Lewis Carroll: Aspergers Disorder

     I did a little bit of research on the childhood of Lewis Carroll because I was searching for a way to relate the characters in Alice in Wonderland to his siblings. However, I could not find a lot of reliable and useful information very easily, so I decided to look into the mental disorder that plagued Carroll as a child. I found that Carrol was thought to possibly have Aspergers disorder. I then did some quick research on Aspergers and looked up its symptoms and impairments. The disorder tends to cause social isolation and eccentric behavior in individuals as children. Also, their speech may be grammatically correct but still sound funny. Motor skills may be inhibited causing 'clumsiness.' The last thing that I found about the disorder was very interesting. It stated that the individual usually has one extreme focus in an area of study and does not have time to progress their age or other interests.
    After reading this article about Aspergers that was not in anyway connected to an article about Lewis Carroll, I began to compare what we knew about Carroll with the information I now had on the disorder. The stutter that haunted Carroll his whole life matches up perfectly with the issues that Aspergers has on speech. Also, his intense focus on mathematics and literature did not allow him to mature past his childhood. We discussed in class about how he behaved as a child even in his older age. I also brought up the suggestion in class that this was attributed to a drug addicted developed at an early age, but I retract that statement. There's too much evidence leaning towards Carroll having Aspergers to blame any disorder on a drug addiction. Also, we thought him to possibly be a pedophile. However, with the knowledge that I have now, is it not reasonable to think that he wanted to be around children because he felt that he possibly still was a child and that they understood him much better than adults? Very. The last point that I noticed was that individuals with Aspergers tended to stay isolated. I found that even when Carroll was rich and famous later on in his life, he chose not to marry anyone and lived in a modest house by himself. I found this to be very interesting and definitely a good topic to bring up in class.