ANCIENT& not so ancient WISDOM
offering a weekly positive perspective

August 12, 2004

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"   from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (Chapter 2 - "The Garden of Live Flowers")

- Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898)

Victorian writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27, 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, England. Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym invented by translating his first two names into the Latin "Carolus Lodovicus" and then anglicizing it into "Lewis Carroll."

Carroll was the eldest son and third child in a family of seven girls and four boys, all of whom stuttered.  His mother (Frances Jane Lutwidge) and father (Charles Dodgson) were first cousins and very religious.  Carroll's father was a distinguished scholar whose favorite study was mathematics. 

He took an early interest in mathematics.  When he was told that logarithms were too difficult for a child to understand, he said, "Yes, but please explain."  His father educated him until age 12. He then attended Mr. Tate's school at Richmond in Yorkshire where he excelled in his studies. He also earned the reputation of being "a boy who knew how to use his fists in a righteous cause."  One of Carroll’s childhood illnesses left him deaf in one ear.

In 1846, he entered Rugby School, and in 1854 he graduated from Christ Church College, Oxford. He was successful in mathematics and writing, and remained at the college after graduation to teach. Carroll was ordained as a deacon; however, he never took vows as a priest.

His interest in logic came purely from the playful nature of the principle. Carroll was an inventor of puzzles, games, ciphers, mnemonics for remembering names and dates, poetical acrostics, and a system for writing in the dark. He improved the game of backgammon and many of his philosophies were based on games.

He never wholly overcame his stutter, yet he did preach from time to time. Carroll was uncomfortable in the company of adults and is said to have spoken without stuttering only to children. Carroll's association with children grew naturally out of his position as an eldest son with eight younger brothers and sisters, so it is not surprising that he should begin to entertain the children of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church. One of the girls was named Alice.  

Properly chaperoned by their governess, Miss Prickett (the prototype of the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass), the three girls listened to his stories.  In 1862, Carroll and his friend Robinson Duckworth, fellow of Trinity, rowed Miss Prickett and the three children up the Thames from Oxford to Godstow, and picnicked on the bank, while Carroll told the girls the fairy-tale of Alice's Adventures Underground. At the end of the trip, inspired by the story, Alice started to cry, and asked Carroll to write out Alice's adventures for her, which he did. 

The novelist Henry Kingsley, while visiting the deanery, picked up the story from the drawing room table, and urged Carroll to publish it.  Carroll’s writing was original and inventive, and added words to the English language, such as chortle, a portmanteau word that combines "snort" and "chuckle."   He played games with idioms, using such expressions as "beating time" (to music) in a literal sense.  He reshaped animals of fable or rhetoric such as the March Hare, or Cheshire Cat, and invented new ones like the Bandersnatch and the Boojum.

Carroll consulted his friend George Macdonald, author of some of the best children's stories of the period, who then took it home to read to his children. The book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland published in 1865, was such a success, that Carroll decided to write a sequel to it. Through the Looking Glass, published in 1872, later became the most popular children's book in England. 

Carroll shied away from publicity. He wrote, "Mr. C. L. Dodgson ...neither claims nor acknowledges any connection with any pseudonym or with any book not published under his own name."

Carroll died of bronchitis/influenza in his sisters' home in Guildford on January 14, 1898.  He is buried in The Mount Cemetery, Guildford.  There is a perpetual public endowment of a cot dedicated to him in the Children's Hospital, Great Ormond Street, London.

We can all choose to run twice as fast as we are now or choose to focus on what we can contribute to others with all the time we have available. A positive perspective on your personal relationship to time makes a world of difference in the results you attain for business and life.

Wishing you great and continued success in all pursuits of contribution.

Sincerely,