Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson)
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that
bite, the claws that catch!
Lewis Carroll was born as Charles
Dodgson on January 27, 1832 at Daresbury, Cheshire, where his father Charles was
vicar. Charles attended Richmond Grammar School (Yorkshire) after his family moved
to Croft. He wrote a series of family magazines throughout his childhood, containing
poetry, drawing, and prose.
In 1846 Dodgson attended Rugby School, from
which he graduated to Christ Church College, Oxford. In 1854 he was awarded a
degree in mathematics, and the following year he began work as a Lecturer at Christ
Church in that subject. During that time he continued to write comic verse, some
of which was published in the Comic Times.
In 1856 Dodgson submitted a
parody to the magazine The Train. The editor of The Train, Edmund Yates, chose
the pseudonym "Lewis Carroll" from a list of possible pen names submitted
by Dodgson. In that same year Carroll first met Alice Pleasance Liddell, daughter
of the Dean.
Dodgson was an enthusiastic photographer, at a time when the
art was young. He took photographs of Alfred Tennyson, and had four of his prints
exhibited at the annual exhibition of the Photographic Society in London.
He
continued to write, and published several short stories and novels, in addition
to works on mathematics, such as A Syllabus of Plane Algebraic Geometry.
On July 4, 1862 (a momentous date in English literature!) Dodgson took
a boat trip with Alice Liddell and several others to Godstow. On this trip Dodgson
passed the time by telling the children a nonsense tale. He later wrote down the
story, calling it Alice's Adventures Underground. When he finished the
book in 1863 his friends and family urged him to publish it.
The book was
renamed Alice in Wonderland and published in July 1865. It was immediately
withdrawn from circulation due to poor print quality. A second, corrected, edition
was published in November, at roughly the same time as Dodgson's mathematical
treatise The Dynamics of a Particle.
In 1867 Dodgson began a new
children's series, Sylvie and Bruno, beginning with Bruno's Revenge,
in Aunt Judy's Magazine. In that same year he began a sequel to "Alice"
entitled Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.
When
Dodgson's father died in 1868, he purchased "The Chestnuts", at Guildford, Surrey,
where his family moved. He himself moved into quarters at Tom Quad, where he remained
for the rest of his life. There he continued his experiments with photography,
and went so far as to have a special photographic studio built on the roof of
Tom Quad.
Dodgson was a prolific writer, contributing political pamphlets,
mathematical works, and children's tales to a variety of magazines. In 1881 he
gave up his mathematics Lectureship to devote himself full time to his writing.
The year 1889 saw the final episode of Sylvie and Bruno.
"Lewis
Carroll" had mixed feelings about his lasting fame as an author of children's
stories. He preferred to think of himself as a man of science and mathematics
who also happened to write nonsense.
Charles Dodgson died of bronchitis
on January 14, 1898. He is buried in Mount Cemetery, Guildford, Surrey, near the
home he bought for his family.
Web Resources
Lewis Carroll and Christ Church
Places
To Visit
Christ Church College - Oxford
Mount Cemetary, Guildford
- Lewis Carroll's grave
More British
Biography
