Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

Lewis Carroll’s real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and he was born, the son of a country clergyman, on 27 January 1832, in the small English village of Daresbury, Cheshire (as in Cheshire Cat). There were 11 children in the family: Charles was the eldest of his three brothers and had seven sisters.

As a young boy, he made pets of snails and frogs, was constantly inventing games for his brothers and sisters, and he built a small theatre with dolls as actors, moving them around the stage with strings. He performed tricks of magic dressed in a brown wig and long white robe, started a home magazine for which he wrote poems and plays, and illustrated them himself with his own comical and spirited drawings.

When 18 years old, he entered the Christ Church, Oxford, where he spent the rest of his life. For the next fifty years, he led a sort of double life. He had become a clergyman and, as the Rev. C. L. Dodgson, he taught mathematics and wrote textbooks.

As Lewis Carroll, he wrote verses for comic papers and stories for children. He made his pen name out of his real Christian names: Lutwidge is an old German form of Lewis, and Charles in Latin is Carolus. So, transposing and transliterating “Charles Lutwidge”, he arrived at “Lewis Carroll”.

The Head of his college, Dr Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, had three young daughters of whom Charles Dodgson became very fond. He and his friend Robinson Duckworth used to take the three little girls for trips on the river at Oxford, rowing to picnic spots on the banks and inventing fabulous stories. According to Alice Liddell, the beginning of “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground” (as Dodgson first called his story) originated here in the golden summer of 1862.

Had it not been for the many requests of ten-year-old Alice, Dodgson may never have actually written the story down. But finally he did – it took him two-and-a-half years – in a beautifully handwritten and illustrated bound copy that her then gave to Alice as a Christmas gift.

While writing it, Lewis Carroll had happened to show the manuscript to his friend, George MacDonald, and MacDonald urged Dodgson to send it to a publisher. In 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (as it was now re-titled and would forever be known) was published by the prestigious firm of Macmillan in London. The superb drawings were by John Tenniel, based on Dodgson’s sketches in the copy he gave Alice.

More than 120,000 copies were sold in the first twenty years. Today the figure is many millions. It is the fourth best-known and most-quoted book in the world, after the Bible, the Qur’an and Shakespeare’s Collected Works. Dodgson’s original handwritten edition now resides in the British Museum, London.

A sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, was published in 1871, again with illustrations by Tenniel.

Dodgson would write 23 books in total, including twelve on mathematics, but only two featured his most famous character, Alice. Well, two and a bit! A chapter of Through the Looking-Glass entitled “The Wasp in a Wig” was omitted from the book prior to publication because John Tenniel said he couldn’t draw a wasp! It was finally published in book form with Wonderland and Looking-Glass in Martin Gardner’s More Annotated Alice (1990), with illustrations by Peter Newell. A famous American mathematician, Gardner has written two books (the first was The Annotated Alice) which explain all the riddles and tricky bits in Carroll’s Alice stories, including the mathematical basis behind the apparently nonsensical verse.

Despite the worldwide adulation because of his books, Dodgson was, by all accounts, a grave, rather sad face, with a quiet, shy manner and a slight stammer in his speech. Beneath that outer reserve was a spirit of fun as he would entertain children with fantastic stories and, when he travelled, he would fill his pockets with ingenious puzzles of his own invention to amuse any child he might meet on the railway train. He would also write long, delightful letters to his young friends, full of fun and nonsense.

Dodgson read and possessed lots of books. He had a diary that consisted of thirteen volumes. From January 1861 until his death in 1898, he kept a register of all the letters that he ever wrote. It consisted of twenty-four volumes and contained 98,721 letters! (A mere 1305 were published in 2 volumes in 1979.)

Dodgson died from pneumonia on 14 January 1898. His gravestone bears first his full name, Rev Charles Lutwidge Dodgson; underneath it is the name by which thousands who have never heard the other know and love him: Lewis Carroll.