The Story Little Alice Heard From Lewis Carroll

Chances are, if you have children or grandchildren, or perhaps a memory from your own childhood, there is one single great children's book (or the movie about it) that we are all familiar with. However, the odds are even greater that the author, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is someone you've never heard of even if you still own the book.

On the title pages of his books we know this most celebrated of modern fairy story tellers as Lewis Carroll, but in real life he had a different and less attractive name -- Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. His pen name, however, is where he became one of the most well known authors of stories for boys and girls.

Just about everybody has, of course, read Alice in Wonderland, and perhaps his other fairy books as well -- Through the Looking Glass, The Hunting of the Snark, and Sylvie and Bruno. It is quite unnecessary to recall the names of the many strange characters, such as the Mad Hatter, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the White Rabbit, the Mock Turtle, and the rest of that varied throng with which every boy and girl, once having found them, loses no time in making acquaintance.

However, what sort of man was he from whose brain of teeming fancies these strange and delightful features came? Should we picture him a jolly, middle-aged gentleman, leading a life free from care, and happiest with his children round his knees, telling stories?

Such a picture would be curiously far from fact, for Lewis Carroll was in certain ways as unusual a character as some of his own fairy folk. In the first place, he was, of all things in the world, a mathematician, and lectured at Oxford University on that science which is the terror of most young scholars. Perhaps it was because he spent so much time over difficult problems in mathematics that he liked to clear and refresh his brain with humorous thoughts and happy fancies, which he turned into the form of fantastic stories for the amusement of the children of his friends.

Maybe it was because he was just a little "moody," being sometimes rather a dull companion to grown-ups, and although he was sixty-six years of age at the time of his death, on January 14, 1898 -- he had never been married. However, though he was an "old bachelor" for many years before his death, he was a comparatively young one when he wrote his immortal story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, first published in 1865.

It is most interesting to know how he came to write this story. There really was a little girl named Alice, one of many little girls who were delighted when Lewis Carroll came to visit their parents, as they had never any difficulty in getting him to tell a story.

The real Alice was a daughter of Dean Liddell, and she herself told of how this captivating tale was first begun to entertain three little English girls, all on a pleasant summer afternoon.

It was well reported by the real Alice the following:

"Most of Mr. Dodgson's stories, she later said, "were told to us on river expeditions to Nuneham or Godstow, near Oxford. My eldest sister, was Prima, I was Secunda, and Tertia, was my sister Edith. I believe the beginning of "Alice" was told one summer afternoon when the sun was so burning that we had landed in the meadows down the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a new made hayrick. Here from all three, came the old petition of 'Tell us a story!' and so began the ever-delightful tale."

"Sometimes, to tease us and perhaps being really tired -- Mr. Dodgson would stop suddenly and say, 'And that's all till next time.' "Ah, but it is next time!' would be the exclamation from all three, and after some persuasion, the story would start afresh. Another day, perhaps, the story would begin in the boat, and Mr. Dodgson, in the middle of telling a thrilling adventure, would pretend to go fast asleep, to our great dismay."

Is that not a pretty story of how the gate of imagination was opened that leads us into Wonderland? Lewis Carroll himself has told others of that afternoon when little Alice Liddell and her sisters first induced him to begin describing Wonderland, for at the opening of his book we read of it in these lively verses:

"All in the golden afternoon

Full leisurely we glide;

For both our oars, with little skill,

By little arms are plied;

While little hands make vain pretence

Our wanderings to guide.

Ah, cruel Three -- In such an hour,

Beneath such dreamy weather,

To beg a tale of breath too weak

To stir the tiniest feather!

Yet what can one poor voice avail

Against three tongues together? . . . .

It would be easy to go on to tell so many stories about this dear friend of the little girls, but there is this one story that reveals a poignant aspect to his life that begs to be told.

He was traveling in a railway carriage one day with a lady and her little daughter, neither of whom he knew. The girl was reading his famous book, and he, who had always pretended that Mr. Dodgson was no relation of Mr. Lewis Carroll, began talking to the little reader about Alice in Wonderland. At this, her mother joined in and said:

"Isn't it sad about poor Mr. Lewis Carroll? He's gone mad, you know."

"Indeed," said the astonished author, "I had not heard that."

"Oh, I assure you, it is quite true: I have it on the best authority!"

A few days later, the little girl received a copy of Through the Looking Glass, inscribed with her name and the words: "From the author, in memory of a pleasant journey."

Finally, one last peek into the man who has delighted so many children. It needs to be remembered that it was not only to little girls that Lewis Carroll told his stories. Little boys also were his friends, and one of these was Greville Macdonald, whom he almost convinced on one occasion, that it would be an excellent thing to have a marble head, as there would then be no need to comb his hair!

The father of Greville Macdonald, was a very famous man -- a great preacher, a poet and the author of many fine novels. His name was George Macdonald. He, too, was one who knew the fairies. Though he did not invent such strange and amusing characters as Lewis Carroll has imagined for us, yet he wrote man books of fairy tales, such as:

At the Back of the North Wind

The Princess and the Goblin

Even though Lewis Carroll joked with him about needing a marble head, George Macdonald's son, Greville became a famous physician and always spoke fondly of the man who found him so gullible to have almost believed such a wild tale.