Lewis Carroll message. Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery Inpr.

Lewis Carroll is one of the most mysterious personalities in the history of world literature. Widely known as a storyteller, the author of the famous “Alice in Wonderland,” he was also a wonderful, and according to experts, the best photographer of his time. Some scandalousness of his personality was given by the fact that his weakness was to photograph little girls naked. “I adore all children,” Carroll once said, “except boys.” At the same time, there were researchers who claimed that he had a morbid sexual interest in his models and even drew an analogy between him and the murderous maniac Jack the Ripper. At the same time, it is known that his colleagues who studied at Oxford, clergy, and artists trusted him infinitely, otherwise how can one explain that the children of acquaintances most often posed for the artist?

However, first things first...

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (later he would take the pseudonym Lewis Carroll) was born on January 27, 1832 in Cheshire, England, into a large family of a parish priest. He was the third child and eldest son in a family of four boys and seven girls. Charles began to receive his education at home and was already distinguished by his exceptional intelligence as a child. When he was little, he was left-handed, and they tried very hard to retrain him, prohibiting him from writing with his left hand, which later led to stuttering. At first, the boy's father was involved in the boy's education, but at the age of 12 the child entered a grammar private school near Richmond, where he really liked it, but after 2 years the parents sent the child to a privileged closed educational institution, Rugby School, where he liked it much less, but it was At this school his outstanding abilities in mathematics and classical languages ​​were revealed. Having received an excellent education and possessing a number of talents, the young man entered Oxford, where he was admitted to scientific work and lecturing, which, however, was rather boring for him. Around this time, he became passionate about photography. In 1855, Dodgson was offered a professorship at his college, which in those days meant taking holy orders and a vow of celibacy. However, the latter was easy for him; it was rumored that Carroll experienced absolute indifference to sexual life and died a virgin. What worried Dodgson himself most about these changes was that this circumstance could become a serious obstacle to further photography and his beloved visits to the theater. However, in 1861 Dodgson was ordained deacon, the first intermediate step towards becoming a priest. However, changes in university status subsequently relieved him of the need for further steps in this direction.

For a more complete understanding of the writer’s personality and those facts from his life that have survived to this day, it should be noted that he was very shy from childhood and, as we know, noticeably stuttered. He led an orderly life: he gave lectures, took obligatory walks, ate only at certain hours, and was known as a pathological pedant. But what amazed those around him: his shyness and stuttering immediately disappeared as soon as he found himself in the company of little girls. This circumstance was noted by all his acquaintances, and his friendship with little girls was thoroughly discussed in 1856, when a new dean, Henry Lidell, appeared at the college where Lewis worked. He arrived at his new job accompanied by his wife and four small children: Harry, Lorina, Alicia and Edith. Dodgson, who was very fond of small children, very soon became friends with the girls and became a frequent guest in the Liddell house. The restraint with which Carroll described his meetings with Alice is extremely surprising, and yet on April 25, 1856, a record appeared that the writer went for a walk with his three sisters. By that time, Carroll was already acquainted with the eldest of the Liddell sisters, the youngest at that time was only two years old, and therefore it is logical to assume that the writer was amazed precisely by the meeting with four-year-old Alice, whom he had never seen before. But the name of this girl did not appear in Carroll's diary entries until May 1857, when the writer gave Alice a small present for her fifth birthday. Carroll often went to the dean's house to play with Alice and her two sisters (of course, having previously received an invitation from Mrs. Liddell); the girls came to visit him (with their mother’s permission, of course); they walked together, went boating, went out of town (of course, in the presence of the governess Miss Prickett - and it turned out that most often the five of them). Carroll spent so much time in the Liddell house that rumors spread around the college where he taught about his affair with the Liddell children's governess, after which the writer noted in his diary that “from now on, when in society, I will avoid any mention of girls, except in cases where it will not cause any suspicion.”

Beginning in November 1856, Carroll began to feel hostile towards himself on the part of Mrs. Liddell. From the writer’s diary, apparently, the entries devoted to the period from April 18, 1858 to May 8, 1862, disappeared forever, namely, it formed the basis for the masterpiece created somewhat later - “Alice in Wonderland.” The famous summer boat ride took place on July 4, 1862. On this day, Lewis, his priest friend and the dean's three daughters took a boat up one of the tributaries of the Thames. The day turned out to be very hot, and the tired girls asked their older friend to tell them a fairy tale. And Carroll began to come up with an intricate plot on the fly about Alice’s adventures underground, where the girl fell asleep in a meadow. And she has an extraordinary dream about how she falls down a rabbit hole, meets strange characters and takes part in amazing adventures. What was unusual about this fairy tale was that in it, seven-year-old Alice tries to reason and participate in various discussions with fantastic characters, but her thoughts and conclusions defy ordinary logic.

Subsequently, Carroll wrote down this fairy tale (at the girl’s request), which was published 2 years later under the title “Alice’s Adventures Underground,” and after a triumphant march around the world it began to be called “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” He gave his own handwritten copy to the “customer”, pasting at the end of the manuscript a photograph of the main character he personally took.

In 1928, Mrs. R. G. Hargreaves (Alice Liddell) auctioned the manuscript at Sotheby's and received £15,400 for it, which was then donated to Great Britain. The manuscript is currently in the British Museum in London.

Mrs. Liddell's dissatisfaction with the relationship between Carroll and her daughters grew more and more. In 1864, she completely banned any walks and meetings between the writer and the girls and destroyed all the letters Alice received from Carroll. And the writer himself, apparently, tore out from his diaries that have reached us, pages that mention precisely this period of the break in relations with the Liddells.

Despite the fact that Lewis Carroll is the author of outstanding scientific books, articles on mathematics and logic, it was his fairy tales that brought him worldwide fame and were most discussed by critics and readers. Moreover, the subject of the study was also the personal life of the writer-scientist, which also “did not fit into any framework.”

Especially a lot of controversy and discussion arose around his strange long-term friendship with Alice Liddell, for whom he wrote his fairy tale, whom he constantly photographed and drew, including nude.

Alice is often present in his photographs; in one of the most famous, she depicts a beggar. A seven-year-old girl is looking at us from this photo. In a free pose, with a bare shoulder, she looks defiantly sexy.

It was not only young Alice that occupied Carroll's attention. He approached girls when he saw them in stores and on beaches. And he even specially carried puzzle toys with him to lure youngsters. And having become friends, he wrote them tender letters, reminding them that “we remember each other and feel tender affection for each other.”

There is a lot of similar evidence of such strange behavior of the writer. Indeed, he gave reason to suspect him of hidden pedophilia. After all, evidence that Carroll had sexual relations with his young girlfriends (and researchers counted that he was friends with almost a hundred girls) was never found.

But, according to biographer N.M. Demurova, this well-known version of Carroll’s “pedophilism” is a gross exaggeration. She is convinced that relatives deliberately fabricated a lot of evidence about Carroll’s supposedly great pure love for children, because they wanted to hide his overly active social life, unforgivable either for a deacon (he had a holy rank) or for a professor. According to this evidence, Carroll was not at all modest: he loved to go to the theater, appreciated painting, dined with young girls in cafes, stayed overnight in the houses of widows and married women - in general, he was a lover of life. And such a way of life was in no way consistent with his sacred rank. Such a truth about a relative seemed murderous to the nieces; most of all, they were afraid that their uncle would be spoken of as an adulterer. And then they decided to focus on his crazy love for little misses. Concerned about Lewis Carroll's reputation after his death, his relatives apparently went overboard and destroyed most of his diaries, drawings of little girls, photographs and negatives of "a'naturel", his sketches of fancy dresses, trying to create a heavily "powdered" biography. Most of the photographs Carroll took were destroyed, and none of the nude photographs survived. In fact, Carroll gradually exposed his models, and only in 1879 he began to take photographs of girls “in the costume of Eve,” as he himself wrote about it in his diary: “the naked girls are absolutely pure and delightful,” he writes to one of his friends, “But the nakedness of boys must be covered.” Meanwhile, he wrote in his diary: “If I found the most beautiful girl in the world for my photographs and discovered that she was embarrassed by the idea of ​​posing naked, I would consider it my sacred duty before God, no matter how fleeting her timidity and no matter how easy was to overcome it, immediately abandon this idea once and for all...” – the author of “Alice in Wonderland” wrote in his diaries.

Thus, the writer’s relatives and friends deliberately wanted to present him as a person who “really, really loved children.” From the point of view of a modern person, attention to girls is perceived as unhealthy. In the era when the author of “Alice” lived, they looked at it completely differently. The Victorians viewed the naked body differently and distinguished sexual desire from aesthetic desire. On postcards of the era, naked children as angels are the norm. In Victorian England, photographing and drawing little girls, including in the nude, was in fashion and symbolized purity and purity), and children under 12 were generally considered asexual, unable to evoke thoughts of fornication. In addition, Carroll took portraits of famous people, not just girls. However, as soon as suspicious townsfolk began to whisper behind his back, he immediately stopped drawing and photographing children.

From the point of view of that morality, the writer’s nieces, emphasizing his relationship with children, did not imagine that, by protecting Victorian virtues, they would condemn their famous relative to more serious accusations of pedophilia and other “oddities.” Even a whole direction has emerged that analyzes Carroll’s pathological tendencies through the study of his work. According to one of the “Freudian” versions, Carroll developed his own reproductive organ in the image of Alice. There were “critics” who discovered “elements of sadism” and “oral aggression” of the writer. Proof: in “Wonderland,” Alice drinks or eats something all the time to change her height, but the Queen of Hearts screams at the top of her lungs: “Cut off your head!”

Concluding this topic, it should be noted that a careful reading of Carroll’s correspondence with the girls revealed that many of them had long since left childhood. Some people were even over 30, although the writer treated them like little ones, but at the same time he paid for music lessons for one, and visits to the dentist for another.

At the same time, it cannot be denied that Carroll was really very very an unusual man who hid his many-sided aspirations under the mask of Victorian respectability. For example, he ate exclusively in the college cafeteria, but several shelves of his bookcases were occupied by cookbooks. He hardly drank alcohol, but the books “Deadly Alcohol” and “Uncontrollable Drunkenness” were prominently displayed in his library. He did not have children, but a place of honor in his library was occupied by works on the upbringing, nutrition, and training of children from the cradle until they enter into “full intelligence.”

The writer’s relationship with the already matured Alice is interesting, which over time became extremely rare and unnatural. After one of them, in April 1865, he wrote: “Alice has changed a lot, although I strongly doubt that for the better. She may be entering puberty." The girl was twelve years old at that time. In 1870, Carroll took the last photograph of Alice, then a young woman, who came to meet the writer, accompanied by her mother.

Two meager notes, made by Carroll in old age, tell about the writer’s sad meetings with the one who was once his muse.
One of them took place in 1888, and Alice was accompanied by her husband, Mr. Hargreaves, who was once a student of Dodgson himself. Carroll makes the following entry: “It was not easy to put together in my head her new face and my old memories of her: her strange appearance today with the one who was once so close and beloved “Alice.”

Another passage tells of a meeting of the almost seventy-year-old Carroll, who could not walk due to problems with his joints, with Alice Liddell: “Like Mrs. Hargreaves, the real “Alice” was now sitting in the dean’s office, I invited her to tea. She could not accept my invitation, but was kind enough to come to see me for a few minutes in the evening along with her sister Rhoda. "[In Carroll's memoirs, these two scenes are presented in the form of a peculiar triangle of images - the awkward presence of the husband, the imprint of time on the woman's face and the ideal girl from the memories. Nabokov in his “Lolita” combines these two scenes into one, when the desperate Humbert meets for the last time with the matured Lolita, living with some vulgar type].

Rhoda was the youngest of the Liddell daughters; Carroll brought her to the role of Rose in the Garden of Fresh Flowers in Alice Through the Looking Glass.

One of the last letters dates back to the period when Alice came to Oxford in connection with her father's retirement.
Carroll's invitation letter to an old acquaintance contains a professional reference to the linguistic concept of the dual meaning of words:
“You may prefer to come accompanied by someone; I leave the decision up to you, only noting that if your spouse is with you, I will accept it with great (crossed out) great pleasure (I crossed out the word “great” because it is ambiguous, I’m afraid, like most words). I met him not long ago in our break room. It was hard for me to come to terms with the fact that he was the husband of the one whom I still, even now, imagine as a seven-year-old girl.”

Dodgson suffered from insomnia: he spent nights trying to find solutions to complex mathematical problems. He worried that no one remembered his scientific works, and at the end of his days, tired of Carroll’s fame, he even said that “he had nothing to do with any pseudonym or book published under my real name.”

Nabokov's novel gave names to this brand of eroticism. Only here we can probably talk about eroticism, perhaps platonic. Apparently, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson could only possess a woman - or more precisely, a little girl - only in his imagination. And even then only in those moments while the photography lasted (the words “forty-two seconds” run through the book about Alice in Oxford like an obsessive motif). As young Chukovsky wrote in his Diary, old maids and old virgins are the most unhappy people in the world.

It's amazing that much of Alice's time has survived to this day. The elm planted by Alice on the wedding day of the Prince of Wales lived until 1977 (then, like many of his neighbors in the alley, he fell ill with fungal elm disease, and the trees had to be cut down). The famous Punch magazine (where Teniel, the first Alice illustrator, worked) closed quite recently. But the devils, rabbits and gargoyles that decorate the windows of the Oxford University Museum are there forever.
In Lewis Carroll's book The Logical Game, where he teaches the art of reasoning logically, drawing correct conclusions from not exactly incorrect but unusual premises, there is the following problem: “No fossil animal can be unhappy in love. The oyster is unhappy in love." The answer is also the conclusion: “The oyster is not a fossil animal.”

Lewis Carroll, professor of mathematics at Oxford, deacon, amateur photographer, amateur artist, amateur writer died in 1898. Many of those around him had no idea that this shy, stuttering man lived such a bizarre secret existence. Some psychiatrists argued that Carroll had schizoid disorders, and his literary work is confirmation of this.

However, if there were such disorders, they led to the fact that scientific works were written by the “sick”, which contributed to science, and immortal works of art were created, published all over the world. He dreamed of returning to childhood, turning back time and, indeed, became immortal thanks to his amazing fairy tales!

Carroll lived to be 66 years old and looked very youthful until the end of his life, but was not in good health, as he suffered from severe migraines. Many believed that he took laudanum (opium), but in those days many people did this even with minor ailments, since it was considered a simple medicine. The drug helped Carroll cope with his stuttering - after taking opium he felt more confident. It is likely that the “treatment” had an impact on his creative fantasies, because, for example, in “Alice in Wonderland” incredible events and amazing transformations take place.

The writer’s originality was manifested in the fact that he managed to organically weave into his fantasies not only real characters such as Alice Liddell, but also everyday suffering associated with his illness, which later received its name in honor of the work in which Alice in Wonderland syndrome was mentioned .

Alice in Wonderland syndrome is one of the rare forms migraine auras, a complex of brief (no more than an hour) neurological disorders that precede the onset of a migraine attack. An aura does not always accompany a headache, and doctors make a separate diagnosis in such cases – migraine with aura. Typically, an aura is a set of visual or sensory disturbances, manifested as bright or iridescent spots, loss of part of the visual field, or numbness, a crawling sensation in the hand, arm or face. Sometimes the aura may be present in the form of motor disturbances or olfactory phenomena. Perhaps the most famous literary description of an aura in the form of a violation of the sense of smell is found in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”:

“More than anything else in the world, the procurator hated the smell of rose oil, and everything now foreshadowed a bad day, since this smell began to haunt the procurator since dawn...” Yes, there is no doubt! It’s her, her again, the invincible, terrible disease of hemicrania, which makes half your head hurt. There is no remedy for it, there is no salvation. I’ll try not to move my head.”

Alice in Wonderland syndrome is a rare form of migraine aura and occurs primarily in children. Manifestations of the syndrome can be different: from perversion of smell or taste to complex, detailed disturbances of perception, reminiscent of hallucinations. Visual phenomena usually appear as images of people or animals that swim from one side of the visual field and disappear on the other, or materialize from air currents, like the Cheshire cat.

“Okay,” said the Cat and disappeared – very slowly this time. The tip of his tail disappeared first, and his smile last. She hovered in the air for a long time, when everything else had already disappeared.”

Sufferers of Alice in Wonderland syndrome realize that these images are just visions, since the images are usually stereotypical and located at a specific point in space.

There are studies that prove that the headaches of many artists were reflected in their works. The fact can be traced by studying, for example, the works of outstanding artists: for example, elements that in all respects resemble manifestations of the visual aura of a migraine can be found in the paintings of Picasso and Matisse.

Another fragment of the book, which describes how Alice became smaller and larger after drinking from a bottle and eating a piece of mushroom, also has a very real origin. Lewis Carroll so effectively described the manifestations of macropsia and micropsia, which are also considered features of Alice in Wonderland syndrome. These are temporary changes in perception in which surrounding objects appear larger in size than they actually are, or, accordingly, smaller.

In addition to the above, those who suffer from Alice in Wonderland syndrome may experience a sensation of distorted body diagram. Derealization (a feeling of the unreality of what is happening), depersonalization (the feeling of “I am not me”), deja vue occur, the sense of the passage of time is disturbed, or palinopsia appears (a disturbance of visual perception in which an object that is no longer in the field of vision remains in it or appears again ). If you carefully re-read Alice in Wonderland, descriptions of many of these phenomena can be easily found.

Apparently, Carroll, who suffered from migraines, transferred his experiences of the aura of the attack to the characters of his works. By the way, the author also experienced the usual visual aura of migraine, which can be seen in his drawings. For example, the famous writer correctly and clearly reflected all the smallest details, but in the figure of the dwarf he missed part of the face, shoulder and left hand. This is very similar to a scotoma (loss of vision), which is a common element of the visual aura in migraines.

Fortunately, there is little chance of encountering Alice in Wonderland syndrome outside of a book: the syndrome is very rare, usually occurs in childhood, can be treated and, as a rule, its manifestations decrease with age.

PS:Richard Wallis's book "Jack the Ripper, Fickle Friend" was published in 1996. In it, the author claimed that the mysterious killer who brutally murdered London prostitutes in 1888 was... Lewis Carroll. He made his conclusions after discovering... anagrams in Carroll's books. He took several sentences from the storyteller's works and composed new sentences from the letters in them that told about Dodgson's atrocities as Jack the Ripper. True, Wallis chose long sentences. There were so many letters in them that, if desired, anyone could compose a text with any meaning.

LEWIS CARROLL

Lewis Carroll inspired more musicians to create psychedelic rock than any other writer in the history of literature. Think, for example, of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," or the Beatles' "I Am the Walrus," or Donovan's entire album, "Hurdy Gurdy Man." (And no one is saying that it was all good psychedelic rock!) And all this thanks to a man who, most likely, has never tried drugs in his life, has never had a serious relationship with a woman, and spent most of his life lecturing in college mathematics Christ Church University of Oxford.

Oh, yes, and, of course, he also created one of the world's most beloved children's book heroines.

Long before Alice, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Carroll's real name) was a shy, stuttering son of a vicar from the village of Daresbury, Cheshire. The third of eleven children in the family, he took his first steps in literature very early. Even after graduating from Christ Church College, Oxford, with a master's degree in mathematics, Charles continued to write humorous poems and sometimes published them in the Comic Times. Deciding not to mix his mathematical career with his literary one, Charles Lutwidge came up with the pseudonym “Lewis Carroll”, reversing his names and translating them into Latin and then back into English. This intricate and witty play on words soon became a signature feature of his writing style.

Tall, thin and rather handsome, Carroll lived as an ascetic scientist, alien to all worldly goods. Apart from science, his only hobbies were writing and photography. In 1861, Dodgson took the junior diaconate (a prerequisite for becoming a Fellow of the College), which meant he would become an Anglican priest, but something kept Charles Lutwidge from throwing himself entirely into the service of God. In his diaries, he wrote about the feeling of his own sinfulness and guilt that haunted him, but it is not clear whether this feeling prevented him from finally becoming a priest or something else. Despite all this, he remained a respectable son of the church. It is known that, having visited the Cologne Cathedral, Charles could not hold back his tears. Another remarkable fact from Carroll’s biography: he more than once left the theater during a performance if something on stage offended his religious feelings.

In 1862, Carroll went on a boat trip with friends. There was also Alice Liddell, a ten-year-old girl with whom the writer developed an unusually close friendship. For most of the trip, Carroll amused himself by telling a fairy tale in which Alice was the main character and which the girl demanded to be written down. The tale was originally called "Alice's Adventures Underground", but then Carroll renamed it "Alice in Wonderland". The book was published in 1865 and was a huge, downright stunning success, and in 1871 a sequel followed - “Alice through the Looking Glass”. Filled with crazy characters like the Hatter and nonsensical but hilarious poems like "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter," Alice's story immediately won a massive following among readers of all ages. The shy bookworm Charles Dodgson instantly became the world-famous children's writer Lewis Carroll (although he still found time to write mathematical treatises, which were all boring and dry, with the exception of the entertaining scientific pamphlet "Dynamics of the Particle", published in 1865 ).

In the last two decades of his life, Carroll continued to write, photograph, invent, and think about mathematical topics. The photographic portraits he took, according to modern estimates, were clearly ahead of their time, but his models (mainly little girls) pose a number of still unresolved questions for biographers. Carroll, without a doubt, was a great original. His lifestyle cannot be called standard.

Carroll never married and, according to the reviews of his contemporaries, did not start a long-term relationship with any adult woman. The writer died in 1898 from bronchitis, leaving behind a series of colorful characters, amazing stories and puzzling word games that continue to inspire writers, musicians and children around the globe.

MASTER OF ALL THINGS

Carroll was not only the author of one of the most popular works of children's literature, he was also a fan of technological progress, obsessed with invention. His inventions included the electric pen, a new form for money orders, a tricycle, a new method of right-justifying the typewriter, an early double-sided exhibition stand, and a mnemonic system for remembering names and dates.

Carroll was the first to come up with the idea of ​​printing the title of a book on the spine to make the desired edition easier to find on the shelf. The words Carroll coined by combining two other words are still widely used in the English language. Carroll, a big fan of riddles and puzzles, invented many card and logic games, improved the rules of backgammon and created a prototype of the game Scrabble.

MEDICAL MIRACLE

Rumors that Carroll took psychoactive drugs are greatly exaggerated, but even if this were true, who, knowing the writer's medical history, would blame him? You would also want to get rid of pain if you suffered from swamp fever, cystitis, lumbago, furunculosis, eczema, synovitis, arthritis, pleurisy, laryngitis, bronchitis, erythema, catarrh of the bladder, rheumatism, neuralgia, insomnia and toothaches - all these ailments were found in Carroll's possession at different times. In addition, he was tormented by severe chronic migraines, accompanied by hallucinations - he saw, for example, moving fortresses. Let's add to this stuttering, possibly hyperactivity and partial deafness. Isn't it a miracle that Carroll wasn't an avid opium smoker? Although who knows, maybe there was.

OH, MY POOR HEAD!

It is possible that Alice's Adventures was a side effect of severe headaches. This conclusion was reached by scientists who published an article in 1999 in the British medical journal Lancet, where hallucinations during migraine attacks described in Carroll's diaries were analyzed. Recurring images appear in his writings several years before the first edition of Alice in Wonderland, and this supports the assumption that "at least some of Alice's adventures were based on Carroll's visions during migraines."

EXCUSE ME, AM I ANNOYING YOU?

In addition to all his other health problems, Carroll apparently suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. He was terribly petty and meticulous. Before setting out on any journey, even a short one, he studied the route on a map and calculated how long each stage of the journey would take, leaving nothing to chance. He then calculated how much money he would need and put the required amount into different pockets: to pay for the passage, tip the porters, and buy food and drinks. When brewing tea, Carroll demanded that the tea leaves steep for exactly ten minutes, not a second more and not a second less.

His hypertrophied love for inventing and observing all kinds of rules extended to those around him. When hosting a holiday dinner, Carroll would draw a seating chart for the guests and then write down in his diary what each person ate, “so people wouldn’t have to eat the same thing too often.” Once, while visiting the library, he left a note in the suggestion box in which he outlined a more advanced system for arranging books. One day he reproached his own niece for leaving an open book on a chair. He even corrected other writers if he found minor mathematical errors in their works. Yet, like so many other originals, Carroll somehow managed to make his flaws seem like endearing quirks. And his constant nagging didn’t seem to irritate anyone.

LEWIS CARROLL'S FAVORITE VEHICLE WAS A TRICOLE. THE WRITER CONSTRUCTED ONE OF THE MODELS HIMSELF.

ASK ALICE

How many years have passed since the writer’s death, and he is still suspected of pedophilia. Was he really a pedophile? There is fierce debate on this matter. It is obvious that Carroll had a special affection for girls. He took hundreds of photographs of young ladies, sometimes in the nude (we are talking about the appearance of the young ladies, not Carroll himself). There is not a single photograph that would capture any explicitly sexual scene, however, there is a known case when the mother of one girl was seriously frightened when she learned that the shooting of a minor would take place without the participation of a companion, and refused Carroll a photographic session. Carroll had a particularly close relationship with Alice Liddell, the prototype of the main character of Alice in Wonderland. However, in 1863 their friendship ended abruptly. No one can say with certainty why. Pages from Carroll's diary from this period were later torn out and destroyed by the writer's family, perhaps to protect his reputation. Carroll’s interest in photography also dried up suddenly, in 1880, add to this the entries in his diary, where the writer talks about the consciousness of his own sinfulness and guilt that tormented him all his life. He does not specify what the fault is. Did anything happen during filming besides photography? Some of Carroll's biographers have recently argued that the writer was just a real-life embodiment of Willy Wonka - an innocent man-child who was fascinated by children, but did not harm them and was not sexually attracted to them. In fact, there remains no evidence that Carroll even touched any of his models with lewd intentions. Only the White Rabbit knows the truth...

CHARLES DODGSON? DODJACK THE RIPPER?

Or maybe the eccentric author of Alice was actually a misogynist and serial killer? In his book “Jack the Ripper, the Careless Friend,” published in 1996, a certain Richard Wallace suggests that the famous London maniac who killed prostitutes was none other than Lewis Carroll. As evidence, Wallace cites excerpts from Carroll's works, in which, in his opinion, detailed descriptions of the Ripper's crimes are hidden in the form of anagrams. For example, the beginning of the poem “Jabberwocky”:

It was boiling.

Squishy shoryky

They poked around,

And the zepyuks grunted,

Like mumziki in mov.

If you rearrange the letters (meaning, of course, the English original, and not the translation), you can read the following:

I swear I'll spank my balls

Until I destroy the evil floor with my sword hand.

Slippery business; lend me some gloves

It's a little unclear what pig jerking has to do with Jack the Ripper. Moreover, Wallace avoids the fact that Carroll was not in London at all at the time of the murders. And, as you know, anagrams were invented for this purpose, so that almost anything could be constructed from any written phrase. To support this, one writer, the author of a biography of Carroll, rearranged the letters in a phrase from Winnie the Pooh and “proved” that Christopher Robin was the true Bloody Jack. Otherwise, Wallace's theory is flawless.

author Sugar Burt Randolph

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Lermontov and M. Lewis Neither in the writings and letters of Lermontov that have come down to us, nor in the memoirs about him there are any traces that would indicate his acquaintance with the Gothic novel of the 18th century. The names of Radcliffe and Lewis were, however, to come to his attention. In 1830 a young man

From the book Diary of a trip to Russia in 1867 by Carroll Lewis

Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972) It's All Gone Now the sea has dried up. And poverty was exposed: Sand and a rusty anchor, and glass: The sediment of former days, when it was light Joy decided to break through the weed. And the sea, like a blind man or like a cruel light, Forgave me my sight. Weeds - My moments,

From the book Diary of a Youth Pastor author Romanov Alexey Viktorovich

Alun Lewis (1915–1944) Farewell So, we say: “Good night” - And, like lovers, we go again, On the very last date, Having only managed to quickly pack our things. Having dropped the last shilling for the gas, I watch how the dress was thrown off silently, Then I’m afraid of frightening off the rustling of the comb, the leaves

From the author's book

[Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Bailey Aldrich] It was on a bench in Washington Square Park that I spent the longest time with Stevenson. That outing, which lasted an hour or more, was very pleasant and friendly. We came together from his house, where I went to pay my respects

From the author's book

Sinclair Lewis Harry (1885-1951) American novelist and social critic Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Center, a newly built town of less than 3 thousand people in the heart of Minnesota. His father, Edwin Lewis, was a country doctor, and mother, Emma (Kermott)

From the author's book

Lewis Carroll. Diary of a trip to Russia in 1867 July 12 (Fri). The Sultan and I arrived in London almost simultaneously, although in different parts of it - I arrived through Paddington Station, and the Sultan through Charing Cross: I must admit that the largest crowd gathered exactly at

From the author's book

Clive Staples Lewis But I am deeply convinced that all our talents should raise the church as high as possible. A person who is known for several literary works, such as The Chronicles of Narnia. Today, when you think about him, you involuntarily think about the church. His whole life

Lewis Carroll was born in the village of Daresbury in the English county of Cheshire on January 27, 1832. His father was the parish priest, and he was involved in the education of Lewis, as well as his other children. In total, four boys and seven girls were born into the Carroll family. Lewis showed himself to be a fairly smart and quick-witted student.

Carroll was left-handed, which was not as calmly accepted by religious people in the nineteenth century as it is now. The boy was forbidden to write with his left hand and was forced to use his right, which caused psychological trauma and led to a slight stutter. Some researchers claim that Lewis Carroll is autistic, but there is no exact information about this.

At the age of twelve, Lewis began studying at a private grammar school located near Richmond. He liked the teachers and classmates, as well as the atmosphere in the small educational institution. However, in 1845 the boy was transferred to the fashionable public school of Rugby, where great importance was attached to the physical training of boys and instilling in them Christian values.

Young Carroll liked this school much less, but he studied well there for four years and even demonstrated good abilities in theology and mathematics.

In 1850, the young man entered Christ Church College at Oxford University. In general, he was not a very good student, but he still showed outstanding mathematical abilities. A few years later, Lewis received his bachelor's degree, and then began giving his own lectures on mathematics at Christ Church. He did this for more than two and a half decades: work as a lecturer brought Carroll good income, although he found it very boring.

Since educational institutions in those days were closely interconnected with religious organizations, upon assuming the position of lecturer, Lewis was obliged to take holy orders. In order not to work in the parish, he agreed to accept the rank of deacon, renouncing his powers as a priest. While still in college, Carroll began writing short stories and poetry, and it was then that he came up with this pseudonym (in fact, the writer's real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson).

The Creation of Alice

In 1856, Christ Church College changed its dean. The philologist and lexicographer Henry Liddell, along with his wife and five children, came to Oxford to work in this position. Lewis Carroll soon became friends with the Liddell family and became their faithful friend for many years. It was one of the couple’s daughters, Alice, who was four years old in 1856, who became the prototype for the well-known Alice from Carroll’s most famous works.

First edition of the book “Alice in Wonderland”

The writer often told Henry Liddell's children funny tales, the characters and events of which he composed on the fly. One day in the summer of 1862, during a boat trip, little Alice Liddell asked Lewis to once again compose an interesting story for her and her sisters Lorina and Edith. Carroll got down to business with pleasure and told the girls an exciting tale about the adventures of a little girl who fell through the White Rabbit's hole into the Underground Country.

Alice Lidell - prototype of the famous fairy-tale character

To make it more interesting for girls to listen to, he made the main character similar to Alice in character, and also added characteristic features of Edith and Lorina to some of the secondary characters. Little Liddell was delighted with the story and demanded that the writer write it down on paper. Carroll did this only after several reminders and solemnly handed Alice a manuscript entitled "Alice's Adventures Underground." Somewhat later, he took this first story as the basis for his famous books.

Books

Lewis Carroll wrote his cult works “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass” in 1865 and 1871, respectively. His style of writing books was not similar to any of the writing styles that existed at that time. As a very creative person, with a rich imagination and inner world, as well as an outstanding mathematician with an excellent understanding of logic, he created a special genre of “paradoxical literature.”

Illustration for the fairy tale “Alice in Wonderland”

His characters and the situations in which they find themselves are not at all intended to amaze the reader with absurdity and absurdity. In fact, they all follow a certain logic, and this logic itself is taken to the point of absurdity. In an unusual, sometimes even anecdotal form, Lewis Carroll subtly and elegantly touches on many philosophical issues, talks about life, the world and our place in it. As a result, the books turned out to be not only entertaining reading for children, but also wise fairy tales for adults.

Carroll's unique style appears in his other works, although they were not as popular as the Alice stories: "The Hunting of the Snark", "Sylvie and Bruno", "The Knot Stories", "Midnight Problems", "Euclid and His modern rivals", "What the tortoise said to Achilles", "Allen Brown and Carr".

Writer Lewis Carroll

Some argue that Lewis Carroll and his world would not have been so extraordinary if the writer had not consumed opium on a regular basis (he suffered from severe migraines and also still had a noticeable stutter). However, at that time, opium tincture was a popular medicine for many diseases; it was used even for mild headaches.

Contemporaries said that the writer was “a man with quirks.” He led a fairly active social life, but at the same time suffered from the need to meet certain social expectations and desperately longed to return to childhood, where everything was simpler and he could remain himself in any situation. For some time he even suffered from insomnia, and spent all his free time on numerous studies. He truly believed in going beyond the reality we know and tried to comprehend something more than the science of his time could offer.

Mathematics

Charles Dodgson was indeed a gifted mathematician: perhaps this is partly why the riddles of his texts are so complex and varied. When the author was not writing his masterpiece books, he was often engaged in mathematical work. Of course, he did not rank with Evariste Galois, Nikolai Lobachevsky or Janusz Bolyai, however, as modern researchers note, he made discoveries in the field of mathematical logic that were ahead of his time.

Mathematician Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll developed his own graphical technique for finding solutions to logical problems, which was much more convenient than the diagrams used at that time. In addition, the storyteller masterfully solved “sorites” - special logical problems consisting of a sequence of syllogisms, the removal of the conclusions of one of which becomes a prerequisite for the other, while all the remaining premises in such a problem were mixed.

Photo

Another serious hobby of the writer, from which only his own fairy tales and heroes could distract him, was photography. The style of his photography is attributed to the style of pictorialism, characterized by a staged style of filming and editing of negatives.

Lewis Carroll loved photographing children most of all. He was well acquainted with another popular photographer of those times, Oscar Reilander. It was Oscar who made one of the best photographic portraits of the writer, which later became a classic of photography in the mid-1860s.

Personal life

The writer led a very active social life, including often being seen in the company of various representatives of the fair sex. Since at the same time he held the title of professor and deacon, the family tried in every possible way to reason with Lewis, who did not want to settle down, or at least hide the stories of his stormy adventures. Therefore, after Carroll’s death, his life story was carefully retouched: contemporaries sought to create the image of a good-natured storyteller who loved children very much. Subsequently, this desire of theirs played a cruel joke on Lewis’s biography.

Carroll really loved children, including little girls, the daughters of friends and colleagues, from time to time in his social circle. Unfortunately, Carroll never found a woman on whom he could try on the status of “wife” and who would bear him his own children. Therefore, in the 20th century, when it became very fashionable to turn the biographies of famous people upside down and look for Freudian motives in their behavior, the storyteller began to be accused of such a crime as pedophilia. Some particularly ardent supporters of this idea even tried to prove that Lewis Carroll and Jack the Ripper are one and the same person.

No evidence for such theories was found. Moreover: all the letters and stories of contemporaries, in which the writer was presented as a lover of little girls, were subsequently exposed. Thus, Ruth Gamlen stated that the writer invited a “shy child of about 12” Isa Bowman to visit, while in reality the girl at that time was at least 18 years old. The situation is similar with Carroll’s other allegedly young girlfriends, who were in fact fully adults.

Death

The writer died on January 14, 1898, the cause of death was pneumonia. His grave is located in Guildford, in Ascension Cemetery.

Lewis Carroll (Carroll, Lewis) (1832-1898; real name - Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), English children's writer, mathematician, logician.

Born 27 January 1832 in Daresbury near Warrington (Cheshire). Charles Latwidge was the third child and eldest son in a family of four boys and seven girls. Young Dodgson was educated by his father until he was twelve years old, then the boy was sent to Richmond Grammar School. A year and a half later he entered Rugby School. Here he studied for four years, showing outstanding abilities in mathematics and theology. In May 1850 he was enrolled at Christ Church College, Oxford University, and moved to Oxford in January of the following year. Having won the Boulter Scholarship competition in 1851 and received first-class honors in mathematics and second-class honors in classical languages ​​and ancient literature in 1852, the young man was admitted to scientific work. In 1855 he was appointed lecturer in mathematics and remained in this position until his resignation in 1881.

Alice didn’t know what to do, shake hands with one and then the other? What if the second one gets offended? Then it dawned on her and she extended both hands to them at once.

Lewis Carroll

Dodgson lived at the college until his death in 1898.

A significant number of books and pamphlets on mathematics and logic indicate that Dodgson was a conscientious member of the learned community. Among them - Algebraic analysis of the fifth book of Euclid (The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically, 1858 and 1868), Notes on Algebraic Planimetry (A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry, 1860), An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, 1867 ) and Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879), Mathematical Curiosities (Curiosa Mathematica, 1888 and 1893), Symbolic Logic (1896).

Children interested Dodgson from a young age; As a boy, he invented games, composed stories and poems, and drew pictures for his younger brothers and sisters. Dodgson’s unusually strong attachment to children (and girls almost ousted boys from his circle of friends) puzzled his contemporaries, while the latest critics and biographers do not cease to multiply the number of psychological investigations of the writer’s personality.

Of Dodgson's childhood friends, the most famous were those with whom he became friends earlier than anyone else - the children of Liddell, the dean of his college: Harry, Lorina, Alice (Alice), Edith, Rhoda and Violet. Alice was a favorite, and soon became the heroine of the improvisations with which Dodgson entertained his young friends on river walks or at home, in front of the camera. He told the most extraordinary story to Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell and Canon Duckworth on July 4, 1862 near Godstow, on the upper Thames.

Alice asked Dodgson to write down this story on paper, which he did over the next few months. Then, on the advice of Henry Kingsley and J. MacDonald, he rewrote the book for a wider range of readers, adding several more stories previously told to Liddell's children, and in July 1865 he published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. . A sequel, also from the earlier stories and later stories told to the young Liddells at Charlton Kings, near Cheltenham, in April 1863, appeared at Christmas 1871 (1872) under the title Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Seen There. What Alice Found There). Both books were illustrated by D. Tenniel (1820-1914), who followed Dodgson's exact instructions.

Both Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass talk about events that happen as if in a dream. Breaking down the narrative into episodes allows the writer to include stories that play on common sayings and proverbs, such as “the smile of the Cheshire Cat” or “the mad hatter,” or play on situations in games such as croquet or cards. Through the Looking Glass has a greater unity of plot compared to Wonderland. Here Alice finds herself in a mirrored world and becomes a participant in a chess game, where the White Queen's pawn (this is Alice) reaches the eighth square and turns into a queen. This book also features popular nursery rhyme characters, notably Humpty Dumpty, who interprets “made-up” words in “Jabberwocky” with a comically professorial air.

I know who I was this morning when I woke up, but I've changed several times since then.

Lewis Carroll

Dodgson was good at humorous poetry, and he published some of the poems from the Alice books in the Comic Times (a supplement to the Times newspaper) in 1855 and in Train magazine in 1856. He published many more poetry collections in these and other periodicals, such as College Rhimes and Punch, anonymously or under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll (the English name Charles Lutwidge was first Latinized to become Carolus Ludovicus, and then the two names were reversed and were again anglicized). This pseudonym was used to sign both books about Alice and the collections of poems Phantasmagoria (Phantasmagoria, 1869), Poems? Meaning? (Rhyme? And Reason?, 1883) and Three Sunsets (1898). The poetic epic in the genre of nonsense, The Hunting of the Snark (1876), also became famous. The novel Sylvie and Bruno (Sylvie and Bruno, 1889) and its second volume, The Conclusion of Sylvie and Bruno (Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893) are distinguished by the complexity of their composition and the mixture of elements of realistic narrative and fairy tale.

In the lush greenery of a tiny village in the south-east of the county, on January 27, 1932, Cheshire, Lewis Carroll was born - real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson - British logician, mathematician, writer. In total there were 7 girls and 4 boys in the family. He started studying at home and showed himself to be smart and quick-witted. He was left-handed, according to unverified data, he was forbidden to write with his left hand, which traumatized the young psyche (presumably this led to stuttering).

From an early age, the boy entertained his family with magic tricks, puppet shows and poetry. At the beginning of 1851 he moved to Oxford to enter one of the most aristocratic colleges at Oxford University. Lewis was not a very good student, but thanks to his outstanding mathematical abilities, he won a competition to give mathematical lectures at Christ Church. For 26 years he gave these lectures, which Lewis considered boring, but they provided good income. According to the college charter, he was ordained a deacon (which gave him the right to preach sermons without working in the parish).

As an unmarried lecturer in the mathematics department at Oxford University, he enjoyed the company of young women. Carroll's hobbies gave rise to rumors about his pedophilia. Modern biographies of Lewis Carroll also mention this fact. However, in recent decades it has become known that almost all of the author's little girlfriends were over 14 years old, and many of them were 16 and 18 years old. In addition, Lewis was an avid bachelor and did not make friends with the opposite sex.

In the mid-1950s, Charles began writing works on humorous and mathematical topics. And already in 1856, by translating into Latin and rearranging the words of his name, he created the pseudonym “Lewis Carroll”. However, his mathematical works were published under the real name of the writer. In 1856, a new dean appeared at the college - Henry Liddell, with whom his wife and five children arrived, among whom was 4-year-old Alice. In 1864, Lewis Carroll's famous novel about the adventures of a little girl in Wonderland was born. The work is based on stories that the author told his friends in his youth.

The incredible commercial success of the first Alice book changed Dodgson's life, as Lewis Carroll became quite famous all over the world, his mailbox was flooded with letters from admirers, and he began to earn very significant sums of money. However, Dodgson never abandoned his modest life and church positions.

In 1867, Lewis Carroll left England for the first and last time and made a very unusual trip to Russia for those times. Visits Calais, Brussels, Potsdam, Danzig, Koenigsberg along the way, spends a month in Russia, returns to England via Vilna, Warsaw, Ems, Paris. In Russia, Dodgson visits St. Petersburg and its environs, Moscow, Sergiev Posad, and a fair in Nizhny Novgorod.

In the continuation of the book, which was written in 1871, the author describes the further adventures of the heroine. Filled with fantastic characters and colorful landscapes, as well as wit and plenty of puzzles, these two books have become some of the most famous and revered children's books in the world.

Lewis Carroll was also an honorary portrait photographer. He loved to photograph children and famous people. Among his last sitters were Alfred Lord Tennyson, D. G. Rossetti and John Millais. By combining his best qualities as a photographer and an author of fantastic comics, the writer became the most unforgettable, talented and original person of his time.

An equally interesting fact from the biography of Lewis Carroll is that he was an inventor. His main and famous invention is the nyctograph. This is a device for quickly jotting down ideas or notes in the dark. The writer himself often woke up at night and wanted to write down an idea, but did not want to light a lamp (we all remember what time Carroll lived in). This is exactly how the idea came to make such a device, which served to discover a new form of shorthand - nyctography. Initially, the writer called the device a “tiflograph”, but renamed it “nyctograph” at the suggestion of one of his comrades. Carroll also invented the book dust jacket, which fits over the binding or main cover, and the travel chess set.

Lewis Carroll died on January 14, 1898 in Guildford, Surrey, at the home of his seven sisters, from pneumonia that broke out after influenza. He was buried there, along with his brother and sister at Mount Cemetery.

The biography of Lewis Carroll will not leave anyone indifferent, because we all love the wonderful series of books. Lewis Carroll's Alice has been filmed many times, which testifies to the popularity and universal love for this work.