unfettered imagination

Lewis Carroll. whose real name was Charles Dodgson, was born in a small village and grew up playing in the family garden, constructing mazes and setting up puppet shows. Like his father before him, Carroll went to Oxford, where he excelled in Mathematics; he eventually took a master´s degree and became a rather eccentric, reclusive professor at Oxford. He remained there for the rest of his life and would not be remembered today had he not written two of the greatest of children´s books, Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Alice in Wonderland was born one July afternoon when the Oxford don took the three young daughters of his college dean on a boating party. To entertain the girls - one of whom was named Alice - he began to spin together a series of tales dealing with the strange adventures of a young girl who falls down a rabbit-hole and encounters a nonsense world.

When published in 1865 the book was an instant success. In 1871, Carroll published his second and last Alice book, Through the Looking Glass, which recounts Alice´s dream of passing through a mirror and entering a world which is reverse of our own.

Through the Looking Glass is full of the odd humour and puns characteristic of Alice in Wonderland, but it also contains mathematical puzzles hidden under the nonsensical surface. There is a plot, for soon after entering the mirror world Alice is transformed into a pawn in a game of chess, whose goal is to become queen and win the game. After many strange encounters with the Red and White Queens and Knights - as well as with Humpty Dumpty the talking egg and other assorted creatures of fantasy - Alice does become Queen Alice, whereupon she wakes up wondering who it was that dreamed it all.

It´s essential to point out that Carroll´s work is immersed in the Victorian Age, time in which child labour flourished under brutal conditions. That´s why literature produced especially for children began to appear. Maybe the resort to a literature of fantasy means an attempt to escape a harsh reality or even the search for the lost innocence of youth.