A Brief Lewis Carroll Biography
Lewis Carroll‘s Life
Lewis Carroll is the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an English
author, photographer, and mathematician. He is best known for writing Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass. Carroll is
also the author of the poems The Hunting of the Snark and Jabberwocky.
Lewis Carroll was born in Daresbury near Warrington, Cheshire on
January 27, 1832. He was the eldest boy, but the third child in his parent's four and
a half year marriage. The family went on to have eight more children. Carroll's
family was very conservative and deeply religious; many of his relatives were
Church of England clergymen.
Carroll was educated at home until attending a private school at age 12.
He was an excellent student, but suffered from a stammer that hampered his social
life. He studied mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, which was his father's old
college.
Throughout his life, Carroll was troubled by various medical concerns. As a child, Carroll had a fever that left him deaf in one ear. He
contracted whooping cough at age 17, which left him with lingering chest problems throughout the rest of his life. He sustained a knee injury in
middle age that caused him to walk with a bit of a limp. Lewis Carroll died on January 14, 1898 of pneumonia that developed following influenza. He
was 65 years old. Carroll is buried in Guildford at the Mount Cemetery.
Literary Career
Lewis Carroll wrote poetry and short stories from a very young age, often submitting them to various local magazines. However, he was an
unknown writer until the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was written as a tribute to Alice
Liddell, one of the daughters of Christ Church Dean Henry Liddell. Carroll began the story while taking Alice and her sisters on a rowing trip. The
children enjoyed the tale so much that they begged him to write it down. He presented Alice with a handwritten manuscript in 1864, which attracted
the attention of the author George MacDonald. MacDonald encouraged Carroll to have the manuscript published.
One interesting bit of trivia in the Lewis Carroll biography is that there was initially quite a debate about the proper title for his story. Alice
Among the Fairies and Alice's Golden Hour were first proposed as titles before Carroll's publisher decided on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Other Pursuits
Despite being best known as an author of children's literature, Lewis Carroll actually had many interests. He worked as a mathematics
tutor and wrote several books on geometry, matrix algebra, and mathematical logic. He also worked on many different inventions, including a writing
tablet called the nyctograph for note taking in the dark.
At one point, Lewis Carroll was a fairly well-known photographer. He shot portraits of notable people. However, his photographic work has
been the source of some controversy among the scholarly community. Carroll frequently photographed children.