Lewis Carroll’s Guide for Insomniacs

Lewis Carroll‏

مارچ 2024 · New York Review of Books

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Here is the perfect gift for all insomniacs: a feast of intriguing puzzles, rhymes, limericks, and other entertainments devised by the author of Alice in Wonderland to help pass what he called “the wakeful hours.”

“The dilemma my friends suppose me to be in,” said Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, “has, for its two horns, the endurance of a sleepless night, and the adoption of some recipe for inducing sleep.” In this delightful book, therefore, are collected a splendid variety of the things he devised to help rid himself of insomnia.

They range from simple number problems and calming calculations to a number of whimsical activites: composing rhymes at midnight, conjuring up ghosts, planning dreams, devising shadow shows, and writing in the dark by means of Nyctograph. Take Carroll’s advice and the “wakeful hours” can be turned to your advantage.

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Lewis Carroll (1832–1898; pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was born in 1832. The son of a clergyman, he became a clergyman himself in 1861, but preached only occasionally and spent his life as a don at Christ Church, Oxford, where he taught mathematics. He published Alice in Wonderland in 1865, when he was only 33, and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There six years later. He died in 1898 and is buried in Guilford, United Kingdom.

Gyles Brandreth is a writer, broadcaster, actor, former MP and Lord Commissioner of the Treasury, and now Chancellor of the University of Chester. He has been a devotee of Lewis Carroll since he saw a production of Alice Through the Looking-Glass when he was seven. In the 1970s he created a one-man Lewis Carroll stage show and TV series for the entertainer Cyril Fletcher. In the 1980s he devised the Alice in Wonderland board game for the makers of Scrabble. More recently, with Sue Pearse, he created the musical Wonderland about Charles Dodgson and his friendship with the actress Isa Bowman. In 2023, with descendants of the Dodgson family and the great-grandchildren of Alice Liddell (the original Alice), he unveiled a plaque at Folly Bridge in Oxford, on the bank of the river Isis, commemorating the boat trip that took place on ‘the golden afternoon’ of 4 July 1862 when the story of Alice’s adventures was told for the first time.