Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematician who spent his working life at Christ Church, Oxford. He was born at the vicarage in Daresbury, Cheshire, the eldest son among the eleven children of a clergyman, and he stammered all his life. The pen name is his own name taken into Latin and back: Charles Lutwidge became Carolus Ludovicus, then Carroll Lewis, then Lewis Carroll. He sent four possible names to the editor Edmund Yates in 1856, and Yates chose this one.

At Oxford he took first-class honours in mathematics and lectured in the subject for twenty-six years. He wrote on logic and on Euclid, and a method for computing determinants is still called Dodgson condensation. From 1856 to 1880 he was also a serious photographer and took about 3,000 pictures, of which fewer than 1,000 survive.

On 4 July 1862 he and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed the three young daughters of Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church, up the river from Folly Bridge to Godstow, and he told them a story on the way. Alice, who was ten, asked him to write it down. In November 1864 he gave her a handwritten copy with his own drawings, called Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. The published book is about twice as long and adds, among other scenes, the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Macmillan brought it out in 1865 with illustrations by John Tenniel, and Carroll paid for the printing himself, including a second run after Tenniel objected to how his pictures had come out in the first.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is literary nonsense, not a fairy tale with a lesson. The verses Alice tries to recite come out wrong because they parody the improving poems Victorian children learned by heart, and the Duchess, who finds a moral in everything, is part of the joke. Through the Looking-Glass followed in 1871, with “Jabberwocky”, the poem that gave dictionaries the words “chortle” and “galumphing”, and The Hunting of the Snark in 1876. He died in Guildford in January 1898.