Author
Lewis Carroll
1832-1898
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician, photographer and deacon who wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.
Born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on 27 January 1832 at Daresbury, Cheshire, the oldest boy and third of 11 children of a clergyman, and from the age of 11 grew up in the rectory at Croft-on-Tees in Yorkshire. A stammer he acquired in early childhood stayed with him all his life. After Richmond School he went to Rugby, where he was unhappy but did well.
In 1850 he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, where he lived for most of his life. He took first-class honours in mathematics in 1854, held the college's mathematical lectureship for 26 years, and was ordained deacon in 1861. From 1856 he was a keen photographer. That year he first used the name Lewis Carroll, for a poem in The Train.
Also in 1856 Henry Liddell arrived as Dean of Christ Church, and Dodgson grew close to his family. On a rowing trip on 4 July 1862 he made up a story that Alice Liddell begged him to write down. It was published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, with illustrations by John Tenniel, and made Lewis Carroll famous around the world. The sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, followed late in 1871. Dodgson repeatedly denied that his Alice was based on any real child.
He went on to write The Hunting of the Snark (1876) and Sylvie and Bruno, and invented puzzles including the word ladder. He died of pneumonia on 14 January 1898 at his sisters' home in Guildford, and in 1982 a memorial stone to him was unveiled in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.
Sources: wikipedia.org
