Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass

Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass

“If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic,” according to Tweedledee, a character in Lewis Carroll’s famous children’s work Through the Looking Glass (Complete Works 181). Of course, Lewis Carroll is most well known for that particular book, and maybe even more so for the first Alice book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The connection between Lewis Carroll and logic is less obvious for most people. In reality, Lewis Carroll is the nom de guerre for the Reverend Charles L. Dodgson, a “puttering, fussy, fastidious, didactic bachelor, who was almost painfully humorless in his relations with the grown-up world around him” (Woollcott 5). Though it may seem that Dodgson and his pseudonym emit two very different personalities, as Braithwaite points out, there really only existed “a completely integrated though singular personality” (174). While Dodgson under his true name usually only published books on mathematics and logic, under the name of Lewis Carroll he published books for the young, with some exceptions. One such exception to this division of subjects is the work Symbolic Logic; this textbook was published under the name of Lewis Carroll. It is through Dodgson’s children’s works that his integrated personality emerges. His Alice books, for example, contain many statements of logic and games of mathematics, intended for the amusement of his audience.

Dodgson “regarded formal and symbolic logic not as a corpus of systematic knowledge about valid thought nor yet as an art for teaching a person to think correctly, but as a game” (174). With this perspective, it is easy to see why he was interested in...

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