So Lewis Carroll lived, this strange mixture of a man, loving and loved by children, aloof and humourless with his adult colleagues.He apparently saw his life’s role as a combination of court-jester and kindly  king to his little friends.

Through the years that came after Croft he tried to create an extension of the laughter and happiness he had known there whilst his adult inadequacies made him retreat further into his dream-world which was always deeply child-orientated.

As the years passed Carroll faced the peopect of old age and death without fear or bitterness. On January 5th 1898, whilst spending his Christmas holidays at Guildford he received a telegram informing him of the death of his sister’s husband, the Rev. C.S.Collingwood of Southwick, a suburb of Sunderland. He was preparing to travel north to the funeral when he fell ill himself. At first it appeared that he was suffering from an attack of influenza but within a few days bronchial symptoms had developed and he became seriously ill.

On the 13th January he knew that his end was near. ‘Take away these pillows’ he said to his sisters, ‘I shall not need them again.’  He died peacefully at 2.30 pm on the afternoon of January 14th, just before his 66th birthday.

At his own request Lewis Carroll was given a simple funeral. He was buried in the beautiful cemetary of Guildford under the shadow of a pine tree. Over the grave was placed a white marble cross and underneath his own name was engraved the name by which millions know him better – Lewis Carroll.

On the Sunday after Lewis Carroll’s death Prof. Sanday, in a sermon preached at Christ Church, said of him: ‘ The world will think of Lewis Carroll as one who opened out a new vein in literature, a new and delightfil vein which added at once mirth and refinement to life…..May we not say that from our courts at Christ Church there has flowed into the literature of our time a rill, bright and sparkling, health-giving and purifying, wherever its waters extend?’

The ‘Alice’ books were to be translated into more than thirty foreign languages. ‘Alice’ was to be performed in countless theatres all over the world and many films were made of her adventures in Wonderland. New versions have been made for television and many of Carroll’s nonsense words and verse have become part of the daily dialogue of the English-speaking world.

For more than a hundred years the ‘Alice’ books have continued to delight and entertain children everywhere and they have passed permanently into the folk-lore and fantasy of the world. All this flowed from the imagination and the pen of Lewis Carroll, to whom happiness only existed in retrospect.This klndly, rather pathetic man moved through all his years as if he resented being pitchforked into adult life.

The searching psychology of the 20th century has found much rewarding matter in Lewis Carroll’s later years after he left the North. There has been talk of deep motivations and fixations to explain his ‘eccentric’ personality. Perhaps if modern research had paid more attention to Lewis Carroll’s more serious poems they moght have understood this gentle, sensitive man a little better.

Indeed if he had any fixation then surely it lay with his whole, vivid, happy childhood in which his mother and  sisters played such a prominent part at Croft.. The memories of those abundant days were to dominate his life and shape his character and his pen.

"Lewis Carroll" by Brenda Dane Matheson

‘I’d give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of life’s decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer day.’