A hurried White Rabbit, a queen handing out sentences, a cat whose grin remains suspended in the air: a few images are enough to enter Alice’s world. We often know these characters before we have even read the book. Yet behind this universe that seems ruled by chance stands a man of logic, numbers and proofs. That contrast is what fascinates me about Lewis Carroll: how did a mathematician invent one of literature’s most bewildering journeys?
A Mathematician Named Dodgson
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born in England in 1832. He taught mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and published works on subjects including geometry and logic. His intellectual life cannot be neatly divided into a serious side and a whimsical one. Riddles, paradoxes and unexpected lines of reasoning move between the two. For him, playing with words sometimes seems like another way of doing mathematics.
In 1862, during a boating trip with the Liddell sisters, he told a story to Alice Liddell and her companions. The tale took shape as a manuscript before becoming Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865. The book is nothing like a lesson in disguise. It moves through surprises, changes of scale and impossible conversations. Yet every absurdity seems to follow its own rule, like a game whose instructions we discover while playing.
Wonder Has Its Rules
In Alice, words slip away, questions change meaning and the simplest certainties become fragile. Who am I if I keep growing and shrinking? What is a rule worth when the person stating it changes it to suit themselves? Beneath the humor, Carroll delights in shifting the foundations of thought. The reader laughs, but is also compelled to think differently.
In 1871, Through the Looking-Glass continued that exploration, drawing in part on the structure of a chess game. The mirror becomes a passage into a world where familiar relationships are reversed. I love the idea that imagination is not the opposite of logic, but a laboratory in which we can bend it, test it and look at it from another angle.
Words, Images and a Lasting Legacy
Carroll also practiced photography, especially portraiture, at a time when the medium required patience and preparation. He paid close attention to staging and composition. The images of Alice owe much to illustrator John Tenniel, whose drawings for the early editions helped establish the enduring appearance of the Hatter, the White Rabbit and so many other characters. The meeting of an exuberant text and precise illustration is part of the book’s power.
Carroll died in 1898, leaving work that continues to inspire writers, illustrators, filmmakers and artists. Alice does not need everything to be explained in order to speak to us. She reminds us that an absurd question can open a serious line of thought, and that a simple drawing can become a doorway to an entire world. Perhaps the other side of the looking-glass is not so far away: it begins whenever we agree to see things differently.
