Resumo de Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

The most interesting historical aspect of the Alice books is,
undoubtedly, their remarkable creator.?Lewis Carroll, the author of
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, was really the
pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a professor of mathematics at
Oxford University, England.?Born in 1832, Dodgson spent most of his
life in the university; he went to study in Oxford's Christ Church
College when he was nineteen, and after receiving his B.A. was quickly
made a lecturer (a tutor, or professor).? Partly to comply with his
job requirements, he became a clergyman, becoming a deacon of the
Church of England at twenty-nine.? But he decided not to go on to
become a full-fledged priest, and never married, spending the rest of
his life as a bachelor mathematician among the towers of Oxford.So
who was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson??He was a strange but internally
consistent character.? He had been a brilliant student of mathematics,
and became a respected, if not innovative, teacher in that field.?He
was obsessed with puzzles and logic games, and published dozens of
pamphlets and booklets about them in his lifetime; he was a
good-natured but shy person, reported to have been handsome but
awkward, deaf in one ear, with a tendency to stammer, and with a habit
of talking on and on about his hobbies.? Add to this mix his private
life -- his interest in the then-new art of photography, his brilliant
gift for nonsense verse, and his enormous love of little girls -- and
we begin to see what an interesting figure this Victorian math geek
was.Dodgson lived a fairly reclusive, though seemingly happy,
life.? He didn't travel much outside the walls of Oxford, and he
entertained himself by inventing new ways of solving mathematical
puzzles and making friends with little girls.?In the summer of 1862,
Dodgson and another Oxford clergyman went on a trip up the river, in a
rowboat, with the three young daughters of the dean of their college --
Alice, Lorina, and Edith Liddell.?As usual, Dodgson told the children a
story as they went along.? But that afternoon, Alice Liddell requested
that he write it down for her, and the rest is history.?In 1865, the
revised version of Dodgson's story was published, under the pseudonym
of Lewis Carroll, as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.? By the time
Carroll died in 1898, his works were the most popular children's books
in England.There aren't many historical references in Alice in
Wonderland (unlike its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, which
contains several characters based on English political history).?Still,
the very texture of the book -- full of events like tea parties,
croquet games, and awkward encounters with royalty -- are so rooted in
Victorian English culture that they can seem very foreign to a modern
American reader. The book is full of nineteenth-century words (what's a
comfit?), and many characters are based on common sayings or ideas of
Carroll's day.? (You can find these explained in the section on
Characters.)? Moreover, Alice's running conversation with herself tells
us about certain aspects of Victorian childhood education: we notice
her study of Latin, her (mediocre) knowledge of geography, and the
improving moral poems which she had to memorize (and which Carroll
enjoyed subverting in his own irreverent versions.)?/span>But
although the flavor of Carroll's culture permeates Alice in Wonderland,
the events which framed Lewis Carroll's England in a larger historical
context -- the long rule of Queen Victoria, the American Civil War, the
prominence of writers such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot -- fail
to show up inside Alice's fantasy world, much as Carroll himself
preferred to retreat behind the protective walls of Christ Church
College in Oxford University.? And probably, to children reading the
Alice books with their governesses in their cozy English nurseries,
this was just as well.

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