Lewis Carroll Biography and List of Works

English logician, mathematician and novelist, 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 settings of his fantasy world to question the norms of the Victorian age in a way that many critics considered his work subversive. Unlike other children's books of the time, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland did not try to teach a moral message. Carroll also wrote poetry which have remained open to all explanations of meaning.

"I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir," said Alice, "because I'm not myself, you see."
"I don't see," said the Caterpillar.
"I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly," Alice replied very politely, "for I can't understand it myself top begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing."
"It isn't," said the Caterpillar.
(from Alice in Wonderland)

Carroll was born at Daresbury in Cheshire into a wealthy family. He attended a Yorkshire grammar school and Rugby. At Christ Church, Oxford, he studied mathematics and worked from 1855 to 1881 as a lecturer (tutor). Carroll's career in education was troubled by a bad stammer. He lectured and taught with difficulty and he also preached only occasionally after his ordination in 1861.

In spite of his stammer, Carroll was able to speak easily to children, whom he loved to photograph, especially small girls. During one picnic he 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. Carroll wrote down the story and the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was born. - (SEE ALSO: Other adventures inside the Earth - Giacomo Casanova's Icosameron, 1788; Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth.)

The friendship with the Liddell family ended abruptly, and Carroll turned his attention to other young girls. He spent his holidays in Eastbourne, and recorded in his diary discussions with his new friends.

The sequel Through the Looking Glass, appeared in 1871, and is perhaps more often quoted than the first, featuring the poems Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter. Artist John Tenniel refused to illustrate one chapter in Through the Looking Glass because he thought that it was ridiculous. The chapter was published later in 1872 as The Wasp in a Wig. Carroll himself always wished to be an artist and as a boy he illustrated all the manuscript magazines which he made for his younger brothers and sisters. Carroll's original drawings for Alice's Adventures Underground were published in 1961.

Carroll also wrote humorous verse, such as The Hunting of the Snark and mathematical works. The author's life and work has become a constant area for psychological speculation. According to Carl Jung, "a typical infantile motif is the dream of growing infinitely small or infinitely big, or being transformed from one to the other - as you find, for instance, in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland." (in Man and His Symbols, 1964) Physicists have drawn parallels between features of quantum reality and the world of Carroll. Many non-physicist have echoed Alice's 'I can't believe that!' when confronted with phenomena like cats that are both alive and dead at the same time ('Schrödinger's cat') or with particles that change their identities for no apparent reason.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax -
Of cabbages - and kings -
And why the sea is boiling hot -
And whether pigs have wings."
(from 'The Walrus and the Carpenter')

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. As Virginia Woolf remarked, "the two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children". In the 1960s hippies were attracted to their surrealistic world, and Carroll's characters gave inspiration to such songs as Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit' and The Beatles's 'I am a Walrus'. Fredric Brown used Carroll's characters and lyrics in his novel Night of the Jabberwock (1950). In the 1990s Jeff Noon continued Alice's adventures in Automated Alice, in which she is transported to the modern world.

"'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here'."

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) - originally published as Alice's Adventures Under Ground. The story centres on the seven-year-old Alice, who falls asleep in a meadow, and dreams that she plunges down a rabbit hole. She finds herself first too large and then too small. She meets such strange characters as Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the King and Queen of Hearts, and experiences wondrous, often bizarre adventures, trying to reason in numerous discussions that do not follow the daylight logic. Finally she loses her temper, bringing down this dream world and wakes up.

For further information: Lewis Carroll Home page, The Lewis Carroll Society - For further reading: Lewis Carroll by Walter de la Mare (1930); The Story of Lewis Carroll by Roger Lancelyn Green (1949); Lewis Carroll by Derek Hudson (1954, rev. 1976); The Annotated Alice (1960); The Annotated Snark (1962); Aspects of Alice, ed. by Robert Phillips (1971); The Philosopher's Alice by Peter Heath (1974); Lewis Carroll and His World by John Pudney (1976); Beyond the Looking Class by Colin Gordon (1982); Play, Games and Sport by Kathleen Blake (1984); The Alice Concordance by Daryl Colquhoun (1986); Lewis Carroll by Richard Michael Kelly (1990); The Red King's Dream by Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone (1995); Automated Alice by Jeff Noon (1996) -

Other writers connected with Oxford in the nineteenth and early twentieth century: Mathew Arnold, Max Beerbohm, Hilaire Belloc, Vera Brittain, Rhoda Broughton, John Buchan,Richard Burton, James Elroy Fleeker, J.A. Froude, John Galsworthy, Robert Graves, Winifred Holtby, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hughes, Henry James, Francis Kilvert, Andrew Lang, T.E. Lawrence, C.S. Lewis, Rose Macaulay, Compton Mackenzie, William Morris, J.H. Newman, Walter Pater, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Reade, John Ruskin, Dorothy Sayers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Algernon Swinburne, J.R.R. Tolkien, Oscar Wilde.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, (1865)