Lewis Carroll (Author of Alice in Wonderland) Children's , Poetry , Fiction Influences edit data The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English 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 poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky", all considered to be within the genre of literary nonsense. Oxford scholar, Church of England Deacon, University Lecturer in Mathematics and Logic, academic author of learned theses, gifted pioneer of portrait photography, colourful writer of imaginative genius and yet a shy and pedantic man, Lewis Carroll stands pre-eminent in the pantheon of inventive literary geniuses. He also has works published under his re The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English 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 poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky", all considered to be within the genre of literary nonsense. Oxford scholar, Church of England Deacon, University Lecturer in Mathematics and Logic, academic author of learned theses, gifted pioneer of portrait photography, colourful writer of imaginative genius and yet a shy and pedantic man, Lewis Carroll stands pre-eminent in the pantheon of inventive literary geniuses. He also has works published under his real name. For more information, please see ...more Lewis Carroll – author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - The British Library Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) © National Portrait Gallery, London Biography Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, which he adopted when publishing his famous children’s novels and nonsense verse. The son of a Cheshire parson, Dodgson grew up in a large family which enjoyed composing magazines and putting on plays. In 1851, he went to Christ Church, Oxford.

By 1855, he was a fellow (which necessitated celibacy), lecturing in mathematics. He occupied a tower in the college for the rest of his life. He wrote many books on mathematics and logic, and enjoyed inventing puzzles and games and playing croquet. His love of paradox and nonsense and his fondness for small children led to the writing of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), a story which he began while rowing Lorina, Alice, and Edith, the three small daughters of the College Dean H G Liddell, up the Thames for a picnic near Binsey. A sequel, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, appeared in 1871. Interviewed when she was old, Alice remembered him as tall and slender, with blue/grey eyes, longish hair, and ‘carrying himself upright, almost more than upright, as if he had swallowed a poker’. He published Phantasmagoria and Other Poems in 1869, The Hunting of the Snark in 1876 and Sylvie and Bruno in 1889.

Dodgson wrote and received ‘wheelbarrows full’ of letters (a letter register he started in his late 20s and kept for the rest of his life records more than 98,000 sent and received). Many of these were on religious and political issues while others were full of light-hearted nonsense. He excelled in artfully staged photographs, many of children in costumes and others of friends, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Alfred, Lord Tennyson . He died, aged 65, of pneumonia. Further information about the life of Lewis Carroll can be found here via the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Name 'The Origins Of Alice' from a biography of Lewis Carroll From Lewis Carroll by Derek Hudson For all his academic success and inborn love of teaching, Dodgson's early experience as 'Mathematical Lecturer' at Christ Church—he began his duties in 1855—showed that he lacked a natural gift of communicating to an assembled class. His lectures, it seems, were dull and uninspiringly delivered. A part-time engagement to teach the boys at St Aldate's School proved no more successful.

'School class again noisy and troublesome—I have not yet acquired the arts of keeping order', runs a diary entry of 1856. Dodgson's shyness and his stammer told heavily against him. It soon became clear, therefore, that Dodgson's main contribution to the academic life of Oxford would lie in the sphere of research and publication. He conscientiously delivered himself of some thirty works, large and small, on mathematical and logical subjects, which appeared under his own name. But, with the possible exception of Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1879)— Falconer Madan has described this as 'an outstanding example of serious argument cast in an amusing style'—our interest in him as a writer does not derive from the publications of 'Charles L. Dodgson, M.A., Student and Mathematical Lecturer of Christ Church, Oxford'. It is the boy and the man who entertained children with his fantasy, parody and humour whom we love and honour. Nothing could be more mistaken than to imagine that the first publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 was solely the fruit of a sudden unexpected inspiration.

It is true that its origin must be attributed to one particular event—a trip up-river from Oxford with three little girls in 1862—but Dodgson had been unconsciously preparing himself for Alice in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass for twenty years. We have seen that drawings in his Useful and Instructive Poetry, written in 1845, fore-shadowed Humpty Dumpty and the Mouse's Tail, while a Shakespearean skit in that same little book touched upon dreams and visions and the half-state between sleeping and waking, setting them aside, as it were, for future reference. We see him here, and in his later manuscript scrapbooks, The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch, absorbed ill parody and fantasy and preoccupied by their pictorial illustration. Dr Thomas Fowler, a fellow-member with Dodgson of a mathematical reading party at Whitby in 1854, remembered that he 'used to sit on a rock on the beach, telling stories to a circle of eager young listeners of both sexes' and believed that 'it was there that Alice" was incubated'.

Certainly the poem 'She's all my fancy painted him', which formed the basis of the White Rabbit's 'evidence' at the trial of the Knave of Hearts, was composed in 1854; but it is unlikely that other ingredients of Alice derive from this early date. The importance of the Whitby visit lies in the knowledge that, while he was there, Dodgson was establishing his character as a raconteur and as a free-lance humorous journalist in the pages of the Whitby Gazette. Gradually he began to give literary shape (though not always in writing) to some of those whimsical intimations and impressions which had haunted him since childhood, fantasies that belonged (as we now know) to the Wonderland country and to the other side of the Looking-Glass. For the Alice books were in some degree an autobiographical miscellany, woven together with uncanny skill.

In 1855, when he was twenty-three, Dodgson wrote a four-line stanza in parody of Anglo-Saxon poetry which has become extremely famous: Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe: All mimsy were ye borogroves; And ye mome raths outgrabe. We know these lines now as the opening stanza of 'Jabber-wocky' ( Mr Roger Lancdyn Green has shown that there is a strong probability that the rest of the poem was influenced by 'The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains', a translation by Menella Smedley from the German of Fouque (Times Literary Supplement, 1st March 1957). in Through the Looking-Glass. The spelling was a little altered, and Dodgson's original explanations of the words differ considerably from those provided by Humpty Dumpty: 'That's enough to begin with', Humpty Dumpty interrupted: 'there are plenty of hard words there.

"Brillig" means four o'clock in the afternoon—the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.' 'That'll do very well', said Alice: 'and "slithy"?' 'Well, "slithy" means "lithe and slimy". "Lithe" is the same as "active". You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.' 'I see it now', Alice remarked thoughtfully: 'and what are "roves"?' 'Well, "totwes" are something like badgers—they're something like lizards—and they're something like cork screws.' 'They must be very curious looking creatures.' 'They are that', said Humpty Dumpty; 'also they make their nests under sun-dials - also they live on cheese.' 'And what's to "go" and to "gimble"?' 'To pyre" is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To "gamble" is to make holes like a gimlet.' 'And "the wabe" is the grass-plot round a sun-dial, I suppose?' said Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity. 'Of course it is.

It's called "wabe" you know, because it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it—' 'And a long way beyond it on each side', Alice added. 'Exactly so. Well then, "mimsy" is "flimsy and miserable" (there's another portmanteau for you). And a "borogrove" is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round—something like a live mop.' 'And then "mome raths"?' said Alice. 'I'm afraid I'm giving you a great deal of trouble.' 'Well, a "rath" is a sort of green pig: but Rome" I'm not certain about. I think it's short for "from home"—meaning that they'd lost their way, you know.' 'And what does "outgrak" mean?' 'Well "outgribing" is something between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle....' In 1856 Dodgson contributed to The Train a parody of Wordsworth called 'Upon the Lonely Moor', which eventually formed the basis of the White Knight's song.

And in his diary of February 1856, we find an entry— 'Query: when we are dreaming and, as often happens, have a dim consciousness of the fact and try to wake, do we not say and do things which in waking life would be insane ? May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life'—a remark which suggests the Cheshire Cat's 'We're all mad here'. Enough has been said—more perhaps might be said if the diaries of 1858-62 were not missing—to show that, when he wrote Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, Lewis Carroll gathered together loose ends of fancy and experience that stretched back many years. Much of this hoarded material appears in the Alice books in the form of humorous verse, especially parody, for Dodgson had made himself proficient in the genre since his childhood. As he developed, he also began to write serious romantic poems which were less successful, being conventional exercises lacking originality and inspiration.

Yet many of the passages and prose situations in the Alice books could not have been realized without the help of an instinctive and insistent vein of poetry, associated perhaps with that 'very rebellious mind' which a graphologist has detected in his adolescent hand writing. We cannot say with any certainty that Dodgson ever fell in love in the adult sense, although we know that his sister believed he was in love with the famous actress Ellen Terry when she was about seventeen. It is unlikely that he ever declared his love, if it existed, or that he ever seriously contemplated marriage with Ellen Terry, for she was then already married (though unhappily). From his early youth, however, he had sought the society of little girls, thus compensating himself, in part, for his inability to form friendships with women of his own age. Children were an escape from sex rather than any sort of conscious satisfaction of it, but they gave him the affection he needed and helped him to fulfil the Platonic and protective love which was characteristic of his nature. His ordeal as a stammerer may largely explain his development; for he found—as others similarly afflicted have found—that he could talk freely and naturally with children and was happiest in their company.

In 1864, before Alice in Wonderland was published, he was writing to George MacDonald's daughter, Mary, letters full of delightful nonsense in no way inferior to that in Alice. Although his letters, like the Alice books, can only be fully appreciated by adults, they are an additional proof that he wrote his nonsense primarily to give pleasure to children. And as for Alice in Wonderland itself, there is no doubt of his source of inspiration. She was Alice Liddell, one of the daughters of Dr H. G. Liddell, the formidable Dean of Christ Church. Dodgson apparently first met her on 25 April 1856, when she was not quite four years old, and he added to his diary entry a comment he reserved for outstanding occasions: 'I mark this day with a white stone.' Lewis Carroll's Shifting Reputation | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Lewis Carroll's Shifting Reputation Why has popular opinion of the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland undergone such a dramatic reversal? Biographers disagree over what kind of man Charles Dodgson really was. (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson / SSPL / Getty Images) By Jenny Woolf Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe April 2010 The Rev.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a teacher of mathematics at Oxford and a deacon of the Anglican Church. Some colleagues knew him as a somewhat reclusive stammerer, but he was generally seen as a devout scholar; one dean said he was “pure in heart.” To readers all over the world, he became renowned as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. From This Story [×] CLOSE Alice Liddell, who urged Dodgson to write down the story that became Alice, posed for him in 1858, at the age of 6, as a beggar. (Lewis Carroll / Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY) As Freudians weighed in on Alice, one analyst wrote that the meaning of an illustration depicting the title character was "almost too obvious for words." (Lebrecht Music & Arts / Corbis) Biographers disagree over what kind of man Charles Dodgson really was. (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson / SSPL / Getty Images) Alice Liddell (here in 1872, about age 20) did not speak with biographer Florence Becker Lennon, but her sister Ina did.

(Julia Margaret Cameron / Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Art Library International) Photo Gallery Alice was popular almost from the moment it was published, in 1865, and it has remained in print ever since, influencing such disparate artists as Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, just released in movie theaters nationwide, is only the latest of at least 20 films and TV shows to be made from the book. But if Alice has endured unscathed, its author has taken a pummeling. Since the 1930s, biographers and scholars have questioned the nature of Dodgson’s relationship with the 10-year-old girl to whom he first told the story, and since the 1960s his work has been associated with the psychedelic wing of the countercultural movement. When some of Dodgson’s photographs—he was an accomplished portraitist—were exhibited in 1999, a New York Times reviewer quoted Vladimir Nabokov (who had translated Alice into Russian) as saying there was “a pathetic affinity” between the photographer and the pedophilic narrator of Nabokov’s novel Lolita.

Tim Burton recently described Dodgson’s stories as “drugs for children” and Wonderland as a place where “everything is slightly off, even the good people.” The decades of interpretation and reinterpretation have created a widening chasm between how modern readers perceive the author and how they receive his work. “Lewis Carroll is treated like a man you wouldn’t want your kids to meet,” says Will Brooker, author of Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture, “yet his stories are still presented as classics of pure, innocent literature.” As Burton’s movie beckons us down the rabbit hole once again, it might be wise to ask: How did we arrive at this curious state of affairs? Charles Dodgson was born in 1832 in Daresbury, a village in northwest England, the third child (and first son) of Charles Dodgson, an Anglican clergyman, and his wife, Frances. As the household grew to include 11 children, Charles did not lack for company. “He told his brothers and sisters stories, made up games and wrote magazines with them,” says Edward Wakeling, who spent 12 years annotating Dodgson’s diaries.

Later in life, “he really enjoyed entertaining children, and they loved him in return.” After enrolling at Oxford in 1850, at age 18, Dodgson became a “senior student”—the equivalent of a fellow—at the university’s College of Christ Church. According to college rules, senior students had to be ordained as priests and take a vow of celibacy; Dodgson evaded the ordination rule and lived at the college unmarried, until his death in 1898, less than two weeks before his 66th birthday. Like many Victorian bachelors, he became a sort of uncle to his friends’ children, making up stories and games and taking them on short trips; the role ensured him a warm welcome in many homes. In 1855, dean Henry Liddell arrived at Christ Church with his wife, Lorina; their son, Harry, and daughters Lorina (or “Ina”), Alice and Edith. (The Liddells would have five more children.) Before long, Dodgson struck up a friendship with Harry, then 9. “He taught Harry rowing and arithmetic, spent time with him and took him on outings,” says Wakeling.

As Harry’s sisters grew older, he says, “Dodgson also took them under his wing, with their parents’ blessing.” Dodgson particularly liked to pack a picnic lunch and take the Liddell children boating on the Thames, with adult friends or family to share in the rowing. On a July afternoon in 1862, he took the three Liddell sisters on a stretch of the river between Oxford and Godstow and told them the story that would become Alice. Alice Liddell, then 10, was delighted that the main character bore her name and asked Dodgson to write down the story. At this time, Dodgson was taking photographs. Although the camera was still a relatively new technology, he had been an early enthusiast, starting in 1856, and he found no shortage of friends who wanted him to make likenesses of them or their children. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, England’s poet laureate, befriended the then-obscure don and let Dodgson photograph him after becoming impressed by one of his child portraits. “You, I suppose, dream photographs,” he said.

Of the approximately 3,000 photo­graphs Dodgson made in his life, just over half are of children—30 of whom are depicted nude or semi-nude. Some of his portraits—even those in which the model is clothed—might shock 2010 sensibilities, but by Victorian standards they were...well, rather conventional. Photographs of nude children sometimes appeared on postcards or birthday cards, and nude portraits—skillfully done—were praised as art studies, as they were in the work of Dodgson’s contemporary Julia Margaret Cameron. Victorians saw childhood as a state of grace; even nude photographs of children were considered pictures of innocence itself.

In discussing the possibility of photographing one 8-year-old girl unclothed, Dodgson wrote to her mother: “It is a chance not to be lost, to get a few good attitudes of Annie’s lovely form and face, as by next year she may (though I much hope won’t) fancy herself too old to be a ‘daughter of Eve.’ ” Likewise, Dodgson secured the Liddells’ permission before taking his now-famous portrait of Alice at age 6, posing as a beggar child in a tattered off-the-shoulder dress; the family kept a hand-colored copy of it in a morocco leather-and-velvet case. Dodgson’s relationship with the Liddells apparently hit some kind of pothole in June 1863: he stopped seeing both the children and their parents for several months. And although he resumed socializing with the dean and his wife, he never took their daughters out again. In 1864, however, he did give Alice a present: a bound manuscript titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. The next year an expanded version of the story was published as a book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

It quickly made the name “Lewis Carroll” famous. He published a sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, in 1871, and a long-form nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark, in 1876. Dodgson’s identity as Alice’s author was an open secret, and the author gathered about him a large circle of affectionate children and their parents. His slight air of mystery added to his fame, which spread by word of mouth. Eventually he was invited to entertain two grandchildren of Queen Victoria herself. He retired from teaching mathematics in 1881. While visiting some of his sisters in Guildford, just outside London, in 1898, he became ill. He died there of pneumonia on January 14 of that year.

By then, Dodgson’s reputation as a merry, child-doting—and entirely proper—maker of nonsense needed little burnishing; the London Daily Graphic’s obituary noted that “like many bachelors, he was very popular with children and very fond of them.” Before the year was out, Dodgson’s nephew Stuart Collingwood published a biography that devoted two effusive chapters to Dodgson’s many “child friends,” including references to his hugging and kissing girls, and largely omitted references to his many friendships with women. “The popular Victorian image of Lewis Carroll was of a sort of child-loving saint,” says Brooker.

“It is an image which Dodgson himself helped to create, and it suited Victorian attitudes.” In 1932, the centennial of Dodgson’s birth, Alice Liddell, then an 80-year-old widow, traveled with her son and sister to New York City to receive an honorary doctorate from Columbia University for “awaking with her girlhood’s charm the ingenious fancy of a mathematician familiar with imaginary quantities, stirring him to reveal his complete understanding of the heart of a child.” An informal group of his admirers commemorated the centennial by praising Dodgson as a “great lover of children” and raising the equivalent of almost $800,000 in today’s currency to fund a Lewis Carroll children’s ward at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. That may have been the last time he was so simply remembered. The next year, a writer named A.M.E. Goldschmidt presented at Oxford an essay titled “Alice in Wonderland Psycho-Analysed,” in which he suggested that Dodgson was suppressing a sexual desire for Alice.

(Her fall down the well, he wrote, is “the best-known symbol of coitus.”) Goldschmidt was an aspiring writer, not a psychoanalyst, and some scholars say he may have been trying to parody the 1930s vogue for Freudian ideas. Whatever his intent, unambiguously serious writers picked up the thread. “We are reasonably sure that the little girls substitute for incestuous love objects,” wrote New York University professor Paul Schilder in 1938. The meaning of an illustration of a long-necked Alice is “almost too obvious for words,” psychoanalyst Martin Grotjahn offered in 1947. Similar analyses would appear as the literature on the Alice author grew. In 1945, Florence Becker Lennon advanced the case that Dodgson had had an unhealthy attraction to Alice with Victoria Through the Looking Glass, the first modern critical biography of him. “People have wondered what he did with his love life,” Lennon wrote. “Now it can be told.

He loved little girls, but, like Peter Pan, he had no intention of marrying them.” But Alice, she wrote, “was the first and most favoured of his girl friends,” and she speculated about the idea that Dodgson precipitated the rift with the Liddells by proposing “honourable marriage to [Alice] directly or through her parents” in 1863. Alice was 11 then—too young, even by Victorian mores. Lennon’s basis for the assertion may have seemed sound: Ina was one of her sources. (Alice did not talk to Lennon because, her sister said, she was ill.) But in a letter to Alice, Ina wrote, “I tremble at what I said” to Lennon about the Liddell family’s supposed rift with Dodgson. “I said his manner became too affectionate to you as you grew older and that mother spoke to him about it, and that offended him, so he ceased coming to visit us again.” Ina had also told Lennon that she, Ina, was 10 at the time—but she was 14, or old enough to entertain formal suitors.

Whether Ina was mistaken, duplic­itous or confused when she spoke with Lennon, her letter to Alice does not say. (One conjecture is that she lied to conceal Dodgson’s interest in her, or hers in him; given his finances and prospects at the time, her parents would have discouraged the match.) The idea that Dodgson had an unhealthy involvement with Alice has persisted, although there is no evidence to support it. Three major biographies published in the 1990s, by Donald Thomas, Michael Bakewell and Morton Cohen, suggested that he had pedophilic urges but never acted on them. Lennon acknowledged that she wrote without the benefit of Dodgson’s diaries, which were published in abridged form in 1954 and in full, with Wakeling’s annotations, beginning in 1993. But even they are an imperfect source. Four of the 13 volumes are missing—as are the pages covering late June 1863, when his break with the Liddells occurred. A Dodgson descendant apparently cut them out after the writer died. But if the diaries offer nothing about his romantic interests, other documents do.

One is a note, purportedly written by one of Dodgson’s nieces, summarizing what was in the missing diary pages from 1863: “L.C. learns from Mrs. Liddell that he is supposed to be using the children as a means of paying court to the governess—he is also supposed...to be courting Ina,” it reads, meaning that the children’s mother told him that people were gossiping about him, saying he was courting either the Liddells’ governess or their eldest daughter. In addition, Dodgson’s surviving letters suggest that he had a keen interest in women—and worked to circumvent the Victorian proscription of mingling between unmarried adults of the opposite sex. “I wish you could come and stay here a bit!” he wrote to 22-year-old Edith Rix in 1888. “I believe the ‘Mrs. Grundy’ risk might be altogether avoided by simply arranging 2 or 3 visits to be paid consecutively.” (Mrs.

Grundy was British society’s fictitious guardian of morality.) In 1879, he asked Gertrude Thomson, a new acquaintance in her late 20s, “Are you sufficiently unconventional (I think you are) to defy Mrs. Grundy, and come down to spend the day with me at Oxford?” (She was, and did.) In a 1967 memoir, the stage designer Laurence Irving, a son of one of Dodgson’s friends, summarized Oxford gossip from previous decades in dubbing him a “greying satyr in sheep’s clothing.” In 1999, Karoline Leach published yet another Dodgson biography, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, in which she quoted the summary of the missing diary information and argued that her predecessors, misunderstanding the society in which Dodgson lived, had created a “Carroll myth” around his sexuality. She concluded that he was attracted to adult women (including Mrs. Liddell) after all. The reaction among Dodgson scholars was seismic. “Improbable, feebly documented...tendentious,” thundered Donald Rackin in Victorian Studies.

Geoffrey Heptonstall, in Contemporary Review, responded that the book provided “the whole truth.” Which is where Dodgson’s image currently stands—in contention—among scholars if not yet in popular culture. His image as a man of suspect sexuality “says more about our society and its hang-ups than it does about Dodgson himself,” Will Brooker says. We see him through the prism of contemporary culture—one that sexualizes youth, especially female youth, even as it is repulsed by pedophilia. The nature of his relationships with Alice, with other girls and with women may never be established with certainty. But then, uncertainty is a consistent theme in the Alice books. Jenny Woolf, a London-based journalist, is author of the recently published The Mystery of Lewis Carroll. Like this article? Lewis Carroll Essay - Carroll, Lewis (Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism) - eNotes.com Lewis Carroll Essay - Carroll, Lewis (Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism) Navigate Study Guiderows link Link Lewis Carroll 1832-1898 (Born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) English novelist, poet, satirist, and mathematician.

See also Lewis Carroll Poetry Criticism and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There Criticism. Dodgson produced several essays on mathematics and symbolic logic as an Oxford lecturer in mathematics, but it was under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll that he published his most famous works, the fantasy novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872). Originally intended for the amusement of children, the Alice stories, as well as Carroll's highly imaginative poetry, have been subjected to intense scrutiny and widely varying interpretations by scholars around the world since their publication. Biographical Information The third child and the eldest son of eleven children, Carroll was born in the parsonage in Daresbury, Cheshire on January 27, 1832. In 1843, his father, a country clergyman, accepted a more lucrative position in Croft, Yorkshire, a post that also provided a larger parsonage for the family of thirteen. Carroll's childhood was apparently a happy one, and he spent hours entertaining and caring for his many siblings, particularly his sisters.

He began writing at an early age, producing poems and stories for the amusement of his siblings as well as a series of illustrated magazines for his family. Carroll's formal education began at the Richmond Grammar School, where he spent a year and a half; this was followed by three years at Rugby, after which he attended Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a first in mathematics, earned a bachelor's and a master's degree, and remained for the rest of his life, first as a lecturer in mathematics and later as curator of the Senior Common Room. He produced a number of scholarly works on mathematics and symbolic logic and tutored countless students, including young women denied admission to the all-male university, in both subjects. In 1861, he became a deacon in the Church of England but decided not to take holy orders. After the death of his father in 1868, Carroll assumed responsibility for his unmarried sisters, establishing a home for them in Guildford in Surrey. Carroll never married and had no children of his own, but he was devoted to a succession of little girls he had befriended.

The most famous of these was Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, who provided the model for the fictional Alice and for whom Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures Under Ground, which he illustrated himself and never published, presenting it instead as a gift to Alice Liddell. It provided the basis for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. Both works were published under the name Lewis Carroll, a pseudonym Carroll adopted in 1856. He published all of his poetry and fiction under that name, although he continued to produce scholarly texts under his own name. At the same time, he became fascinated with the emerging field of photography and earned a considerable reputation as one of the first art photographers and the nineteenth-century's most celebrated photographer of children. Carroll died at the age of sixty-five in Guildford. Major Works Carroll's best-known works, all produced under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, were his fantasy novels, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Famously innovative for their unconventional use of language, the stories were also among the first non-didactic, non-moralizing texts aimed at children.

Carroll's nonsense verse, most notably The Hunting of the Snark (1876) and “Jabberwocky” (from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) are usually considered related to his prose works by virtue of the similarity of language. His serious verse, published in several collections, is considered uninspired and is largely forgotten today. The later novels Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893) were his only fictional works aimed at an adult reading audience. Far more serious and didactic than the Alice stories, the two texts have often been treated by critics as a single, two-volume work, and occasionally as a fairly conventional Victorian novel. Far less famous than his fictional works are Carroll's writings on mathematics and symbolic logic. They include A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry, Part I (1860), An Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867), Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879), and Symbolic Logic, Part I: Elementary (1896).

Critical Reception Carroll's publications as Lewis Carroll, particularly the Alice stories, were enormously popular with juvenile readers at the time of their publication and have since attained an assured place in the canon of children's literature. They have been reprinted countless times in a wide variety of editions and have been translated into virtually every modern language. The two books were originally considered nonsense for the amusement of children and were considered unworthy of analysis by serious scholars. Beginning in the 1930s, however, the Alice stories and the nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark have attracted increasing attention from literary critics and philosophers. Psychoanalytic critics in particular have for many years been preoccupied with the details of Carroll's life, particularly his sex life. In addition to the much-documented phallic and womb imagery of his fiction, his extreme fondness for pre-adolescent girls—he often took them on overnight outings and photographed many of them nude—made Carroll a suspicious character in his own time and even more so today. Morton N. Cohen confronts speculation about Carroll's relationship with his young friends, claiming that the author was a “model Victorian” who never acted on whatever erotic impulses he may have harbored for the young.

As Cohen puts it, “Carroll knew that, given his preference for the friendship of children, if he once succumbed to any temptation, he would never be able to befriend them again. His own uncompromising standards, his forthright, pious nature would not permit it. Besides he loved innocence so, how could he ever violate it?” Robert M. Polhemus seems to agree: “Freudians have had grand times analyzing the kinks in Charles Dodgson's personality, but the striking irony is that psychoanalysis and its theories … seem to flow right out of Carroll's wonderland.” Michael Irwin also acknowledges that “the Alice books, of course, are a gift to the Freudian, proliferating as they do in holes, tunnels, doors, locks, keys, fluids and size-changes.” Nonetheless, Irwin claims, “that game is all too easy.” Daniel Bivona reads Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in the context of nineteenth-century imperialism, referring to Alice as ethnocentric because she assumes that the language and behavior of the creatures in Wonderland operate according to no rules simply because they fail to conform to English rules.

“Alice's ‘imperialism,’ such as it is,” contends Bivona, “is a semiotic imperialism: she is incapable of constructing, on a model radically different from her own, the ‘system’ or ‘systems’ that give meaning to the behavior of the creatures.” Several critics maintain that Carroll's fictional work anticipates modernism and even postmodernism, and his name has been linked with many of the literary figures of those movements.

Polhemus reports: “From out of his rabbit-hole and looking-glass world we can see coming not only such figures as Joyce, Freud, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Proust, Artaud, Nabokov, Beckett, Waugh, Lacan, Borges, Bakhtin, and García Márquez, but also much of the character and mood of twentieth-century popular culture.” Michael Holquist has examined The Hunting of the Snark as a modernist text and concluded that the poem “is the most perfect nonsense which Carroll created in that it best exemplifies what all his career and all his books sought to do: achieve pure order.” Carroll's work does not consist of meaningless gibberish, according to Holquist, but is rather “its own system of signs which gain their meaning by constantly dramatizing their differences from signs in other systems.” Peter Heath also rejects the idea that Carroll was a nonsense writer and claims that the author should be more properly categorized as an absurdist.

Heath maintains that the Alice books are rational works “whose frolics are governed throughout, not by a formal theory of any kind, but by close attention to logical principles, and by a sometimes surprising insight into abstract questions of philosophy.” Carroll's two later novels, Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, have generally been considered far inferior to the author's earlier works. Edmund Miller, however, believes that the two books should be treated as a whole and suggests that the resulting two-volume work has much in common with the early Victorian novel, particularly Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. “Both works are infused with the sentiments of the age and yet combine traditional materials in completely original ways,” claims Miller. More Content: Carroll, Lewis (Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism) (hide) Lewis Carroll | Alice in Wonderland Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia Nationality English Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, Anglican deacon and photographer. He was thought by many people to be a genius and he enjoyed puzzles.

He is best known for writing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass , as well as the poems The Hunting of the Snark and Jabberwocky . Description Edit Lewis Carroll was for many years widely assumed to have derived his own "Alice" from Alice Liddell , the daughter of a close friend. This was given some apparent substance by the fact the acrostic poem at the end of Through the Looking Glass spells out her name, and that there are many superficial references to her hidden in the text of both books. Carroll himself, however, repeatedly denied in his later life that his "little heroine" was based on any real child. Though information is scarce (Carroll's diaries for the years 1858–1862 are missing), it does seem clear that Carroll's friendship with the Liddell family was an important part of his life in the late 1850's, and he grew into the habit of taking the Alice and her sisters on rowing trips.

It was during one such expedition, on July 4, 1862, accompanied, in addition by Reverend Robinson Duckworth , that Carroll invented the outline of the story that eventually became his first and largest commercial success. Having told the story and begged by Alice Liddell to write it down, Carroll eventually (after much delay) presented her with a handwritten, illustrated manuscript entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground in November 1864. This manuscript became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , which was first published in 1865 with illustrations by Sir James Tenniel .

Question: What was the sequel to Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventure in Wonderland?
Answer: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS