Lewis Carroll is the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. The eldest son of a large clerical family, he was born at Daresbury, Cheshire, was educated at Rugby School, and entered Christ Church, Oxford, in 1850. On obtaining first-class honors in mathematics in 1854, he was appointed student and mathematical lecturer of the college, and remained on its foundation until his death. In many ways an archetype of the pernickety bachelor don, Dodgson had a wholly uneventful academic career. Hampered by a stammer, he shone neither as lecturer nor as preacher (he took deacon's orders in 1861). He embroiled himself—often amusingly, although usually without effect—in academic politics, was for a time curator of the college common room, and visited Russia in 1867. His leisure was spent in gallery-going and theatergoing; in photography, at which he was an expert; in the writing of light verse; and in the patronage of an interminable succession of small girls. The last peculiarity has endeared him to psychoanalytical biographers, who would seem, however, to have enriched the literature of nonsense on the subject more often than they have been able to explain it.
Dodgson the mathematician published a number of books and pamphlets, none of any lasting importance. The best known is Euclid and His Modern Rivals (London, 1879); the most useful, probably his edition of Euclid I & II (London, 1882); and the most original, his contributions to the mathematical theory of voting, to which attention was drawn by D. Black in his Theory of Committees (Cambridge, U.K., 1958). Dodgson's mathematical outlook was, in general, conservative and provincial, aiming no higher than the improvement of elementary teaching or routine calculation. His talent found greater scope in the construction of puzzles contained in A Tangled Tale (London, 1885) and Pillow Problems (London, 1893), which at times show depth as well as ingenuity. The same can be said of his dabblings in symbolic logic, which otherwise make little advance on the work of Augustus De Morgan and John Venn. His Game of Logic (London, 1887) and Symbolic Logic, Part I (London, 1893) present logic merely as a mental recreation devoted to the solution of syllogistic problems by means of a square diagram and colored counters. His logical output was completed by nine papers on elementary logic and by two short pieces in Mind (n.s., 3, 1894 and n.s., 4, 1895). His influence is to be seen mainly in the attempts of later logicians to imitate the elegant absurdity of his examples. Their failure merely emphasizes the rarity of his own peculiar gift.
Needless to say, that gift finds its happiest exercise in his writings for children. Alice in Wonderland (London, 1865), Through the Looking-Glass (London, 1871), and The Hunting of the Snark (London, 1876) and, to a lesser extent, the two parts of Sylvie and Bruno (London, 1889 and 1893), are the only works that keep his name alive—or deserve to do so. Apart from Pickwick, and perhaps Waverley, they seem also to be the only works of fiction generally known to philosophers, and have been constantly pillaged for quotations. All five are dream narratives or have episodes depicting dreams, whose aberrant logic is responsible for much of their philosophic interest and fun. Alice in Wonderland exploits the idea of sudden variations in the size of the heroine; its sequel, the conception of a world in which time, space, and causality are liable to operate in reverse. The characters—a bizarre medley of nursery and proverbial figures, animals (fabulous or otherwise), plants, playing cards, and chessmen—are all much addicted to argument; and their humor, where it does not rely upon puns, is largely a matter of pursuing logical principles to the point of sophistry or absurdity. The frog, who supposes that an unanswered door must have been asking something, is a simple case in point. The King of Hearts and the White King, who both take "nobody" for a person, are victims of the same error and have often been cited as a warning to less venial, because less nonexistent, hypostatizers of the null class.
These books are further remarkable for their echoes—and pre-echoes—of philosophic controversy. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are Berkeleian metaphysicians, and the latter has notions of logic that bespeak the influence of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Alice herself, on the road to their house, is a step ahead of Gottlob Frege in discovering the difference between Sinn and Bedeutung. Humpty Dumpty has been taken, on anatomical grounds, for a Hegelian; but his ascription of fixed meaning to proper names and denial of it to general terms, plus his confident philology and shaky mathematics, proclaim him beyond doubt an early, if eccentric, linguistic analyst. The White Knight's reactionary views on the mind-body question give no hint of the metalinguistic virtuosity he later displays in the announcement of his song. The distinctions there enunciated have been formalized by Ernest Nagel in "Haddocks' Eyes" (in J. R. Newman, The World of Mathematics, New York, 1956, Vol. III, pp. 1886–1890). They would not have troubled the Duchess, another adroit logician, although her primary interest is in morals. Her cat, on the other hand, although adept enough at defying the principle that an attribute must inhere in a substance, offers a regrettably invalid proof of its own madness, as does the pigeon of Alice's serpentinity. The Hatter, March Hare, and Dormouse are sounder reasoners; whatever their troubles with time, they know a fallacy of conversion when they see one, and it is no great wonder that Messrs. Bertrand Russell, George Edward Moore, and John McTaggart, who were supposed to resemble them, should have been known at one time as the "Mad Tea Party of Trinity."
Not even Nobody, in his senses, would venture to identify that other and more formidable trio, the Queen of Hearts and her chessboard cousins. The former's principle of government by decapitation scarcely ranks as a political theory; but the White Queen is respected by philosophers both for her abilities in believing the impossible and for her success in proving, for the special case of jam at least, that the future will resemble the past, if not the present. The Red Queen is no less celebrated, among physicists, for her anticipations of the theory of relativity. In this, however, she meets competition from the Bellman in the Snark, who has been acclaimed, on the strength of his map, as the first general relativist and is, in any case, the undisputed inventor of an interesting three-ply version of the semantic theory of truth (⊦p. ⊦p. ⊦p ≡ "p" is true). Of his crew members, the Baker, with his lost identity and Heideggerian premonitions of impending Vernichtung, has been plausibly represented as a protoexistentialist; but the other protagonists still abide the conjecture of commentators, as do the quest and the quarry itself. The Snark has been taken for everything from the Tichborne inheritance to the North Pole, and from a business depression to the atom bomb. F. C. S. Schiller's interpretation of it in Mind! (1901, pp. 87–101) as the Absolute is elaborately argued, and doubtless finds an echo in the Oxford Dictionary's definition of the creature as a "chimerical animal of ill-defined characteristics and potentialities"; but its fondness for bathing machines is not really explained thereby, and the theory founders completely on the Bellman's explicit assertion, confirmed by the Baker's uncle, that Snarks are Many and not One. Nobody, it is true, has been more successful than Schiller on this point, and his views have been generally accepted; but the opinions of nonentities have no place in a grave work of learning such as the present, so neither use nor mention of them is appropriate here.
Apart from the standard Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll by his nephew, S. D. Collingwood (London: T.F. Unwin, 1899), the soberest accounts of Carroll's life are Derek Hudson, Lewis Carroll (London: Constable, 1954), and Roger Lancelyn Green, Story of Lewis Carroll (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950) and Lewis Carroll (London: Bodley Head, 1960).
The least incomplete version of Lewis Carroll's works is The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (London and New York, 1939). The most philosophical editions are The Annotated Alice (New York: C.N. Potter, 1960) and The Annotated Snark (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), edited by Martin Gardner.
The pioneer work of logical investigation in this field is P. E. B. Jourdain, The Philosophy of Mr B*rtr*nd R*ss*ll (Chicago: Open Court, 1918). Further light on the subject may be obtained, inter alia, from R. B. Braithwaite, "Lewis Carroll as Logician," in Mathematical Gazette 16 (1932): 174–178; P. Alexander, "Logic and the Humour of Lewis Carroll," in Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 6, Part 8 (1951): 551–566; and, despite some inaccuracies, from W. Weaver, "Lewis Carroll, Mathematician," in Scientific American 194 (4) (1956): 116–128; and R. W. Holmes, "The Philosopher's Alice in Wonderland," in Antioch Review 19 (2) (1959): 133–149.
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