Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

A selective list of literary criticism for the British Victorian poet and children's writer Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the Modern Language Association Guidelines for Authors of Web Pages

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Literary Criticism

Ben-Zvi, Pinhas. "Lewis Carroll and the Search for Non-Being." Carroll was fascinated by the question of whether non-being, like being, exists, the author of this paper contends. The Philosopher, Volume LXXXX No. 1

Burstein, Mark. "To Stop a Bandersnatch." Burstein discusses the many interpretations of the Alice books. Lewis Carroll Society of N. America

Cohen, Morton N. Publisher's blurb for Lewis Carroll and His Illustrators (Cornell Univ. Press, 2003)

Green, Laura. "Alice in Mirrorland: Every age finds its own obsessions reflected in Lewis Carroll's fearless little girl." An engaging essay by Professor Green in Salon Magazine, July 1997

Hidalgo, Laura. "Alice In Pragmaticland: Reference, Deixis And The Delimitation Of Text Worlds In Lewis Carroll's Alice Books," Patterns in Discourse and Text (1998)

Kaighin , Errol D. "Alice and the Knockdown Argument." Quadrant Magazine, Volume XLVII Number 2 (January-February 2003) (moved or removed from Quadrant Online)

Leach, Karoline. A review of In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll (Peter Owen/Dufour). The reviewer notes "Leach's heretical thesis, which scandalizes and enrages orthodox Carrollians, is that C.L. Dodgson was primarily interested not in little girls but in sexually mature women." Reviewed by August A. Imholtz, Jr. in Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2000; another review, "The Close Reader" from the NYTimes, 4/7/02

Lopez, Alan. "Deleuze with Carroll" on the philosophy of Lewis Carroll's nonsense. Angelaki, Vol. 9, 3 (Dec. 2004)

Lovell-Smith, R. "The Animals of Wonderland: Tenniel as Carroll's Reader." Criticism, Fall, 2003

Lucas, J.R. Lukas comments on Lewis Carroll briefly as a mathematician and logician. A talk given in St Mary's, Guildford, on May 17th, 1998

Milpas, Simon. "'I cried "Come, tell me how you live!/ And thumped him on the head': Wordsworth, Carroll and the 'Aged, Aged Man,'" Romanticism on the Net 5 (Feb. 1997)

McLuhan, Marshall. "Bosch, Alice in Wonderland, and MAD Magazine." Understanding Media (1964)

Oates, J.C. Noted novelist writes about how she was affected by the Alice stories

Rexer, Lyle. "Dodgson in wonderland: a traveling show, currently at New York's ICP, and two new books revive the question of intent behind the photographic work of Lewis Carroll." Art in America, June, 2003

Robson, Catherine. Sample chapter from Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton Univ. Press, 2001). Masculinity and literature, the relationship between middle-class men and little girls in nineteenth-century British culture, covers William Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, and Lewis Carroll.

Shetter, William Z. "Curiouser and Curiouser: The language world Alice blunders into." Language Miniatures, #18 (1999) (removed).

Woolf, Jenny. "Lewis Carroll's Bank Account," an annotated study of the records from Lewis Carroll's bank account, 1856-1900, revealing his attitudes about spending and money.

Introductory, Overview, Unsigned Material

The Poetry Foundation has an excellent encyclopedia-type article on Lewis Carroll. The Poetry Foundation is a highly reliable, outstanding poetry resource on the internet.

The Victorian Web has essays on Lewis Carroll's writing techniques, themes, biography, and the Victorian background

"But there are no such things as words." Lexemes, morphemes, and "Jaberwocky." From Alphadictionary

Discussion questions on the Alice books, from the North East Wales Institute of Higher Education

A brief introduction to Lewis Carroll from the Academy of American Poets

Photos and Web Sites

An online exhibit from the Univ. of Texas presents unusual artifacts from Carroll's childhood and his interest in logic, mathematics, and puzzles, along with his photographs

An extensive portfolio of Carroll's photographs in the Princeton Univ. Rare Book collection can be seen in thumbnails

Approximately 15 photos taken by Carroll can be seen at this web site devoted to his photography

Web site for the UK Lewis Carroll Society

The Lewis Carroll web site from the Lewis Carroll Society of North America

Section on Lewis Carroll from a class on children's literature at Rutgers U, with discussion questions

Victorian cultural and historical context

"Victorianism." The Victorian Web. Ed. George P. Landow. Essays topics include Victorianism as a Fusion of Neoclassical and Romantic Ideas; The Complex Realities of Victorianism; Main Currents in Victorian Intellectual History; The fundamental conflicts of Victorian poetry; Density and Elaborate Interconnectedness of High and Late Victorian culture; The Difficulties of Victorian Poetry; Victorian Doubt and Victorian Architecture; Victorian taste; Victorian Design; Race in Thought and Science; Victorian Earnestness; The Seaside in the Victorian Literary Imagination; Tennyson and Victorianism; The Victorian Gentleman; Crisis of Organized Religion; Queen Victoria.

"Monuments and Dust." Eds. Michael Levenson, David Trotter, Anthony Wohl. IATH, U of Va. A project by an international group of scholars who are creating a complex visual, textual, and statistical representation of Victorian London.

Jackson, Lee. "A Dictionary of Victorian London." Victorian social history through a "dictionary" of Victorian institutions.

"Darwin Correspondence Project." Eds. Jim Secord, Janet Browne. Online database of Charles Darwin's correspondence. The Darwin Correspondence Project was begun in 1974 by Frederick Burkhardt with the aid of zoologist Sydney Smith. It is now a searchable, online, open access database that includes complete transcripts of Darwin's letters and letters written to him, staffed by researchers and editors based in the UK at Cambridge University Library, home of the largest existing collection of Darwin's manuscripts, and in the US.

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