SOURCE: An introduction to Prisoners of Hope: An Exposition of Dante's Purgatorio, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906, pp. xvii-xxvii.

In the following essay, Carroll explains why Dante's markedly atypical conception of Purgatory, including locating it on a mountain instead of underground, was essential to the symbolism used in the Purgatorio.

Protestant readers, unable to accept a threefold division of the world to come, may be excused if they approach the Purgatorio with the feeling that its chief ethical interest and value must be confined to members of Dante's own Church. Fortunately it is not necessary for our present purpose to entangle ourselves in the polemics of the subject, for the simple reason that Dante assures us that the whole poem has a meaning for this world as well as for the next. In his Epistle to Can Grande he writes: ‘The subject, then, of the whole work, taken according...