Carroll Lewis, pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–98), English writer and mathematician. The eldest son of a large clerical family, he was educated at Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his uneventful life, as mathematical lecturer (until 1881) and curator of the senior commonroom. His mathematical writings (under his own name) are more numerous than important. He was, however, the only Oxonian of his day to contribute to symbolic logic, and is remembered for his syllogistic diagrams, for his methods for constructing and solving elaborate sorites problems, for his early interest in logical paradoxes, and for the many amusing examples that continue to reappear in modern textbooks. Fame descended upon him almost by accident, as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking Glass (1872), The Hunting of the Snark (1876), and Sylvie and Bruno (1889– 93); saving the last, the only children’s books to bring no blush of embarrassment to an adult reader’s cheek. Dodgson took deacon’s orders in 1861, and though pastorally inactive, was in many ways an archetype of the prim Victorian clergyman. His religious opinions were carefully thought out, but not of great philosophic interest. The Oxford movement passed him by; he worried about sin (though rejecting the doctrine of eternal punishment), abhorred profanity, and fussed over Sunday observance, but was oddly tolerant of theatergoing, a lifelong habit of his own. Apart from the sentimental messages later inserted in them, the Alice books and Snark are blessedly devoid of religious or moral concern. Full of rudeness, aggression, and quarrelsome, if fallacious, argument, they have, on the other hand, a natural attraction for philosophers, who pillage them freely for illustrations. Humpty-Dumpty, the various Kings and Queens, the Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Unicorn, the Tweedle brothers, the Bellman, the Baker, and the Snark make fleeting appearances in the pages of Russell, Moore, Broad, Quine, Nagel, Austin, Ayer, Ryle, Blanshard, and even Wittgenstein (an unlikely admirer of the Mock Turtle). The first such allusion (to the March Hare) is in Venn’s Symbolic Logic (1881). The usual reasons for quotation are to make some point about meaning, stipulative definition, the logic of negation, time reversal, dream consciousness, the reification of fictions and nonentities, or the absurdities that arise from taking ‘ordinary language’ too literally. (For exponents of word processing, the effect of running Jabberwocky through a spell-checker is to extinguish all hope for the future of Artificial Intelligence.)
Though himself no philosopher, Carroll’s unique sense of philosophic humor keeps him (and his illustrator, Sir John Tenniel) effortlessly alive in the modern age. Alice has been translated into seventy-five languages; new editions and critical studies appear every year; imitations, parodies, cartoons, quotations, and ephemera proliferate beyond number; and Carroll societies flourish in several countries, notably Britain and the United States. P.He.
