Steven Needham - Lewis Carroll: Biography of the Author of Alice in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, in Daresbury, Cheshire, England in the year 1832. Dodgson's parents were Rev. Charles Dodgson and his wife, Frances Jane Lutwidge. The Dodgsons ultimately had eleven children, and Charles Dodgson was their eldest son. The Rev. Charles Dodgson was a priest in the Church of England, and the children were raised in a country village where their father was the local Curate. The young Charles Dodgson showed an aptitude for writing and creativity at a tender age, even writing for the Rectory Magazine when he was only twelve years old.

As a young boy, Dodgson attended Richmond School in Yorkshire, England and then went on to attend Rugby School from 1846 to 1850. He was, by all accounts, a shy and sickly child, and he was also said to have had a serious stammer that caused him much insecurity. According to Karoline Leach's article , Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll): A Brief Biography," "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."

Dodgson shared his father's interest in theology, and in 1851 he became an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford and began to pursue a career in religion. Shortly after beginning his college career, Dodgson was struck by tragedy when his mother died at the age of forty-seven. Despite this hardship, he flourished while in school at Oxford, getting the highest grades in his class in mathematics. After his graduation in 1854, he was appointed as a lecturer in mathematics at the school. In 1856, he published his first work under his famous pen name of Lewis Carroll. His first piece was a romantic poem titled "Solitude."

Dodgson was ordained as a Deacon in the Church of England in 1861, a position that required he remain unmarried. When he met Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ Church, he became instantly enamoured of Liddell's children. Having grown up on a large family with many younger siblings, Dodgson was more comfortable with children than with other adults. The three Liddell girls, Alice, Lorina and Edith Liddell, began to visit Dodgson on a regular basis at the college. He took the girls on many outings and entertained them with his stories.

Alice Liddell became the inspiration for Dodgson's most famous character. As an adult, she remembered that she and her sisters, "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 alongHe 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."

Alice Liddell. Image via svajcr .

Dodgson seems to have acquired many of his literary characters during this period. The Liddell children's visits were chaperoned by their governess, a Miss Prickett who inspired the character of the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass . Dodgson began to write down his children's tales, which he also illustrated himself purely for the children's entertainment. At first, he did not intend to publish his stories, but when the novelist Henry Kingsley read them, he convinced the author to seek publication.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865. The book was an instant success, and the pen name Lewis Carroll became well known in England. Interestingly, although he continued to write fiction under his pen name for the rest of his life, Dodgson also published non-fiction, scholarly works under his real name.

By all accounts, Charles Dodgson was a renaissance man who was interested in literature, theology and mathematics. He also practised a relatively new art form of the period: photography. Dodgson photographed many of his friends, including the famous poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson. He took about three thousand photos over the course of his life. Many of Charles Dodgson's photographs can be seen at the University of Virginia's website .

T he first and perhaps the most important literary accomplishment of Charles Dodgson's life was the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . Part of the reason that the book received so much attention at the time of its publication is that it was not typical of literature at that time. The cultural constraints of Victorian England discouraged people from openly showing their emotions. Dodgson's story of a little girl who fell down a rabbit hole was unusually expressive and fraught with emotion. Because the story was a fantasy or "nonsense" story, Dodgson was able to write about things that were unusual in Victorian England and seldom spoken about.

Scholar Aila Malkki from the University of Helsinki wrote in her essay , "Translating Emotions Across Time: Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," that Dodgson was aware of these cultural constraints and addressed them in his book. Malkki wrote, "Witnessing the strange turns of conversation (for example, in Chapter VII during the Mad Tea-Party) parallels the efforts to find out how to deal with the rules in the Victorian era. Furthermore, the dream setting emphasizes the striking contrast between the restrictions of the community and the boundless dream world." Because Dodgson's book was a work of fantasy for children, the normal societal rules did not apply.

Dodgson was particularly successful in the world of academics during his lifetime. Because he wrote his children's fiction under the pen name Lewis Carroll, he was able to separate fully his literary life from his life in academics. In 1851, his excellence in the discipline of mathematics paid off when Dodgson was awarded a Boulter Scholarship, which was worth twenty pounds a year. Upon graduation, he received a Second Class in classics and a First Class in mathematics and as a consequence in 1852 he was awarded a fellowship of twenty-five pounds a year for the rest of his life.

During his academic career in mathematics, Dodgson published a number of books on the subject under his own real name. These works included: A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry , in 1860, Two Books of Euclid , also in 1860, The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry , in 1861, Condensation of Determinants , in 1866, Elementary Treatise on Determinants , in 1867, Examples in Arithmetic, in 1874, Euclid and his Modern Rivals , in 1879, Curiosa Mathematica, Part I: A New Theory of Parallels , in 1888, and Curiosa Mathematica, Part II: Pillow Problems thought out During Sleepless Nights , in 1893.

Dodgson was also considered successful in his theological career, although he decided never to become a priest. In the Anglican tradition of the Church of England, the position of Deacon is as a lay minister who is responsible for the religious instruction of the congregation. Some scholars of his life believe that Dodgson chose not to become a priest due to his issue with stuttering. He was self-conscious about his speech impediment, and may have been frightened of a career that involved long sermons.

In their essay "Charles Lutwidge Dodgson," J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson wrote of his decision not to pursue the priesthood, "It seems likely, however, that as time went on he found it harder to accept the view that non-Christians 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."