Still, even in mathematics his whimsical fancy was sometimes suffered to peep out, and little girls who learnt the rudiments of calculation at his knee found the path they had imagined so thorny set about with roses by reason of the delightful fun with which he would turn a task into a joy. But when the fun was over the little girl would find that she had learnt the lesson (all unknowingly) just the same. Happy little girls who had such a master. The old rhyme—
“Multiplication is vexation,
Division is as bad,
The rule of three doth puzzle me,
And Practice drives me mad,”
would never need to have been written had all arithmetic lessons been like the arithmetic lessons given by Charles Dodgson to his little friends.
As a lecturer to his grown-up pupils he was also surprisingly lucid, and under his deft treatment the knottiest of problems were quickly smoothed out and made easy for his hearers to comprehend. “I always hated mathematics at school,” an ex-pupil of his told me a little while ago, “but when I went up to Oxford I learnt from Mr. Dodgson to look upon my mathematics as the most delightful of all my studies. His lectures were never dry.”
For twenty-six years he lectured at Oxford, finally giving up his post in 1881. From that time to the time of his death he remained in his college, taking no actual part in the tuition, but still enjoying the Fellowship that he had won in 1861.
This is an official account, a brief sketch of an intensely interesting life. It tells little save that Lewis Carroll was a clever mathematician and a sympathetic teacher; it shall be my work to present him as he was from a more human point of view.
Lewis Carroll was a man of medium height. When I knew him his hair was a silver-grey, rather longer than it was the fashion to wear, and his eyes were a deep blue. He was clean shaven, and, as he walked, always seemed a little unsteady in his gait. At Oxford he was a well-known figure. He was a little eccentric in his clothes. In the coldest weather he would never wear an overcoat, and he had a curious habit of always wearing, in all seasons of the year, a pair of grey and black cotton gloves.
But for the whiteness of his hair it was difficult to tell his age from his face, for there were no wrinkles on it. He had a curiously womanish face, and, in direct contradiction to his real character, there seemed to be little strength in it. One reads a great deal about the lines that a man’s life paints in his face, and there are many people who believe that character is indicated by the curves of flesh and bone. I do not, and never shall, believe it is true, and Lewis Carroll is only one of many instances to support my theory. He was as firm and self-contained as a man may be, but there was little to show it in his face.
Yet you could easily discern it in the way in which he met and talked with his friends. When he shook hands with you—he had firm white hands, rather large—his grip was strong and steadfast. Every one knows the kind of man of whom it is said “his hands were all soft and flabby when he said, ‘How-do-you-do.’” Well, Lewis Carroll was not a bit like that. Every one says when he shook your hand the pressure of his was full of strength, and you felt here indeed was a man to admire and to love. The expression in his eyes was also very kind and charming.
