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.
[] Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland []
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.
"Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it." - Lewis Carroll
On July 4, 1862 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 It was immediately withdrawn from circulation due to poor print quality.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.
Charles Dodgson kept his identity as Lewis Carroll quite separate from his everyday life as a teacher and parish priest. Until he died in 1898, few people connected the retired Oxford don with the world-famous children's author
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.
Further Reading: Mystery of Lewis Carroll
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l e w i s c a r r o l l : s e l e c t e d b o o k s
[] Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
[] Bruno's Revenge, 1867
[] Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, 1869
[] Through the Looking-Glass, 1871
[] The Hunting of the Snark, 1876
[] The Wasp in a Wig: The "Suppressed" Episode of Through the Looking Class, 1877
[] Rhyme? and Reason?, 1883
[] Sylvie and Bruno, 1889
[] The Nursery "Alice", 1889
[] Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893
[] Three Sunsets and Other Poems, 1898
[] For the Train: Five poems and a Tale, 1932
[] The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch, 1932
[] The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, 1939
[] The Poems of Lewis Carroll, 1973
[] Lewis Carroll's Diaries, 1993-1997 (ed. Edward Wakeling; 4 vols.)
His academic works include A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry (1860), The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry (1861),
A Guide to the Mathematical Student (1864), The Dynamics of a Particle (1865),
An Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867), and The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically (1868).
Lewis Carroll, Xie Kitchin (in Greek dress)
12 June 1873, Albumen Print
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Recommended Viewing:
T.F. Colston....?, Lewis Carroll's Birthplace, Church, Daresbury, Cheshire
19th Century Primitive Oil
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Lewis Carroll. Biog. Gallery Carroll's Books at Amazon
Alice in Wonderland Dvd Search Site Top of Page
© Estate of Lewis Carroll
E-mail
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