SOURCE: "C. L. Dodgson: The Poet Logician," in The Shores of Light, Farrar, Straus and Young, Inc., 1952, pp. 540-50.

In the following excerpt, Wilson argues for a serious critical approach to Carroll's work.

… If Dodgson and his work were shown as an organic whole, his "nonsense" would not seem the anomaly which it is usually represented as being. It is true that on one of his sides he was a pompous and priggish don. He used to write letters to friends the next morning after he had been having dinner with them and beg them never again in his presence to speak so irreverently of Our Lord as they had the evening before, because it gave him infinite pain; and he wrote to the papers in a tone of indignation worthy of Mr. Podsnap protesting against the impiety of W. S. Gilbert in being whimsical about curates on...