Complete Alice in Wonderland - L. Carroll [157]
January 27, 1832: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is born.
1846: Edward Lear (using the pseudonym Derry Down Derry) publishes A Book of Nonsense. This work likely had a significant influence on Carroll’s own literary style.
1846: “The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains,” by Friedrich de la Motte Foqué, is translated into English by Menella Bute Smedley (a relative of Carroll). This tale, about a gryphon slayer who returns to be praised by a duke, may inspire Carroll to write his “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry” (and therefore “Jabberwocky”).
1848: The English Struwwelpeter, by Heinrich Hoffman, is published. This darkly humorous work, with its subversive descriptions of grim punishments suffered by unruly children, was certainly one of Carroll’s inspirations. (It is strongly alluded to when Alice is considering whether the “Drink Me” bottle is filled with poison.)
May 4, 1852: Alice Pleasance Liddell is born.
February, 1855: Carroll meets the new Dean, Henry Liddell (Alice’s father). (Mr. Liddell will later be the inspiration for the Crab of the Underwater School in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.)
August, 1855: Carroll reads Tennyson’s “Maud” (which he will later allude to in The Garden of Live Flowers chapter of Through the Looking-Glass).
September 8, 1855: The Comic Times publishes Dodgson’s poem, “She’s All My Fancy Painted Him,” which will later appear in a revised form in the trial scene of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Late 1855?: Dodgson writes “A Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” which will later become the first verse of “Jabberwocky.”
February 9, 1856: Carroll writes the following in his diary, which seems to presage the tale he will tell in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Query: when we are dreaming and, as often happens, have a dim consciousness of the fact and try to wake, do we not say and do things which in waking life would be insane? May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: ‘sleep hath its own world,’ and it is often as lifelike as the other.”
February 11 to March 1, 1856: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson creates the nom de plume by which the world will always know him, Lewis (Lutwidge/Ludovicus) Carroll (Charles/Carolus).
February 25, 1856: Dodgson meets the Liddell family at the Oxford boat races.
March 6, 1856: Carroll makes friends with Harry Liddell, Alice’s brother. (Harry may be the model of the Jabberwock slayer in “Jabberwocky,” comparing his pose in one of Carroll’s photographs; but this is speculation.)
March 8, 1856: Carroll makes friends with Lorina Liddell, Alice’s elder sister. (Lorina is featured in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as the sister on the bank, the Lory, and Elsie.)
April 25, 1856: Carroll meets young Alice Pleasance.
Late April?, 1856: Carroll first photographs the Liddell sisters in the Deanery garden. (This garden would later be the inspiration for the croquet-ground in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.)
October, 1856: Carroll publishes the poem “Upon the Lonely Moor,” which will later become the song of the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass.
November 3, 1856: Carroll meets the governess of the Liddell children, Miss Prickett. (Miss Prickett is probably the model for the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, considering Carroll’s comments on the nature and demeanor of governesses.)
September, 1857 and April, 1859: Carroll meets the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson. (Arguably, Carroll may have been inspired to create the peculiar format of his later poem, “The Mouse’s Tale,” due to a curious discussion with Tennyson. His meeting with Tennyson’s son Hallam may have inspired the later portrayal of the Jabberwock slayer. More likely, the Bellman as illustrated in Carroll’s later book The Hunting of the Snark may be a caricature of Tennyson.)
October, 1857: Carroll meets the artist John Ruskin. (Ruskin