CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON A.K.A. LEWIS CARROLL

Lewis Carroll

Today, The Grandma is at home resting and preparing new exciting ideas for this year. She is working very hard in some interesting projects that she is going to explain in her blog.

Tomorrow, The Grandma is going to welcome a new member of her adventures, Jordi Santanyí, a magnificent writer who she has known in Palma. Jordi Santanyí is the character who is going to talk to you about Literature and Writing since tomorrow.

After an exciting night of Mallorcan culture, The Grandma has decided to not going out and stay at home reading interesting books like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a masterpiece written by Lewis Carroll an amazing author who was born on a day like today in 1832.

Before reading about Carroll, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 9).

More information: Vocabulary 9-Animals

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832-14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer of world-famous children's fiction, notably Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. He was noted for his facility at word play, logic and fantasy.

The poems Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark are classified in the genre of literary nonsense. He was also a mathematician, photographer, and Anglican deacon.

More information: The British Library

Carroll came from a family of high church Anglicans, and developed a long relationship with Christ Church, Oxford, where he lived for most of his life as a scholar and teacher. Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, Henry Liddell, is widely identified as the original for Alice in Wonderland, though Carroll always denied this.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson a.k.a. Lewis Carroll

Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, with Irish connections, conservative and high church Anglican. Most of Dodgson's male ancestors were army officers or Church of England clergy. His great-grandfather, also named Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become the Bishop of Elphin. His paternal grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in Ireland in 1803 when his two sons were hardly more than babies. The older of these sons –yet another Charles Dodgson– was Carroll's father.

He went to Westminster School and then to Christ Church, Oxford. He reverted to the other family tradition and took holy orders. He was mathematically gifted and won a double first degree, which could have been the prelude to a brilliant academic career. Instead, he married his first cousin Frances Jane Lutwidge in 1830 and became a country parson.

Dodgson was born in the small parsonage at Daresbury in Cheshire near the towns of Warrington and Runcorn, the eldest boy but already the third child. Eight more children followed. When Charles was 11, his father was given the living of Croft-on-Tees in North Yorkshire, and the whole family moved to the spacious rectory. This remained their home for the next 25 years.

More information: Oxford Dictionaries

Charles's father was an active and highly conservative cleric of the Church of England who later became the Archdeacon of Richmond and involved himself, sometimes influentially, in the intense religious disputes that were dividing the church. He was high church, inclining toward Anglo-Catholicism, an admirer of John Henry Newman and the Tractarian movement, and did his best to instil such views in his children. Young Charles was to develop an ambiguous relationship with his father's values and with the Church of England as a whole.

In 1846, Dodgson entered Rugby School where he was evidently unhappy. He left Rugby at the end of 1849 and matriculated at the University of Oxford in May 1850 as a member of his father's old college, Christ Church. After waiting for rooms in college to become available, he went into residence in January 1851. He had been at Oxford only two days when he received a summons home. His mother had died of inflammation of the brain –perhaps meningitis or a stroke– at the age of 47.

First Edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

His early academic career veered between high promise and irresistible distraction. He did not always work hard but was exceptionally gifted and achievement came easily to him.

In 1852, he obtained first-class honours in Mathematics Moderations and was shortly thereafter nominated to a Studentship by his father's old friend Canon Edward Pusey.

In 1854, he obtained first-class honours in the Final Honours School of Mathematics, standing first on the list, graduating Bachelor of Arts. He remained at Christ Church studying and teaching, but the next year he failed an important scholarship through his self-confessed inability to apply himself to study. Even so, his talent as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship in 1855, which he continued to hold for the next 26 years.

More information: BBC

Despite early unhappiness, Dodgson was to remain at Christ Church, in various capacities, until his death, including that of Sub-Librarian of the Christ Church library, where his office was close to the Deanery, where Alice Liddell lived.

From a young age, Dodgson wrote poetry and short stories, contributing heavily to the family magazine Mischmasch and later sending them to various magazines, enjoying moderate success.

Between 1854 and 1856, his work appeared in the national publications The Comic Times and The Train, as well as smaller magazines such as the Whitby Gazette and the Oxford Critic. 

Lewis Carroll

Most of this output was humorous, sometimes satirical, but his standards and ambitions were exacting. I do not think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication, but I do not despair of doing so some day, he wrote in July 1855. Sometime after 1850, he did write puppet plays for his siblings' entertainment, of which one has survived: La Guida di Bragia.

In 1856, he published his first piece of work under the name that would make him famous. A romantic poem called Solitude"appeared in The Train under the authorship of Lewis Carroll. This pseudonym was a play on his real name: Lewis was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll an Irish surname similar to the Latin name Carolus, from which comes the name Charles.

The transition went as follows: Charles Lutwidge translated into Latin as Carolus Ludovicus. This was then translated back into English as Carroll Lewis and then reversed to make Lewis Carroll.

More information: The Guardian

Dodgson's existence remained little changed over the last twenty years of his life, despite his growing wealth and fame. He continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881 and remained in residence there until his death. The two volumes of his last novel, Sylvie and Bruno, were published in 1889 and 1893, but the intricacy of this work was apparently not appreciated by contemporary readers; it achieved nothing like the success of the Alice books, with disappointing reviews and sales of only 13,000 copies.

The only known occasion on which he travelled abroad was a trip to Russia in 1867 as an ecclesiastic, together with the Reverend Henry Liddon. He recounts the travel in his Russian Journal, which was first commercially published in 1935. On his way to Russia and back, he also saw different cities in Belgium, Germany, partitioned Poland, and France.

He died of pneumonia following influenza on 14 January 1898 at his sisters' home, The Chestnuts, in Guildford. He was two weeks away from turning 66 years old. His funeral was held at the nearby St Mary's Church. He is buried in Guildford at the Mount Cemetery.

Download Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

If you don't know where you are going, 

any road will get you there.

Lewis Carroll