Lewis Carroll and His Illustrators

Carroll's words and images created art so radical and variously appealing that it could, did, and does bring many kinds of readers to look with fresh wonder at the structure and meaning of experience. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), the shy, eccentric bachelor, mathematician, logician, Oxford don, and cleric, made up tales for little girls, turned them into books by Lewis Carroll-his pen name-and, in doing so, astonishingly expanded the possibilities for art, fiction, and speculative thought. In creating the Alice texts, he became a master of what we might call a stream of unconsciousness that others could tap into and use. He points the way to both modernism and postmodernism, but he is also a writer who shows the fact and importance of the emergence in the nineteenth century of children as subjects in the enterprise of fiction-a key cultural fact that deserves recognition and attention. Carroll's Alice is, after all, the most famous child in nineteenthcentury prose. She de-centers, de-constructs, and de-familiarizes the Victorian universe ...»