[Gutenberg 35418] • Lewis Carroll in Wonderland and at Home: The Story of His Life

Excerpt:

Glebe farms were very common in England; they consisted of large tracts of land surrounding the parsonage, which the pastor was at liberty to cultivate for his own use, or to eke out his often scanty income, and as the parsonage at Daresbury was comparatively small, and the glebe or farm lands fairly large, we can be sure these boys and girls loved to be out of doors, and little Charlie at a very early age began to number some queer companions among his intimate friends.

...He did not, like Hiawatha in the legend, "Learn of ev'ry bird its language," but he invented a language of his own, in which no doubt he discoursed wisely to the toads and snails who had time to listen; he learned to speak this language quite fluently, so that in later years when eager children clustered about him, and with wide eyes and peals of laughter listened to his nonsense verses, full of the queerest words they ever heard, they could still understand from the very tones of his voice exactly what he meant.

...The children, some five or six in number-the entire eleven had not yet arrived-were left in the care of an accommodating aunt, but Charles, being the eldest, received a letter from his mother in which he took much pride, his one idea being to keep it out of the clutches of his little sisters, whose hands were always ready for mischief.

...He was shy, and the thought struck terror; but everybody who is anybody in England goes to some fine public school before becoming an Oxford or a Cambridge student, and for that reason Charles Lutwidge Dodgson buried his regrets beneath a smiling face, bade farewell to his household, and at the mature age of twelve, armed with enough Greek and Latin to have made a dictionary, with a knowledge of mathematics that a college "don" might well have envied, set forth to this alluring world of books and learning.

...In reality they bullied the smaller boys, for the system of fagging was much abused in those days, and the poor little fags had to be bootblacks, water-carriers, and general servants to very hard task-masters, while the "praeposter" had little thought of doing any service for the service he exacted; in fact the unfortunate fag had to submit in silence to any indignity inflicted by an older boy, for if by chance a report of such doings came to the ears of the Head-Master or his associates, the talebearer was "sent to Coventry," in other words, he was shunned and left to himself by all his companions