A Tangled Tale
| Author | Charles "Lewis Carroll" Dodgson |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Arthur B. Frost |
| Country | England |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Children's fiction |
| Publisher | Macmillan |
|
Publication date
|
1885 |
| Media type |
A Tangled Tale is a collection of 10 brief humorous stories by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), published serially between April 1880 and March 1885 in The Monthly Packet magazine.Arthur B. Frost added illustrations when the series was printed in book form. The stories, or Knots as Carroll calls them, present mathematical problems. In a later issue, Carroll gives the solution to a Knot and discusses readers' answers. The mathematical interpretations of the Knots are not always straightforward. The ribbing of readers answering wrongly – giving their names – was not always well received (see Knot VI below).
In the December 1885 book preface Carroll writes:
Describing why he was ending the series, Carroll writes to his readers that the Knots were "but a lame attempt." Others were more receptive: In 1888 Stuart Dodgson Collingwood wrote, "With some people, this is the most popular of all his books; it is certainly the most successful attempt he ever made to combine mathematics and humour." They have more recently been described as having "all the charm and wit of his better-known works".
Knot I, Excelsior. Two knights discuss the distance they will have travelled that day, uphill and downhill at different speeds. The older knight obscurely explains the mathematical problem.
Knot II, Eligible Apartments. Professor Balbus, named after a hero with "anecdotes whose vagueness in detail was more than compensated by their sensational brilliance", is given a problem by students. The number of guests for a party is described in puzzling terms. He in turn creates a mathematical problem for them: two answers are required of readers.
Knot III, Mad Mathesis. Overbearing aunt Mad Mathesis bets her niece that she can select a train from London that will pass more trains than her niece's does. The niece loses, but thinks she has found a solution to win, a second time.
Knot IV, The Dead Reckoning. The two knights of Knot I, in a modern guise, are party to a dispute about the weight of passengers' bags lost overboard from a ship.
Knot V, Oughts and Crosses. The aunt and niece from Knot III are in an art museum. Trading snipes as before, the aunt evades her niece's logical problem: The niece's preceptress had told her girls, "The more noise you make the less jam you will have, and vice versa." The niece wants to know if this means that if they are silent, they will have infinite jam. Instead, her aunt responds with her own logical problem.
Knot VI, Her Radiancy. Two travellers appear in Kgovjni, a land referenced in earlier Knots. The ruler places them in "the best dungeon, and abundantly fed on the best bread and water" until they resolve a logical problem.
...
Wikipedia