Lewis Carroll Biography
Author (18321898)
Quick Facts
Name
Lewis Carroll
Occupation
Author
Birth Date
January 27, 1832
Death Date
January 14, 1898
Education
Christ Church (Oxford), Rugby School, Richmond School, Yorkshire
Place of Birth
Daresbury, England
Place of Death
Guildford, England
Originally
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
Synopsis
Early Life
Alice and Literary Success
Photography and Legacy
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Cite This Page
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles L. Dodgson, author of the children's
classics "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass."
Synopsis
Born on January 27, 1832 in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, Charles Dodgson
wrote and created games as a child. At age 20 he received a studentship at
Christ Church and was appointed a lecturer in mathematics. Dodgson was
shy but enjoyed creating stories for children. His books including "Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland" were published under the pen name Lewis
Carroll. Dodgson died in 1898.
Early Life
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, best known by his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, was
born in the village of Daresbury, England, on January 27, 1832. The eldest
boy in a family of 11 children, Carroll was rather adept at entertaining himself
and his siblings. His father, a clergyman, raised them in the rectory. As a boy,
Carroll excelled in mathematics and won many academic prizes. At age 20, he
was awarded a studentship (called a scholarship in other colleges) to Christ
College. Apart from serving as a lecturer in mathematics, he was an avid
photographer and wrote essays, political pamphlets and poetry. "The Hunting
of the Snark" displays his wonderful ability in the genre of literary nonsense.
Alice and Literary Success
Carroll suffered from a bad stammer, but he found himself vocally fluent when
speaking with children. The relationships he had with young people in his
adult years are of great interest, as they undoubtedly inspired his best-known
writings and have been a point of disturbed speculation over the years. Carroll
loved to entertain children, and it was Alice, the daughter of Henry George
Liddell, who can be credited with his pinnacle inspiration. Alice Liddell
remembers spending many hours with Carroll, sitting on his couch while he
told fantastic tales of dream worlds. During an afternoon picnic with Alice and
her two sisters, Carroll told the first iteration of what would later become
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. When Alice arrived home, she exclaimed
that he must write the story down for her.
He fulfilled the small girl's request, and through a series of coincidences, the
story fell into the hands of the novelist Henry Kingsley, who urged Carroll to
publish it. The book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was released in 1865. It
gained steady popularity, and as a result, Carroll wrote the sequel, Through
the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). By the time of his
death, Alice had become the most popular children's book in England, and by
1932 it was one of the most popular in the world.
Photography and Legacy
Besides writing, Carroll created a number of fine photographs. His notable
portraits include those of the actress Ellen Terry and the poet Alfred Tennyson.
He also photographed children in every possible costume and situation,
eventually making nude studies of them. Despite conjecture, little real
evidence of child abuse can be brought against him. Shortly before his 66th
birthday, Lewis Carroll caught a severe case of influenza, which led to
pneumonia. He died on January 14, 1898, leaving an enigma behind him
Actress Ellen Terry
Alfred Tennyson
Overview
The lists below give all the main works, but omit many of the pieces printed in journals and a lot of
the short papers. Full descriptions and a reclassification is planned, for this section. In the meantime,
these lists might give you some ideas about what else Dodgson wrote.
Childhood Compositions and Magazines
1845
Useful and Instructive Poetry (manuscript - published 1954)
c1848
The Rectory Magazine (manuscript)
c1850
La Guida Di Bragia (manuscript)
c1850-53
The Rectory Umbrella (manuscript - published 1932)
1855-62
Mischmasch (manuscript with press cuttings - published 1932)
Major Works - Books
1865
Alices Adventures in Wonderland
(illustrated: John Tenniel)
Printed in July, some copies were issued but most were recalled. Sheets from recalled
edition were published by Appleton, New York in 1866. (See Publishing of Alice)
1866
Alices Adventures in Wonderland
First published edition, (issued Dec 1865)
(See Publishing of Alice)
1869
Phantasmagoria
A collection of poems
1872
Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there
(Illustrated by John Tenniel; issued Dec 1871)
(See Publishing of Alice)
1876
The Hunting of the Snark (illustrated by Henry Holiday) A long nonsense poem written in a
mock-heroic style.
1879
Euclid and his Modern Rivals - a play written in defence of Euclid's approach to the
teaching of geometry
1879
Doublets - a word game
1883
Rhyme? And Reason? (A poetry collection - includes The Hunting of the Snark as
illustrated by Henry Holiday as well as Phantasmagoria and other poems, newly illustrated
by Arthur Frost)
1885
A Tangled Tale (illustrated by Arthur Frost) A series of short stories, each containing one
or more puzzles.
1886
The Game of Logic. An elementary text on logic - presented in an entertaining way using
Carroll's "game" to solve problems.
1886
Alices Adventures under Ground. The facsimile of the original manuscript of the story as
presented to Alice Liddell.
(See Publishing of Alice)
1889
The Nursery Alice. An adaption of the Alice for younger children. (See Publishing of
Alice)
1889
Sylvie and Bruno (illustrated by Harry Furniss) A complicated story collecting together a
diverse range of material - poems, short stories, etc.
1893
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. The second and concluding part of the Sylvie and Bruno
story.
1896
Symbolic Logic Part I Elementary. The first part of Carroll's major textbook on logic.
Presented as a serious testbook for schools, but made entertaining by the use of
interesting examples of puzzles to be solved and the use of Carroll "game" to solve them.
Miscellaneous Pieces
1869
The Guildford Gazette Extraordinary
1876
An Easter Greeting to Every Child who loves Alice
1877
Memoria Technica
1884
Christmas Greetings from a Fairy to a Child
1888
Curiosa Mathematica Part I - New Theory of Parallels
1890
Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter Writing
1893
Curiosa Mathematica Part II - Pillow Problems
Posthumous Publications
1898
Three Sunsets (illus. E Gertrude Thomson)
1899
Isas Visit to Oxford (1888). A humorous diary written out by Carroll for Isa Bowman
recording events which took place during a visit which Isa made to stay with Carroll in
Oxford.
Maggies Visit to Oxford (1889). Similar to Isa's Visit, although this account of Maggie's
visit is entirely in verse.
1907
Feeding the Mind (a printing of a lecture delivered 1884)
1932
Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch
1954
Useful and Instructive Poetry
The Diaries of Lewis Carroll (An abridged version of Carroll's diary)
1977
Symbolic Logic. Edited by W.W. Bartley. A collection of material originally developed for
Carroll's three-part text book on logic. The editor attempts to recreate the second part
and some of the third part of the series using material in proof or manuscript form.
The Wasp in a Wig. This episode from Through the Looking-Glass was edited out at a late
stage of preparation for publication - partly at the request of John Tenniel, the illustrator.
Proof pages of the episode were found in the 1970s and first published in 1977.
1979
The Letters of Lewis Carroll. Edited by Morton N Cohen
19932005
The Diaries of Lewis Carroll. The unabridged text of the nine surviving (of the original 13)
volumes, published with annotations and index, edited by Edward Wakeling.
Alice is reasonable, well-trained, and polite. From the start, she is a miniature,
middle-class Victorian "lady." Considered in this way, she is the perfect foil, or
counterpoint, or contrast, for all the unsocial, bad-mannered eccentrics whom she
meets in Wonderland. Alice's constant resource and strength is her courage. Time
and again, her dignity, her directness, her conscientiousness, and her art of
conversation all fail her. But when the chips are down, Alice reveals something to
the Queen of Hearts that is: spunk! Indeed, Alice has all the Victorian virtues,
including a quaint capacity for rationalization; yet it is Alice's common sense that
makes the quarrelsome Wonderland creatures seem perverse in spite of what they
consider to be their "adult" identities.
Certainly, Alice fits no conventional stereotype; she is neither angel nor brat. She
simply has an overwhelming curiosity, but it is matched by restraint and
moderation. She is balanced in other ways, too. To control her growth and shrinking,
she only "samples" the cake labeled "EAT ME." And never is there a hint that she
would seek to use her size advantage to control her fate and set dictatorial rules of
behavior for Wonderland. The Caterpillar takes offense when she complains of being
three inches tall. And the Duchess is unreasonable, coarse, and brutal. But in each
case, their veneer of "civility" is either irrational or transparent. The Caterpillar finds
mirth in teasing Alice with his pointed, formal, verb games, and the rude Duchess
mellows into a corrupt "set of silly rules." Yet, behind their playfulness, Alice senses
resentment and rage. It is not so much that Alice is kept "simple" so as to throw into
relief the monstrous aspects of Wonderland characters. Rather, it is that Alice, as
she conceives of her personality in a dream, sees herself as simple, sweet,
innocent, and confused.
Some critics feel that Alice's personality and her waking life are reflected in
Wonderland; that may be the case. But the story itself is independent of Alice's "real
world." Her personality, as it were, stands alone in the story, and it must be
considered in terms of the Alice character in Wonderland.
A strong moral consciousness operates in all of Alice's responses to Wonderland, yet
on the other hand, she exhibits a child's insensitivity in discussing her cat Dinah
with the frightened Mouse in the pool of tears. Generally speaking, Alice's simplicity
owes a great deal to Victorian feminine passivity and a repressive domestication.
Slowly, in stages, Alice's reasonableness, her sense of responsibility, and her other
good qualities will emerge in her journey through Wonderland and, especially, in the
trial scene. Her list of virtues is long: curiosity, courage, kindness, intelligence,
courtesy, humor, dignity, and a sense of justice. She is even "maternal" with the
pig/baby. But her constant and universal human characteristic is simple wonder
something which all children (and the child that still lives in most adults) can easily
identify with.
The novel is composed of twelve brief chapters; it can be read in an afternoon. Each of
the brief chapters, furthermore, is divided into small, individual, almost isolated
episodes. And the story begins with Alice and her sister sitting on the bank of a river
reading a book which has no pictures or dialogue in it. " . . . and what is the use of a
book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?" Thus, we find many pictures
and read much dialogue (although very little of it makes sense) in this novel.
After introducing us to one of the creatures in Wonderland, the Gryphon, for instance,
the narrator tells us, "If you don't know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture." As
noted earlier, Wonderland is filled with strange animals, and Alice's encounters with
these creatures, all of whom engage her in conversations, confuse her even more
whenever she meets yet another inhabitant of this strange country.
Slowly losing interest in her sister's book, Alice catches sight of a white rabbit. However,
he is not merely a rabbit; he will be the "White Rabbit," a major character in the novel.
In this first paragraph, then, we learn about the protagonist, Alice, her age, her
temperament, and the setting and the mood of the story. In a dream, Alice has escaped
from the dull and boring and prosaic world of adulthood a world of dull prose and
pictureless experiences; she has entered what seems to be a confusing, but perpetual
springtime of physical, if often terrifying, immediacy.
The White Rabbit wears a waistcoat, walks upright, speaks English, and is worrying over
the time on his pocket watch. Alice follows him simply because she is very curious
about him. And very soon she finds herself falling down a deep tunnel. For a few
minutes, she is frightened; the experience of falling disorients her. Soon, however, she
realizes that she is not falling fast; instead, she is falling in a slow, almost floating
descent. As she falls, she notices that the tunnel walls are lined with cupboards,
bookshelves, maps, and paintings. She takes a jar of orange marmalade off a shelf. But
finding the jar empty, she replaces it on a lower shelf, as though she were trying to
maintain a sense of some propriety especially in this situation of absolute
uncertainty. As she reflects on the marmalade jar, she says that had she dropped the
jar, she might have killed someone below. Alice is clearly a self-reflective young girl
and she's also relatively calm; her thinking reveals a curiously mature mind at times.
But like an ordinary little girl, she feels homesick for her cat, Dinah. In that respect, she
is in sharp contrast with conventional child heroines of the time. Although Alice may be
curious and sometimes bewildered, she is never too nice or too naughty. But she is
always aware of her class-status as a "lady." At one point, she even fears that some of
Wonderland's creatures have confused her for a servant, as when the White Rabbit
thinks that she is his housekeeper, Mary Ann, and orders Alice to fetch his gloves and
fan.
Thus, in Chapter I, Carroll prepares us for Alice's first major confrontation with absolute
chaos. And note that Alice's literal-minded reaction to the impossible is always
considered absurd here in Wonderland; it is laughable, yet it is her only way of coping.
As she falls through the rabbit-hole, for instance, she wonders what latitude or
longitude she has arrived at. This is humorous and ridiculous because such
measurements if one stops to think about it are meaningless words to a sevenyear-old girl, and they are certainly meaningless measurements of anything
underground.
In Chapter II, Alice finds herself still in the long passageway, and the White Rabbit
appears and goes off into a long, low hall full of locked doors. Behind one very small
door, Alice remembers that there is "the loveliest garden you ever saw" (remember, she
saw this in Chapter I), but now she has drunk a liquid that has made her too large to
squeeze even her head through the doorway of the garden. She wishes that she could
fold herself up like a telescope and enter. This wish becomes possible when she finds a
shrinking potion and a key to the door. The potion reduces her to ten inches high, but
she forgets to take the key with her (!) before shrinking, and now the table is too high
for her to reach the key. To any young child, this is silly and something to be laughed
at, but on another level, there's an element of fear; for children, the predictable
proportions of things are important matters of survival. Yet here in Wonderland, things
change for no known reason thus, logic has lost all its validity.
Then Alice eats a cake that she finds, and her neck shoots up until it resembles a
giraffe's. Suddenly, she is a distorted nine feet tall! Clearly, her ability to change size
has been a mixed blessing. In despair, she asks, "Who in the world am I?" This is a key
question.
Meanwhile, the rapid, haphazard nature of Alice's physical and emotional changes has
created a dangerous pool of tears that almost causes her to drown when she shrinks
again. Why has she shrunk? She realizes that she has been holding the White Rabbit's
lost white gloves and fan therefore, it must be the magic of the fan that is causing
her to shrink to almost nothingness. She saves herself by instantly dropping the fan.
But now she is desperate; in vain, she searches her mind for something to make sense
out of all this illogical chaos, something like arithmetic and geography, subjects that are
solid, lasting, and rational. But even they seem to be confused because no matter how
much she recites their rules, nothing helps. At the close of this chapter, she is
swimming desperately in a pool of her own tears, alongside a mouse and other
chattering creatures that have suddenly, somehow, appeared.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is full of parody and satire. And in Chapter III,
Victorian history is Carroll's target. The mouse offers to dry the other creatures and
Alice by telling them a very dry history of England. Then, Carroll attacks politics: the
Dodo organizes a Caucus-race, a special race in which every participant wins a prize.
Alice then learns the mouse's sad tale as Carroll's editor narrates it on the page in the
shape of a mouse's very narrow, S-shaped tail. The assembled, unearthly creatures
cannot accept ordinary language, and so Alice experiences, again, absolute bafflement;
this is linguistic and semantic disaster. Indeed, much of the humor of this chapter is
based on Alice's reactions to the collapse of three above-ground assumptions:
predictable growth, an absolute distinction between animals and humans, and an
identity that remains constant. We might also add to the concept of a constancy of
identity a conformity of word usage. But in Wonderland, Alice's previous identity and
the very concept of a permanent identity has repeatedly been destroyed, just as the
principles of above-ground are contradicted everywhere; here in Wonderland, such
things as space, size, and even arithmetic are shown to have no consistent laws.
In Chapter IV, the confusion of identity continues. The White Rabbit insists that Alice
fetch him his gloves and his fan. Somehow, he thinks that Alice is his servant, and
Alice, instead of objecting to his confusion, passively accepts her new role, just as she
would obey an adult ordering her about above-ground. On this day when everything
has gone wrong, she feels absolutely defeated.
In the rabbit's house, Alice finds and drinks another growth potion. This time, however,
she becomes so enormous that she fills up the room so entirely that she can't get out.
These continuing changes in size illustrate her confused, rapid identity crisis and her
continuous perplexity. After repulsing the rabbit's manservant, young Bill, a Lizard (who
is trying to evict her), Alice notices that pebbles that are being thrown at her through a
window are turning into cakes. Upon eating one of them, she shrinks until she is small
enough to escape the rabbit's house and hide in a thick wood.
In Chapter V, "Advice From a Caterpillar," Alice meets a rude Caterpillar; pompously and
dogmatically, he states that she must keep her temper which is even more confusing
to her for she is a little irritable because she simply cannot make any sense in this
world of Wonderland. Alice then becomes more polite, but the Caterpillar only sharpens
his already very short, brusque replies. In Wonderland, there are obviously no
conventional rules of etiquette. Thus, Alice's attempt at politeness and the observance
of social niceties are still frustrated attempts of hers to react as well as she can to very
unconventional behaviorat least, it's certainly unconventional according to the rules
that she learned above-ground.
Later, Alice suffers another bout of "giraffe's neck" from nibbling one side of the
mushroom that the Caterpillar was sitting on. The effect of this spurt upward causes her
to be mistaken for an egg-eating serpent by an angry, vicious pigeon.
In Chapters VI and VII, Alice meets the foul-tempered Duchess, a baby that slowly
changes into a pig, the famous, grinning Cheshire-Cat, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter,
and the very, very sleepy Dormouse. The latter three are literally trapped (although
they don't know it) in a time-warp trapped in a perpetual time when tea is being
forever served. Life is one long tea-party, and this episode is Carroll's assault on the
notion of time. At the tea-party, it is always teatime; the Mad Hatter's watch tells the
day of the year, but not the time since it is always six o'clock. At this point, it is
important that you notice a key aspect of Wonderland; here, all these creatures treat
Alice (and her reactions) as though she is insane and as though they are sane! In
addition, when they are not condescending to her or severely criticizing her, the
creatures continually contradict her. And Alice passively presumes the fault to be hers
in almost every case because all of the creatures act as though their madness is
normal and not at all unusual. It is the logical Alice who is the queer one. The chapter
ends with Alice at last entering the garden by eating more of the mushroom that the
Caterpillar was sitting on. Alice is now about a foot tall.
Chapters VIII to X introduce Alice to the most grimly evil and most irrational people
(and actions) in the novel. Alice meets the sovereigns of Wonderland, who display a
perversely hilarious rudeness not matched by anyone except possibly by the old
screaming Duchess. The garden is inhabited by playing cards (with arms and legs and
heads),who are ruled over by the barbarous Queen of Hearts. The Queen's constant
refrain and response to seemingly all situations is: "Off with their heads!" This beautiful
garden, Alice discovers, is the Queen's private croquet ground, and the Queen matterof-factly orders Alice to play croquet. Alice's confusion now turns to fear. Then she
meets the ugly Duchess again, as well as the White Rabbit, the Cheshire-Cat, and a
Gryphon introduces her to a Mock Turtle, who sings her a sad tale of his mock (empty)
education; then the Mock Turtle teaches her and the Gryphon a dance called the
'Lobster-Quadrille." Chapters XI and XII concern the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Here,
Alice plays a heroic role at the trial, and she emerges from Wonderland and awakens to
reality. The last two chapters represent the overthrow of Wonderland and Alice's
triumphant rebellion against the mayhem and madness that she experienced while she
was lost, for awhile, in the strange world of Wonderland.
This story is characterized, first of all, by Alice's unthinking, irrational, and heedless
jumping down the rabbit-hole, an act which is at once superhuman and beyond human
experience but Alice does it. And once we accept this premise, we are ready for the
rest of the absurdities of Wonderland and Alice's attempts to understand it and, finally,
to escape from it. Confusion begins almost immediately because Alice tries to use her
world of knowledge from the adult world above-ground in order to understand this new
world. Wonderland, however, is a lawless world of deepest, bizarre dream
unconsciousness, and Alice's journey through it is a metaphorical search for experience.
What she discovers in her dream, though, is a more meaningful and terrifying world
than most conscious acts of intelligence would ever lead her to. Hence, "Who in the
world am I?" is Alice's constant, confused refrain, one which people "above-ground" ask
themselves many, many times throughout their lifetimes.
Throughout the story, Alice is confronted with the problem of shifting identity, as well as
being confronted with the anarchy and by the cruelty of Wonderland. When Alice
physically shrinks in size, she is never really small enough to hide from the disagreeable
creatures that she meets; yet when she grows to adult or to even larger size, she is still
not large enough to command authority. "There are things in Alice," writes critic William
Empson, "that would give Freud the creeps." Often we find poor Alice (and she is often
described as being either "poor" or "curious") in tears over something that the adult
reader finds comic. And "poor Alice" is on the verge of tears most of the time. When
she rarely prepares to laugh, she is usually checked by the morbid, humorless types of
creatures whom she encounters in Wonderland. Not even the smiling Cheshire-Cat is
kind to her. Such a hostile breakdown of the ordinary world is never funny to the child,
however comic it might appear to adults. But then Wonderland would not be so
amusing to us except in terms of its sheer, unabated madness.
One of the central concerns of Alice is the subject of growing up the anxieties and
the mysteries of personal identity as one matures. When Alice finds her neck elongated,
everything, in her words, becomes "queer"; again, she is uncertain who she is. As is the
case with most children, Alice's identity depends upon her control of her body. Until
now, Alice's life has been very structured; now her life shifts; it becomes fragmented
until it ends with a nightmarish awakening. Throughout the novel, Alice is filled with
unconscious feelings of morbidity, physical disgrace, unfairness, and bizarre feelings
about bodily functions. Everywhere there is the absurd, unexplainable notion of death
and the absolute meaninglessness of death and life.
Alice's final triumph occurs when she outgrows nonsense. In response to the Queen's
cry at the Knave's trial: "sentence first verdict afterward," Alice responds: "Stuff and
nonsense! Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards!" At last, Alice takes
control of her life and her growth toward maturity by shattering and scattering the
absurdity of the playing cards and the silly little creatures who are less rational than she
is. In waking from her nightmare, she realizes that reason can oppose nonsense, and
that it can and did win. And now that the dream of chaos is over, she can say,
from her distance above-ground, "It was a curious dream," but then she skips off
thinking that for a strange moment what a wonderful dream it was.
