The brilliance of Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll has always been a writer who I go back to in order to escape the real world and because of his vivid imagination, he is someone I aspire to be like. 

One of my favourite books is Alice in Wonderland but it's not until recently that I learned that Lewis Carroll and I have something in common; we both stutter. I find Lewis Carroll's life story so intriguing, who is the man behind my favourite book? What was his relationship with his own stutter? And how did his stutter affect his work?

A little bit about the author;

One thing that intrigues me about Lewis Carroll is that he didn’t use his own name for his work. Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in the year 1832, in Chesire, England. (Could the reason be that he struggled to say his own name, therefore he changed it to something he could say?) He was the eldest son of eleven siblings; most of whom stuttered. Carroll's father was a Church of England cleric, which I believe is significant because Carroll’s stutter; ‘Upon one occasion he accepted the invitation to preach and recalled, "I got through it all with great success, till I came to read out the first verse where the two words ‘strife, strengthened’ coming together were too much for me, and I had to leave the verse unfinished.” Carroll's stutter, seemed to prevent him from doing the things he wanted to do, such as performing his clerical duties and even pursuing a career in teaching, which he eventually did achieve. He did, however, demonstrate a tremendous writing talent, which is why he is so well-known today.

Isolation and Intelligence;

As almost every person who stutters has experienced; Carroll went through bouts of isolation because of his stutter, which he called his 'hesitation'. It's important to remember that back in Carroll's day, stuttering wasn't addressed nearly as much as it is now, and because Carroll focused on fluency rather than learning to accept his speech, he tended to carry a great deal of shame. As a result, he struggled with feelings of isolation, which inevitably affected his self-esteem and confidence.

However, as a person who stutters, Carroll used his stutter to his advantage in relation to language; ‘Most probably Carroll used the phenomenon of stuttering…as a literary device, as a kind of positive contribution to the language in reaction to the negative influence of the stuttering on his personality.’  I believe this means two things: Carroll had a large vocabulary range due to his stutter; and, in my opinion, Carroll presumably switched his words around a lot to avoid stuttering, resulting in him learning more words than he needed to know. Another fascinating aspect of Carroll's stutter and language is that he used nonsense language, which essentially subverts language conventions or logical reasoning into a comprehensible language form. The reason for this, I believe, is that separating words from their meanings implies that words and phrases are empty, so why should it matter how the words are said if they have no meaning?

Alice in Wonderland (1865)

One character that Carroll created in order to symbolise his struggle with his stutter is The Dodo from Alice in Wonderland. It is noted that the character of The Dodo came from Carroll’s inability to pronounce his real name of Charles Dodgson and frequently being forced to pronounce his surname “do-do-Dodgson.”

There are other references to Carroll’s stutter which feature in Alice in Wonderland, including the following statement from the Red Queen to Alice; ‘It's time for you to answer now,' the Queen said, looking at her watch, 'Open your mouth a little wider when you speak...’ ‘Look up, speak nicely, and don't twiddle your fingers’ ‘Think before you speak.  Write it down afterward!’ This passage contains similar ideas to those commonly associated with people who stutter, such as ‘Take your time' or ‘Breathe.'

What Lewis Carroll has taught me;

This can be summarised in one statement; he taught me that I didn’t have to make sense of the world, nor the world make sense of me in order to be accepted. Alice in Wonderland is essentially about a child’s struggle to survive in the adult world but in relation to stuttering, this novel has elements of Carroll’s struggle to survive in a world of fluency.

A poem that Lewis Carroll wrote which describes his feelings about his stutter