Lewis Carroll

Born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27, 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, the eldest son in a family of eleven children, Lewis Carroll grew up in a household of Anglican clergymen, word games, and homemade magazines. His father, the Reverend Charles Dodgson, was a mathematician and clergyman. The young Dodgson suffered from a stammer that would persist throughout his life. He attended Rugby School, where he was reportedly miserable, and then Christ Church, Oxford, where he would remain, as student, mathematics lecturer, and reluctant Anglican deacon, for nearly fifty years. On July 4, 1862, during a rowing trip on the Thames with the three young daughters of Henry Liddell, the Dean of Christ Church, Dodgson began spinning an improvised tale for ten-year-old Alice Liddell about a girl who tumbles down a rabbit hole. Alice begged him to write it down, and the result was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), published under his pen name, which became one of the most beloved and influential works in English literature. Its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), introduced Humpty Dumpty, the Jabberwock, and Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Under his real name, Dodgson published serious works in mathematical logic, including Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879) and Symbolic Logic (1896). He was also a pioneering photographer, producing some of the finest portrait photographs of the Victorian era. He never married. He died of pneumonia on January 14, 1898, at his sisters' home in Guildford, Surrey, two weeks before his sixty-sixth birthday.