THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

educators should be men in Holy Orders.’ The author of A Syllabus of Plain Algebraical Geometry (1860),
Condensation of Determinants (1866), and Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1879) appears to have remained untroubled
by the
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scientific and religious controversies of his time, yet it is perhaps from a combination of a rapt delight in
mathematical order and pattern and a perception of the workings of God in a shapely universe that the logic of his
children’s fantasies emerges. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found
There (1872), and The Hunting of the Snark (1876) have quite eclipsed Dodgson’s professional scholarship, but all
three suggest a pleasure in exploring nonsense because nonsense, like looking-glasses, offered an alternative way of
viewing things. ‘Lewis Carroll’ recognizes the joy in disjunction, distortion, and displacement because they are mirror
images of unity, shapeliness, and stability.
The emergence of an intelligent and whimsical children’s literature was perhaps the most remarkable result of the
revolution in sensibility which came to see children as distinct from adults rather than as adults-in-waiting.
Essentially the work of both Carroll and of Edward Lear (1812-88) transformed adult assumptions by considering
them through the eyes of children. Pomposity, pretension, and all conventional pieties have, therefore, to be radically
rejudged and re-presented. This is not to say that Victorian children’s literature rigorously excludes adult concerns,
but that however gloomy and perplexing the grown-up world might seem to be, there remained a space in which the
playful and the joyfully absurd could triumph. There is a wistful sadness about the work of both Carroll and Lear, both
of them lonely and to some degree unfulfilled men, but neither dwells self indulgently on the problems of the
alienated adult self. For both, the recapture of childhood seems to offer release. Lear’s world is full of terrors, errors,
and misapprehensions (as his limericks vividly suggest) but the sing-song of his rhythms holds them (just) in their
due place. If his longer poems (‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ and ‘The Jumblies’ of 1871 and ‘The Dong with a
Luminous Nose’ of 1877) echo something of the nostalgic, elusive yearning of Tennyson, when Lear writes directly of
himself (as in the lyric, ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear’) his lightness of touch banishes melancholy almost as soon
as it is evoked:
‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough...
He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads but he cannot read Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger-beer;
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr Lear!
For Lewis Carroll, poetry offered the opportunity to play rhythmically with the paradoxes and whimsically with
philosophical propositions which clearly
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fascinated him in his professional life. This is evident not simply in his parodies of Isaac Watts, Southey, or
Wordsworth or in his jesting at Old English verse (in ‘Jabberwocky’) but also in his stretchings of logic in The
Hunting of the Snark (1876) and of sense in ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’:
The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his best to make
The billows smooth and bright —
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.