Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27, 1832 – January 14, 1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was a British author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman and photographer.

Writing career

During his writing career, Carroll wrote poetry and short stories, sending them to various magazines and enjoying moderate success. Between 1854 and 1856, his work appeared in the national publications, The Comic Times and The Train, as well as smaller magazines like the Whitby Gazette and the Oxford Critic.

Related Topics:
Poetry - Short stories - 1854 - 1856 - Whitby Gazette

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Most of his output was funny, sometimes satirical. But his standards and his ambitions were exacting. "I do not think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication (in which I do not include the Whitby Gazette or the Oxonian Advertiser), but I do not despair of doing so some day," he wrote in July 1855. Years before Alice, he was thinking up ideas for children's books that would make money: 'Christmas book sell well... Practical hints for constructing Marionettes and a theatre'. The ideas got better as he got older, but his canny mind, with an eye to income, was always there.

Related Topics:
Satirical - 1855

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In 1856 he published his first piece of work under the name that would make him famous. A very predictable little romantic poem called "Solitude" appeared in The Train under the authorship of 'Lewis Carroll'. This pseudonym was a play on his real name, Lewis being the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll being an anglicised version of Carolus, the Latin for Charles.

Related Topics:
1856 - Anglicise

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In the same year, a new Dean, Henry Liddell, arrived at Christ Church, bringing with him a young wife and children, all of whom would figure largely in Dodgson's life over the following years. He became close friends with the mother and the children, particularly the three sisters Ina, Alice and Edith. It seems there became something of a tradition of his taking the girls out on the river for picnics at Godstow or Nuneham.

Related Topics:
Henry Liddell - Alice - Godstow - Nuneham

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It was on one such expedition, in 1862, that Dodgson invented the outline of the story that eventually became his first and largest commercial success — the first Alice book. Having told the story and been begged by Alice Liddell to write it down, Dodgson eventually presented Alice with a hand-written, illustrated manuscript entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground (now in the British Library, Add. MS 46700). Later he took the little book to Macmillan the publisher, who liked it immediately. After the possible alternative titles Alice Among the Fairies and Alice's Golden Hour were rejected, the work was finally published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 under the Lewis Carroll pen-name Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier. The illustrations this time were by Sir John Tenniel; Dodgson evidently realised that a published book would need the skills of a professional artist.

Related Topics:
1862 - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - 1865

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With the immediate, phenomenal success of Alice, the story of the author's life becomes effectively divided in two: the continuing story of Dodgson's real life and the evolving myth surrounding "Lewis Carroll." Carroll quickly became a rich and detailed alter ego, a persona as famous and deeply embedded in the popular psyche as the story he told. To him belongs a large part of the image of little girls and strange otherworldliness that we know from the author of Alice.

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It is undisputed that throughout his growing wealth and fame, he continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881, and that he remained in residence there until his death. He published Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There in 1872; his great Joycean mock-epic The Hunting of the Snark, in 1876 (inspired by and dedicated to his other great child-friend after Alice Liddell, Gertrude Chataway), and his last novel, the two-volume Sylvie and Bruno, in 1889 and 1893 respectively.

Related Topics:
1881 - 1872 - The Hunting of the Snark - 1876 - Gertrude Chataway - Sylvie and Bruno - 1889 - 1893

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He also published many mathematical papers and books under his own name.

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Other selected works

• An Elementary Treatise on Determinants
• Symbolic Logic
• Euclid and his Modern Rivals
• The Alphabet Cipher
• What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.
• Hiawatha's Photographing (a parody of The Song of Hiawatha)