Lewis Carroll

Life

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born in January 1832 at Daresbury in Cheshire, the eldest son of a large clerical family. He was educated at Rugby School and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a first in mathematics in 1854 and remained for the rest of his life as a lecturer and, from 1855, as a member of the college. He was ordained a deacon in 1861 but never proceeded to the priesthood.

Dodgson was a keen amateur photographer, one of the better-known practitioners of the art in its early decades, and he made friends easily with children, including the daughters of Henry Liddell, the dean of Christ Church. On a river outing in July 1862 he told the Liddell sisters a story that, at Alice Liddell’s request, he wrote down and later expanded into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865 with illustrations by John Tenniel. Through the Looking-Glass followed in 1871 and the nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark in 1876.

Under his own name he published books and pamphlets on mathematics and logic. He was shy, stammered, and kept a meticulous diary and letter register. He died of pneumonia in Guildford in January 1898.

Literary significance

The two Alice books changed children’s literature by dropping the moral instruction that Victorian readers expected and replacing it with wordplay, parody, and logical puzzle. They have remained in print continuously, have been translated into well over a hundred languages, and have been quoted, adapted, and illustrated more than almost any other English prose. Carroll’s nonsense verse, especially “Jabberwocky” from the second book, has had a separate influence on poets and linguists interested in how language can carry meaning without making sense.

Where to start

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is short and self-contained and is where nearly everyone begins. Through the Looking-Glass is a little more elaborate and is best read second.