More common, particularly round here, which is where Carroll lived, are psylocibe semilancea, which are less toxic than amanita muscaria. The most likely drug reference is the hookah-smoking caterpillar, but even in Tenniel’s illustration the mushrooms don’t appear to resemble anything hallucinogenic. (All of that from memory: if only I had put as much effort into my schoolwork as I did into researching hallucinogens.)
I feel the same way about it. I don’t think the first assumption that you make when you see a work of art is “what were they smoking?” On the other hand, I think it’s strange when the role of mind-altering substances in the creation of art is not aknowledged.
A great book on opium use in this period is “Opium and the Romantic Imagination” by Alethea Hayter.
But, in Carroll’s day, did the Brits actually know you could use those mushrooms as a drug? It’s not something I recall from any literature of the period.
I have never read anything that suggested it, and based my analysis of his writings (aided by the late Martin Gardner’s masterful An Annotated Alice) I find it highly unlikely.
The imagination in Carroll’s work shows a keen and insightful understanding of mathematics, logic, and language. Rather than being surreal or illogical or hallucinatory, it is supremely logical, the essence of rationality taken to an extreme and funny end. Only a mathematician and logician who truly and clearly understood the pitfalls of logic and the human mind could do it.
Credit Carroll instead as being the inspiration of Russell, Goedel, and Hofstader.
I also have to say that his apparent absurdity comes from his gleeful thrashing of the “Anglo-Saxon” fad of his day. The poem Jabberwocky taken in the abstract seems bizarre and unreal. But Carroll originally published the first stanza as a satire of Anglo-Saxon verse that was then in vogue.
The Anglo-Saxon fad was a nostalgic harkening back to the pre-Norman history of England, represented by such novels as Ivanhoe. Old English poems and myths, and stories of those days became extremely popular. Carroll was just making fun of them. He continued with this satire in Through the Looking Glass, which features the White King’s two messengers Heigha and Hatta (both names clearly derived from Saxon).
Alice spies one of them coming down the road exhibiting strange contortions and dances. She asks the other one what is going on. “Oh”, he replies, “those must be his Anglo-Saxon attitudes,” punning “attitudes” as in beliefs or ideals with “attitudes” as in positions.
“The late Martin Gardner”?
Please tell me that’s a mistake!
Gardner (b. 1914) is still alive, AFAIK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Gardner
Ooops! Rumors of his demise have been greatly exaggerated? I guess when he left the Scientific American, I just assumed he had died!
Surreal is not necessarily Unreal
Surreal is a bizarre combination that preserves some common logic from reality but transposes other elements and rules. Sounds like a hallucinogenic experience to me.
I have no doubt they were known about - mushroom use has a long history. I doubt that Dodgson used them, however.