viaggi in terre fantastiche

In the Victorian Period journeys took also the form of  fantastic dreams to incredible lands which hid controversial realities. A master of these oniric journeys was ….Lewis Carroll (1832- 98), pseudonym of the English writer and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He invented his pen name by translating his first two names into the Latin Carolus Lodovicus and then anglicizing it into Lewis Carroll.
Son of a clergyman and first of 11 children, Carroll began at an early age to entertain himself (divertirsi)and his family with magic tricks (trucchi), marionette shows, and poems.
He graduated from ChristChurchCollege, Oxford, in 1854 where he remained lecturing on mathematics and writing treatises and guides for students.
Carroll took deacon’s orders in 1861, but he was never ordained a priest, partly because he was afflicted with a stammer (balbuzie) that made preaching  (predicare) difficult and partly, perhaps, because he had discovered other interests. Among them was photography, at which he became very expert. He like especially to photograph children. Alice Liddell, one of the three daughters of Henry George Liddell, the dean of ChristChurch, was one of his photographic subjects and the model for the Alice.
As a mathematician, Carroll was conservative and derivative. As a logician, he was more interested in logic as a game than as an instrument for testing reason.
In 1867 Carroll travelled through Europe and Russiawith preacher and friend from Oxford, Henry Parry Liddon.
In 1881 Carroll resigned his lectureship at Oxford in order to focus on his writing.
He died on 14 January 1898 at his sisters’ home The Chestnuts and he now lies buried with many of his siblings at The Mount cemetery in Guildford, Surrey, England. His epitaph reads Where I am there shall also my servant be.


Among his most popular works are: Alice‘s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Alice Through the Looking Glass (1872), and What Alice Found There, including another famous poem “Jabberwocky”.