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Lewis Carroll and ‘Dinah’: An Unnoted Joke in the Oxford Pamphlets
Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of English.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2968-4867
2021 (English)In: Notes and Queries, ISSN 0029-3970, E-ISSN 1471-6941, Vol. 68, no 3, p. 321-324Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Early in Charles Dodgson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the protagonist finds herself falling down a rabbit hole. In the impossibly extended period of this fall, she entertains herself by musing about the fate of ‘Dinah’, her cat, before engaging in a little wordplay over whether or not cats eat bats. As is well known, Dodgson had first narrated the story to the daughters of his friend and colleague, Henry Liddell (1811–1898), including Alice (1852–1934), one of the inspirations for the titular character, during a boat trip from Oxford to Godstow, taken 4 July 1862. In a footnote to the Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner notes that the name Dinah derives from that of one of two cats, Dinah and Villikins, that the Liddell children had themselves ‘named after a popular song, “Villikins and His Dinah”’. It is in this context that we may unpack joke alluding to ‘Dinah’ in a different work published by Dodgson during the same period, The Dynamics of a Parti-cle (1865), one that has been hitherto passed over by the critical heritage.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2021. Vol. 68, no 3, p. 321-324
Keywords [en]
Lewis Carroll, humour
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URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-197168DOI: 10.1093/notesj/gjab113OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-197168DiVA, id: diva2:1597870
Available from: 2021-09-28 Created: 2021-09-28 Last updated: 2022-03-23Bibliographically approved

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Whiteley, Giles

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