Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) is the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician, logician and photographer who wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Born from a story told on a boat trip to a ten-year-old girl, Alice Liddell, the two books revolutionised children's literature with their nonsense, wordplay and logic games.
Works
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
A clergyman's son
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on 27 January 1832 at Daresbury, Cheshire, the eldest son among the eleven children of a clergyman. He entertained his brothers and sisters with puzzles, puppet shows and handwritten family magazines. After Rugby School he went to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1851.
He stayed at Christ Church for the rest of his life, as a lecturer in mathematics. He published books on geometry, algebra and logic under his own name, and stammered, which made lecturing difficult. His pen name, chosen in 1856, comes from his first names translated into Latin, Carolus Ludovicus, reversed and turned back into English.
Photographer and storyteller
Dodgson took up photography in 1856, when it was still a new art, and became one of the finest portrait photographers of his time, photographing Tennyson, the Rossettis and many children. He befriended the children of Henry Liddell, the dean of Christ Church, especially Lorina, Alice and Edith.
On 4 July 1862 he rowed up the Thames from Oxford to Godstow with his friend Robinson Duckworth and the three Liddell sisters. On the way he improvised a story about a girl called Alice who fell down a rabbit hole. Alice asked him to write it down; he gave her a handwritten, illustrated manuscript, Alice's Adventures Under Ground, for Christmas 1864.
Wonderland and the looking-glass
Expanded and illustrated by the cartoonist John Tenniel, the story was published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. Its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, appeared at Christmas 1871, built around a game of chess, with Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the poem Jabberwocky.
The books parodied the moral poems that Victorian children learned by heart, played with logic and language, and refused to teach a lesson. They were best sellers in Carroll's lifetime and have been translated into almost every language.
Later works
Carroll also wrote The Hunting of the Snark (1876), a long nonsense poem, and the two-volume novel Sylvie and Bruno. He invented word games, ciphers and logic puzzles, and published Symbolic Logic in 1896. He died on 14 January 1898 at his sisters' house in Guildford.
In 1928 Alice Liddell, by then Mrs Hargreaves and a widow, sold the original manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground at auction. It was later bought by American benefactors and given to the British Museum in 1948 in gratitude for Britain's role in the Second World War; it is now at the British Library.
Anecdotes
The first edition withdrawn
The first printing of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in 1865, was withdrawn because John Tenniel was unhappy with the quality of the printing of his pictures. The unbound sheets of its 2,000 copies were sold to a New York publisher; only about twenty-two copies of the original edition are known to survive, and they are among the most valuable children's books in the world.
A raven like a writing desk
At the Mad Hatter's tea party, the Hatter asks why a raven is like a writing desk, and admits he has no idea of the answer. Readers kept asking for one, and in the preface to an 1896 edition Carroll suggested that it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat, and is never put with the wrong end in front.
Frequently asked questions
What is Lewis Carroll's real name?
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. His pen name comes from his first two names: Charles Lutwidge became the Latin Carolus Ludovicus, reversed into Ludovicus Carolus, and anglicised as Lewis Carroll.
Who was the real Alice?
Alice Liddell (1852–1934), the daughter of the dean of Christ Church, Oxford, for whom Carroll first told and wrote down the story.
What is the difference between the two Alice books?
In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Alice falls down a rabbit hole into a land of playing cards; in Through the Looking-Glass (1871), she steps through a mirror into a world laid out like a chessboard.