Web Quotableonline.com Frasescelebres.org Greatbookscollection.org

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27, 1832 – January 14, 1898), 
better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was a British author, 
mathematician, Anglican clergyman, logician, and amateur 
photographer.

His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and 
its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the comic 
poem The Hunting of the Snark. He also wrote many short pieces, 
including Euclid and his Modern Rivals and The Alphabet Cipher.

His facility at word play, logic, and fantasy has delighted 
audiences ranging from the most naïve to the most sophisticated. 
His works have remained popular since they were published and 
have influenced not only children's literature, but also a 
number of major 20th century writers such as James Joyce and 
Jorge Luis Borges.


Upbringing

Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, with some 
Irish connections. Conservative and High Church Anglican, most 
of Dodgson's ancestors belonged 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.

The elder of these—yet another Charles—reverted to the other 
family business and took holy orders. He went to Westminster 
School, and thence to Christ Church, Oxford. 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 cousin in 1827 and retired into obscurity as a 
country parson.

Young Charles was born in the little parsonage of Daresbury in 
Cheshire, the oldest boy but already the third child of the 
four-and-a-half year old marriage. Eight more were to follow 
and, incredibly for the time, all of them—seven girls and four 
boys— survived into adulthood. 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.

Dodgson senior made some progress through the ranks of the 
church: he published some sermons, translated Tertullian, 
became an Archdeacon of Ripon Cathedral, and involved himself, 
sometimes influentially, in the intense religious disputes that 
were dividing the Anglican church. He was High Church, 
inclining to Anglo-Catholicism, an admirer of Newman and the 
Tractarian movement, and he did his best to instill such views 
in his children.

Young Charles grew out of infancy into a bright, articulate boy. 
In the early years he was educated at home. His "reading lists" 
preserved in the family testify to a precocious intellect: at 
the age of seven the child was reading The Pilgrim's Progress. 
It is often said that he was naturally left-handed and suffered 
severe psychological trauma by being forced to counteract this 
tendency, but there is no documentary evidence to support this. 
At twelve he was sent away to a small private school at nearby 
Richmond, where he appears to have been happy and settled. But 
in 1845, young Dodgson moved on to Rugby School, where he was 
evidently less happy, for as he wrote some years after leaving 
the place:

    I cannot say ... that any earthly considerations would 
    induce me to go through my three years again ... I can 
    honestly say that if I could have been ... secure from 
    annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would 
    have been comparative trifles to bear.

The nature of this nocturnal 'annoyance' will probably never now 
be fully understood, but it may be that he is delicately referring 
to some form of sexual abuse. Scholastically, though, he excelled 
with apparent ease. "I have not had a more promising boy his age 
since I came to Rugby" observed R.B. Mayor, the Maths master.

Academics

He left Rugby at the end of 1850 and, after an interval which 
remains unexplained, went on in January 1851 to Oxford: to 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.

Whatever Dodgson's feelings may have been about this death, he did 
not allow them to distract him too much from his purpose at Oxford. 
He may not always have worked hard, but he was exceptionally 
gifted and achievement came easily to him. The following year 
he received a first in Honour Moderations, and shortly after 
he was nominated to a Studentship (the Christ Church equivalent 
of a fellowship), by his father's old friend Canon Edward Pusey.

His early academic career veered between high-octane promise and 
irresistible distraction. Through his own laziness, he failed an 
important scholarship, but still his clear brilliance as a 
mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship, 
which he continued to hold for the next 26 years. The income was 
good, but the work bored him. Many of his pupils were stupid as 
well as older and richer than he was, and almost all of them were 
disinterested. They didn't want to be taught, he didn't want to 
teach them. Mutual apathy ruled.

Photography

In 1856, Dodgson took up the new art form of photography. He 
excelled at it and it became an expression of his very personal 
inner philosophy; a belief in the divinity of what he called beauty, 
by which he seemed to mean a state of moral or aesthetic or 
physical perfection. He found this divine beauty not simply in 
the magic of theatre, but in the poetry of words, in a mathematical 
formula; and perhaps supremely, in the human form; in the 
body-images that moved him.

When he took up photography he sought with his own representations 
to combine the ideals of freedom and beauty into the innocence 
of Eden, where the human body and human contact could be enjoyed 
without shame. In his middle age, he was to re-form this 
philosophy into the pursuit of beauty as a state of Grace, a 
means of retrieving lost innocence. This, along with his 
lifelong passion for the theatre, was to bring him into 
confrontation with Victorian morality and his own family's High 
Church beliefs.

Character

The young adult Charles Dodgson was about six foot tall, slender 
and handsome in a soft-focused dreamy sort of way, with curling 
brown hair and blue eyes. At the unusually late age of seventeen 
he suffered a severe attack of whooping cough which left him with 
poor hearing in his right ear and was probably responsible for his 
chronically weak chest in later life, but the only overt defect he 
carried into adulthood was what he referred to as his "hesitation"
—a stammer he had acquired in early childhood and which was to 
plague him throughout his entire life.

The stammer has always been a potent part of the myth. It is part 
of the mythology that Carroll only stammered in adult company, and 
was free and fluent with children, but there is nothing to support 
this idea. Many children of his acquaintance remembered the 
stammer; many adults failed to notice it. It came and went for 
its own reasons, but not as a clichéd manifestation of fear of 
the adult world. Dodgson himself was far more acutely aware of it 
than most people he met. Although his stammer troubled him — even 
obsessed him sometimes — it was never bad enough to stop him using 
his other qualities to do well in society.

He was naturally gregarious and egoistic enough to relish attention 
and admiration. At a time when people devised their own amusements, 
when singing and recitation were required social skills, the young 
Dodgson was well-equipped as an engaging entertainer. He could 
sing tolerably well and was not afraid to do so in front of an 
audience. He was adept at mimicry and story-telling. He was 
reputedly quite good at charades.



There are brief hints at a soaring sense of the spiritual and the 
divine; small moments that reveal a rich and intensely-lived 
inner life. 'That is a wild and beautiful bit of poetry, the song 
of "call the cattle home",' he suddenly observed, in the midst of 
an analysis of Charles Kingsley's novel Alton Locke:

    I remember hearing it sung at Albrighton: I wonder if any one 
    there could have entered into the spirit of Alton Locke. I 
    think not. I think the character of most that I meet is merely 
    refined animal... How few seem to care for the only subjects 
    of real interest in life.

He was also quite socially ambitious, anxious to make his mark on 
the world in some way, as a writer, as an artist. His scholastic 
career was only a stop-gap to other more exciting attainments 
that he desired.

His favorite subjects for photography were portraits of famous 
persons, such as Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Alfred, 
Lord Tennyson, as well as little girls and older females, both 
with and without clothing. Dodgson either destroyed or returned 
the nude photographs to the families of the girls he'd 
photographed. They were long presumed lost, but four nudes have 
surfaced.

Dodgson's practice of photographing or sketching nude girls has 
added to speculation that he was a paedophile, see below.

Dodgson abruptly ceased to photograph in 1880.

Writing career

During his academic career, Carroll wrote poetry and short 
stories, sending them to various magazines and already 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.

Most of his output was funny, sometimes satirical. But his 
standards and his ambitions were exacting. "I do not think I 
have yet written anything worthy of real publication (in which 
I do not include the Whitby Gazette or the Oxonian Advertiser), 
but I do not despair of doing so some day," he wrote in July 
1855. Years before Alice, he was thinking up ideas for children's 
books that would make money: 'Christmas book [that would] sell 
well... Practical hints for constructing Marionettes and a 
theatre'. The ideas got better as he got older, but his canny 
mind, with an eye to income, was always there.

In 1856 he published his first piece of work under the name 
that would make him famous. A very predictable little romantic 
poem called "Solitude" appeared in the Train under the 
authorship of 'Lewis Carroll'. This pseudonym was a play on his 
real name, Lewis being the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which 
was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll being an anglicised 
version of Carolus, the Latin for Charles.

In the same year, a new Dean, Henry Liddell, arrived at Christ 
Church, bringing with him a young wife and children, all of 
whom would figure largely in Dodgson's life over the following 
years. He became close friends with the mother and the 
children, particularly the three sisters Ina, Alice and Edith. 
It seems there became something of a tradition of his taking 
the girls out on the river for picnics at Godstow or Nuneham.

It was on one such expedition, in 1862, that Dodgson invented 
the outline of the story that eventually became his first and 
largest commercial success — the first Alice book. Having told 
the story and been begged by Alice Liddell to write it down, 
Dodgson was evidently struck by its potential to sell well. He 
took the manuscript — at this stage titled Alice's Adventures 
Under Ground — to Macmillan the publisher, who liked it 
immediately. After the possible alternative titles Alice Among 
the Fairies and Alice's Golden Hour were rejected, the work was 
finally published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 
under the Lewis Carroll pen-name Dodgson had first used some 
nine years earlier.

With the immediate, phenomenal success of Alice, the story of 
the author's life becomes effectively divided in two: the 
continuing story of Dodgson's real life and the evolving myth 
surrounding "Lewis Carroll." Carroll quickly became a rich and 
detailed alter ego, a persona as famous and deeply embedded in 
the popular psyche as the story he told. To him belongs a large 
part of the image of little girls and strange otherworldliness 
that we know from the author of Alice.

It is undisputed that throughout his growing wealth and fame, 
he continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881, and that 
he remained in residence there until his death. He published 
Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There in 1872; 
his great Joycean mock-epic The Hunting of the Snark, in 1876 
(inspired by and dedicated to his other great child-friend 
after Alice Liddell, Gertrude Chataway), and his last novel, 
the two-volume Sylvie and Bruno, in 1889 and 1893 respectively.

He also published many mathematical papers and books under his 
own name.

Allegations of paedophilia

Dodgson’s undeniable fondness for little girls, especially his 
beloved Alice Liddell, his collection of the early child 
photographs of Oscar Rejlander, his love of the London theatres 
before the child-actress reforms, and psychological readings of 
his fiction — and especially his photographs of nude or 
semi-nude girls, and his sketchbooks featuring his own drawings 
of nude or seminude girls — have all led to speculation that he 
was a paedophile, albeit probably a celibate one.

The issue has been contentious, with some noting that there is 
no evidence that Dodgson abused girls, or arguing that child 
nudes were not uncommon during the era. (Other notable 
Victorian-era photographers who took images of nude children 
include Julia Margaret Cameron and Francis Meadow Sutcliffe, 
Oscar Rejlander, and others.)

The first hints of allegations that Dodgson was a paedophile 
seem to have appeared in 1932, in The Life of Lewis Carroll 
by Langford Reed. Reed apparently was the first to claim that 
all of Carroll's female friendships ended when the girls 
reached puberty, though Reed apparently only intended to suggest 
that Dodgson was therby a pure man untainted by touch of lust 
for adult flesh. This claim that Dodgson lost interest in girls 
once they reached puberty was later caught up by other 
biographers, who remained unaware of the evidence to the contrary 
since Dodgson's family refused to publish his diaries and 
letters.

The view of Dodgson as having no adult life and being preoccupied 
with children persisted among his biographers, including 
Florence Becker Lennon (Victoria Through the Looking-Glass - 
UK title Lewis Carroll), 1945) and the highly influential 
Alexander Taylor (The White Knight, 1952). The debate tended to 
veer between those who believed Dodgson to have been innocently 
obsessed with children and those who believed this obsession to 
have been paedophilic.

The issue was rekindled in 1995 with Lewis Carroll, a Biography 
by Morton Cohen, which deals with the issue much in the line of 
The White Knight by Alexander Taylor. Cohen writes: “We cannot 
know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Charles’s preference 
for drawing and photographing children in the nude. He contended 
the preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his emotional 
attachment to children as well as his aesthetic appreciation of 
their forms, his assertion that his interest was strictly artistic 
is naïve. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even 
to himself. Certainly he always sought to have another adult 
present when nude prepubescent modeled for him.” Cohen notes that 
the children’s mothers were encouraged to be present, and asks if 
these precautions were the result of Dodgson “insuring himself 
against slipups.” (p 228–229) Cohen concedes that Dodgson “apparently 
convinced many of his friends that his attachment to the nude 
female child form was free of any eroticism,” but adds that “later 
generations look beneath the surface” (p 229).

The theories of Karoline Leach:

A new analysis in Karoline Leach's 1999 book, In the Shadow of 
the Dreamchild, claims that the image of Dodgson's alleged 
paedophilia was built out of a failure to understand Victorian 
mores as well as the mistaken idea that Dodgson had no interest 
in adult women which evolved out of the minds of various 
biographers.

The scholarship on which Leach's claims are based has been 
contested. In a review of the title in Victorian Studies 
(Vol.43, No.4) reviewer Donald Rackin wrote... "As a piece of 
biographical scholarship, Karoline Leach's In the Shadow of 
the Dreamchild is difficult to take seriously".

According to Leach, Dodgson's real life was very different from 
the accepted biographical image. He in fact was keenly interested 
in adult women and enjoyed several relationships with women, 
married and single; although most of these were his child-friends 
with whom he retained good relations into adulthood. Suggestions 
of paedophilia only evolved many years after his death, when his 
well-meaning family had suppressed all evidence of his adult 
friendships in order to try to preserve his reputation, thus 
giving a false impression of a man only interested in little 
girls. Dodgson's problems with societal disapproval, Leach 
says, stemmed not from his usage of nude child models but his 
attempts to get slightly older models to pose in 'bathing 
dress' and other immodest clothing. These studies of 
scantily-dressed older models have all disappeared, leaving 
commentators only the photos of young girls to comment on.

The only recorded instance of trouble associated with the 
nudes of children was Dodgson's experience with the Mayhew 
family. In 1879, Dodgson wrote what have been called by Cohen 
"several curious letters ... to the family of Andrew Mayhew, 
an Oxford colleague ... He asked permission to take nude 
photographs of the three Mayhew daughters, ages 6, 11, and 
13, with no other adults present." The Mayhew parents, who 
had previously allowed Dodgson to photograph their children, 
refused, and Cohen notes this same period saw a "sudden 
break in the friendship" between Dodgson and the Mayhew 
family (p. 170). Leach suggests that the problem lay with 
his desire to study the older daughters in frontal positions 
and not with the younger children.

Leach's book also claims a homosexual affair between Liddell 
and his friend Arthur Stanley.


Jack the Ripper theories

Many wild theories have been woven around the life of Lewis 
Carroll. Perhaps the most extreme emerged in 1996 when 
author Richard Wallace published a book titled Jack the 
Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend accusing Lewis Carroll and 
his colleague Thomas Vere Bayne of being Jack the Ripper. 
It was largely based upon anagrams Wallace constructed from 
Carroll's writing. Carroll and Bayne have strong alibis for 
most of the nights of the Ripper murders, and Wallace's theory 
has not found support from other scholars. For more 
information, see the Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend 
article.

Carroll did show some interest in the Jack the Ripper case; 
however, this is hardly unusual, given the profound 
publicity surrounding the crimes. A passage in his diary 
dated August 26, 1891, reports that he spoke that day with 
an acquaintance of his about his "very ingenious theory 
about 'Jack the Ripper'". No other information about this 
theory has been found.