Carroll’s love of purity and guilelessness and his early experience with his many siblings made him prefer the company of children to that of adults. Whatever other impulses may have led Dodgson to seek out the companionship of young girls, these relationships were by all accounts innocent and kindly. Indeed, Dodgson’s young friends were inspirational—the games and stories he invented to please them led to the creation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, among other works of fantasy and high nonsense.

Carroll never married, maintained close relationships with his siblings, and led a charitable, productive life unshaken by the political and social upheavals of the day. His more than 300 published works comprise poetry, mathematics, logic, and his beloved children’s stories. Lewis Carroll died in Guildford, England, on January 14, 1898.

The World of Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

1832The third of eleven children, Lewis Carroll is born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27 in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, the eldest son of the Reverend Charles Dodgson and Frances Jane Lutwidge Dodgson.
1843The family moves to Croft, Yorkshire, where Charles se nior takes the position of rector. While looking after his siblings, young Charles shows signs of his creative gifts. He paints, puts on puppet shows, and writes plays and sophisticated poems.
1844Charles enrolls in the Richmond School, Yorkshire, where he also boards. Previous instruction by his father makes him an excellent student of Latin and mathematics.
1846He enters the Rugby public (in American terms, “pri vate”) school; he has a difficult time acclimating socially but performs admirably in his courses.
1847Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Emily Bronte’s Wuther ing Heights are published.
1850Charles enrolls at Christ Church college of Oxford Uni versity.
1852He is made a life fellow of Christ Church.
1854He graduates with honors. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is published.
1855Charles becomes a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. He writes the first stanza of “Jabber wocky.”
1856He invents the nom de plume “Lewis Carroll,” versions of his first and middle names in reverse order. Through out his life, he will publish mathematical works as Charles Dodgson and literature as Lewis Carroll. (For the sake of simplicity, from here on we refer to him as Lewis Carroll.)
1856Carroll first meets the Liddell family when Alice Lid dell’s father takes a position at Oxford. He buys a camera and eventually becomes an excellent photographer.
1857He earns his MA degree.
1859Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is published. Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities is published.
1861Carroll is ordained as a deacon but never becomes a priest. Around this time, he begins to keep a log of his correspondence; by the end of his life, his meticulous accounting records nearly 100,000 letters.
1862Carroll and a friend take the Liddell sisters, including Alice, on a summertime river-boat ride. Carroll tells the girls the tale Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Alice asks him to write down the story for her.
1863By February he has written a first draft. In June he dis cusses publishing the book with the Clarendon Press.
1864Carroll has expanded the manuscript and engages Punch magazine cartoonist John Tenniel as illustrator.
1865Tenniel finishes the illustrations and the Clarendon Press prints 2,000 copies of the book as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Despite the book’s great success, Carroll prefers to stay out of the public eye.
1869Long fascinated by occultism, Carroll introduces ghosts into his work with the publication of Phantasmagoria and Other Poems.
1871As a sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll pub lishes Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is published.
1876Carroll’s long poem The Hunting of the Snark, An Agony in Eight Fits, a classic of nonsense literature, is published.
1879Euclid and His Modern Rivals is published; demonstrat ing the usefulness of Euclid’s Elements in the teaching of geometry, it is written as a play with the ghost of Euclid as one of the characters.
1881Carroll resigns his mathematical lectureship to focus on his writing.
1882He takes the demanding position of curator of the Senior Common Room at Christ Church, Oxford.
1883The poetry collection Rhyme? And Reason? is published.
1885Carroll publishes A Tangled Tale, ten stories for children featuring linguistic play and mathematical “knots” to undo.
1886The original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is published.
1888Curiosa Mathematica, Part I: A New Theory of Parallels is published.
1889Sylvie and Bruno, a story for children, is published.
1890The Nursery Alice, Carroll’s adaptation for younger chil dren, with twenty enlargements from Tenniel’s illustra tions, is published. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is published.
1892Carroll resigns as curator of the Senior Common Room.
1893Sylvie and Bruno Concluded and Curiosa Mathematica, Part II: Pillow Problems Thought Out during Sleepless Nights are published.
1896Symbolic Logic, which shows how to visually represent propositions in mathematical logic, is published.
1898Lewis Carroll dies of pneumonia at Guildford, England, on January 14.

Introduction

BOREDOM AND NONSENSE IN WONDERLAND

“What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning?” (p. 253)

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There pursue what lies beyond and down rabbit holes and on reverse sides of mirrors. But mainly their subject is what comes after, and in this sense the books are allegories about what a child can know and come to know. This quest, as in many great works of literature, unwinds against a larger backdrop: what can and what cannot be known at a particular historical moment, a moment that in Lewis Carroll’s case preceded both Freud’s speculations on the unconscious and Heisenberg’s formulation of the uncertainty principle. Yet because the books were written by a teacher of mathematics who was also a reverend, they are also concerned with what can and cannot be taught to a child who has an infinite faith in the goodness and good sense of the world. But Alice’s quest for knowledge, her desire to become something (a grown-up) she is not, is inverted. The books are not conventional quest romances in which Alice matures, overcomes obstacles, and eventually gains wisdom. For when Alice arrives in Wonderland, she is already the most reasonable creature there. She is wiser than any lesson books are able to teach her to be. More important, she is eminently more reasonable than her own feelings will allow her to express.