Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832 to 1898), an English author, poet, mathematician, photographer and Anglican deacon. He is best known for “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865) and its sequel “Through the Looking-Glass” (1871), and for the nonsense poems “Jabberwocky” and “The Hunting of the Snark”.
Dodgson was born on 27 January 1832 at the vicarage in Daresbury, Cheshire, the eldest boy among eleven children, and the family moved to Croft-on-Tees in Yorkshire when he was 11. He entered Rugby School in 1846 and went on to Christ Church, Oxford, where he took first-class honours in mathematics in 1854. He won the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship in 1855 and held it for 26 years, was ordained a deacon in 1861, and lived at the college for the rest of his life. He took up photography in 1856.
The Alice stories grew out of his friendship with the family of Henry Liddell, the Dean of Christ Church. On a rowing trip on 4 July 1862 he told the outline of the story to the Liddell sisters, and Alice Liddell asked him to write it down. He gave her a handwritten, illustrated manuscript called “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground” in November 1864. An expanded version, illustrated by John Tenniel, was published as “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” in 1865 under the Lewis Carroll name, which he had first used about nine years earlier. “Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There” followed late in 1871, and “The Nursery ’Alice’”, his own abridgement for children up to five, appeared in 1890.
“The Hunting of the Snark” (1876), illustrated by Henry Holiday, follows a crew of nine tradesmen and a beaver who set off to find the snark. His last novel, “Sylvie and Bruno”, came out in two volumes in 1889 and 1893 and sold far fewer copies than the Alice books. “A Tangled Tale” (1885) collects ten short humorous stories that each set a mathematical problem.
Under his own name Dodgson published mathematical works including “Euclid and His Modern Rivals” and “The Game of Logic”, and he devised the word ladder puzzle he called Doublets. He died of pneumonia on 14 January 1898 at his sisters’ home in Guildford, Surrey. A memorial stone to him was unveiled in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey in 1982.
Publication Order of Alice Books
| Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland | 1865 |
| Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There | 1871 |
| The Nursery “Alice” | 1890 |
Publication Order of Sylvie and Bruno Books
| Sylvie and Bruno | 1889 |
| Sylvie and Bruno Concluded | 1893 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| A Tangled Tale | 1885 |
Publication Order of Poetry Books
| Phantasmagoria and Other Poems | 1869 |
| The Hunting of the Snark | 1876 |
| Rhyme? And Reason? | 1883 |
| Three Sunsets and Other Poems | 1898 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| A Syllabus of Plane Algebraic Geometry | 1860 |
| Euclid and His Modern Rivals | 1879 |
| The Principles of Parliamentary Representation | 1884 |
| The Game of Logic | 1886 |
| Curiosa Mathematica, Part 1: A New Theory of Parallels | 1888 |
| Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing | 1890 |
| Curiosa Mathematica, Part 2: Pillow Problems | 1892 |
| Symbolic Logic, Part I | 1896 |
Photo: Oscar Gustave Rejlander, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).