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Victorian Rebel. When his little girls had gone to bed and the lonely bachelor was alone in his rooms, he would find himself face to face with what Author Lennon believes was the other major problem of his life — his religious beliefs. To be a rebel in Victorian England required unusual boldness, and while such doughty fighters as Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Samuel Butler were openly questioning the authority of the Church, the Rev. Mr. Dodgson was doing his utmost to quiet the tormenting questions that filled his brilliant, inquisitive mind. Cursed with insomnia, he would put himself to sleep by endless inventions of games, gadgets, toys, puzzles in mathematics; by day he would take a daily walk of 20 miles at top speed. At best, he would find release from "the sin of thinking for himself about religion" by turning his worries into innocent literary fantasies — such as the remarkable passage from his lesser-known children's book, Sylvie and Bruno:
"Sylvie was arranging some letters on a board — EVIL. 'Now Bruno,' she said, 'what does that spell. . .?'
"'Why, it's LIVE backwards!' he exclaimed. (I thought it was indeed.)
" 'How did you manage to see that?' said Sylvie.
" 'I just twiddled my eyes, ' said Bruno, 'and then I saw it directly.' "
Wonderland at Last. "It is a characteristic of British thinking, on the whole," says Author Lennon, in her book's most discerning passage, "that each man thinks for himself, yet all reach the same conclusions." But Lewis Carroll, she believes, belongs with that strange, not-quite-sane minority of British child-humorists (Charles Lamb, Charles Kingsley, W. S. Gilbert, James Barrie, Edward Lear) who "have all been to the Never Never Land at the Back of the North Wind, to the Snow Queen's country — to the edge of insanity, [and fetched] a treasure from the borderland for readers who are too busy or too timid to explore for them selves the cold, dark, lonely places of the spirit."
"Take away those pillows; I shall need them no more," said Dodgson on his deathbed. "Wonderland at last!" said the nephew who buried him.
* Sample stanza from a French translation of Jabberwocky (Le Jaseroque) by Frank L. Warrin, which appeared in the New Yorker in 1931:
Il brilgue: les táves lubricilleux Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave, Enmimés sont les gougebosqueux, Et le mômerade horsgrave.