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Biography from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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.

His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the comic poem The Hunting of the Snark, and the nonsense poem "Jabberwocky".

His facility at word play, logic, and fantasy has delighted audiences ranging from children to the literary elite. His works have remained popular since they were published and have influenced not only children's literature, but also a number of major 20th century writers such as James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges.

There are societies dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works in many parts of the world including North America, Japan, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.

Early life

Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, with some Irish connections. Conservative and High Church Anglican, most of Dodgson's ancestors belonged to the two traditional English upper-middle class professions: the army and the Church. His great-grandfather, also Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become a bishop; his grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in 1803 when his two sons were hardly more than babies.

The elder of these — yet another Charles — reverted to the other family business and took holy orders. He went to Rugby School, and thence to Christ Church, Oxford. He was mathematically gifted and won a double first degree which could have been the prelude to a brilliant academic career. Instead he married his first cousin in 1827 and retired into obscurity as a country parson.

Young Dodgson was born in the little parsonage of Daresbury in Warrington, Cheshire, the oldest boy but already the third child of the four-and-a-half year old marriage. Eight more were to follow and, remarkably for the time, all of them—seven girls and four boys— survived into adulthood. When Charles was 11 his father was given the living of Croft-on-Tees in north Yorkshire, and the whole family moved to the spacious Rectory. This remained their home for the next twenty-five years.

Dodgson senior made some progress through the ranks of the church: he published some sermons, translated Tertullian, became an Archdeacon of Ripon Cathedral, and involved himself, sometimes influentially, in the intense religious disputes that were dividing the Anglican church. He was High Church, inclining to Anglo-Catholicism, an admirer of Newman and the Tractarian movement, and he did his best to instil such views in his children.

In his early years, young Dodgson was educated at home. His "reading lists" preserved in the family testify to a precocious intellect: at the age of seven the child was reading The Pilgrim's Progress. It is often said that he was naturally left-handed and suffered severe psychological trauma by being forced to suppress this natural tendency, but there is no documentary evidence to support this. He also suffered from a stutter that often influenced his social life throughout his years. At twelve he was sent away to a small private school at nearby Richmond, where he appears to have been happy and settled. But in 1845, young Dodgson moved on to Rugby School, where he was evidently less happy, for as he wrote some years after leaving the place:

"I cannot say ... that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again ... I can honestly say that if I could have been ... secure from annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would have been comparative trifles to bear."[citation needed]

The nature of this nocturnal "annoyance" will probably never now be fully understood, but it may be that he is delicately referring to some type of sexual molestation. Scholastically, though, he excelled with apparent ease. "I have not had a more promising boy his age since I came to Rugby" observed R.B. Mayor, the Maths master.

Academic life

He left Rugby at the end of 1850 and, after an interval which remains unexplained, went on in January 1851 to Oxford, attending his father's old college, Christ Church. He had only been at Oxford two days when he received a summons home. His mother had died of "inflammation of the brain" — perhaps meningitis or a stroke — at the age of forty-seven.

Whatever Dodgson's feelings may have been about his mother's death, he did not allow them to distract him too much from his purpose at Oxford. He may not always have worked hard, but he was exceptionally gifted and achievement came easily to him. The following year he received a first in Honour Moderations, and shortly after he was nominated to a Studentship (the Christ Church equivalent of a fellowship), by his father's old friend Canon Edward Pusey.

His early academic career veered between high-octane promise and irresistible distraction. He failed an important scholarship, but his talent as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship, which he continued to hold for the next twenty-six years. The income was good, but the work bored him and his stammer hampered him. Many of his pupils were older and richer than he was, and almost all of them were uninterested.

At Oxford he was also diagnosed as an epileptic, then a considerable social stigma to bear. However, recently John R. Hughes, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago's epilepsy clinic, has argued that Dodgson may have been misdiagnosed.

Writing career

During his writing career, Dodgson 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.

Most of his output was humorous, sometimes satirical, but his standards and 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 [that would] 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.

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 was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll being an anglicised version of Carolus, the Latin for Charles.

The ruin of Godstow Nunnery.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 Lorina, Edith and Alice Liddell, from whom it is often said he may have derived his own "Alice", a suggestion backed up by the acrostic of Alice's full name that appears at the end of Through the Looking Glass. Dodgson himself later denied his "little heroine" was based on any real child. It seems there became something of a tradition of his taking the girls out on the river for picnics at Godstow or Nuneham Courtenay.

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 Alexandra Kitchin ("Xie"), daughter of the Dean of Durham, with a hand-written, illustrated manuscript entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground, dated 1887. Later he took the little book to Macmillan, 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. The first edition copy of Alice's Adventures Under Ground, now highly sought after by literary collectors, changed hands to a private collector on January 26, 2006. It was sold at Christie's for £4,800 by the Duke of Gloucester, its previous owner, to pay for his father's death duties (The Sunderland Echo, 28th January, 2006).

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.

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.

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

		"When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age." Victor Hugo