Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an English writer and brilliant mathematician perhaps best known for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and Through the looking glass (1872), children's books that are also distinguished as satire and as examples of verbal wit. Carroll invented his pen name by translating his first two names into the Latin "Carolus Lodovicus" and then anglicizing it into "Lewis Carroll."
The son of the Rev. Charles Dodgson, of Daresbury, Cheshire, and his wife Frances Jane. He was the third child, and first son of a family of eleven children. Carroll began at an early age to entertain himself and his family with magic tricks, marionette shows, and poems written for homemade newspapers.
At the age of 14 he was sent to Rugby School, where he was evidently unhappy. He made reference years later to the 'annoyance' he had suffered there 'at night'. The nature of this nocturnal 'annoyance' can be to some form of sexual abuse.
He graduated from Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1854. Carroll remained there, lecturing on mathematics and writing treatises and guides for students. Although he took deacon's orders in 1861, Carroll 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.
At the age of 23, 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.
Charles was about six foot tall, slender and handsome in a soft-focused dreamy sort of way, with curling brown hair and blue eyes. The only overt defect he carried into adulthood was the stammer he had acquired in early childhood and which was to plague him throughout his entire life.
Although he spent so much of his life in the academic environment, Dodgson's real passions were always artistic. He loved the theatre and the company of 'theatricals'. He loved artists and their work. He courted the bohemian life in a way that sometimes compromised the required dignity of his position as an Oxford don.
In 1856 he took up photography and very soon became an acknowledged master of the art, making portraits of some of the greatest celebrities of his day. His speciality became portraiture, and among his subjects were some leading people of the day, including Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Holman Hunt, the painter. He excelled especially at photographing children. Alice Liddell, one of the three daughters of the dean of Christ Church, was one of his photographic subjects and the model for the fictional Alice in Wonderland.
In his diaries he records that he learned photography by following his uncle, himself a photographer, on expeditions in the mid fifties. His passionate admiration of the naked human form, and his desire to celebrate this in his work was one of several aspects of his life that brought him into conflict with the "decent" middle class morality of his day.
To have one's portrait taken was often a pretty daunting business. Lewis Carroll described it very aptly in a poem:
"From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood.
Made of sliding folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together...
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squared and oblongs...
This he perched upon a tripod
And the family in order
Sat before him for their picture
Mystic, awful was the process."
Nevertheless, Carroll's portraits of children do not show this tension; doubtless he had a fund of stories which would enable them to relax, and with exposures still in the order of 30 - 40 seconds, he was remarkably successful. The pictures of Alice Liddell are particularly delightful characterisations, with lovely pensive moods.
In 1861 he became a deacon of the Anglican church, but, despite his religious background, and in direct defiance of the laws of his college, he refused to become a priest. The reason for this is one of the several enigmas that still surround his life. At the time that he was supposed to take his vows, he was in a turmoil of sexual guilt, resulting, it would appear, from a tormenting love affair, although evidence is fragmentary since his family destroyed the relevant portions of his diaries. Whether this guilt was behind his decision to abandon the priesthood we simply do not know, although the extant evidence suggests a connection.
Dodgson was writing from his earliest youth. First for family magazines, then as he matured, his poetry and short stories began appearing in various magazines like The Comic Times and The Train. Most of his output was funny, sometimes very sharply satirical. He specialised in a kind of anarchic mockery of hypocrisy and authority, that has its most famous example in his 'Alice' books.
In the same year that he became a photographer 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 The Train under the authorship of Lewis Carroll.
Also 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 and sometimes rather mysteriously, in Dodgson's life over the following years.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, under the pen-name Charles 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".
Throughout his growing wealth and fame, Dodgson continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881, and he remained in residence there until his death. He published Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There in 1872, and his last novel the two volume Sylvie and Bruno in 1889 and 1893 respectively, an unsuccessful attempts to re-create the Alice fantasies.
He also published many mathematical papers under his own name. As a mathematician, Carroll was conservative and derivative. As a logician, he was more interested in logic as a game than as an instrument for testing reason. In his diversions as a photographer and author of comic fantasy, he is most memorable and original--the man who, for example, contributed, in "Jabberwocky," the word chortle, a portmanteau word that combines "snort" and "chuckle," to the English language.
He never married, though there is evidence of at least one traumatic sexual relationship during the 1860s, and in later years, he enjoyed increasingly open and intimate friendships with numbers of women, married and single. He died, suddenly of violent pneumonia, on January 14, 1898.
After his death, his invented name "Lewis Carroll" quickly became the focus of a potent mythology. Despite the evidence of his slightly irregular private life, and his many unconventional and possibly sexual relationships with women, the man became legendary as a "scholar-saint" who avoided the adult world; a "perpetual child" who could only relate to children. Biographers wrote these things up as if they were fact, but they were never true in any real biographical sense.
