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Lewis Carroll 1832-1898 author of Alices Adventures in Wonderland

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One of the most famous Victorian authors and books is the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I thought it would be of interest to write about his life works.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on 27th January 1832 and is better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll who was an English author, Mathematician, Logician, Anglican Deacon and Photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through The Looking-Glass.


According to anecdotes, Dodgson was very shy and he even hid his hands continually within a pair of gray-and-black gloves. In 1867 he travelled with his friend and colleague Henry Parry Liddon to Russia, where they visited churches, museums and other places of interest. After this journey, he never again left Britain. Dodgson died on January 14, 1898. He was buried in Guilford Cemetery.

In spite of his stammer, Dodgson spoke easily with children, whom he often photographed, first with their clothes on. From July 1866, Dodgson began to take nude photographs, always with the permission of parents. During the next thirteen years, Dodgson took many nude studies, but before he died, he destroyed most the negatives and prints. Dodgson was careful not to show them to anybody, stating in a letter that "there is really no friend to whom I should wish to give photographs which so entirely defy conventional rules."

Dodgson had seven sisters. Although his attraction to young girls was well-known, he followed in their company the strict Victorian rules of behavior and morals, even if his feelings were more intense than he acknowledged in his diaries. He also had long friendships with mature women, but remained a bachelor. This side of his life has remained little examined.

During one picnic – on July 4, 1862, on a blazing summer afternoon – Dodgson began to tell a long story to Alice Liddell (died in 1934), his ideal child friend, who was the daughter of Henry George Liddell, the head of his Oxford college. The Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was born from these tales. The friendship with the Liddell family ended abruptly in June 1863, two years before Wonderland was published, and Dodgson turned his attention to other young friends.

According to some Oxford gossips, Dodgson had proposed marriage to Alice, aged eleven; for females the legal age to marry was twelve. However, the cause of the break between Dodgson and the Liddells is a mystery. Dodgson's relationship with the family remained formal, but in 1870 Mrs. Liddell Brough, Alice and her sister Ina to Dodgson's studio to be photographed. When Alice married Reginald Gervis Hargreaves in 1870, he gave the couple a watercolor of Tom Quad, one of the quadrangles of Christ Church in Oxford. Alice was absent from his funeral, no Liddells appeared.

Originally the book appeared under the title Alice's Adventures Under Ground. The story centers on the seven-year-old Alice, who falls asleep in a meadow, and dreams that she plunges down a rabbit hole, where finds herself first too large and then too small. She meets such strange characters as Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the King and Queen of Hearts, and experiences wondrous, often bizarre adventures, trying to reason in numerous discussions that do not follow the usual paths of logic. Finally she totally rejects the dream world and wakes up.

The sequel Through the Looking Class, appeared in 1871. It is perhaps more often quoted than the first, featuring the poems Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter. The artist John Tenniel refused to illustrate one chapter in Through the Looking Class because he thought that it was ridiculous. The chapter was published later in 1872 as The Wasp in a Wig. Dodgson himself always wished to be an artist and as a boy he illustrated all the manuscript magazines, which he made for his younger brothers and sisters. Dodgson's original drawings for Alice's Adventures Underground were published in 1961.

He was also well known for his poems "The Hunting of the Snark and "Jabberwocky", all examples of the genre of Literary nonsense. He is noted for his facility at word play, logic, and fantasy, and there are societies dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works and the investigation of his life in many parts of the world, including the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States, and New Zealand.

Lewis Carroll Life's Work

Literary works


  • A Tangled Tale

  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

  • Facts

  • He thought he saw an elephant

  • Rhyme? And Reason? (also published as Phantasmagoria)

  • Pillow Problems

  • Sylvie and Bruno

  • Sylvie and Bruno Concluded

  • The Hunting of the Snark (1876)

  • Three Sunsets and Other Poems

  • Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (includes "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter") (1871)

  • What the Tortoise Said to Achilles

Mathematical works


  • A Syllabus of Plane Algebraic Geometry (1860)

  • The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically (1858 and 1868)

  • An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equations

  • Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1879), both literary and mathematical in style

  • Symbolic Logic Part I

  • Symbolic Logic Part II (published posthumously)

  • The Game of Logic

  • Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection

  • Curiosa Mathematica I (1888)

  • Curiosa Mathematica II (1892)

  • The Theory of Committees and Elections, collected, edited, analyzed, and published in 1958, by Duncan Black.

Over the remaining twenty years of his life, throughout his growing wealth and fame, his existence remained little changed. He continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881, and remained in residence there until his death. His last novel, the two-volume Sylvie and Bruno, was published in 1889 and 1893 respectively. It achieved nowhere near the success of the Alice books. Its intricacy was apparently not appreciated by the contemporary readers. The reviews and its sales, only 13,000 copies, were disappointing.[

The only occasion on which (as far as is known) he travelled abroad was a trip to Russia in 1867, which he recounts in his "Russian Journal" which was first commercially published in 1935.

He died on 14 January 1898 at his sisters' home, "The Chestnuts" in Guildford of pneumonia following influenza. He was 2 weeks away from turning 66 years old. He is buried in Guildford at the mount cemetary.

Please visit my Funny Animal Art Prints Collection @ http://www.fabprints.com

My other website is called Directory of British Icons: http://fabprints.webs.com

The Chinese call Britain 'The Island of Hero's' which I think sums up what we British are all about. We British are inquisitive and competitive and are always looking over the horizon to the next adventure and discovery.

Copyright © 2010 – 2011 Paul Hussey. All Rights Reserved.
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