Lewis Carrolls magic

By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Published: 3:36PM GMT 08 March 2010

The Mystery of Lewis Caroll by Jenny Woolf

There is a great story about Queen Victoria enjoying Alices Adventures in Wonderland so most that she asked for a initial book of the authors subsequent book. Two years after a beautifully wrapped package arrived, containing an stamped duplicate of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants: With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraical Geometry. Sadly, the story isnt loyal the bard of the Alice books captivated misconceptions the approach a cloak attracts moths but it fairly suggests the worry of reconciling his identical tiwn personalities.

To his adoring readers he was Lewis Carroll, the sweet-natured bard who wandered by hold up with a head full of stories. To his submissive colleagues in Oxford he was the Rev Charles Dodgson, the irritated mathematician who walked around with a poker-straight behind and a head full of algebra. The dual were identical to strangers who merely happened to live the same skin.

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Both sides of him would have appreciated Jenny Woolfs essential and inexhaustible new biography, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll. Dodgson competence ruefully have recognized the contradictions of a veteran hold up in that he inspected customary forms of loyalty in open whilst secretly ravenous books about ghosts and witchcraft. Carroll competence have been beholden for the investigator work concerned in going by his bank account, that shows that the figure post-Freudian readers have been speedy to see as pathetically seedy, if not actively predatory, essentially donated large sums to charities that upheld immature kids who had been intimately exploited. Both would have been grateful for Woolfs exclusion of prior biographers some-more pale hypotheses, from drug obsession to stories about Jack the Ripper, and both would have enjoyed Woolfs own delight at his written acrobatic exercises and philosophical contortions. They competence even have been fast reconciled prior to they resumed their unconstrained quarrel, identical to a real-life Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

One prime diversion was "Doublets", in that difference were converted in to each other, creation the passed live (DEAD, lead, lend, lent, lint, line, LIVE) or mice rats (MICE mite partner mats RATS). Woolf points out that people who met Carroll/Dodgson for the initial time were astounded at how fast he could switch from one celebrity to the other, thawing in the participation of immature kids or topping over if he sensed any spirit of incorrectness or ridicule. (He was generally supportive about his stammer.) Some beheld that, with his disproportionate eyes and unilateral shoulders, even his physique appeared to be uncertain either it was one thing or two, identical to Jekyll held in the routine of morphing in to Hyde.

As he grew older, these opposition selves seemed increasingly penetrating to surpass each other. The childrens crony easily filled his cupboards in Christ Church with sufficient toys and gadgets to batch a small toyshop. Meanwhile, the strict enclose was bustling angry about the distance of his hassock in church or how his cauliflower was cooked. Only frequency did they collaborate, but when they did the formula were wonderful.

Both Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass followed a identical pattern, in that Carrolls talented appetite was braced by Dodgsons judicious rigour, and Dodgsons display of knowledge was stooged by Carrolls humour. Indeed, one of the reasons immature kids suffer Wonderland and Looking-Glass World so most is that they are in no approach anarchic worlds in that anything goes. Like all games, they rely on rules, and at your convenience the unsteadiness threatens to brief out of control, Carroll is discerning to lift it behind in line, as when a gnat at Alices feet interrupts her musings in a voice that sounds "like a horse". "You competence have a fun on that," it suggests in little font, "something about equine and hoarse." It is identical to a extrinsic note that has someway drifted in to the main physique of the text.

Never again did Carroll attain in reconciling these identical tiwn drives, and when he attempted the pretence elsewhere, such as a short story in that someone excitedly sees a pointer promotion ROMANCEMENT and usually after realises that it essentially reads ROMAN CEMENT, the formula were strained. As an e.g. of illusions being exposed, and sorcery being since a picturesque twist, zero came close to the impulse in that Alice shakes the Red Queen in to the figure of a kitten. Worse still, what had been a startling settlement on the page progressively became a depressingly informed one off it. From his eremite doubts to his desertion of photography allegedly since the relatives of his immature models did not regularly see his hobby as innocently as he did all as well mostly grace collapsed in to disenchantment.

Nowhere was this settlement followed some-more predictably than in his friendships with children. "All children, solely one, grow up," wrote JM Barrie on the initial page of Peter Pan, but for Carroll the interest of photography seems to have been that it ensured his prime immature kids would never grow up. But of march it was usually in the darkroom or on the page that he could carry out the expansion of a "dream child" identical to Alice. Flesh-and-blood immature kids were far harder to pin down, and his love for them was by inlet short-lived, perpetually staid on the margin of nostalgia.

One competence consternation what he would have done of the new Tim Burton movie not usually for the perfect scale and noise, but also, some-more fundamentally, since it revolves around a grown-up Alice returning to a Wonderland where things have changed. For Carroll, the total point of Wonderland was that it could not change. Its relations were as unalterable as a set of equations. As for an adult entering Wonderland for Carroll, that would have been as inconceivable as Eve picking the close on the gates of Eden. Childhood was a bliss to that there could be no return.

The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Understanding the Author of Alice in Wonderland by Jenny Woolf is published by Haus at �18.99 T �16.99 (�1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515 or revisit Books

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