Lewis Carrollis the pseudonym of the English writer and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, b. Jan. 27, 1832, d. Jan. 14, 1898, known especially for ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND (1865) and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (1872), children's books that are also distinguished as satire and as examples of verbal wit. Carroll invented his pen name by translating his first two names into the Latin "Carolus Lodovicus" and then anglicizing it into "Lewis Carroll."
The son of a clergyman and the firstborn of 11 children, Carroll began at an early age to entertain himself and his family with magic tricks, marionette shows, and poems written for homemade newspapers. From 1846 to 1850 he attended Rugby School; he graduated from Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1854. Carroll remained there, lecturing on mathematics and writing treatises and guides for students. Although he took deacon's orders in 1861, Carroll was never ordained a priest, partly because he was afflicted with a stammer that made preaching difficult and partly, perhaps, because he had discovered other interests.
Among Carroll's avocations was photography, at which he became proficient. He excelled especially at photographing children. Alice Liddell, one of the three daughters of Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ Church, was one of his photographic subjects and the model for the fictional Alice.
Carroll's comic and children's works also include The Hunting of the Snark (1876), two collections of humorous verse, and the two parts of Sylvie and Bruno (1889, 1893), unsuccessful attempts to re-create the Alice fantasies.
As a mathematician, Carroll was conservative and derivative. As a logician, he was more interested in logic as a game than as an instrument for testing reason. In his diversions as a photographer and author of comic fantasy, he is most memorable and original--the man who, for example, contributed, in "Jabberwocky," the word chortle, a portmanteau word that combines "snort" and "chuckle," to the English language. DONALD J. GRAY
- 1845 - Useful and Instructive Poetry published in 1954
- 1848 - The Rectory Magazine published 1975
- 1850-1853 - The Rectory Umbrella published with Mischmasch in 1932
- 1855-1862 - Mischmasch
- 1856-1857 - The Train
- 1858 - The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically
- 1860 - A Syllabus of Plane Algebraic Geometry, Systematically Aranged with Formal Definitions, Postulates, and Axioms
- 1860 - Notes on the First Two Books of Euclid, Designed for Candidates for Responsions
- 1864 - Alice's Adventures Under Ground Published in 1886
- 1865 - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
- 1866 - Condensation of Determinants, Being a New and Brief Method for Computing their Arithmetic Values
- 1867 - Russian Journal published privately in 1928 and commercially in 1935
- 1867 - An Elementary Treatise on Determinants with their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Geometry
- 1867 - Bruno's Revenge published in 1924
- 1868 - The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically, so far as it Relates to Commensurable Magnitudes
- 1869 - Phantasmagoria and Other Poems
- 1872 - Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
- 1873 - The Enunciations of Euclid I-VI, Together with Questions on the Definitions, Postulates, Axioms, &c.
- 1873 - The Vision of the Three T's
- 1876 - The Hunting of the Snark
- 1879 - Euclid and His Modern Rivals
- 1882 - Euclid, Books I, II
- 1883 - Rhyme? and Reason?
- 1885 - Supplement to Euclid and His Modern Rivals
- 1885 - A Tangled Tale
- 1886 - The Game of Logic privately published. Commercially published in 1887
- 1886 - Alice's Adventures Under Ground
- 1889 - The Nursery Alice
- 1889 - Sylvie and Bruno
- 1893 - Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
- 1896 - Symbolic Logic, Part I
- 1898 - Three Sunsets and Other Poems
Posthumously Published Works
- 1907 - Feeding the Mind
- 1932 - For the Train
- 1932 - The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch
- 1935 - The Russian Journal and Other Selections from the Works
- 1954 - Useful and Instructive Poetry
- 1975 - The Rectory Magazine
- 1977 - The Wasp in a Wig
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