One Golden Afternoon

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Few days have ever proved as richly, fortuitously frabjous as the beamish afternoon of July 4, 1862. It was a century ago this week, between lunch and brillig, that the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and a friend rowed three small sisters up the River Isis and came upon Wonderland.

A quarter-century later, Lewis Carroll, as the world by then called Dodgson, still remembered "that golden afternoon almost as clearly as if it were yesterday and the three eager faces, hungry for news of fairy-land." There had been many such outings, and many other reports from fairyland for ten-year-old Alice and her sisters. But on this day. Alice Liddell recalled, "the stories must have been better than usual," and she pleaded to the lonely, gawky mathematics master: "Oh, Mr.

Dodgson, I wish you would write out Alice's adventures for me." Two Men. Next day, on a train trip to London, Lewis Carroll drew up chapter headings for the book he originally called Alice's Adventures Underground. Illustrated by the great Sir John Tenniel, and expanded and rewritten, the first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland reached Alice exactly three years later. It was an immediate hit. and with its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, earned Carroll an affluence he did not want and the fame he detested. An aloof, high-strung eccentric, he insisted for the rest of his life that there was no connection between Lewis Carroll and Charles Dodgson, whose erudite treatises on mathematics and logic* were forgotten almost as quickly as his rules for Circular Billiards and the Dodgson Nyctograph, an invention for taking notes in the dark.

Today, for all his hatred of "lionization," even the dustiest pamphlet by Dodgson fetches a fortune at auction.

The Lewis Carroll Handbook, by Roger Lancelyn Green, lists no fewer than 561 memorabilia on or by the enigmatic Oxford don. The Alice adventures and The Hunting of the Snark have given the language a host of full-blooded words such as chortle, galumphing and burble. Learned Carrollian treatises include farfetched Freudian analyses, one of which purports to show that Dodgson suffered from a "reversal of unresolved Oedipal attachment." In the untidy, inventive White Knight, who of all Carroll's characters is the only one who shows affection for Alice, scholars see a self-caricature. Some commentators think that the battle of his Lion and Unicorn was intended as a satire on Gladstone and Disraeli.

In fact, Alice was intended for Alice and all other young "spirits fresh from God's hands"; yet it is equally true and absorbing for adults. Down a rabbit hole and through a looking glass, Lewis Carroll leads mankind into a world that is both sad and hilarious, wondrously nonsensical, and yet vividly relevant to a century from which most of the solid Victorian absolutes of Truth, Goodness and Progress have faded like the Cheshire Cat. There is no more devastating comment on Marxist myth than the White Queen's "Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday--but never jam today." In his wildest escapades, whether hunting the Snark ("They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care:/They pursued it with forks and hope;") or playing croquet with flamingos as mallets and hedgehogs as balls, the moral of the mythology is that all pretensions and dogmas turn, like the Red Queen, to pasteboard. As Dodgson wrote to one of his young friends: "If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things." No Boys. Charles Dodgson found many ways to truth. He was absorbed in science, photography, medicine, the theater. He concocted puzzles, invented gadgets and games. Most of all, the gentle, fussy bachelor sought truth and solace with dozens of small girls on whom he could lavish affection without the embarrassment of a mature emotional relationship. "Boys," said he, "are not in my line; I think they are a mistake." Though some critics have pictured Dodgson's little girl friends as 19th century Lolitas. he was an unfailingly considerate and honest man, whose moral standards were, as Alice Liddell described his physical posture, "almost more than upright, as if he had swallowed a poker." He suffered at the thought of children growing up and forgetting his friendship. Within two years of Alice's first telling. Alice's mother made it clear that she did not welcome a friendship between her daughter and a man 20 years older. Through the Looking Glass fades on "the shadow of a sigh" as Alice bounds happily into her future and the old White Knight bumbles on his way. Lewis Carroll's consolation was to create a Wonderland that lingers forever in "the golden gleam" of that summer's day a century ago.

* According to one legend (which the author denied), Queen Victoria was enchanted by Alice, and having discovered Lewis Carroll's identity, ordered his publisher to send her a copy of his next book. She is said to have received Dodgson's Condensation of Determinants (1866).

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