Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet, mathematician, photographer and Anglican deacon. He was born in Daresbury, Cheshire, in 1832 and died in Guildford, Surrey, in 1898. He grew up in a conservative, high-church Anglican family, and his life unfolded within the Victorian world of the Church of England and the universities. He is remembered above all for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but his training in mathematics and logic, along with his love of word play, explains much of what makes his writing so distinctive.

He was the eldest boy in a family of eleven children, and all of them survived into adulthood. His father, a clergyman, moved the household to the rectory at Croft-on-Tees when Charles was eleven, and the family stayed there for the next quarter century. Charles was first taught at home and then sent to several schools, including Rugby, where he was clearly unhappy even though he excelled academically. He lived with a stammer for his whole life, which made social situations harder, and he was partly deaf in one ear. In 1851 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, his father's old college, but he had been there only two days when he was summoned home after his mother's death. His academic career alternated between brilliant results and a marked tendency to distraction. In 1855 he was appointed Mathematical Lecturer at Christ Church, a post he held for twenty-six years, and a few years later he was ordained a deacon.

Photography became another great passion, and he mastered it with real skill. For him it was a way of expressing a conviction that beauty, understood as moral, aesthetic or physical perfection, had something close to the sacred. He photographed many young girls, a fact that has been interpreted in very different ways, while some scholars stress that images of children were common in Victorian culture and should be read in that context. Much of his work has been lost: he is thought to have made around 3000 pictures, and fewer than 1000 survive. He gave up photography in 1880. His photographs were not widely recognised until after his death, when pictorialist photographers championed them and the Bloomsbury Group, which included Virginia Woolf, supported them. Today he is regarded as one of the most important Victorian photographers.

His literary career began with humorous verses and stories sent to periodicals between 1854 and 1856, in magazines such as The Comic Times and The Train. The book that made him famous was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), followed by Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Both mix a often absurd humour with an internal logic that owes much to his work as a mathematician. The same is true of poems such as Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark, which belong to the tradition of literary nonsense. He was also an enthusiastic deviser of puzzles and invented the word ladder he called Doublets, published in Vanity Fair between 1879 and 1881. As a mathematician he wrote on logic, in works such as The Game of Logic, and on geometry, in Euclid and His Modern Rivals.

His thought rests on the belief that logic and play are not incompatible, and on a vision in which innocence and beauty hold a central place. His influence has been considerable. His books have been translated into many languages and have inspired countless adaptations, and in 1982 a memorial stone to him was unveiled in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. Societies devoted to his work exist in many parts of the world.