Author: Lewis Carroll
Publisher: Macmillan
Rating: WORTHY!
Read Perfectly by Jim Dale.
According to wikipedia. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a writer, a mathematician, an Anglican deacon and photographer. He married Frances Jane Lutwidge, who was his first cousin, and he became a parson. He learned math from his father and after completing his schooling, he taught at Christ Church College. He was talked into writing Alice's adventures by Alice Liddell, one of three daughters of the Dean of Christ Church. He had told the girls, Alice, Edith, and Lorina, a story which at Alice's bidding he wrote down by hand, illustrated, and gave it to her in 1864. Its title then was Alice's Adventures Under Ground.
The story became his most popular work and lent fame to his pseudonym around the world. It begins with Alice sitting with her sister, slightly bored, when she espies a white rabbit running by, talking to itself and carrying a fob watch. She follows it down the infamous rabbit hole and falls almost endlessly until she lands in a room.
From this point onwards, the bizarre fantasy unfolds, with Alice almost constantly changing size by various means. Usually this is achieved by drinking a potion or eating cake or a bit of a giant (to her) mushroom, but at the end of the story she begins to grow again without intake of any food or drink.
The story is fantastical and oddball, with curious and amusing talking creatures, and weird events,but I have to say that the lengths to which some so-called scholars people have gone to try to "analyze" his nonsense is as laughable as it is pathetic.
It's just a nonsensical children's story written for the sake of it. Dodgson wasn't sitting in a boat telling this tale to the three Liddell sisters as social commentary, or a mathematical treatise. He was just telling a story for goodness sakes! It has no deeper meaning.
Yes, Dodgson was a mathematician and a product of his era, but that doesn't mean he consciously sought to imbue a whimsical children's story with profound concepts or societal commentary - it merely means that he is like all writers: they write what they know and they invent concepts out of this knowledge, more than likely unconsciously. It's more absurd than what Dodgson wrote to philosophize about something which had no deeper meaning than Dodgson's desire to amuse and entertain the children.
That said, I recommend this book for a bit of fun and nonsense. It's inventive and entertaining and worth reading at least once. The audio book was only three CDs which went by effortlessly. Jim Dale, who I praised for his inventive reading of Around the World in Eighty Days does a masterful job here, too.
