@ Nighthawk: Sorry, I wasn't trying to imply that you were high.
@Nathan_p: Shucks, you're right, LSD wasn't used until what, the fifties? I looked it up and supposedly the only verifiable theories are that he used opium or psilocybin mushrooms.
Shrooms are unlikely. Don't think they were available.
My theory is just that the dude had an active imagination but if we're calling drugs... he might have taken laudanum or drunk absinthe. Both will cause you to hallucinate... at a certain dosage.
Yeah, I don't think shrooms were available in the states, but I know people knew about them as early as the Spanish missionaries who accused the Aztecs of idolatry because they used them as a sacrament or something. I had to do a project on 'em for a Health class. As far as the author you're probably right, I'd just heard rumors the he was on some hallucinogen.
He was a Brit >.> Maybe my research is too far to the goody-two-shoes side, but I haven't heard anything about magic mushrooms being available in Victorian England.
Er, Lewis Carrol was a botanist. It's where the idea of those huge ass mushrooms in the books came from. (Or at least that's what I think. But either way he was a botanist.)
Plus that particular type of mushroom can be found in southern U.S.
I read that he had minored in it or something. Or taken classes. Granted this was stated from a children's book (Olivia Kidney, the third one) so I don't know the credibility.
Not true, according to any source I can find. Reportedly, he was telling a crazy story to three young girls (ages 8-13) and the middle one, Alice Liddel, aged 10 at the time, asked Carrol if he could write it down. That's all. Carrol has no published drug history, and his worst psychological issues were epilepsy and a stutter.