Johnstown High School - Spectator Yearbook (Johnstown, PA)

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please n.eadt............... Lewis Carroll, on the other hand, loved to take long, meandering walks accompanied by several young charges—never giving a thought to where the next turn in the road might lead; stopping at a bakery shop to buy sweets; visiting a toy store to purchase trinkets for his small companions. Dodgson suffered great embarrassment be- cause of a speech impediment which caused him to stammer when conversing with adults. But Carroll could talk easily for hours on end, spin- ning fantasy with his gentle voice for the amuse- ment of his young friends. Perhaps the first children to discover the Lewis Carroll who could tell such wonderful stories were Dodgson's small brothers and sisters. The son of a clergyman, he was the oldest of 11 children, and though, even as a boy, he was scholarly and serious, he would gather his broth- ers and sisters around and amuse them with im- probable stories and impromptu bits of humor- ous verse. But it remained for a little girl named Alice Liddell to introduce Lewis Carroll to the world—it was she who inspired the immortal Alice of the books. It started on a July afternoon in 1862, when Dodgson invited the three young daughters of Henry G. Liddell, dean of Christ Church Col- lege at Oxford, to go on a picnic with him. They took a rowboat and glided slowly up the quiet Thames. Then, seeking relief from the hot sun, they pulled the craft into a peaceful cove and took refuge in the shade of a hayrick. Soon the children asked for a story. Dark-haired, elfin-faced little Alice had al- ways been Dodgson's favorite of the three sisters —perhaps because her lilting, imaginative nature matched that of Lewis Carroll. Now she smiled in anticipation of another of his magic tales and added one special requirement: Make sure, she said, there's some non- sense in it. No sooner was the admonition given than the storybook Alice and all her friends seemed to pop unbidden into Lewis Carroll's mind. This was the magic moment: and the story that has since delighted countless children began. All that afternoon he held the little girls spellbound. Then other afternoons followed, for Alice Liddell and her sisters could not hear enough of Car- roll's fascinating Wonderland. Soon, the real Alice was begging that the story be written for her to keep. Thus, the imag- inary Alice's adventures found their way onto paper — printed with painstaking care by the young professor's own hand and illustrated with his own drawings. It was his gift to the little girl who had inspired the tales. The rest is history. One of Dodgson's writer- friends saw a copy of the manuscript and urged that it be submitted to a publisher. Lewis Carroll (he had selected this pen name for his non- sense writings) took his story to London, where it was immediately accepted. On July 4, 1865, Lewis Carroll presented the first printed copy of Alice's Adventures to Alice Liddell. The book was an instant success; edition after edition was demanded by the public. A few years later, Carroll wrote another Alice book, Through the Looking Glass, which proved just as popular as the first. Yet while Lewis Carroll was becoming richer and winning greater renown each year, Charles Dodgson, the scholarly mathematician, went his untroubled way. He continued to live in the modest suite he had always occupied at Oxford. He continued to pursue mathematical truths and to set down his findings in learned dissertations. He grew older and wiser and even a little more serious than he had always been. And finally, one day in January, 1898, Charles Dodg- son died. It is here, perhaps, that the distinction between Charles Dodgson and Lewis Carroll is most mark- ed. For Carroll never aged. His delight in the companionship of children remained with him to the end—long after the real Alcie had grown up and married. And his store of new stories and poems for children was inexhaustible. Today, when the quiet old professor named Dodgson is almost forgotten, Lewis Carroll lives on—his memory immortalized in the hearts of each new generation of boys and girls all over the world. We also wish to introduce Barbara Ann Reavel, Union Street Grade School pupil, who is photographed through the book as Alice in Wonderland.