Dodgson biography Version for printing Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is better known by the pseudonym "Lewis Carroll". Although he was a mathematician, he is best known as the author of Alice's adventures in wonderland (1865) and Through the looking glass (1872), children's books that are among the most popular of all time. They are distinguished as satire and as examples of verbal wit. Dodgson wrote mathematical works under his own name but for his children's books he invented the pen name "Lewis Carroll" by translating his first two names "Charles Lutwidge" into Latin as "Carolus Lodovicus", then anglicising and reversing their order. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's father was the Reverend Charles Dodgson. Charles Dodgson senior was born in 1800 and studied at the University of Oxford where he gained a First Class degree in both mathematics and classics. He was appointed as a mathematics lecturer at Oxford where he held a Fellowship but, on marrying his cousin Frances Jane Lutwidge in 1827, he had to give up his Oxford Fellowship.

He then became a curate at All Saints' Church in Daresbury and it was in that town that ten of Charles and Frances' eleven children were born. Charles Lutwidge was the eldest of his parents three boys, having two elder sisters Fanny, born in 1828, and Elizabeth, born in 1830. Charles was baptised on 11 July 1832 in his father's church and grew up in a strict Christian household. His early education, like that of his brothers and sisters, was provided by his parents. He read mostly religious books as a child and an indication of his rapid progress is that he had read Pilgrim's Progress by the time he was seven. Charles looked up to his father and wished to be like him. Since mathematics was his father's favourite subject, it is easy to see how Charles gained an early love for it. Not only did Charles model himself on his father, but his father also wanted his son to follow in his footsteps by studying mathematics at Oxford, then obtaining a Fellowship, marrying and becoming a vicar.

At Daresbury the Dodgson family had to struggle financially, so it was a relief when Charles's father moved to become vicar at Croft-on-Tees in Yorkshire in 1843 where his income was substantially increased. At Croft the family lived in a large rectory with a wonderful garden but chose to live much more simply than they might have done. On 1 August 1844 Charles enter Richmond School as a boarder, living in the headmaster's house. The school was only ten miles from his home and so his parents were able to visit him just over a week after he arrived. They found that he was settling in well and indeed at this school he received an excellent foundation for his education, excelling in mathematics. On 27 January 1846, Charles' fourteenth birthday, he enrolled at Rugby School. This was a famous school but one where Charles found things extremely difficult. A shy, sensitive boy with a stammer, he suffered bullying from the older boys and, as Clark writes [ 7 ]:- From every point of view life at Rugby was a personal disaster for young Dodgson.

Despite being deeply unhappy, Dodgson achieved high standards in his school work, receiving a steady stream of prizes. Again mathematics was his favourite subject but he also excelled at divinity. A number of illnesses which he suffered from in 1848 had a lasting effect. The first was whooping cough which he caught in the spring. He was left with a persistent cough which returned at various times throughout his life. In the autumn he contracted mumps and this left him somewhat deaf in his right ear, a problem which never improved. He wrote afterwards of his time at Rugby (see for example [ 9 ]):- During my stay I made I suppose some progress in learning of various kinds, but none of it was done with love, and I spent an incalculable time in writing out impositions - this last I consider one of the chief faults of Rugby School. I made some friends there ... but I cannot say that I look back upon my life at a Public School with any sensations of pleasure, or that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again. He left Rugby in December 1849 and in the following May he travelled to the University of Oxford to make the necessary arrangements to begin his studies there.

As his father wished, Dodgson matriculated at Christ Church College Oxford, which had been his father's College. Things did not start very well for him, however, for there was a shortage of accommodation and he had to return to his parent's home in Croft and wait until accommodation could be arranged before starting his university studies. On 24 January 1851 Dodgson returned to Oxford to live with the Rev. Jacob Ley, a friend of his father. Two days later his mother died suddenly at the age of 47 and again he had to return to Croft. When he returned to Oxford he was filled with a determination to work hard so that he might win scholarships and become financially independent. He was able to mix social and cultural activities with hard work at mathematics and in November 1851 he was awarded a Boulter Scholarship worth 20 pounds a year. After receiving a Second Class in classics and a First Class in mathematics in December 1852 he was awarded a Fellowship of 25 pounds a year for life.

This came with the right to live in Christ Church College, but although there were no requirements to any further academic achievements, he was required to take Holy Orders and to remain unmarried. Dodgson's father was absolutely delighted with his son's success and, moreover, he himself had been made Canon of Ripon Cathedral in 1852, going on to become Archdeacon of Richmond two years later. This was the year when Dodgson completed his studies receiving a Third Class Degree in Classics but topping the list of those receiving First Class honours in mathematics by a good margin. The challenges ahead were now the senior scholarship competition and he knew that success in that would almost certainly lead to his appointment as a lecturer in mathematics. At this point, however, the usually conscientious Dodgson became too taken up with leisure and cultural activities and failed to put in the necessary work at mathematics. He did begin to take pupils, although not as an official university tutor, and this too must have taken much of his time.

Disappointed with his own performance in the two scholarship examination papers on 22 March 1855, and that on the morning of the following day, he gave up and did not turn up to sit the final paper on the afternoon of 23 March (only two students did sit it). Of course he did not receive the scholarship and wrote in his diary (see for example [ 9 ]):- It is tantalizing to think how easily ... I might have got it, if I had only worked properly during this term, which I fear I must consider as wasted. However, I have now got a year before me, and with this past term as a lesson ... I mean to have read by next time, Integral Calculus, Optics (and theory of light), Astronomy, and higher Dynamics. I record this resolution to shame myself with, in case March 1856 finds me still unprepared, knowing how many similar failures there have been in my life already. He still had a hectic schedule, coaching pupils, and he also had, since February 1855, an official appointment as sub-librarian at Christ Church.

In another scholarship examination he again failed to win an award but then took on coaching fourteen pupils for the Mathematical Examiner. This task (see for example [ 9 ]):- ... will give me no official position as it is merely a private arrangement between ourselves: it is decidedly favourable to my getting the lectureship hereafter, though it by no means secures it. During the summer of 1855 Dodgson taught at his father's school in Croft and by the time he returned to Oxford in October it was as a Mathematics Lecturer, the position that he had sought. It meant that he now did not need to take the scholarship examinations in March 1856 as he had planned. Dodgson remained at Christ Church, Oxford, lecturing on mathematics and writing treatises and guides for students until 1881. Although he took deacon's orders in 1861, Dodgson was never ordained a priest, partly because he was afflicted with a stammer that made preaching difficult and partly, perhaps, because he had discovered other interests such as the theatre.

It seems likely, however, that as time went on he found it harder to accept the view that non-Christian were condemned and, as a man of great honesty, would therefore find the oaths he would be required to swear to become a priest unacceptable. Among Dodgson's hobbies was photography, at which he became highly proficient. His interest began when visiting his uncle in 1855, and at that time he took some photographs with his uncle's equipment. He purchased his own camera and developing chemicals in March 1856 and began to experiment with pictures of landscapes, architecture, sculptures and, most of all, of people. His family, friends and colleagues became the subjects of his photographs but he excelled especially at photographing children, which was his greatest pleasure. Alice Liddell, one of the three daughters of Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ Church, was one of his photographic subjects and the model for the fictional Alice. Other subjects were the children of the writer George Macdonald and the sons of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Not only did Dodgson enjoy photographing children, but he also enjoyed their company.

In 1932 Alice Liddell recalled how she and her sisters Lorina and Edith:- ... used to sit on the big sofa on each side of him, while he told us stories, illustrating them by pencil or ink drawings as he went along ... He seemed to have an endless store of these fantastical tales, which he made up as he told them, drawing busily on a large sheet of paper all the time. They were not always entirely new. Sometimes they were new versions of old stories; sometimes they started on the old basis, but grew into new tales owing to the frequent interruptions which opened up fresh and undreamed-of possibilities. It was in 1862 that Dodgson wrote down the stories at Alice's request. Henry Kingsley, the author, visited the Liddells and happened to pick up Dodgson's stories. He made it very clear that Dodgson had to be persuaded to publish his writings. Three years later, after polishing them and adding some more material, Dodgson published his first "Alice book" as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. As a mathematician, Dodgson was rather conservative but certainly thorough and careful.

He was the author of a fair number of mathematics books including: A syllabus of plane algebraical geometry (1860), Two Books of Euclid (1860), The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry (1861), Condensation of Determinants (1866), Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867), Examples in Arithmetic (1874), Euclid and his modern rivals (1879), Curiosa Mathematica, Part I: A New Theory of Parallels (1888), and Curiosa Mathematica, Part II: Pillow Problems thought out during Sleepless Nights (1893). None of his mathematics books have proved of enduring importance except for Euclid and his modern rivals (1879) which is of historical interest. Dodgson wrote it to defend using Euclid 's Elements as a means of teaching geometry. The book is written in the form of a play in which the ghost of Euclid returns to defend his book to modern geometers.

Euclid sums up saying:- Let me carry with me the hope that I have convinced you of the importance, if not the necessity, of retaining my order and numbering, and my method of treating straight lines, angles, right angles, and (most especially) parallels. Leave me these untouched, and I shall look on with great contentment while other changes are made ... It is a serious work with well argued cases on all sides regarding the teaching of geometry. It contains much evidence of Dodgson's humour too as for example after the ghost of Euclid makes his first appearance he leaves saying:- ... that concludes our present interview; so we will meet again when you have reviewed my Modern Rivals one by one. If you had any slow music handy, I would vanish to it: as it is ... [Vanishes without slow music] Although Dodgson argued here for retaining Euclid 's way of treating parallels, in Curiosa Mathematica, Part I: A New Theory of Parallels published nine years later, he presented his own ideas on dealing with the parallel axiom. As a mathematical logician, he was interested in increasing understanding by treating it as a game.

He published The Game of Logic in 1887 and Symbolic Logic Part I in 1896. In the latter work Dodgson presented a way of visually representing propositions in a diagram which is similar to Venn diagrams, developed by John Venn in 1881, but Dodgson's pictures have certain advantages. However, Venn diagrams are today much used and Dodgson's gameboard method is forgotten. Symbolic Logic Part I contains the statement that:- I have a quantity of manuscript in hand for Parts II and III, and hope to be able - should life, and health, and opportunity, be granted to me - to publish them... In fact between 1959 and 1970 portions of the missing parts were found by William Warren Bartley and published for the first time in 1977. In the article [ 23 ] Bartley claims that the previously unpublished material shows specific achievements which can be credited to Dodgson. These are:- By 1896 Dodgson had developed a mechanical test of validity for a large part of the logic of terms, an achievement usually credited to Leopold Löwenheim [in 1915].

As early as 1894 Dodgson used truth tables for the solution of specific logic problems. The application of truth tables and matrices did not come into general use until 1920. By 1896 Dodgson had developed the method of trees for determining some validity, which bears a resemblance to the trees frequently employed by contemporary logicians. Other recent work has again put Dodgson's mathematical contributions in a much more favourable light than it was previously seen. For example in [ 20 ] Abeles writes:- A discussion is given of three pamphlets on elections and committees by C L Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) written between 1873 and 1876. It is argued that Dodgson's work on cycles anticipates a stochastic model proposed by Thompson and Remage in 1964 and includes ideas that are basic to maximum likelihood estimation.

In [ 18 ] we also have a very positive view of Dodgson's numerous contributions to the theory of elections, perhaps his most significant being Parliamentary Elections and The Principles of Parliamentary Representation both written in 1884:- Dodgson's work present a complete and unified approach to the electoral reform issues which were being discussed at the time, but in doing so he developed and contributed ideas to game theory and apportionment which are well in advance of the 1880s. Finally we should mention Dodgson's love of puzzles [ 9 ]:- He was good at charades, he sang, he told stories. Soon enough, jokes, puzzles, games, questions-and-answers, tricks with numbers and with words, and mental exercises became for him a means of everyday amusement and for his family and friends source of fun and diversion. He also played traditional games - chess, croquet, billiards, cards - but his mind was not content with these, and he expanded, extended, and experimented with all forms and fashions, pushing traditional entertainments to their outer limits and inventing new ones.

in the 1870s he created a veritable cornucopia of conundrums and mental challenges, brilliant additions to the store of magic and game playing ... He was so creative and so productive that his games and diversions fill sizeable anthologies. The book [ 14 ] contains "42 delightfully diverting mind-benders", puzzles which Dodgson was working on at the time he died. His death was sudden. He contracted a cold in early January 1898 which at first seemed very minor but it developed into a chest problem and his doctor insisted he go to bed. His breathing became more and more difficult and he died at 2.30 in the afternoon of 14 January. Dodgson, writing as Lewis Carroll, contributed wonderful examples of nonsense verse the best known of which is 'Jabberwocky' from Through the Looking-Glass. This begins:- 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

The Hunting of the Snark, published by Dodgson (as Lewis Carroll in 1876), has been called:- ... the longest and best sustained nonsense poem in the English language. Several words from his nonsense poems have entered standard English language usage. For example, the word 'chortle', a word that combines 'snort' and 'chuckle', appears in 'Jabberwocky'. Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll): A Brief Biography Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll): A Brief Biography Karoline Leach [contrariwise@lookingforlewiscarroll.com] [ Victorian Web Home —> Authors —> Lewis Carroll —> Works —> Genre and Style —> Literary Relations —> Theme and Subject ] Antecedents and Early Life "Lewis Carroll," as he was to become known, was born on January 27 1832. His family was predominantly northern English, with Irish connections, Conservative, Anglican, High Church , upper middle class, and inclining towards the two good old upper middle class professions of 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 most romantically in action in 1803 while 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 Westminster, one of England's famous seven public schools , and thence to Oxford. He was mathematically brilliant and won an astonishing double first which could have been, but turned out not to be, the prelude to a brilliant career. Instead he married his cousin in 1827 and retired into obscurity as a country parson. Young Charles was born in the little parsonage of Daresbury in Cheshire, the oldest boy but already the third child of the four-and-a-half year marriage. Eight more were to follow and, incredibly 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 25 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. Young Charles grew out of infancy into a bright, articulate boy. In the early years he 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 counteract this tendency, but there is no documentary evidence to support this. 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. The nature of this nocturnal 'annoyance' will probably never now be fully understood, but it may be that he is delicately referring to some form of sexual abuse. 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. Oxford He left Rugby at the end of 1849 and, after an interval which remains unexplained, went on in January 1851 to Oxford: to his father's old college, Christ Church. Oxford and beyond 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 this 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 achieved 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. Through his own laziness, he failed an important scholarship, but still his clear brilliance as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship, which he continued to hold for the next 26 years. The income was good, but the work bored him. Many of his pupils were stupid, older than him, richer than him, and almost all of them were uninterested. They didn't want to be taught, he didn't want to teach them. Mutual apathy ruled In 1856 he took up the new art form of photography.

He excelled at it and it became an expression of his very personal inner philosophy; a belief in the divinity of what he called "beauty" by which he seemed to mean a state of moral or aesthetic or physical perfection. He found this divine beauty not simply in the magic of theatre, but in the poetry of words, in a mathematical formula; and perhaps supremely, in the human form; in the body-images that moved him. When he took up photography he sought with his own representations, to combine the ideals of freedom and beauty into the innocence of Eden, where the human body and human contact could be enjoyed without shame. In his middle age, he was to re-form this philosophy into the pursuit of beauty as a state of Grace, a means of retrieving lost innocence. This, along with his lifelong passion for the theatre was to bring him into confrontation with the Moral Majority of his day and his own family's High Church beliefs. The young adult Charles Dodgson was about six foot tall, slender and handsome in a soft-focused dreamy sort of way, with curling brown hair and blue eyes.

At the unusually late age of seventeen he suffered a severe attack of whooping cough which left him with poor hearing in his right ear and was probably responsible for his chronically weak chest in later life, but the only overt defect he carried into adulthood was what he referred to as his "hesitation" — a stammer he had acquired in early childhood and which was to plague him throughout his entire life. The stammer has always been a potent part of the myth. It is part of the mythology that Carroll only stammered in adult company, and was free and fluent with children, but there is nothing to support this idea. Many children of his acquaintance remembered the stammer; many adults failed to notice it. It came and went for its own reasons, but not as a clichá manifestation of fear of the adult world. Dodgson himself was far more acutely aware of it than most people he met. Although his stammer troubled him — even obsessed him sometimes — it was never bad enough to stop him using his other qualities to do well in society. He was naturally gregarious, egoistic enough to relish attention and admiration.

At a time when people devised their own amusements, when singing and recitation were required social skills, this youth was well-equipped as an engaging entertainer. He could sing tolerably well and was not afraid to do so in front of an audience. He was adept at mimicry and story-telling. He was something of a star at charades. He could be charming, pushy, manipulative, with the kind of ready sensitivity vulnerable women are apt to find irresistible. There are brief hints at a soaring sense of the spiritual and the divine; small moments that reveal a rich and intensely-lived inner life. 'That is a wild and beautiful bit of poetry, the song of "call the cattle home",' he suddenly observed, in the midst of an analysis of Kingsley 's novel Alton Locke: 'I remember hearing it sung at Albrighton: I wonder if any one there could have entered into the spirit of Alton Locke. I think not. I think the character of most that I meet is merely refined animal... How few seem to care for the only subjects of real interest in life'. He was also quite nakedly socially ambitious, anxious to make his mark on the world in some way, as a writer, as an artist.

His scholastic career was only a stop-gap to other more exciting attainments that he wanted hungrily. He was writing — poetry, short stories, sending them to various magazines, and already enjoying moderate success. Between '54 and '56, 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 funny, sometimes satirical. But his standards and his 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 dro 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' His ideas got better as he got older, but the 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'. In the same year, a new Dean arrived at Christ Church, Henry Liddell, 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 — Ina, Alice and Edith. It seems there became something of a tradition of his taking the girls out on the river for picnics at Godstow or Nuneham. 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 was evidently struck by its potential to sell well. He took the MS to Macmillan the publisher who liked it immediately. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, under the pen-name Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier — Lewis Carroll.

With the launch and immediately 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. To him belongs a large part of the image of 'little girls' and strange otherworldliness. that we know as the author of Alice. Dodgson's reality remained and remains largely obscure. It has been ignored, even by the most recent and reputed of modern biographers, in all, but its briefest outline. 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, and his last novel the two volume Sylvie and Bruno in 1889 and 1893 respectively.

He also published many mathematical papers under his own name, courted scandal through his associations with the opposite sex, toured Russia and Europe on an extended visit (in 1867) and bought a house in Guildford, where he died, suddenly of violent pneumonia, in January 14 1898, leaving mystery and enigma behind him. The more than an century that has elapsed since then has shown an explosion of the Carroll mythology. Elaborate tales are now told of the how and why of Dodgson's life and mind. He has been presented as paedophile, perpetual child, as scholar-saint as innocent dreamer of children, as a deviant resident in an ivory tower or dreaming spire. But how did these truths get here? Are they any kind of reality? The linked extracts from In the Shadow of the Dreamchild will try and answer these questions, and trace the strange story of how "Carroll" came to be born and to eclipse the reality of the man who created him. FAQ « Lewis Carroll Society of North America FAQ The information below is intended to address some frequently asked questions about the LCSNA and about Lewis Carroll, but is by no means intended to answer all questions.

For more about Lewis Carroll and his works, please visit our Lewis Carroll page. Questions can be addressed to our web master . Please note that as a non-profit organization, we do not post advertising. You are welcome to submit news of a Carrollian nature to our Blog . About Lewis Carroll Who exactly was Lewis Carroll? Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, was a man of diverse interests — in mathematics, logic, photography, art, theater, religion, science, and of course literature. He was happiest in the company of children for whom he created puzzles, clever games, and charming letters. And of course, he also told them stories. As all Carroll admirers know, his book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), became an immediate success and has since been translated into more than eighty languages. The equally popular sequel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, was published in 1872. The “Alice” books are but two examples of his wide ranging authorship.

The Hunting of the Snark (1876), a classic nonsense epic, and Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879), a rare example of humorous work concerning mathematics, still entice and intrigue today’s students. Sylvie and Bruno (1889), published toward the end of his life, contains startling ideas including a description of weightlessness. The humor, sparkling wit and genius of this Victorian Englishman have lasted for more than a century. His books are among the most quoted works in the English language, and his influence (as well as that of his illustrator, Sir John Tenniel) can be seen everywhere, from the world of advertising to that of atomic physics. Why did Mr. Dodgson write under the pen name of Lewis Carroll? As a modest gentleman and a scholar/instructor at Oxford, he valued his privacy very highly. He would refuse letters sent to “Lewis Carroll, Christ Church, Oxford”, claiming no such person lived there! But he did occasionally use his pen name to smooth an introduction to a well-known member of society or new child friend. How did he come up with the name Lewis Carroll?

He took the first two parts of his name, Charles Lutwidge, and translated them into Latin: Carolus Ludovicus. He then reversed their order: Ludovicus Carolus, and then loosely translated them back into English: Lewis Carroll. He actually supplied his first publisher with a short list of possible pen names, and it was the publisher who selected “Lewis Carroll” from the list. Share that bit of trivia at your next mad tea party! Was there a real Alice? Indeed there was. Alice Pleasance Liddell was arguably Charles Dodgson’s greatest child friend. She was one of the daughters of Henry George Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, where Mr. Dodgson lived, taught and wrote. Was Lewis Carroll in love with Alice? To say that much has been written on this question would be a monumental understatement. For the purposes of this site, suffice it to say that in addition to being a friend during her childhood years, she was his first true creative muse. Interestingly, Alice Liddell also inspired a number of other well known artists of the time, including John Ruskin, William Richmond and Julia Margaret Cameron.

The fact that the two “Alice” books are still so beloved today stands as a testament to the lasting power of that original inspiration, and to Mr. Dodgson’s timeless genius. What was the origin of the Alice books? Mr. Dodgson would often take young Alice and her sisters Lorina (older) and Edith (younger) on leisurely rowing expeditions in the company of a fellow Oxford scholar. During these boat rides and subsequent picnics, he would make up fantastical tales to entertain the girls. What we now know as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland began as one of these stories, and was only written down because Alice begged Mr. Dodgson to do it. The first version, which he wrote and illustrated by hand for her, was entitled Alice’s Adventures under Ground. Some of the most famous chapters of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland were actually written only after his friend (and noted children’s author) George MacDonald and his family encouraged Mr. Dodgson to explore the idea of expanding and publishing the story so that more children could enjoy it. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland met with instant success, as did its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

Can Lewis Carroll’s creativity and writings be explained by any possible drug use, epilepsy, migraines, or other mind-altering circumstance? In brief: no, no, no, and no. Based on all evidence unearthed to date, unless you count the occasional use of an over-the counter homeopathic remedy, Lewis Carroll was not a drug user. This may disappoint lazy media hounds and Miley Cyrus, but that’s the truth as we currently know it, and given Carroll’s abstemious personality and conduct, that particular finding is unlikely to change. Similarly, while he had a couple of seizures of one kind or another in later years, and wondered if one of them might be “epileptiform” in his diary, he also recorded afterward that his own doctor told him that it was not, and there was no history of it in his immediate family line. And while he records that he occasionally had a very bad headache, including some descriptions that sound like migraine symptoms, we have no hard facts that could lead one to say uncontestably that he suffered from migraines. Seizures and severe headaches can be caused by any number of things, and providing a medical diagnosis more than 100 years after the fact is not advisable.

It’s fascinating what people since Carroll’s time have tried to read into his life after reading his remarkably inventive works. Our explanation for how the Alice books, the Snark, and all Carroll’s other writings came to be is simple: the man was extremely talented. Where can I find out more about Lewis Carroll? You can find extensive information about Lewis Carroll on our Lewis Carroll page. About the Lewis Carroll Society of North America How do I join? How 8 Famous Writers Chose Their Pen Names | Mental Floss How 8 Famous Writers Chose Their Pen Names Getty Images Like us on Facebook Scottish author Iain Banks died earlier this week after battling gall bladder cancer. With him died his nom de plume Iain M. Banks, under which he wrote science fiction. I admit I’m not familiar with the work Banks wrote under either name, and when I heard the news, I initially thought it weird that two writers with such similar names died on the same day. I wasn’t alone, and my Twitter feed was soon littered with realizations from others that they were the same guy. Some pen names are fairly well-known for what they are. Most people know that Mark Twain was the alias of Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

The outing of Richard Bachman as a pen name used by Stephen King was well-publicized and inspired King’s novel, The Dark Half. Some pen names you don’t see coming, though, and assume the name on the book cover is the real deal. Here, eight that threw me for a loop when I first heard about them. 1. Lewis Carroll While Lewis Carroll might sound delightfully British to American ears, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is even more so. Dodgson adopted his pen name in 1856 because, according to the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, he was modest and wanted to maintain the privacy of his personal life. When letters addressed to Carroll arrived at Dodgson’s offices at Oxford, he would refuse them to maintain deniability. Dodgson came up with the alias by Latinizing Charles Lutwidge into Carolus Ludovicus, loosely Anglicizing that into Carroll Lewis and then changing their order. It was chosen by his publisher from a list of several possible pen names. 2.

Joseph Conrad Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski is a bit of a mouthful, and when the Polish novelist began publishing his writing in the late 1800s he used an Anglicized version of his name: Joseph Conrad. He caught some flack for this from Polish intellectuals who thought he was disrespecting his homeland and heritage (it didn’t help that he became a British citizen and published in English), but Korzeniowski explained, “It is widely known that I am a Pole and that Józef Konrad are my two Christian names, the latter being used be me as a surname so that foreign mouths should not distort my real surname… It does not seem to me that I have been unfaithful to my country by having proved to the English that a gentleman from the Ukraine [Korzeniowski was an ethnic Pole born in formerly Polish territory that was controlled by Ukraine, and later the Russian Empire] can be as good a sailor as they, and has something to tell them in their own language.” 3. Pablo Neruda Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (another mouthful) had an interest in literature from a young age, but his father disapproved.

When Basoalto began publishing his own poetry, he needed a byline that wouldn’t tip off his father, and chose Pablo Neruda in homage to the Czech poet Jan Neruda. Basoalto later adopted his pen name as his legal name. 4. Stan Lee Stanley Martin Lieber got his start writing comic books, but hoped to one day graduate to more serious literary work and wanted to save his real name for that. He wrote the kids’ stuff under the pen name Stan Lee and eventually took it as his legal name after achieving worldwide recognition as a comic book writer. 5. Ann Landers Ann Landers was the pseudonym for several women who wrote the column over the years. The name was created by the column’s original author, Ruth Crowley, who adopted it because she was already writing a newspaper column about child care and didn’t want readers confusing the two. She borrowed the name from a friend of her family, Bill Landers, and made an effort to keep her real identity a secret. 6. Voltaire When François-Marie Arouet was imprisoned in the Bastille in the early 1700s, he wrote a play.

To signify his breaking away from his past, especially his family, he signed the work with the alias Voltaire. The name, the Voltaire Foundation explains, was derived from “Arouet, the younger.” He took his family name and the initial letters of le jeune—“Arouet l(e) j(eune)”—and anagrammed them. If you’re left scratching your head, the foundation helpfully points out that I and j, and u and v, were typographically interchangeable in Voltaire’s day. 7. George Orwell When Eric Arthur Blair was getting ready to publish his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, he decided to use a pen name so his family wouldn’t be embarrassed by his time in poverty. He chose the name George Orwell to reflect his love of English tradition and landscape. George is the patron saint of England and the River Orwell, a popular sailing spot, was a place he loved to visit. 8. J.K. Rowling Joanne Rowling’s publishers weren’t sure that the intended readers of the Harry Potter books—pre-adolescent boys—would would read stories about wizards written by a woman, so they asked her to use her initials on the book instead of her full name.

Rowling didn’t have a middle name, though, and had to borrow one from her grandmother Kathleen to get her pen name J.K. Rowling. Lewis Carroll | British author | Britannica.com British author Alternative Title: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson Lewis Carroll Walter de la Mare Lewis Carroll, pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (born Jan. 27, 1832, Daresbury, Cheshire , Eng.—died Jan. 14, 1898, Guildford , Surrey), English logician, mathematician, photographer, and novelist, especially remembered for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871). His poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876) is nonsense literature of the highest order. Lewis Carroll, 1863. Oscar Gustav Rejlander—Hulton Archive/Getty Images Dodgson was the eldest son and third child in a family of seven girls and four boys born to Frances Jane Lutwidge, the wife of the Rev. Charles Dodgson. He was born in the old parsonage at Daresbury.

His father was perpetual curate there from 1827 until 1843, when he became rector of Croft in Yorkshire—a post he held for the rest of his life (though later he became also archdeacon of Richmond and a canon of Ripon cathedral). The Dodgson children, living as they did in an isolated country village, had few friends outside the family but, like many other families in similar circumstances, found little difficulty in entertaining themselves. Charles from the first showed a great aptitude for inventing games to amuse them. With the move to Croft when he was 12 came the beginning of the “Rectory Magazines,” manuscript compilations to which all the family were supposed to contribute. In fact, Charles wrote nearly all of those that survive, beginning with Useful and Instructive Poetry (1845; published 1954) and following with The Rectory Magazine (c. 1850, mostly unpublished), The Rectory Umbrella (1850–53), and Mischmasch (1853–62; published with The Rectory Umbrella in 1932).

Meanwhile, young Dodgson attended Richmond School, Yorkshire (1844–45), and then proceeded to Rugby School (1846–50). He disliked his four years at public school, principally because of his innate shyness, although he was also subjected to a certain amount of bullying; he also endured several illnesses, one of which left him deaf in one ear. After Rugby he spent a further year being tutored by his father, during which time he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford (May 23, 1850). He went into residence as an undergraduate there on Jan. 24, 1851. Dodgson excelled in his mathematical and classical studies in 1852; on the strength of his performance in examinations, he was nominated to a studentship (called a scholarship in other colleges). In 1854 he gained a first in mathematical Finals—coming out at the head of the class—and proceeded to a bachelor of arts degree in December of the same year.

He was made a “Master of the House” and a senior student (called a fellow in other colleges) the following year and was appointed lecturer in mathematics (the equivalent of today’s tutor), a post he resigned in 1881. He held his studentship until the end of his life. Britannica Stories Ringling Bros. Folds Its Tent As was the case with all fellowships at that time, the studentship at Christ Church was dependent upon his remaining unmarried, and, by the terms of this particular endowment, proceeding to holy orders. Dodgson was ordained a deacon in the Church of England on Dec. 22, 1861. Had he gone on to become a priest, he could have married and would then have been appointed to a parish by the college. But he felt himself unsuited for parish work and, though he considered the possibility of marriage , decided that he was perfectly content to remain a bachelor. Dodgson’s association with children grew naturally enough out of his position as an eldest son with eight younger brothers and sisters.

He also had a stammer—what he referred to as his “hesitation”—that he never wholly overcame; by some accounts, he was able to speak more naturally and easily to children, though his stammer varied in intensity by circumstance, and his contemporaries noted that it manifested itself with both adults and children. These factors may have contributed to Dodgson’s beginning to entertain the children of Henry George Liddell , dean of Christ Church. Alice Liddell and her sisters Lorina and Edith were not, of course, the first of Dodgson’s child friends. They had been preceded or were overlapped by the children of the writer George Macdonald , the sons of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson , and various other chance acquaintances. But the Liddell children undoubtedly held an especially high place in his affections—partly because they were the only children in Christ Church, since only heads of houses were free both to marry and to continue in residence.

British Culture and Politics Properly chaperoned by their governess, Miss Prickett (nicknamed “Pricks”—“one of the thorny kind,” and so the prototype of the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass), the three little girls paid many visits to the young mathematics lecturer in his college rooms. As Alice remembered in 1932, they used to sit on the big sofa on each side of him, while he told us stories, illustrating them by pencil or ink drawings as he went along . . . . He seemed to have an endless store of these fantastical tales, which he made up as he told them, drawing busily on a large sheet of paper all the time. They were not always entirely new. Sometimes they were new versions of old stories; sometimes they started on the old basis, but grew into new tales owing to the frequent interruptions which opened up fresh and undreamed-of possibilities.

Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies On July 4, 1862, Dodgson and his friend Robinson Duckworth, fellow of Trinity, rowed the three children up the Thames from Oxford to Godstow, picnicked on the bank, and returned to Christ Church late in the evening: “On which occasion,” wrote Dodgson in his diary, “I told them the fairy-tale of Alice’s Adventures Underground, which I undertook to write out for Alice.” Much of the story was based on a picnic a couple of weeks earlier when they had all been caught in the rain; for some reason, this inspired Dodgson to tell so much better a story than usual that both Duckworth and Alice noticed the difference, and Alice went so far as to cry, when they parted at the door of the deanery, “Oh, Mr.

Dodgson, I wish you would write out Alice’s adventures for me!” Dodgson himself recollected in 1887 how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards. Dodgson was able to write down the story more or less as told and added to it several extra adventures that had been told on other occasions. He illustrated it with his own crude but distinctive drawings and gave the finished product to Alice Liddell, with no thought of hearing of it again. But the novelist Henry Kingsley , while visiting the deanery, chanced to pick it up from the drawing-room table, read it, and urged Mrs. Liddell to persuade the author to publish it. Dodgson, honestly surprised, consulted his friend George Macdonald, author of some of the best children’s stories of the period.

Macdonald took it home to be read to his children, and his son Greville, aged six, declared that he “wished there were 60,000 volumes of it.” Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest Accordingly, Dodgson revised it for publication. He cut out the more particular references to the previous picnic (they may be found in the facsimile of the original manuscript, later published by him as Alice’s Adventures Underground in 1886) and added some additional stories, told to the Liddells at other times, to make up a volume of the desired length. At Duckworth’s suggestion he got an introduction to John Tenniel , the Punch magazine cartoonist, whom he commissioned to make illustrations to his specification. The book was published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865.

(The first edition was withdrawn because of bad printing, and only about 21 copies survive—one of the rare books of the 19th century—and the reprint was ready for publication by Christmas of the same year, though dated 1866.) The book was a slow but steadily increasing success, and by the following year Dodgson was already considering a sequel to it, based on further stories told to the Liddells. The result was Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (dated 1872; actually published December 1871), a work as good as, or better than, its predecessor. By the time of Dodgson’s death, Alice (taking the two volumes as a single artistic triumph) had become the most popular children’s book in England: by the time of his centenary in 1932 it was one of the most popular and perhaps the most famous in the world. There is no answer to the mystery of Alice’s success. Many explanations have been suggested, but, like the Mad Hatter’s riddle (“The riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all”), they are no more than afterthoughts.

The book is not an allegory; it has no hidden meaning or message, either religious, political, or psychological, as some have tried to prove; and its only undertones are some touches of gentle satire—on education for the children’s special benefit and on familiar university types, whom the Liddells may or may not have recognized. Various attempts have been made to solve the “riddle of Lewis Carroll” himself; these include the efforts to prove that his friendships with little girls were some sort of subconscious substitute for a married life, that he showed symptoms of jealousy when his favourites came to tell him that they were engaged to be married, that he contemplated marriage with some of them—notably with Alice Liddell. But there is little or no evidence to back up such theorizing. He in fact dropped the acquaintance of Alice Liddell when she was 12, as he did with most of his young friends.

In the case of the Liddells, his friendship with the younger children, Rhoda and Violet, was cut short at the time of his skits on some of Dean Liddell’s Christ Church “reforms.” For besides children’s stories, Dodgson also produced humorous pamphlets on university affairs, which still make good reading. The best of these were collected by him as Notes by an Oxford Chiel (1874). Trending Topics Eyjafjallajökull volcano Besides writing for them, Dodgson is also to be remembered as a fine photographer of children and of adults as well (notable portraits of the actress Ellen Terry , the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti , and many others survive and have been often reproduced). Dodgson had an early ambition to be an artist: failing in this, he turned to photography. He photographed children in every possible costume and situation, finally making nude studies of them. But in 1880 Dodgson abandoned his hobby altogether, feeling that it was taking up too much time that might be better spent.

Suggestions that this sudden decision was reached because of an impurity of motive for his nude studies have been made, but again without any evidence. Before he had told the original tale of Alice’s Adventures, Dodgson had, in fact, published a number of humorous items in verse and prose and a few inferior serious poems. The earliest of these appeared anonymously, but in March 1856 a poem called “Solitude” was published over the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. Dodgson arrived at this pen name by taking his own names Charles Lutwidge, translating them into Latin as Carolus Ludovicus, then reversing and retranslating them into English. He used the name afterward for all his nonacademic works. As Charles L. Dodgson, he was the author of a fair number of books on mathematics, none of enduring importance, although Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879) is of some historical interest. His humorous and other verses were collected in 1869 as Phantasmagoria and Other Poems and later separated (with additions) as Rhyme? and Reason?

(1883) and Three Sunsets and Other Poems (published posthumously, 1898). The 1883 volume also contained The Hunting of the Snark, a narrative nonsense poem that is rivalled only by the best of Edward Lear . Later in life, Dodgson had attempted a return to the Alice vein but only produced Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and its second volume, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), which has been described aptly as “one of the most interesting failures in English literature.” This elaborate combination of fairy-tale, social novel , and collection of ethical discussions is unduly neglected and ridiculed. It presents the truest available portrait of the man. Alice, the perfect creation of the logical and mathematical mind applied to the pure and unadulterated amusement of children, was struck out of him as if by chance; while making full use of his specialized knowledge, it transcends his weaknesses and remains unique.

Question: What was the pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson?
Answer: Lewis Carroll