Word: dodgson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Minutes for Tea. There was a darkroom jampacked with photographic materials (Dodgson was one of the most talented amateur photographers of his day) ; mousetraps of his own design with sliding doors and "humane" compartments for drowning; boxes of notepaper in five different sizes for letters of reply ("Let me see," he would say, "for this letter I will use number three size; that should meet the case exactly"); clockwork bears, mice, frogs and bats. Stacked on the shelves were copies of the scores of pamphlets he loved to write, their titles ranging from Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter...
...Alice fetched ?15,400 at auction, and to date, in its 80 years of life, Alice has sold uncounted millions of copies. "How did it happen." asks Florence Becker Lennon, "that the Reverend Charles Dodgson, 30 years of age, lecturer on mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford . . . gave birth to one of the most famous stories of all time...
Christ Church students, to whom Charles Lutwidge Dodgson lectured for 40 years, knew him only as a gawky, dull professor who could not utter the letter "p" and who left the room if he overheard a single indecent or irreverent remark. But visitors to his rooms were bowled over by what they found. Rugs and coats were stuffed against cracks in the door (Dodgson had a horror of draughts). Instructions for lighting an amazingly complicated gas lamp were pasted to the door-though no one was ever allowed to light the lamp...
...women," says Author Lennon, with a faculty for understatement that any Briton might envy, "seem nearly always to develop eccentricities." The psychiatrist who felt that the country of Wonderland was "a continuous threat to the integrity of the body" was simply putting in the wrong nutshell the Reverend Dodgson's own anxiety about the dangers of everyday life. Son of a stern archdeacon, eldest of eleven children, only two of whom married and nine of whom were girls, young Charles seems never to have got over the belief that there was "something ugly and even cruel in masculinity...
...Dodgson loved romance - but all he did about it was write a sad little satire about a young man who, on seeing a sign reading "Shop of Romance-ment," joyfully became an apprentice -only to find that the sign really read "Shop of Roman Cement." He loved the theater - but when he met beautiful Actress Irene Vanbrugh he could think of nothing to talk about but the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. Of dazzling Actress Ellen Terry he made what was probably the most passionate declaration of his life: "I can imagine no more delightful occupation...