Learn well your grammar, / And never stammer, Write well and neatly, / And sing most sweetly. ..... Drink tea, not coffee; / Never eat toffy. Eat bread with butter. / Once more, don't stutter.
The mathematician Charles Dodgson, who indeed suffered from stammering, wrote those lines when he was 13, and they anticipate his later nonsense verse, such as:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch."
Dodgson was the oldest boy of 11 children of the Rev.Dodgson, the big family surely having some bearing on the lifelong ease with which he got on with kids.
As a math major at Christchurch, Oxford, he began contributing poems and stories to magazines, using the pen name 'Lewis Carroll.' After earning a 1st Class Honors degree in Mathematics he was appointed 'Lecturer in Mathematics', and his first published book was "A syllabus of plane algebraic geometry."
Dodgson was about 30 when he and another Oxford Fellow happened to take the three small daughters of a friend on a trip down the river, with Dodgson concocting a story about a little girl called Alice. Afterwards, the children beseeched him to write it down.
"I only took the regular course," said the mock turtle with a sigh. "What was that?" enquired Alice. "Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with ... then Drawling -- the Drawling Master was an old conger-eel ... he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils" ...
Seven years later Dodgson's sequel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There was published.
His mathematical works are less well-known: A Treatise on Determinants came out shortly after Alice; the work Euclid Book V Proved Algebraically; The Game of Logic in 1887, and Curiosa Mathematica Part II in 1893 [ref.2,p.359]. His Pillow Problems was a book of math puzzles for insomniacs.
His nonsense verse lives on, more than 150 years after being penned:
He thought he saw an Elephant, / That practised on a fife; He looked again, and found it was / A letter from his wife. "At length I realize," he said , / "The bitterness of Life."
In later years the Alice books became very popular, and were translated into scores of languages.
In 1936, the NYTimes quoted a Dr Paul Schilder as saying that Lewis Carroll's writings portrayed '... enormous anxiety' and 'oral sadistic traits', and declared Alice in Wonderland unsuitable for children.
"Now for the evidence," said the King, "and then the sentence. "No!" said the Queen, "first the sentence and then the evidence!"
and:
"You are old, Father William", the young man said, "And your hair has become very white; And yet you incessantly stand on your head -- Do you think, at your age, it is right?"
Well, can't please everyone I guess. Dodgson died of bronchial pneumonia after the publication of his Symbolic Logic, Part I, at the age of 66. Interestingly, his Symbolic Logic, Part II was published only 40 years ago, in 1976.
Finally, the above has been a shorter version of my essay that aired in 2002.
References:
1. Lewis Carroll, revised edition, by Richard Kelly; Twayne Publishers, Boston, MA; 1990.
2. The Life of Lewis Carroll, by Florence B. Lennon; Simon & Schuster, NY; 1945.
3. The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll, ed by E.Guilliano; Avenel Books, Crown Publishers, NY; 1982.
4. World Book Encyclopedia, year 2000.
Dr. David Nightingale is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the State University of New York at New Paltz and is the co-author of the text, A Short Course in General Relativity.
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