In 1859, Carroll undertook speech therapy lessons from James Hunt, who was considered the foremost speech correctionist in Great Britain at the time; he was estimated to have treated 1,700 people who stutter.


In The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, biographer Jenny Woolf states that Hunt boasted he taught the patient to speak consciously in a way that other men spoke unconsciously.


Biographer John Pudney in Lewis Carroll and his World explains how childlike fantasies were not only the spark for Carroll's creative genius but also brought him into a new world where stuttering did not exist, “This perfectly hard crystal containing childhood was his true essential life, expressed in the Alice books and in some poems…When he spoke to these children, he lost his habitual stammer. He simply became one of them…This perennial childhood, together with the fantasy and poetry that sometimes expressed it, was his reality."


However, throughout the books, we can see several examples of advice that Carroll must have gotten as a child who stuttered.


In chapter two, the Red Queen suggests that Alice should open her mouth "a little wider" when she speaks; later in chapter four, Alice describes “a rather awkward pause as she struggles to begin conversation. These are just a few of many excerpts that may have described the agonizing moments Carroll felt as he wrestled his own stuttering blocks.


4


Nothing bothered Carroll more about his speech than how it affected his ministry in the Anglican Church. His father had been an Anglican priest, and Carroll himself became a deacon. Upon one occasion he accepted the invitation to preach and recalled, "I got through it all with great success, till I came to read out the first verse where the two words 'strife, strengthened' coming together were too much for me, and I had to leave the verse unfinished."


BEGIN A CONVERSATION 'THERE WAS A RATHER


as Alice didn’t know how to with people she had just been dancing with.'


Stuart Dodgson Collingwood (Carroll's nephew) wrote that his uncle "…saw that the impediment of speech from which he suffered would greatly interfere with the proper performance of clerical duties."


One longtime friend, May Barber, described Carroll's speech, “Those stammering bouts were rather terrifying. It wasn't exactly a stammer because there


AWKWARD PAUSE,


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