By Brad Dison
As a child, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, called Charlie by everyone who knew him, was a shy boy. He was often ridiculed in school and was usually the last student chosen to play team sports during recess. A large part of his shyness came from a speech impediment which he shared to some extent with at least six members of his large family. Conversation was hard for little Charlie. His speech was filled with awkward hesitation. He could form his thoughts perfectly, but he struggled to project his words orally. Little Charlie loved to read because the words flowed so easily. When asked to read aloud, the hesitation often returned. His speech impediment was unpredictable. Little Charlie never knew which words or phrases would cause him trouble. A word that he had spoken thousands of times without incident could suddenly become a problem. Every spoken word was a potential pitfall. The other students teased and mocked little Charlie until his speech impediment manifested into an occasional blockage. Their taunts were often answered non-verbally by little Charlie’s fists. When little Charlie was faced with a blockage, which was normally mid-sentence, he had no choice but to abruptly end the conversation without explanation.
During the Victorian era, many middle-class children created their own homemade magazines as a form of entertainment. These magazines usually contained local gossip, hand-drawn pictures, stories, and riddles thrown together seemingly at random. Through this medium, little Charlie learned that he could communicate more effectively through writing than he could verbally. Biographer Robert Douglas-Fairhurst said that for little Charlie, “The blank page released his tongue.” Whereas most of the Victorian children’s homemade magazines had no rhyme or reason, little Charlie’s magazines were thematic and normally contained a table of contents and a detailed index. For example, one of his homemade magazines pertained to things that began with the letter “M.” His magazines were usually bound with string between a cover made from a recycled school notebook.
Little Charlie never wanted to grow up. He became somewhat obsessed with all things little. For him, it appeared that once a person accepted that they had reached adulthood, the paradise of childhood was lost forever. In his own mind, little Charlie envisioned the bullies of his childhood as little people. He envisioned elephants the size of mice. He often wrote letters to friends in words that were so small that reading them required a magnifying glass.
Little Charlie’s magazines became popular with his family and friends. In them, little Charlie created whimsical worlds as well as nonsensical words. He escaped from the real world into his own creations. As a teenager, little Charlie became a published author of poems and articles. By the age of 24, everything Charlie had published had been anonymous or under assumed initials. Several of his early stories and poems were published under the initials B.B. which had a meaning that Charlie never revealed. In 1856, when Charlie submitted a story for the Comic Times, editor Edmund Yates refused to publish it under his pseudonym B.B. and insisted on an alternative. Charlie submitted a list of potential pen names which were elaborate variations on his real name such as Edgar Cuthwellis and Edgar U.C. Westhall. All but one on the list was rejected by the editor. On March 1, 1856, Charlie wrote in his diary that he and the editor had chosen a name, one which was a derivative of his first and middle names in reverse order in schoolboy Latin. He converted Ludwidge to Ludovicus then to Lewis, and Charles to Carolus then to Carroll. Nine years after adopting his pen name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson published his most notable story “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” under the pen name Lewis Carroll.
Source: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland(Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015).
