Illustration by Sir John Tenniel in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that inspired the Mad Hatter Day.

Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of the English writer and mathematician Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson, b. Jan. 27, 1832, d. Jan. 14, 1898, known especially for ALICE'S
ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND (1865) and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (1872),
children's books that are also distinguished as satire and as examples of verbal wit. Carroll
invented his pen name by translating his first two names into the Latin "Carolus Lodovicus" and
then anglicizing it into "Lewis Carroll."

The son of a clergyman and the firstborn of 11 children, Carroll began at an early age to
entertain himself and his family with magic tricks, marionette shows, and poems written for
homemade newspapers. From 1846 to 1850 he attended Rugby School; he graduated from
Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1854. Carroll remained there, lecturing on mathematics and
writing treatises and guides for students. Although he took deacon's orders in 1861, Carroll was
never ordained a priest, partly because he was afflicted with a stammer that made preaching
difficult and partly, perhaps, because he had discovered other interests.

Among Carroll's avocations was photography, at which he became proficient. He excelled

especially at photographing children. Alice Liddell, one of the three daughters of Henry George
Liddell, the dean of Christ Church, was one of his photographic subjects and the model for the
fictional Alice.

Carroll's comic and children's works also include The Hunting of the Snark (1876), two
collections of humorous verse, and the two parts of Sylvie and Bruno (1889, 1893),
unsuccessful attempts to re-create the Alice fantasies.

As a mathematician, Carroll was conservative and derivative. As a logician, he was

more interested in logic as a game than as an instrument for testing reason. In his
diversions as a photographer and author of comic fantasy, he is most memorable and
original--the man who, for example, contributed, in "Jabberwocky," the word chortle, a
portmanteau word that combines "snort" and "chuckle," to the English language.
DONALD J. GRAY
Illustration by Arthur Rackham

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a work of children's literature by the British

mathematician and author, Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, written under the
pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a
rabbit-hole into a fantasy realm populated by talking playing cards and
anthropomorphic creatures.

The tale is fraught with satirical allusions to Dodgson's friends and to the lessons that
British schoolchildren were expected to memorize. The Wonderland described in the
tale plays with logic in ways that has made the story of lasting popularity with children
as well as adults.

The book is often referred to by the abbreviated title Alice in Wonderland. Some
printings of this title contain both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel
Through the Looking Glass. This alternate title was popularized by the numerous film
and television adaptations of the story produced over the years.

Additional information
Complete Text in HTML with over 170 Illustrations by various artists.

WEB SITES
Plana de Lewis Carroll - Informacions, fotos , dibujos de Lewis Carroll.
www.weblandia.com
falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/carroll.htm
www.victorianweb.org/authors/carroll/carrollov.html
www.literature.org/authors/carroll-lewis
www.lookingforlewiscarroll.com
Matthew, Baronet Barrie
Scottish journalist, playwright, and children's book writer. Barrie became world famous
with his play and story about PETER PAN (1904), the boy who lived in Never Land,
had a war with Captain Hook, and would not grow up. The first name of Peter Pan was
almost certainly taken from Peter Llewellyn Davies (1897-1960), one of the several
Davies brothers that Barrie knew.

"When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all
went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies." (from Peter Pan)

James Matthew Barrie was born in the Lowland village of Kirriemuir, in Forfarshire
(now Angus). His father, David Barrie was a handloom weaver, and mother, Margaret
Ogilvy, the daughter of a stonemason. They had ten children, Barrie was the ninth.
Jamie, as he was called, heard tales of pirates from his mother, who read her children
R.L. Stevenson's adventure stories in the evenings. When Barrie was seven, his brother
David died in a skating accident. David had been the mother's favorite child, and she
fell into depression. Barrie tried to gain her affection by dressing up in the dead boy's
clothes. The obsessive relationship that grew between mother and son was to mark the
whole of his life. After her death Barrie published in 1896 an adoring biography of his
mother.

At the age of 13, Barrie left his home village. At school he became interested in theatre
and devoured works by such authors as Jules Verne, Mayne Reid, and James Fenimore
Cooper. His classmates Barrie observed like an outsider, they were tall, interested in
girls, while he remained small and apparently he never had a girl friend. Barrie studied
at Dumfries Academy at the University of Edinburgh, receiving his M.A. in 1882. After
working as a journalist for the Nottingham Journal, he moved in 1885 with empty
pockets to London as a freelance writer. He sold his writings, mostly humorous, to
fashionable magazine, such as The Pall Mall Gazette. In his mystery novel, BETTER
DEAD (1888), Barrie made jokes of well-known people. Barrie knew such great figures
of literature as G.B. Shaw, who did not like his pipe smoking, and H.G. Wells, and
could surprise them with his remarks. Once he said to Wells: "It is all very well to be
able to write books, but can you waggle your ears?" When a friend noticed that he
ordered Brussels sprouts every day, he explained: "I cannot resists ordering them. The
words are so lovely to say." With his friends, Jerome K. Jerome, Arthur Conan Doyle,
P.G. Wodehouse and others, Barrie founded a cricket club, called Allahakbarries. Doyle
was the only member who could actually play cricket. During World War I Barrie made
a western film with his literary friends, starring Shaw, William Archer, G.K.
Chesterton, etc.

In 1888 Barie gained his first fame with AULD LICHT IDYLLS, sketches of Scottish
life. Critics praised its originality. His melodramatic novel, THE LITTLE MINISTER
(1891), became a huge success, and was filmed later three times. After its dramatization
Barrie wrote mostly for the theater. In 1894 he married Mary Ansell, who had appeared
in his play WALKER, LONDON. According to Janet Dunbar's biography (1970),
Barrie was impotent. "Boys can't love", was Barrie's explanation to her.
The Little Minister was a popular stage production in 1897 both in England and in the
Unites States, where Barrie began his collaboration with the impresario Charles
Frohman and his star Maude Adams. Two of Barrie's best plays, QUALITY STREET,
about two sisters who start a school "for genteel children", and THE ADMIRABLE
CRICHTON, in which a butler saves a family after a shipwreck, were produced in
London in 1902, and also later filmed. In the same year, Peter Pan appeared by name in
Barrie's adult novel THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD. It was a first-person narrative about a
wealthy bachelor clubman's attachment to a little boy, David. Taking this boy for walks
in Kensington Gardens, the narrator tells him of Peter Pan, who can be found in the
Gardens at night. Peter Pan was produced for the stage in 1904 but the play had to wait
several years for a definitive printed version and it did not appear as a narrative story
until 1911. The book was titled PETER AND WENDY. In the novel's epilogue Peter
visits a grown-up Wendy.

"Every time a child says 'I don't believe in fairies' there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down
dead." (from Peter Pan)

Peter Pan evolved gradually from the stories that Barrie told to Sylvia Llewelyn
Davies's five young sons. She was the daughter of the novelist George du Maurier, and
a motherly figure, with whom Barrie formed a long friendship. Arthur, her husband,
was not happy about Barrie's invasion of the family. In 1909 Mary Barrie began an
affair with the writer Gilbert Cannan and Barrie's marriage ended. When Sylvia Llwelyn
Davies and her husband died, Barrie was the unofficial guardian of their sons, but in
reality he was perhaps more a sixth child than an adoptive father. George, one of the
sons, died in World War I, Michael drowned himself with his boy friend in Oxford.
Michael's death was a deep blow to Barrie. Peter, who become a publisher, committed
suicide in 1960.

Peter Pan was first performed at the Duke of York's Theatre, London, in 1904. The
fantastic world of Peter Pan had previously been presented in Barrie's The Little White
Bird (1902). "All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow
up, and the way Wendy knew this." The story begins in the Bloomsbury flat of the
Darlings, which is visited by Peter Pan. He is a boy who has run away from his home to
avoid growing up. Like his attendant fairy Tinker Bell, he can fly and teaches the skill
to the three Darling children. Wendy Darling with her brothers accompany Peter Pan to
Never Land where he lives with the Lost Boys, protected by a tribe of Red Indians.
Wendy becomes mother to the boys. When Peter is away, she is captured with all her
'family' by the pirate Captain Hook. They are saved from the walk on the plank by
Peter's bravery. Hook is eaten by his nemesis, the crocodile who had swallowed a
ticking clock. Peter takes Wendy and her brothers back home but he declines an offer of
adoption from Mrs. Darling. Wendy promises visit him every year to do the spring
cleaning. - Barrie himself was considered by Freudians a suitable target for analysis.
Peter Pan has also been seen as an Oedipal tale. Barrie himself had stopped growing
when he reached five feet in height, he suffered from migraines and rarely smiled.
Wendy, Peter's girl friend, borrowed her name from Barrie - it was his nickname. W.E.
Henley's daughter Margaret called Barrie Friendly-Wendy. The portrait of Wendy owes
much to Barrie's mother, and orphaned "little mother" who had to raise her younger
brother.

Barrie wrote two more fantasy plays. DEAR BRUTUS (1917) described a group of
people who enter a magic wood where they are transformed into the people they might
have become had they made different choices. MARY ROSE (1920) was a story of a
mother, who is searching for her lost child. Eventually she becomes a ghost. WHAT
EVERY WOMAN KNOWS (1908) portrayed a determined woman, Maggie, whose
husband eventually realizes that he owes his success to her. "It's sort of bloom on a
woman. If you have it, you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it
doesn't much matter what else you have. Some woman, the few, have charm for all; and
most have charm for one. But some have charm for none." (from What Every Woman Knows,
1908) In 1913 Barrie became a baronet and in 1922 he received the Order of Merit.
Barrie's penthouse at Adelphi Terrace was visited by ministers, duchesses, movie stars,
such as Charlie Chaplin, and a number of admirers, whom he occasionally helped with
money or advice. Even at his old age, Barrie could play enthusiastically Captain Hook
and Peter Pan with the son of his secretary, Lady Cynthia Asquith. Barrie was elected
lord rector of St. Andrew's University and in 1930 chancellor of Edinburgh University.
Barrie died on June 3, 1937.

Sir James Matthew Barrie (1860 -

1937)

WEB SITES
www.jmbarrie.co.uk
http://www.jmbarrie.net/

FILM
“FINDING NEVERLAND”