Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was a British author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman and photographer, best-known for his classic fantasy novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). Carroll used the surrealistic setitbusngs of his fantasy world to question the commonly accepted ways of thinking. Unlike other children's books of the time, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland did not try to teach a moral message.

Lewis Carroll was born at Daresbury in Chesire into a wealthy family, as the son of Charles Dodgson, Archdeacon of Richmond Cathedral, Lewis Carroll was the third of eleven children. As a child he took an early interest in mathematics. As a child Lewis Carroll produced the family magazine, where he showed his first interest in parody, word-play and puzzles.

Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, with some Irish connections. Conservative and High Church Anglican, most of Dodgson's ancestors belonged to the two traditional English upper-middle class professions: the army and the Church. His great-grandfather, also Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become a bishop; his grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in 1803 while his two sons were hardly more than babies.

At Rugby, Lewis Carroll was a diligent, but not very happy pupil. He left Rugby at the end of 1850 and, after an interval which remains unexplained, went on in January 1851 to Oxford, attending his father's old college, Christ Church. He had only been at Oxford 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 forty-seven.

At Christ Church, Oxford, he excelled in his preferred subject, mathematics. Although ordained, Carroll never entered the church, though he did occasionally preach. Ordination was at the time, a necessary prerequisite to lecture at Oxford in mathematics. From entering Oxford at the age of 18 in 1850, Carroll was to spend the next fifty years of his life at Oxford until his death in 1898.

Carroll's career in education was troubled by a bad stammer. He lectured and autorbusght with difficulty. According to stories, Carroll was shy and he even hid his hands continually within a pair of gray-and-black gloves.

In spite of his stammer, Carroll spoke easily with children, whom he often photographed. He had seven sisters and his attraction to young girls was perhaps more innocent than has been imagined - he also had long friendships with mature women, but this side of his life has remained little examined.

During one picnic - on July 4, 1862 - Carroll started to tell a long story to Alice Liddell (died in 1934), who was the daughter of Henry George Liddell, the head of his Oxford college. The Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was born from these tales. The friendship with the Liddell family ended abruptly in June 1863, two years before Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published, and Carroll turned his attention to other young friends.

The sequel Through the Looking Class, appeared in 1871, and is perhaps more often quoted than the first, featuring the poems Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter. The artist John Tenniel refused to illustrate one chapter in Through the Looking Class because he thought that it was ridiculous. The chapter was published later in 1872 as The Wasp in a Wig.

Carroll also wrote humorous verse, such as The Hunting of the Snark and mathematical works. He was a rather exceptional student of Aristotelian logic.

At the time of their publication, Alice's adventures were considered children's literature, but now his stories are generally viewed in a different light. Carroll's work has fascinated such critics as Edmund Wilson and W.H. Auden, and logicians and scientist such as Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell.

During his writing career, Carroll wrote poetry and short stories, sending them to various magazines and 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 like the "Whitby Gazette" and the "Oxford Critic".

He also published many mathematical papers and books under his own name: An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, Symbolic Logic, Euclid and his Modern Rivals, The Alphabet Cipher, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles and Hiawatha's Photographing (a parody of The Song of Hiawatha) .

Lewis Carroll died on January 14, 1898 at Guilford, Surrey, England.

Selected works:

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
• Bruno's Revenge, 1867
• Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, 1869
• Through the Looking-Glass, 1871
• The Hunting of the Snark, 1876
• Rhyme? and Reason?, 1883
• Sylvie and Bruno, 1889
• The Nursery "Alice", 1889
• Three Sunsets and Other Poems, 1898
• For the Train: Five poems and a Tale, 1932
• The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch, 1932
• The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, 1939
• The Poems of Lewis Carroll, 1973
• Lewis Carroll's Diaries, 1993-1997

Bibliography:

• Lewis Carroll, Photographer by Roger Taylor (2002)
• Nonsense against Sorrow: A Phenomenological Study of Lewis Carroll's 'Alice' Books by David Holbrook (2002)
• Rediscovered Lewis Carroll Puzzles by Edward Wakeling (1996)
• The Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Carroll's Uses of Earlier Children's Literature by Ronald Reichertz (2000)
• In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll by Karoline Leach (1999)
• Lewis Carroll's Classic Photos of Children by Carroll (1999)
• Lewis Carroll: A Biography by Donald Thomas (1999)
• The Alice Companion: A Guide to Lewis Carroll's Alice Books by Jo Elwyn Jones (1998)
• The Agony of Lewis Carroll by Richard Wallace (1997)
• Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll's Alice Books by Carolyn Sigler (1997)
• Lewis Carroll in Wonderland: The Life and Times of Alice and Her Creator by Stephanie Lovett Stoffel (1997)
• Lewis Carroll: A Biography by Morton N. Cohen (1996)
• Lewis Carroll by Harold Bloom (1992)
• Lewis Carroll's Games and Puzzles by Edward Wakeling (1991)
• Lewis Carroll by Richard Michael Kelly (1990)
• Lewis Carroll by Derek Hudson (1976)
• Lewis Carroll and His World by John Pudney (1976)
• The Philosopher's Alice by Peter Heath (1974)
• Lewis Carroll by Walter John De La Mare (1972)
• Language and Lewis Carroll by Robert D. Sutherland (1970)
• The Story of Lewis Carroll by Roger Lancelyn Green (1949)
• The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood (1898)