---

Critical Footnotes:

[A] Another way to write, "Etcetera."
[B] Conflict between Napoleon Bonaparte and a combined force of Belgian, British, Dutch, German, and Prussian forces in 1815.
[C] The International Date Line would be created several years later, in 1884.
[D] An audible exclamation accompanying a yawn or sigh
[E] The first line to a nursery rhyme published in 1850.

About the Author:

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was born in 1832 in Daresbury, Cheshire, UK to Charles Dodgson and Frances Jane Lutwidge. Charles was raised in Yorkshire, though he began attending boarding school at age 14, where he excelled academically, despite bullying from his peers.

From an early age, Dodgson would show an affinity for the literature, writing numerous humorous works of prose and poetry for his family, which he collected in in The Rectory Umbrella, a mock-literary magazine that he created at age 18 for the entertainment of himself and his family. This ‘publication’ is where our texts today originate.

He first published under the penname, Lewis Carroll in 1856 in a poem submitted to the literary magazine, The Train. However his most famous work, Alice in Wonderland would not be published until 1865, several years after he initially told the story to several young girls. Under his more famous pseudonym, Dodgson would go on to write several other notable works of children’s fiction, such as Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, and Hunting of the Snark. His works, though particularly Alice in Wonderland, are considered milestone works of children’s literature.

While Dodgson is most well-known today for his children’s literature, he was also a renowned mathematician and logician in his life, being credited with publishing several notable mathematical proofs and being given the Mathematical Lectureship in Christ Church in 1855, where he continued to lecture until his death in 1898.

Our texts in question today exemplify both the lighthearted humor found in his better-known literary works, as well as his aptitude in for logic, as much of their humor is found in the self-aware and absurdist argumentation

Textual Overview:

DIFFICULTIES No. 1. & No. 2. could best be categorized as a satirical take on academic literature, with both pieces exploring plainly absurd arguments in a very self-serious, and occasionally patronizing, academic tone, complete with equally absurd footnotes to further mimic the style of academic writing.

In the case of DIFFICULTIES No. 1. Dodgson asks the audience to consider a hypothetical scenario wherein you could follow the sunrise on any given morning, only to come all the way around the world and find that the date had changed somewhere along the way.

No. 2. instead presents the readers with a choice between choosing a clock that is only right once per two years and a clock that is right twice per day. After assuming that the readers will choose the clock that is right twice per day, Dodgson presents two scenarios which, if followed to their conclusion, will lead the readers to adopt both contradictory positions on which of the two clocks is preferable.

Several notable features contribute to the humor of each work. First, both works are built upon premises and arguments that are, ultimately, absurd to their core. In No. 1. Dodgson goes out of his way to explain the unbroken ring of homogenous neighbors that would have to exist for the ‘difficulty’ in question to be even relevant in his day and age, while No. 2. devolves into a plainly circular argument, which the audience is effectively instructed to stop thinking too hard about.

However, these evidently untenable arguments only take on their full humorous tone when combined with Dodgson’s use of footnotes, which are typically associated with more serious academic conversations. Instead of this, however, Dodgson uses them as a tool to introduce a level of self-awareness to his pieces, while simultaneously satirizing the formal, academic style that he is imitating. In No. 1. Dodgson notably uses his first two footnotes to both further highlight the absurdity of the premises that he has asked the reader to assume, and then immediately call out that absurdity for what it is. In the case of No. 2. the singular footnote at the end of the piece further highlights the circular nature of the argument that he just made and then calls his readers to simply drop the subject because continuing down this absurdist argument would only bring them further from the original point.

The self-aware nature of the piece’s humor extends even further than this, however. Given that both pieces deal heavily with the concepts of time, No. 1. dealing with our collective perceptions of it and No. 2. dealing with our individual perceptions of it, there is a certain level of meta-humor that can be found in the fact that these sorts of unabashedly illogical musings on time could only be done by someone who, arguably, as too much of it. Such as appears to be the case in the sole footnote of No. 2. as Dodgson talks down his hypothetical reader from arguing endlessly.

Significance of the Text:

Ultimately, Dodgson’s DIFFICULTIES represents a unique opportunity to read a canonical author in a different context than we may be used to. While the majority of readers likely associate Dodgson’s work with humorous children’s literature, and a few mathematically inclined readers may call to mind his work in that field, DIFFICULTIES represents a sort of early collision between those two worlds in Dodgson’s life.

Bibliography: