Lewis Carroll
Author biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who he was
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote as Lewis Carroll, was born in Cheshire on January 27, 1832, and died at Guildford on January 14, 1898. He was the eldest son in a large clerical family and spent nearly his whole adult life at Christ Church, Oxford, as a mathematics lecturer.
He was ordained deacon, stammered, and was a serious early photographer. He published mathematical works under his own name and the nonsense under the other, and preferred to keep the two apart.
Why he wrote it
On a river outing near Oxford on July 4, 1862, he told a story to three children of the Dean's family to pass the afternoon. One of them, Alice Liddell, asked him to write it down.
He did, by hand, with his own illustrations, as a gift. It was published in expanded form in 1865 as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with illustrations by John Tenniel. The book exists because a child asked for it and the man took the request seriously, which is a better origin than most books have.
The book we publish, and why
We publish Alice in Wonderland as a Digital Junior Genius Reader.
Underneath the nonsense is a logician playing fair. The absurd rules hold together once a child works them out: the Caucus Race, the Mad Hatter's riddle, the trial where the verdict comes before the evidence. It is not random, and children can tell the difference between nonsense that is lazy and nonsense that is built.
The benefit is that it rewards thinking rather than following. Alice spends the entire book arguing with authority figures who are confidently and demonstrably wrong, and she is right to. That is a rare and useful thing to put in front of a child.
How to read it with a child
Read aloud from about five, independently from about eight. It is one of the few books where reading aloud is genuinely better, because the wordplay works on the ear.
Do not explain the jokes. A child who gets a pun three weeks later owns it; a child who has it explained has been given somebody else's. Let the ones that miss simply miss.
The Victorian parodies will mean nothing now, since the poems being mocked are forgotten. That is fine and costs the reader almost nothing. The question afterward is the good one: which of the characters was actually being unreasonable, and how did Alice know. Children defend her instinctively and then have to say why.
Pair it with
- The Junior Genius Method, our approach of Read, Notice, Write, Recite, Remember, Question, Apply, which the Digital Junior Genius Reader edition is built around. Alice suits the Recite stage particularly, since the verse is made to be said out loud.
- Aristotle, for the parent, as the serious version of what Alice does all book: asking what a thing actually is rather than what it is called.
- Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess, for a child who likes a heroine who holds her ground among unreasonable adults.
His principal works
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865.
- Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 1871, which contains Jabberwocky.
- The Hunting of the Snark, 1876. A long nonsense poem.
- Sylvie and Bruno, 1889, and its concluding volume, 1893.
- Euclid and His Modern Rivals, 1879, published as Charles Dodgson. Mathematics, and a defense of Euclid written as a play.
- Symbolic Logic, 1896, also as Dodgson.
- Alice's Adventures Under Ground, the original handwritten manuscript of 1864, published in facsimile in 1886.
General reference on Lewis Carroll. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.
All Trumpet editions by Lewis Carroll