Imagine it’s January 27.
And you’re strolling down the riverside, happy and peaceful as can be. Let me give you a small tip. If you happen to see a young man on a boat, telling stories to three little girls, please remember to wish him a happy birthday. For, though he looks young, he would have turned 182 years on that day.
His name is Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. But the world knows him as Lewis Carroll. Carroll, the magic storyteller, who gave us Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland . This, as you know of course, is the fantasy story of a little girl, who falls into a rabbit hole and ends up in a strange, upside-down world that’s neither here nor there.
In 2015, we celebrate the 150th year of that story.
Lewis was born in the little village of Daresbury in Cheshire, England, in 1832. Coming from a line of armymen and churchmen, he was the third child of his parents. What was he? Well, it’s difficult to pin him down. He was a mathematician, a lecturer, a churchman, an artist, a photographer, and even an inventor! And, of course, the writer who gave us hours of fun and thought with his fantasies, poetry, weird characters and utter nonsense.
Sense and nonsense
His poems, Jabberwocky and The Hunting of The Snark , appear in Alice’s sequel, Through The Looking Glass . Try as we might, it would be very difficult to match nonsense for nonsense in his verse.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
That’s how Jabberwocky begins. And if you see where that’s going, then you know more than me! No wonder poor Alice cried: “It seems very pretty, but it’s rather hard to understand! Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don’t exactly know what they are!”
In 1856, the same year that Charles Dodgson got his pseudonym “Lewis Carroll”, a new Dean came to Christ Church College, where he was teaching. Soon, Carroll was taking three of the Dean’s daughters, Lorina, Edith and Alice Liddell, to the river on rowing expeditions.
On one such trip, on July 4, 1862 to be exact, Carroll sat in the boat and made up a story for the girls. Alice begged him to write it down for her. And this would become one of the greatest fantasy tales, enjoyed by children and adults, the saga of Alice and her adventures. Alice Liddell was probably the seed from which this story grew, but Carroll always said that his little heroine Alice was imaginary, and not based on any real girl.
Imagination is something we all have, but such a wild journey into the land of fantasy! You’d have to be Carroll for that!
A bit of fantasy…
What do you do when your world is rather grey, and you’re not too confident of yourself, and you think other people have a rather poor idea of you? What do you do when the only gift you have is the gift of the gab and a ticket to wonderland?
Carroll was six feet tall, had brown hair and walked rather awkwardly because of a knee problem. A childhood fever had left him deaf in one ear. Whooping cough in his teens gave him a permanent chest condition. On top of all that, he also had a stammer. And yet when he was recounting his stories, when he escaped into the land of fantasy taking his listeners with him, none of these disabilities mattered.
When his imagination took over, the world he created was so colourful, so strange and so new and mad, and so incredibly unbelievable, that everything ugly and sordid in the real world was eclipsed. And the magical became real.
Only the craziest moments from a jabberwocky world remained.
