If you know me then you will know that I adore Alice in Wonderland and all its counterparts and sister books, which includes any novels that are based on Alice in Wonderland of anything that was inspired by Alice in Wonderland.
So is it any surprise to know that I love Lewis Carroll for bringing such an,amazing story into the world and letting us discover it.
It is my love for Lewis and Alice in Wonderland that I have collected such a large amount of trivia about them over the years. Some of which I would love to share with you now and perhaps over the next few issues.
1. Carroll suffered from chronic migraines, and epilepsy, stammering, partial deafness, and ADHD.
2. He wrote 11 books on mathematics, and 12 works of literary fiction.
3. Carroll had his productivity down to a science: he could write 20 words a minute, a page of 150 words in seven and a half minutes, and 12 pages in two and a half hours.
(way faster than me. I can type around 50 words a minute but writing probably about 10)
4. Despite being a mathematician, Carroll didn’t keep a fine balance of his bank account. He wasn’t much concerned with money and would often overdraft, sometimes as much as the modern-day equivalent of £7,500, though he would pay it back promptly on payday.
5. He was a big letter writer, sometimes corresponding upwards of 2,000 times in one year, and he would sometimes write backwards, forcing the reader to hold the letter to a mirror to decipher.
(I do love writing letters but nobody seems to want them these days. Anyone know a good place to find a pen pal?)
6. Carroll first told the story of Alice to the Liddell girls on July 4, 1862, while Independence Day was being celebrated across the pond.
7. The Cheshire cat was inspired by cheese moulds from the Cheshire county in England, a dairy-rich area, where “grinning like a Cheshire cat” was a popular phrase, possibly because cats would have been so happy to live in a land of abundant dairy farms. Cheesemakers in the area moulded the cheese with a cat’s grinning face, and sliced from the back, so that the cat would slowly disappear and the last part consumed was the head.
8. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into more than 70 languages.
9. There’s a white rabbit and Alice holding a flamingo immortalised in stained glass in the Christ Church College at Oxford, where Carroll spent most of his life.
10. Even after all the success of Alice, the only time Carroll travelled abroad was in 1867 on a trip to Russia. On the way back he made stops in Poland, Germany, Belgium, and France.
Thanks for reading. Hope you learnt something. I know I enjoyed looking around the internet and reading books to find all this out.
See you tomorrow (I am running out of ideas guys so just be aware of that)
Book Club of the North 