At the end of the nineteenth century,
Charles Carryl was hailed as the American Lewis Carroll. Carryl's
Davy and the Goblin expanded the realm of possibility in American
fantasy for children when it first appeared in serial in 1884.
Charles Edward Carryl wrote for his
children and for himself; by trade he was a businessman and stockbroker
who used his writing as a diversion. He was born in New York on
December 30, 1841, the son of a prosperous businessman. By 1857 he had
his rapid ascent up the business ladder, working as an officer and
director of various railroad companies until 1872. In 1874 he
landed a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, which he held for the next
thirty-four years. From the 1850s through the 1870s the bulk of
Carryl's writings were of the stock transfer-business memorandum
variety.
In 1869 Carryl married Mary Wetmore,
and the first of their two children was born four years later.
With the influence of his imaginative children, Carryl's storytelling
soon began. Though the beginnings of Caryll's literary career were
inauspicious--his first published work was the 1882 Stock Exchange
Primer--he was soon thoroughly ensconced in a nonsense fantasy world
that would, when it was introduced in St. Nicholas a children's
periodical), elicit overwhelming approval from child readers.
At the time of his death in 1920, the
works of Carryl were still in print and widely read. If Carryl is
to be remembered for any one contribution to American children's
literature, it should be that he, more than any other American
children's fantasist of the past century, found a key to successful
nonsense fantasy so long thought to be the exclusive property of the
British.
******************
Source: The Dictionary of Literary Biography.
More specifically, from Douglas Street, "Charles E. Carryl,"
The Dictionary of Literary Biography; Vol. 42: American Writers for
Children before 1900, ed. Glenn E. Estes (Detroit: Gale Research
Company, 1985), pp. 122-126.
