Who Invented Cubism?

Pablo Picasso receives credit for originating the cubist style of painting with his 1907 masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. But a passage in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass--published in 1871!--makes us think that maybe it wasn't actually Picasso who conceived of cubism. In this excerpt from Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll's egg-like character, Humpty Dumpty, tells the young girl Alice how hard it will be to recognize her if they meet again, because human beings look so much alike:

"I shouldn't know you again if we did meet," Humpty Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake; "you're so exactly like other people."

"The face is what one goes by, generally," Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone.

"That's just what I complain of," said Humpty Dumpty. "Your face is the same as everybody has--the two eyes, so--" (marking their places in the air with his thumb) "nose in the middle, mouth under. It's always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance--or the mouth at the top--that would be some help."

"It wouldn't look nice," Alice objected. But Humpty Dumpty only shut his eyes and said "Wait till you've tried."

It is said that the early cubists--Picasso, George Braque, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris--were influenced by mathematical theories. Cubists painted fragmented forms, sometimes literally as cubes, sometimes showing different aspects of the same figures over and over, and sometimes distorting features. Carroll--as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, his real name--was a brilliant mathematician who taught this subject for many years at Oxford. So perhaps he invented cubism?