contrariwise adv

1 in a contrary disobedient manner [syn: perversely, contrarily]

2 with the order reversed; "she hates him and vice versa" [syn: vice versa, the other way around]

3 contrary to expectations; "he didn't stay home; on the contrary, he went out with his friends" [syn: contrarily, to the contrary, on the contrary]

English

Adverb

1. in the contrary or opposite way, order, or direction
2. on the other hand

Quotations

in the opposite direction

• 1955: Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs. / Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows, / Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise, / A wave drops like a wall: another follows, / Wilting and scrambling — Philip Larkin, 'Absences', from The Less Deceived, 1955

The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson () (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll (/ˈkærəl/), was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman and photographer.

His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass as well as the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky", all considered to be within the genre of literary nonsense.

His facility at word play, logic, and fantasy has delighted audiences ranging from children to the literary elite, and beyond this his work has become embedded deeply in modern culture, directly influencing many artists.

There are societies dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works and the investigation of his life in many parts of the world including North America, Japan, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.

Early life

Antecedents

Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, with Irish connections. Conservative and High Church Anglican, most of Dodgson's ancestors were army officers or Church of England clergymen. His great-grandfather, also Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become a bishop. His grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in 1803 when his two sons were hardly more than babies. His mother's name was Frances Jane Lutwidge.

The elder of these sons — yet another Charles — was Carroll's father. He reverted to the other family business and took holy orders. He went to Rugby School, and thence to Christ Church, Oxford. He was mathematically gifted and won a double first degree, which could have been the prelude to a brilliant academic career. Instead he married his first cousin in 1827 and retired into obscurity as a country parson Young Charles' father was an active and highly conservative clergyman of the Anglican church who involved himself, sometimes influentially, in the intense religious disputes that were dividing the Anglican church. He was High Church, inclining to Anglo-Catholicism, an admirer of Newman and the Tractarian movement, and he did his best to instill such views in his children. Young Charles, however, was to develop an ambiguous relationship with his father's values and with the Anglican church as a whole.

Young Charles

Dodgson was born in the little parsonage of Daresbury in Cheshire, the oldest boy but already the third child of the four-and-a-half year old marriage. Eight more were to follow and, remarkably for the time, all of them — seven girls and four boys (including Edwin H. Dodgson) — survived into adulthood. When Charles was 11, his father was given the living of Croft-on-Tees in north Yorkshire, and the whole family moved to the spacious Rectory. This remained their home for the next twenty-five years.

During the earlier times in his life, young Dodgson was educated at home. His "reading lists" preserved in the family testify to a precocious intellect: at the age of seven the child was reading The Pilgrim's Progress. He also suffered from a stammer — a condition shared by his siblings — that often influenced his social life throughout his years. At twelve he was sent away to a small private school at nearby Richmond, where he appears to have been happy and settled. But in 1846, young Dodgson moved on to Rugby School, where he was evidently less happy, for as he wrote some years after leaving the place:

''I cannot say ... that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again ... I can honestly say that if I could have been ... secure from annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would have been comparative trifles to bear''.

Scholastically, though, he excelled with apparent ease. "I have not had a more promising boy his age since I came to Rugby" observed R.B. Mayor, the Mathematics master.

Oxford

He left Rugby at the end of 1849 and, after an interval that remains unexplained, went on in January 1851 to Oxford, attending his father's old college, Christ Church. He had only been at Oxford two days when he received a summons home. His mother had died of "inflammation of the brain" — perhaps meningitis or a stroke — at the age of forty-seven.

Character and appearance

Physical appearance

The young adult Charles Dodgson was about six feet tall, slender and handsome, with curling brown hair and blue or grey eyes (depending on the account). He was described in later life as somewhat asymmetrical, and as carrying himself rather stiffly and awkwardly, though this may be on account of a knee injury sustained in middle age. As a very young child, he suffered a fever that left him deaf in one ear. At the age of seventeen, he suffered a severe attack of whooping cough, which was probably responsible for his chronically weak chest in later life. Another defect he carried into adulthood was what he referred to as his "hesitation", a stammer he acquired in early childhood and which plagued him throughout his life.

Stammer

The stammer has always been a potent part of the conceptions of Dodgson; it is part of the belief that he stammered only in adult company and was free and fluent with children, but there is no evidence to support this idea. Many children of his acquaintance remembered the stammer while many adults failed to notice it. Dodgson himself seems to have been far more acutely aware of it than most people he met; it is said he caricatured himself as the Dodo in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, referring to his difficulty in pronouncing his last name, but this is one of the many "facts" oft-repeated, for which no firsthand evidence remains. He did indeed refer to himself as the dodo, but that this was a reference to his stammer is simply speculation

Personality

Although Dodgson's stammer troubled him, it was never so debilitating that it prevented him from applying his other personal qualities to do well in society. At a time when people commonly devised their own amusements and when singing and recitation were required social skills, the young Dodgson was well-equipped to be an engaging entertainer. He could sing tolerably well and was not afraid to do so before an audience. He was adept at mimicry and storytelling, and was, reputedly, quite good at charades..

Dodgson the artist

The author

From a young age, Dodgson wrote poetry and short stories, both contributing heavily to the family magazine Mischmasch and later sending them to various magazines, enjoying moderate success. Between 1854 and 1856, his work appeared in the national publications, The Comic Times and The Train, as well as smaller magazines like the Whitby Gazette and the Oxford Critic. Most of this output was humorous, sometimes satirical, but his standards and ambitions were exacting. "I do not think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication (in which I do not include the Whitby Gazette or the Oxonian Advertiser), but I do not despair of doing so some day", he wrote in July 1855 and frequently dedicated his works to girls of his acquaintance and added their names in acrostic poems at the beginning of the text. Gertrude Chataway's name appears in this form at the beginning of The Hunting of the Snark, and no one has ever suggested this means any of the characters in the narrative are based on her .

It was on one such expedition, on July 4 1862, that Dodgson invented the outline of the story that eventually became his first and largest commercial success. Having told the story and been begged by Alice Liddell to write it down, Dodgson eventually (after much delay) presented her with a handwritten, illustrated manuscript entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground in November 1864 exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over fifty percent of his surviving work depicts young girls. He would later use many of his photographs of children in conjunction with his writings to add illustration to his work. Alexandra Kitchin, known as "Xie" (pronounced "Ecksy"), was his favourite photographic subject. From 1869 until he gave up photography in 1880, Dodgson photographed her at least fifty times, ending just before her sixteenth birthday. Less than a third of his original portfolio has survived, however; Dodgson also made many studies of men, women, male children and landscapes; his subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues and paintings, trees, scholars, scientists, old men and little girls. His studies of nude children were long presumed lost, but six have since surfaced, four of which have been published.

He also found photography to be a useful entrée into higher social circles. During the most productive part of his career, he made portraits of notable sitters such as John Everett Millais, Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron, Michael Faraday and Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Another invention is a writing tablet called the Nyctograph for use at night that allowed for note-taking in the dark; thus eliminating the trouble of getting out of bed and striking a light when one wakes with an idea. The device consisted of a gridded card with sixteen squares and system of symbols representing an alphabet of Dodgson's design.

Among the games he devised outside of logic, croquet, billiards and those played on a chess board, there are a number of word games, including an early version of what today is known as Scrabble. He also appears to have invented, or at least certainly popularised, the Word Ladder (or "doublet" as it was known at first); a form of brain-teaser that is still popular today: the game of changing one word into another by altering one letter at a time, each successive change always resulting in a genuine word. For instance, CAT is transformed into DOG by the following steps: CAT, COT, DOT, DOG

He died on January 14 1898 at his sisters' home, 'The Chestnuts' in Guildford, of pneumonia following influenza. He was 2 weeks away from turning 66 years old. He is buried in Guildford at the Mount Cemetery and that Dodgson, most historians would agree, probably used it from time to time, but again there is no evidence he ever used it or that its effects had any impact on his work.

The priesthood

Dodgson had been groomed for the ordained ministry in the Anglican Church from a very early age and was expected, as a condition of his residency at Christ Church, to take holy orders within four years of obtaining his master's degree. However, he evidently became reluctant to do this. He delayed the process for some time but eventually took deacon's orders in December 1861. But when the time came a year later to progress to priestly orders, Dodgson appealed to the dean for permission not to proceed. This was against college rules, and Dean Liddell told him he would very likely have to leave his job if he refused to take orders. He told Dodgson he would have to consult the college ruling body, which would almost undoubtedly have resulted in his being expelled. However, for unknown reasons, Dean Liddell changed his mind and permitted Dodgson to remain at the college, in defiance of the rules. Dodgson never became a priest.

There is currently no conclusive evidence about why Dodgson rejected the priesthood. Some have suggested his stammer made him reluctant to take the step, because he was afraid of having to preach, but this seems unlikely given his willingness to take on other public performances (story-telling, recitations, magic lantern shows), and the fact that he did indeed preach in later life, even though not in orders. Others have suggested that he was having serious doubts about the Anglican church. It is known that he was interested in minority forms of Christianity (he was an admirer of FD Maurice) and "alternative" religions (theosophy). Dodgson was deeply troubled by an unexplained sense of sin and guilt at this time (the early 1860s), and frequently expressed the view in his diaries that he was a "vile and worthless" sinner, unworthy of the priesthood.

The missing diaries

At least four complete volumes and around seven pages of text are missing from Dodgson's 13 diaries. The loss of the volumes remains unexplained; the pages have been deliberately removed by an unknown hand. Most scholars assume the diary material was removed by family members in the interests of preserving the family name, but this has not been proven. All of the missing material, with the exception of a single page, is believed to date from the period between 1853 (when Dodgson was 22) and 1863 (when he was 32).

Many theories have been put forward to explain the missing material. A popular explanation for one particular missing page (June 27, 1863) is that it might have been torn out to conceal the belief that Dodgson had proposed marriage on that day to the 11-year old Alice Liddell. However, there has never been any evidence to suggest this was so, and a paper that came to light in the Dodgson family archive in 1996 provides some evidence to the contrary.

The "Cut Pages in Diary" document

This paper, known as the "cut pages in diary document", was compiled by various members of Carroll's family after his death. Part of it at least was presumably written at the time that some of the pages were being mutilated, as it offers a brief summary of two diary pages that are now missing, including the one for June 27 1863. The summary for this page states that Mrs. Liddell told Dodgson there was gossip circulating about him and the Liddell family's governess, as well as about his relationship with "Ina", presumably Alice's older sister, Lorina Liddell. The "break" with the Liddell family that occurred soon after was presumably in response to this gossip. An alternate interpretation has been made regarding Carroll's rumored involvement with "Ina": Lorina was also the name of Alice Liddell's mother. What is deemed most crucial and surprising is that the entry seems to make it clear Dodgson's break with the family was not connected with Alice at all.

Migraine and Epilepsy

In his diary for the year 1880 Dodgson recorded experiencing his first episode of migraine with aura, describing very accurately the process of 'moving fortifications' that are a manifestation of the aura stage of the syndrome. Given this manifestation, it's possible that he chronically experienced the more common form of migraine, consisting simply of headache and nausea, but no real evidence exists either way, though several people have suggested the odd experiences Alice undergoes in the stories may have been inspired by migraine-like symptoms. Indeed a condition, Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, has been named after it. Also known as micropsia and macropsia, it is a brain condition affecting the way objects are perceived by the mind. For example, an afflicted person may look at a larger object, like a basketball, and perceive it as if it were the size of a mouse.

Dodgson also suffered two attacks in which he lost consciousness. He was diagnosed by two different doctors; a Dr. Morshead believed the attack to be an "epileptiform" seizure. Some have concluded from this he was a lifetime sufferer from this condition, but there is no evidence for it in any of his diaries or letters, and it would seem unlikely for this to be the case if he had indeed suffered generalized seizures.. However, according to Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, Carroll may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy in which consciousness is not always completely lost, but altered, and in which the patient experiences many of the same experiences as Alice in Wonderland; Ranson-Polizzotti writes about this in detail in her article "What About Lewis Carroll". More of Ranson-Polizzotti's articles can be found at "Lewis Carroll on Tant Mieux".

Suggestions of Paedophilia

Dodgson's friendships with young girls, together with his perceived lack of interest in romantic attachments to adult women, and psychological readings of his work — especially his photographs of nude or semi-nude girls — have all led to speculation that he was, in modern parlance, a paedophile. This possibility has underpinned numerous modern interpretations of his life and work, particularly Dennis Potter's play Alice and his screenplay for the motion picture, Dreamchild, and a number of recent biographies, including Michael Bakewell's Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1996), Donald Thomas's Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background (1996) and Morton N. Cohen's Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1995). All of these works more or less unequivocally assume that Dodgson was a paedophile, albeit a repressed and celibate one.

Cohen claims Dodgson's "sexual energies sought unconventional outlets", and further writes:

''We cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Charles's preference for drawing and photographing children in the nude. He contended the preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his emotional attachment to children as well as his aesthetic appreciation of their forms, his assertion that his interest was strictly artistic is naive. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself.''

Cohen notes that Dodgson "apparently convinced many of his friends that his attachment to the nude female child form was free of any eroticism", but adds that "later generations look beneath the surface" (p. 229).

Cohen and other biographers argue that Dodgson may have wanted to marry the 11-year old Alice Liddell and that this was the cause of the unexplained "break" with the family in June 1863. But there has never been significant evidence to support the idea, and the 1996 discovery of the "cut pages in diary document" (see above) might imply that the 1863 "break" had less to do with Alice, but was perhaps connected with rumors involving her older sister Lorina, or possibly their governess.

Some writers, e.g., Derek Hudson and Roger Lancelyn Green, who have fallen short of accepting Dodgson as a paedophile, have tended to concur that he had a passion for small female children and next to no interest in the adult world.

"The Carroll Myth"

The accepted view of Dodgson's biography has been challenged recently by a group of scholars led by Hugues Lebailly and Karoline Leach who argue that Dodgson's diaries and letters reveal him to have been very different in many key aspects from the traditional image. Leach's book, In the Shadow of the Dream Child, in particular has raised a considerable amount of controversy.

Lebailly has endeavoured to set Dodgson's child-photography within the "Victorian Child Cult", which perceived child-nudity as essentially an expression of innocence. Lebailly claims that studies of child nudes were mainstream and fashionable in Dodgson's time and that most photographers, including Oscar Rejlander and Julia Margaret Cameron, made them as a matter of course. Lebailly continues that child nudes even appeared on Victorian Christmas cards — implying a very different social and aesthetic assessment of such material. Lebailly concludes that it has been an error of Dodgson's biographers to view his child-photography with 20th or 21st century eyes, and to have presented it as some form of personal idiosyncrasy, when it was in fact a response to a prevalent aesthetic and philosophical movement of the time.

Leach posed a new analysis of Dodgson's sexuality. She argues that the allegations of paedophilia rose initially from a misunderstanding of Victorian morals, as well as the mistaken idea, fostered by Dodgson's various biographers, that he had no interest in adult women. She termed the traditional image of Dodgson "the Carroll Myth".She asserts his diaries show he was also keenly interested in adult women, married and single, and enjoyed several scandalous (by the social standards of his time) relationships with them. In later life many of those he described as "child-friends" were girls in their late teens and even twenties.. She argues that suggestions of paedophilia evolved only many years after his death, when his well-meaning family had suppressed all evidence of his relationships with women in an effort to preserve his reputation, thus giving a false impression of a man interested only in little girls. Similarly, Leach traces the claim that many of Carroll's female friendships ended when the girls reached the age of 14 to a 1932 biography by Langford Reed, who Leach claims intended to suggest from this that Dodgson was a "pure man" untainted by sexual desire.

The concept of the Carroll Myth has been opposed by some leading Carroll scholars, in particular Morton Cohen and Martin Gardner.

Works

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (includes Jabberwocky)
• The Hunting of the Snark
• Rhyme? And Reason? (also published as Phantasmagoria)
• A Tangled Tale
• Sylvie and Bruno
• Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
• Three Sunsets and Other Poems
• Pillow Problems
• The Game of Logic
• Symbolic Logic Part I
• Symbolic Logic Part II (published posthumously)
• An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equations
• What the Tortoise Said to Achilles
• Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1879)
• Facts
• He thought he saw an elephant

See also

• Barbershop paradox
• Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend: deals with the unusual idea that Carroll may have been the Ripper.
• Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll: An upcoming film based on the life of Lewis Carroll, directed by Marilyn Manson.
• Lewis Carroll on Tant Mieux A collection of articles by S. Ranson-Polizzotti and note of forthcoming book, summer, 2008.

Notes

References

• Bowman, Isa (1899), The Story of Lewis Carroll, Told by the Real Alice in Wonderland, London: Dent
• Cohen, Morton N. (1995), Lewis Carroll: A Biography, London: Macmillan
• Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson (1898), The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, London: T. Fisher Unwin
• Graham-Smith, Darien (2005), Contextualising Carroll, University of Wales, Bangor: PhD Thesis (http://library.bangor.ac.uk/search/Xcontextualising&searchscope=5&b=&SORT=A&l=&m=&Da=&Db=&p=/Xcontextualising&searchscope=5&b=&SORT=A&l=&m=&Da=&Db=&p=/1%2C19%2C19%2CB/frameset&FF=Xcontextualising&SORT=A&4%2C4%2C)
• Huxley, Francis (1976), The Raven and the Writing Desk. (ISBN 0-06-012113-0).
• Kelly, Richard, Lewis Carroll. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990.
• Kelly, Richard, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
• Leach, Karoline (1999), In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll, London: Peter Owen Publishers
• Lennon, Florence Becker (1947), Lewis Carroll, London: Cassell
• Reed, Langford (1932), The Life of Lewis Carroll, London: W. and G. Foyle
• Sunghyun Kim, 'Political Unconscious in Fantastic Narrative: Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland(Korean)', Yonsei University Graduate School, 2005
• Taylor, Alexander L., Knight (1952), The White Knight, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd
• Taylor, Roger & Wakeling, Edward, Lewis Carroll, Photographer, 2002 (Catalogues nearly every Carroll photograph known to be still in existence.)
• Wullschläger, Jackie, Inventing Wonderland, (ISBN 0-7432-2892-8) — also looks at Edward Lear (of the "nonsense" verses), J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan), Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows), and A. A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh).
• n.n., Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll. Yale University Press & SFMOMA, 2004. (Places Carroll firmly in the art photography tradition.)

External links

• Looking for Lewis Carroll
• The Lewis Carroll Society
• Lewis Carroll Society of North America
• Lewis Carroll at victorianweb.org
• Contrariwise; the Association for New Lewis Carroll Studies
• The Photography of Lewis Carroll (selected colourised plates from his child photography)
• [http://research.hrc.utexas.edu:8080/hrcxtf/view?docId=ead/00284.xml&query=carroll,%20lewis&query-join=and Lewis Carroll Collection] at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin