AS SEEN ON TV: LEWIS CARROLL

For "As Seen On TV", the time has come to speak of many things... about Lewis Carroll.

I was going to write this up earlier this year for Lewis Carroll's birthday, especially as it fell during the same week as the premiere of 'Trust Me' - which stars Tom Cavanaugh, the actor seen here as the author from an episode of 'Mentors'. But other options kept getting in the way......

Lewis Carroll [pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832-1898), English author, mathematician, and Anglican clergyman wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

Following in his father’s footsteps, Dodgson was appointed Mathematical Lecturer at Oxford, a position he held from 1856 to 1881.

In 1856 he started using his pseudonym ‘Lewis Carroll’ an anglicised form of his given name: ‘Lewis’ being an anglicised form of ‘Ludovicus’ and Latin for Lutwidge; and ‘Carroll’ anglicised from ‘Carolus’, Latin for Charles.

Encouraged by his friends he put pen to paper and composed his Alice stories. They were published in 1865 to much success, with illustrations by John Tenniel.

His epic nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark” was published in 1876. In 1871 Carroll’s sequel to Alice, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There appeared, including another famous poem “Jabberwocky”.

Now, the Lewis Carroll who appeared via the computer as seen in 'Mentors' was not the actual man. Instead, it was a simulacrum, a solid hologram equipped with artificial intelligence. It was a precursor to the Doctor of the starship Voyager, and could have been based on the computer program that first brought 'Automan' to life.

BCnU!
Toby O'B