Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll - 'The Dream-Brothers'

 

Twain and Carroll – ‘The Dream-Brothers’

Introduction

In my work with organisations, I often recommend the works of Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain to clients and colleagues as a colourful, non-scientific, stylish and imaginative description of how companies deal with change and disruption. ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (Carroll, 1867) describes a situation where things are disordered because nothing has changed and everything works the way it always has. “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, (Twain, 1889) shows what happens if you introduce changes into a system without considering the context and the consequences. A high-level view of their lives and works (see table below) throws up some interesting similarities and differences. Outwardly the quiet Oxford don does not look as though he would have anything in common with the American extrovert apart from their literary success. However, there are opportunities for exploration at a literary and behavioral level that could provide entertainment and education.

 

The table below gives some categories that we can consider in assessing each against the other and how their experiences influenced their lives. For example, they were both interested in the paranormal but had a different view on foreign travel. Their personal connections indicate their variety of interests and curiosity.

  Table 1 – High-Level View of Twain and Carroll

	Twain	Carroll
Themes	Change, Disruption, Time, Space and Hierarchy	Change, Disruption, Time, Space and Hierarchy
Modern Influence	Marx Brothers, Freud, W C Fields	Marx Brothers, The Beatles
Marketing Skills	Twain was a great self-promoter with tours and lectures	Carroll was a product marketing specialist. The ‘Alice’ brand was used on items including ‘The Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case’, Biscuit Tins.
Education	Left school and became an apprentice. A lot of self-education from libraries. Writing from an early age.  Spoke German.	Local school, then Rugby, then Oxford as a student then teacher. He was writing from an early age.
Travel	Travelled across the World for book tours and research. Lived abroad frequently.	One trip abroad to Russia and spent college vacations in Eastbourne for many years.
Inventions	Invested in typesetting, He also had patents for a self-pasting scrapbook, a fastener for shirts and a history trivia game.	Created a mechanical bat and a note taking machine to use in the dark, justifying margins on typewriters. He had ideas for ideas for a postal order and double-sided adhesive tape
Interests outside of Writing	Publishing, Travel – his best-selling work in his lifetime was ‘The Innocents Abroad’. The Paranormal – he was a member of the Society for Psychical Research.	Photography, The Theatre, Puzzles, Word Games, Logic and Poetry. He wrote a book on ‘Euclid and his Rivals’. The Paranormal – He was a member of the Society for Psychical Research.
Other writing	Historical fiction such as ‘Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc’, ‘The Private Life of Adam and Eve’	A number of pamphlets that included vivisection, voting strategies and vaccination.
Connections	Ulysses Grant, Nikola Tesla, P T Barnum, Bram Stoker	The Rosettis, George MacDonald, Ellen Terry

              

They were both extremely productive individuals. The timeline below gives an idea of their output during their lives but does not include all of their work including non-fiction, speeches, pamphlets and correspondence.

                            Figure 1 - Timeline of Lifetime Events and Publications

They met only once at a dinner with a common friend who was George MacDonald, the writer. Twain notes in his autobiography that Carroll was interesting to look at, “for he was the stillest and shyest full-grown man I have ever met except ’Uncle Remus’.  Dr Macdonald and several other lively talkers were present, and the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but Carroll sat still all the while except that now and then he answered a question. His answers were brief. I do not remember that he elaborated any of them”. However, he also referred to Carroll as his ‘dream-brother’ which shows the regard he had for Carroll’s work.

 They both used pseudonyms and perhaps these were also dual personas. Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Before he became a writer, he held a variety of jobs including piloting a steamboat up and down the Mississippi River. Biographer Justin Kaplan suggests that the name ‘Mark Twain’ derived from the common practice of marking up two drinks on credit elsewhere it is suggested it was the cry for a measured river depth of two fathoms (12 feet), which was safe water for a steamboat.  Lewis Carroll’s real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. The name change occurred as follows: Carroll took his original name "Charles Lutwidge" translated this into Latin as "Carolus Ludovicus". This was then translated back into English as "Carroll Lewis" and then reversed to make "Lewis Carroll". This was many years before Google Translate but Carroll, like many students, knew Latin. Aside from his other interests, Carroll was a teacher at Oxford University.  He wanted to keep his personas separate so much that he would refuse letters sent to “Lewis Carroll, Christ Church, Oxford”, claiming no such person lived there.

 The casual observer would describe Twain as the bold risk-taker and Carroll as the more conservative individual. The truth is they were both risk-takers. Carroll paid for the publication of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ himself which meant that he received better royalties but it was a big risk for an unknown Oxford teacher who could not even afford to get married. We cannot imagine the outcome if ‘Alice in Wonderland’ had not turned Carroll into ‘the tycoon of whimsy’ as described in The New Yorker (Gopnik, 1995). He could have been in serious financial trouble. Twain was involved in printing and publishing, and he became an investor in a typesetting invention. This cost him millions in today’s money, and he had to undertake lectures and book tours to pay for the costs and the debts to the investors. Twain and Carroll were both were prepared to back their judgement with their own money.

The Worlds of Wonderland and Camelot

The ‘Alice’ stories and ‘A Connecticut Yankee at the court of King Arthur’ both deal with people who travel into another place where time is different and the habits of the local population are not what they are used to. They are in alternate universes with a particular social structure where the normal rules have been suspended, and they have to work out a way to deal with them.

 Twain’s book was an exploration of utopian fiction looking at the psychology and the social impact of changes to an alien environment. Twain’s hero, Hank Morgan, travels to medieval Camelot via a blow to the head while working in a car factory. He unsuccessfully attempts to introduce modern democratic ideas with devastating results. With Carroll, Alice also enters an unconscious state before she falls down a hole following a white rabbit. In Wonderland she has to come to terms a new set of rules and not the one that she left.  Things do not work out well for her, and she ends up in court.

Their Love of Inventions

Twain was an early adopter of the typewriter and a long-time enthusiast of new science and technology, Twain lost the bulk of his fortune by investing huge sums on a typesetting machine, buying the rights to the apparatus outright in 1889. The machine was overcomplicated and frequently broke down, and “before it could be made to work consistently,” writes the University of Virginia’s Mark Twain library, “the Linotype machine swept the market [Twain] had hoped to corner.”

 Carroll was an early adopter of photography and took pictures of the celebrities of the day such as members of the Royal family, the Rosetti family and Tennyson, the poet laureate. He also came up with ideas for postal orders, queuing systems outside the theatre, voting systems. In this Victorian-era there were so many possibilities due to industrialisation, railways where things could be standardised, invented or improved.

 The advances in typesetting and photography during these times had a similar impact to that of the internet had on modern-day. Before photography, only the rich could get likenesses of themselves via portraits. As typesetting improved more books could become available and literacy would improve.

 It is also noted that Carroll went to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and Twain to the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris. These particular exhibitions were used to promote British and American advancement, respectively, to an interested world and attracted attention and visitors.

Influence on Language

Twain and Carroll particularly influenced writers and comedians by their use of language and paradox. We can see their style represented with ‘The Marx Brothers’ who use words to develop comic possibilities and with other comedians who are looking to subvert our certainties or stereotypes such as W.C Fields. Lewis Carroll used language in a colourful way and he invented new words that we use today such as ‘galumph’ and ‘chortle’. This technique of ‘portmanteau words’ is used, particularly in journalism and sociology, for example, metrosexual or chocaholic.  The Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields are a rich source of the type of material produced by Twain and Carroll.

 ‘Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?’ Groucho Marx in ‘Duck Soup’ sounding like the Cheshire Cat

 Also, from ‘Duck Soup’ although it sounds like a dialogue with Carroll’s Hatter:

 Labor Minister: The Department of Labor wishes to report that the workers of Freedonia are demanding shorter hours.

Firefly: Very well, then we'll give them shorter hours. We'll start by cutting their lunch hour to 20 minutes.

 From ‘The Innocents Abroad’, ‘I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up’ This could be Groucho Marx dialogue.

 ‘A crowded police docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty.’ Is it Twain Groucho Marx or W C Fields?

 ‘I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.’ W. C. Fields observation on time and place. Both Carroll and Twain were fond of time distortion in their writing.

 W C Fields said, ‘I never voted for anybody. I always voted against.’ (Taylor,1967). This would not be out of place in either ‘Alice in Wonderland’ or ‘Duck Soup ‘or ‘Horse Feathers’

 From Lewis Carroll we get the dialogue between the Alice and the Mock Turtle where Alice asks the Mock Turtle what he learned at school and the answer is:

'Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,' the Mock Turtle replied; 'and then the different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.'

 From ‘Horse Feathers’ we have the following discussion about education between Groucho and Chico Marx.

Wagstaff: “As you know, there is constant warfare between the red and white corpuscles. Now then, baboons, what is a corpuscle?

Baravelli: That's easy! First isa captain, then isa lieutenant, then isa corpuscle.

Conclusion

 These two writers provided insight and entertainment in equal measure and continue to enchant. This article does not aim to explore in detail the rationale behind the differences and similarities. Some will be cultural, environmental or individual but it is always interesting to contrast and compare two influential figures who co-existed but did not directly influence each other. We can consider whether this was an America v England effect, Mississippi v Oxford or just different sparks of genius flickering away.

References

Carroll L. 1865. Alice in Wonderland, MacMillan.
Carroll L. 1871. Alice Through the Looking Glass. MacMillan.
Twain M. 1889. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Chatto and Windus.
Twain M. 1872. Roughing It. American Publishing Company.
Twain M. 1869. The Innocents Abroad. American Publishing Company.
Taylor R. L.1967. W.C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes. St Martin’s Press.
Gopnik A 1995. Wonderland, 02 October 1995 The New Yorker.