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Lewis Carroll did not live in Wonderland.

Berta Rivera May 7, 2018

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Lewis Carroll was a man of the Renaissance in Victorian England: storyteller, poet,
mathematician, teacher, photographer ... and author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Alicia lived, by the work and grace of its author, in the Land of Wonders but, as far as he was
concerned, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) , nothing could be defined as
an antithesis of that place more than his own life: between what we know and what we think
we know as well as what is suspected and what is rumored, the picture that returns his life can
not be more Victorian, a perfect image behind which a deeper world hides than the one he
wrote for Alice He was stuttering and deaf in one ear, ready to rage but also lazy as he
could not; he also suffered from a neurological disorder that transformed his perception of
objects (he saw them bigger or smaller than he was, farther away than they were ...), this
disorder was unknown in his time, in fact when he was discovered he was called like ' Alice in
Wonderland syndrome '; They count, and here we enter the field of the hypothetical, who
suffered a trauma when he was forced to use his right hand as a right-handed man when
he was really left-handed, who could have suffered sexual abuse when he was an intern
at school and that he himself , as an adult, showed pedophile tendencies in addition to
being diagnosed as epileptic (it could be a wrong diagnosis because he only suffered two
apparently epileptic seizures in his life but the mere success of the diagnosis supposed a
stigma in Victorian society); it is said that he consumed psychotropic substances (at least
laudanum in order to alleviate the pain caused by his arthritis) and the height of insanity is
represented by the rumor that it was possible that he was the one who was after Jack the
Ripper .

Who am I in the world? That is the great puzzle.

This terrible and terrible picture describes a man of great intelligence, a professor of
mathematics, an outstanding photographer and an unparalleled writer of both stories and
poetry, as well as logical and mathematical treatises. Did you know the complexity that the
author of the mythical tale Alicia entailed in hiding? Wonderland ? and is that all that we
have already revealed, we can add one more aspect, that of religious life because Carroll went
to priest although, by personal decision (a decision of which we do not know the motivations)
never got organized.

He was the third of a large family, very numerous, his parents had eleven children and he was
the first male (although not the only one); the exceptional thing of this matter is not so much
the number of children (something habitual in the English families in the Victorian time) but
all of them arrived at the adult age, even the good one of Charles who, for when it began to
write, fiddled with its linguistic knowledge and with its name until transforming it into Lewis
Carroll : Latinized its name that went from being Charles Lutwidge to being Carolus
Ludovicus , and then turn it around and return it to English as Lewis Carroll, as it has
happened in the history of literature British and universal, also to the history of photography
despite the fact that only one third of all his work is preserved.

What a poor memory is that which only works backward!

It is from his photographic work that some scholars of his time conclude their tendencies
towards pedophilia because a good part of the photographs are of girls, some naked but the
truth is that it can not be concluded with such certainty that this is true because, given that
only one third of the total remains, we can not know if they were really a majority; Also, in
the Victorian era, children's nudes were not an exceptional thing, they even appeared on
Christmas cards and, if these reasons were not enough, we also know that Carroll delivered
those photos to the families of the girls, in fact for many years they were given for lost as lost
the records that Carroll did of each photography and, before a so terrible accusation, he
himself destroyed part of his work.

There are those who say, although here we enter again into the hypothetical terrain, that in
fact I was in love with one of the girls whom I portrayed more times (about fifty times), her
name was Alice and there was even talk that she was the inspiration for The Adventures of
Alice in Wonderland , something that Carroll himself denied.

If everyone took care of their own, the world would spin faster.

The second frontal attack on his memory (because it occurred already after death) has to do
with those who accuse him of having been Jack the Ripper . To saint of what accusation?
They say that there are traces in his work that anticipate the crimes he would commit years
later ... but the truth is that this accusation is crossed, mostly, as a pilgrim idea without any
real foundation.

Not all the legends and rumors that revolve around the memory of Lewis Carroll are as grim
and terrible as those who associate him with Jack the Ripper or pedophilia, there are also
curious and positive as he says it is to him, intelligent, creative, inventor and writer of
riddles, to whom we owe the existence of the classic board game Scrabble (you can never
play Scrabble without thinking of Lewis Carroll).

Math teacher, photographer with his own studio, exceptional storyteller and remarkable
poet ; a man of letters, a lover of word games and riddles and a man of science for his love of
mathematics and of science itself (he had one of the most modern microscopes of his time and
he liked to use it to observe minimal animals like larvae of some insects); all of this being
stuttering, left-handed, lazy, distracted, epileptic and may be a pedophile and serial killer as
well as a habitual drug user; he inherited his father's intelligence, but not his perseverance,
something that he did not really need because his brilliance was such that he made up for his
laziness (almost always, on some occasion he failed as when he lost a scholarship for having
fallen in his academic performance) ; undoubtedly Lewis Carroll turns out to be a character
more than exceptional of which there is much to read although the highlight, what you can not
miss, are his two most acclaimed stories: The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and
Alice behind the Mirror.