Biography Essay

Lewis Carroll (the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a Victorian nonsense writer for children whose works hold enduring fascination for adults as well. His Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872) are classics of the English language, vying with the Bible and William Shakespeare as sources of quotation, and they have been translated into virtually every other language, including Pitjantjatjara, a dialect of Aborigine. Alice's story began as a piece of extempore whimsy spun out to entertain three little girls on a boating trip on the river Isis in 1862, and it continues to delight children and to excite the responses of psychoanalysts, philosophers, mathematicians, linguists, semioticians, and Victorianists; historians of children's literature and of childhood; those studying the sources of the parodies, the genre of nonsense, and the development of Victorian humor; along with biographers and literary critics of eclectic interests. Next to the Alice...