Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) (1832 – 1898)
British author, mathematician, Anglican clergyman, logician, and amateur photographer, more famous under the pen name Lewis Carroll.
"That narrow window, I expect,
Serves but to let the dusk in - "
"But please," said I, "to recollect
'Twas fashioned by an architect
Who pinned his faith on Ruskin!"
'Tis a secret: none knows how it comes, how it goes:
But the name of the secret is Love!
Charles, trapped in the cave of his period, was the laughing philosopher who could show others the way out. He spoke the language and played the role of Ariel - the mantle of Prospero ill became him, though he fancied it.
His imaginatively posed photographs of children are a delight, and his hundreds of photographs of friends and celebrities provide us with much insight into the Victorian world around him.
Now that's a thing I WILL NOT STAND,
And so I tell you flat.
And how Lewis Carroll loved the country, the woods, and the hay, and wove into his magic stories the flowers and animals we saw there! Sitting with his back to a big tree-trunk, with one of us on his knee sometimes one on each knee he would tell us for hours, stories of the Pixies. And every time he came, he had fresh adventures to relate.
He is immensely fat, and so
Well suits the occupation:
In point of fact, if you must know,
We used to call him years ago,
THE MAYOR AND CORPORATION!
There was once a young man of Oporta,
Who daily got shorter and shorter,
The reason he said
Was the hod on his head
Which was filled with the heaviest mortar.
Rich deposits of perversity crop up in his humor - and his sudden attacks of virtue or sentimentality midway through his own or other persons' jests hint that his imp has suggested to him something particularly unfunny and unpardonable.
Mr. Dodgson had a mathematical, a logical and a philosophical mind; and when these qualities are united to a love of the grotesque, the resultant fancies are sure to have a quite peculiar charm, a charm so much the greater because its source is subtle and eludes all attempts to grasp it. Sometimes he seems to revel in ideas which are not merely illogical but anti-logical.
The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible.
In his estimation, logic was a most important study for everyone. No pains were spared to make it clear and interesting to those who would but consent to learn of him.
The West is the fitting tomb for all the sorrow and the sighing, all the errors and the follies of the Past: for all its withered Hopes and all its buried Loves! From the East comes new strength, new ambition, new Hope, new Life, new Love! Look Eastward! Aye, look Eastward!"
Dodgson was overcome by the beauty of Cologne Cathedral. I found him leaning against the rails of the Choir and sobbing like a child. When the verger came to show us over the chapels behind the Choir, he got out of the way, he said that he could not bear the harsh voice of the man in the presence of so much beauty.
Never was there a more delightful host for a "dinner-party," or one who took such pains for your entertainment, fresh and interesting to the last.
For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it.
I believe this thought, of the possibility of death if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.
But, once realise what the true object is in life that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds' but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
A change came o'er my Vision - it was night:
We clove a pathway through a frantic throng:
The steeds, wild-plunging, filled us with affright:
The chariots whirled along.
Lewis Carroll is somebody who wore different hats. He was a clergyman, a mathematician, a teacher. He wrote serious books, and amazing chidlren's books. He was a photographer. So like most people, he was many people in one skin. Creatively, he made a greater impact than almost any other Victorian, and yet we know next to nothing about him, we just fall back on the old clich้.
Oh, when I was a little Ghost,
A merry time had we!
Each seated on his favourite post,
We chumped and chawed the buttered toast
They gave us for our tea.