ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to examine Lewis Carroll, mathematician and logician, and the Alice books in relation to the wide-reaching Victorian debates, in part prompted by Darwinian thought, about the proper relationship between human beings and all the rest of nature. The critical history on Carroll is marked by an absorption with his relationship to children, a relationship sullied since the mid-twentieth century by accusations of perversity and exploitation. The book explores Carroll's satires about the emerging disciplines of modern science, an advent he opposed partly on the grounds of his loyalty to the ideals of a classical education and partly on larger religious, moral, and intellectual grounds. Carroll's attacks on Darwin's ideas are wide-ranging and ingenious, as he mocks Darwinian accounts of survival of the fittest, devolution, hybrids, and extinction, all through the by-play of his fantastic narratives.
