.
Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There (1871) are the two greatest works Lewis Carroll produced. These two books began as stories told to the young daughters of Dodgson's dean, one of which, Alice, was the most beloved of his child-friends. At the urgings of his friends (both child and adult), Carroll had the two books published, and corresponded at great length with John Tenniel, the artist chosen to illustrate the stories. (Many other artists have illustrated new editions of these books, but Tenniel remains inseparable from Alice. Read copies of these books with his illustrations if at all possible!)
In Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland, Alice sees a White Rabbit and follows it down the rabbit-hole. Thus begins a series of adventures involving talking animals, magical food, living playing cards and other oddities. The book contains numerous nonsense rhymes, most of which are parodies of popular tunes of the time. (Many of these are now remembered only through Carroll's parodies.)
Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There continues the misadventures of the curious and willful Alice. This time, she travels into a mirror-image world where most of the other characters are animated chess pieces. This book also includes Carroll's masterpiece of nonsense verse, "Jabberwocky."
Older readers who wish to understand the sources of Carroll's creations should find a copy of The Annotated Alice, which contains the full text of both books, plus the Tenniel illustrations and copious and cogent annotations by scholar Martin Gardner.
The suitability of these books for young children has been a source of great debate. I was given copies of them when I was age 5 and someday I intend to share them with my children at about the same age. (Gardner opines in The Annotated Alice that books such as Carroll's Alice and Baum's Oz series will amuse children without harming them, but that adults undergoing analysis should exercise caution with them.) ;-)
After the Alice books, Carroll's best-known work is The Hunting of the Snark (1876). This long poem tells the story of an unlikely group of hunters who seek a "Snark," a creature so fabulous that its exact nature is the source of much debate. (Some of the creatures from "Jabberwocky" also make brief appearances.) This poem is a more challenging read than the shorter verse in the Alice books, so requires a slightly higher reading level.
Rev. Dodgson was a devout and learned Anglican, and later felt the need to include some elevating moral in his stories for children. While Sylvie and Bruno (1889) contains some interesting new creations, on the whole the book is ponderous, over-sentimental and cloying. While I consider myself a fairly serious Carroll fan, this story was so disappointing that I have sworn not to read Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893).
Poems from the above works, as well as early verse, rhymed puzzles and other minor works, can be found in The Collected Verse of Lewis Carroll (Macmillan, 1933; reprinted as The Humorous Verse of Lewis Carroll, Dover, 1960).
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