Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898) was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an English author, mathematician, logician and photographer. A lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, he is remembered above all for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, works that helped establish literary nonsense as a serious form. [1]
Early life and education
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on 27 January 1832 at Daresbury in Cheshire, the eldest son in a large clerical family. He was educated at Richmond School and then at Rugby School, before entering Christ Church, Oxford, where he proved an exceptional mathematician. [1]
He graduated with first-class honours in mathematics and in 1855 was appointed a lecturer at Christ Church, a post he held for some twenty-six years. He remained resident at the college for the rest of his life and was ordained a deacon in the Church of England, though he never took priest's orders or held a parish. [2]
The Alice books
The story that became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was first told during a river outing with the young daughters of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church. Encouraged to write it down, Dodgson expanded the tale and published it in 1865 under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, with illustrations by John Tenniel. [1]
The book was an immediate popular success and was followed in 1871 by Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, which contained the poem "Jabberwocky." Together the two novels broke with the moralising tradition of Victorian children's literature, offering instead dream logic, wordplay, puzzles and inverted reasoning. [3]
Mathematics, logic and photography
Under his own name Dodgson published mathematical works on geometry, determinants and voting theory, as well as textbooks and studies of formal logic including Symbolic Logic. His work on election methods anticipated later developments in social choice theory. [2]
He was also an accomplished early photographer, working with the wet collodion process from the 1850s and producing portraits of children, family members and notable Victorians. He was in addition a prolific diarist and letter writer. [1]
Later life and legacy
Carroll's later literary output included the long nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876) and the two-volume novel Sylvie and Bruno. He gave up his lectureship in 1881 to concentrate on writing. He died of pneumonia at Guildford on 14 January 1898, shortly before his sixty-sixth birthday. [1]
The Alice books have never gone out of print and have been translated into scores of languages, adapted repeatedly for stage and screen, and mined by mathematicians, logicians and philosophers for their puzzles and paradoxes. Carroll's coinages, among them "chortle" and "galumph," entered the English language. [3]
