Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, or "Lewis Carroll," as he was to become known, was born on January 27 1832, in the little parsonage of Daresbury in Cheshire, the oldest boy but already the third child of the four-and-a-half year marriage of Charles Dodgson, clergyman, and his cousin Frances Jane Lutwidge.
The Dodgson family was predominantly northern English, with Irish connections, Conservative, Anglican, High Church, upper middle class, and inclining towards the two good old upper middle class professions of the army and the Church. Eight more children followed young Charles into the world and, incredibly for the time, all of the brood--- seven girls and four boys, Frances Jane (known as Fanny), Elizabeth, Charles, Caroline, Mary, Skeffington, Wilfred, Louisa, Margaret, Henrietta and Edwin -- survived into adulthood.
Dodgson's own drawing of 'the children of the north'; representing, in joke form, his own extensive family and their home,Croft Rectory
In truth, the known facts of Charles Dodgson's life before 1855 when the first surviving diary-volume begins are so sketchy they could be recorded on half a sheet of A4 paper. He kept family magazines, amused his sisters and brothers with games and stories. 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, though there's not much record of young Charles' family life. Dodgson senior made some progress through the ranks of the church: he published some sermons, translated the writings of the Roman early Christian writer Tertullian, became an Archdeacon of Ripon cathedral, and involved himself, sometimes influentially and with great partisan vigour, in the intense religious disputes that were dividing the Anglican church. He was High Church, a friend of Edward Pusey, an admirer of Newman and the Tractarian movement , and he seems to have done his best to instil such views in his children.
Young Charles grew out of infancy into a bright, articulate boy. 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. Indeed, although evidence is sparse, his early childhood does appear to have been a happy one.
sillhouette of Charles Dodgson, aged about eight
Unti the age of 12 he was educated at home by his gentle and adoring mother. The reading lists she carefully prepared for him testify not only to her devotion and dedication to the son she called 'dearest Charlie', but also, and less happily, to the rather stultifying 'properness' of Dodgson family life: almost all the books on his mother's list are religious texts of the preachy kind that Lewis Carroll would one day satirise in the pages of his first 'Alice' book. Yet his precocity shows even here: at the age of seven the child was reading The Pilgrim's Progress.
At twelve young Charles was sent away to a small private school at nearby Richmond, where he appears to have been happy and settled. But in 1845, he moved on to Rugby,the great English public school made famous and infamous by the novel Tom Brown's Schooldays. Perhaps inevitably he was less happy in this harsh and uncompromising environment, 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.
He left Rugby at the end of 1849 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 sweet and beloved 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 recorded nothing of them for posterity, and indeed there is no record of his ever mentioning his mother either in the private diary he began keeping two years after her death, or in any surviving letters. The reasons for this curious silence can only be guessed at, yet there are indications that the image of the loving mother was an exceedingly meaningful one to Dodgson, possibly too meaningful and too painful to be directly alluded to even in his most private writing. After Frances Jane's death, her sister Lucy moved in with the family to take care of the children. She remained a much-loved member of the household until her death in 1880, and Dodgson's diaries and letters are full of quietly affectionate references to 'Aunt L'.
At Oxford Charles Dodgson the undergraduate may not always have worked hard, but he was exceptionally gifted and achievement came easily to him. In December 1852 he achieved 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. He was to remain a Student at Christ Church for the rest of his life.
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. 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 almost certainly not as a simplistic manifestation of fear of the adult world. Dodgson himself seems to have been far more acutely aware of it than most people he met. But, 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.
In direct contradiction of the myth, he was not a desperately shy man. In fact he was naturally quite gregarious, egoistic enough to relish a certain amount of attention and admiration. At a time when people devised their own amusements, when singing and recitation were required social skills, this youth 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 something of a star at charades. He could be charming, pushy, manipulative, with the kind of ready sensitivity that girls and women of a certain kind are apt to find irresistible. His diaries give little away about his spiritual and emotional life, but 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 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.
This moment of unusual frankness, allowing the sense of himself as a deeply feeling, somewhat unusual human being out of step with the 'refined animal' of polite society, gives us a rare glimpse of young Dodgson's inner mind. Alas he says nothing more of what he considered the 'only subjects of real interest' to be.
Perhaps unsurprisingly in such an emotional young man, with so many competing interests in his life, 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. It was a job he probably did for the money and the consequent 'independence' it gave him, having little enjoyment in his work. His real ambitions lay outside academia. He wanted to be a writer. From earliest adolescence, if not before, he was writing; poetry, short stories, for his family magazines, and by the mid 1850s he was sending his work to various magazines, already enjoying moderate success. Between '54 and '56, 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 comic, sometimes sharply 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'. His ideas got better as he got older, but the canny mind, with an eye to income, was always there. < In addition, he never had any shortage of other interests to distract him. He loved the theatre and the arts in general and the happiest times of his young life were spent away from Oxford enjoying the artistic pleasures of London. Then, in 1856 he 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. This, along with his lifelong passion for the theatre was to bring him into confrontation with the Moral Majority of his day and his own family's High Church beliefs.
According to his biographer and nephew Stuart Collingwood, young Charles began to keep a diary almost as soon as he could write, and he apparently kept it regularly, as Collingwood says there was only one notable gap - for the three years that Dodgson as at Rugby School. Strangely, all record of these very early diaries seems to have vanished. However in about 1853 Dodgson began a new series of numbered diary volumes which he continued to keep until his death, and most of these do survive, although even here the record is not complete.
Some time after his death, some members of his family deliberately cut out and destroyed certain pages, while four of the 13 volumes, including two consecutive ones covering the years 1858-62 went missing and have never been recovered.
The fate of these volumes and the reasons why his descendants took scissors and razor to his life's record is just one of the many mysteries and anomalies that surround the man who was 'Lewis Carroll'. Most of this missing material dates from a single decade (between 1853 and 1863), and is so extensive that it amounts to five and a half years of missing time. Over half the record for a single ten-year period of Dodgson's life is thus missing and we currently have no firm idea of why. The loss of this material means that there is very little information about what he was doing or thinking during this very important and formative time. The story is fragmentary and there is more unknown than there is known.
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'.
In the same year, Christ Church acquired a new Dean (head of college), when Thomas Gaisford died and was replaced by one Henry George Liddell, who brought with him a young wife and children, all of whom would figure largely in Dodgson's life over the following years. Dodgson quite quickly became close friends with the mother and the children. They were a beautiful family. The mother, Lorina, was a "beauty of the Spanish type", and her children had inherited her dark comeliness which was exactly the kind Dodgson liked to photograph. He made many studies of the family, especially his three favourites the sisters Ina, Alice and Edith. Although the diaries covering the period of the developing friendship are now missing, it appears that his friendship with the family blossomed, and there became something of a tradition of his taking the children 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. After consulting various friends, including the author George MacDonald, he took the MS to Macmillan the publisher who liked it immediately. Bravely, or crazily, Dodgson undertook to pay for the cost of publication himself in return for 90% of the royalties. Even though his income was well above the national average at L500 per annum, this was still a considerable risk. In the end, though, the gamble was to pay off, and by the end of his life the two 'Alice' books had grossed him approximately L50,000.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, under the pen-name Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier -- Lewis Carroll.
With the launch and immediately 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 his invented name "Lewis Carroll."
The bare facts of Carroll/Dodgson's last thirty years are clear enough.
Though apparently attracted and attractive to women (see below) he never married, and his emotional/sexual life is the aspect of his biography most enshrouded in controversy, misunderstanding, myth and mystery. Several 20th century biographers developed the idea that he wanted to marry Alice Liddell and a great deal has been made of this by writers of fiction and non-fiction alike, indeed it is a central image of Carroll's mythology. However there has never been any real evidence to support the idea and the 'new wave' of Carrollian analysis has called it into serious doubt, particularly since the discovery in 1996 of the 'cut pages in diary' document in the Dodgson family archive has re-shaped the debate in a major and surprising way.
His evident love for children, his enjoyment of their company as well as his usage of them as subjects for his photography is perhaps the most famous aspect of his biography. Unfortunately it is also the aspect most misunderstood and subsumed by myth. For years biographers believed he had no interest in adult society and that he 'rejected' his child friends after they reached puberty, and this led to many ideas that Dodgson was to some extent paedophilic. However recent analysis has claimed to show the idea of his exclusive attachment to small girls is at best a simplification and at worst a falsification. It is certainly true that, far from 'rejecting' his female friends once they reached puberty, Dodgson had a lifelong fascination with adult womanhood and enjoyed numerous friendships with women, some of which provoked a certain amount of gossip during his lifetime.
For a few brief years in the 1860s he was tormented by an extreme psychological pain and guilt that remains little understood; a portion of the diary-record for this time is now missing, compounding the mystery. During this turbulent period he rejected the priesthood that had been his planned career since childhood. This step should have cost him his Studentship and his job as Mathematical Lecturer, but Dean Liddell, somewhat inexplicably, decided to effectively break college rules in order to allow Dodgson to remain at Christ Church without taking holy orders. Nothing about this curious episode has yet been satisfactorily explained.
Dodgson remained at Christ Church throughout his ever increasing wealth and fame, for the next thirty-six years.
His father's death in 1868 plunged him into a depression that 'clouded' his life for some time, little is known about why, though many theories abound.
He published Through the Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There in 1872, his great mock-epic The 
Hunting of the Snark, in 1876, and his last novel the two volume Sylvie and Bruno in 1889 and 1893 respectively. He also published many mathematical papers under his own name, toured Russia and Europe on an extended visit (in 1867).
In 1881 he gave up the Mathematical Lectureship he had probably never much liked, and began a life of increasing leisure and some eccentricity. He became a member of the Society for Psychical Research at its inception in 1882, and an active campaigner against vivisection during the 1870s.
In later life he became increasingly open about his 'unconventional' friendships with numerous girls and women, too old to be regarded as 'children' by the standards of his time. He would frequently entertain these women 'tete a tete' in his apartments at Christ Church, or holiday alone with them at Eastbourne. The absence of chaperonage on these occasions and other 'liberties' he took with the conventions of his time led to repeated rumour and gossip, which irritated him profoundly. His decision to give up photography in 1880 may have been connected with such rumours circulating at the time concerning his interest in photographing young women ( in their late teens and twenties) in what he described as 'bathing dress', though there is no direct evidence to link this to his decision.
From 1869 he owned a house in Guildford, where he housed two maids, his six unmarried sisters and a seemingly ever-changing variety of nieces and nephews and other extended family. It was in a back bedroom of this teeming family home that he died, suddenly of violent pneumonia, on January 14 1898, leaving enigma and an already burgeoning mythology behind him.
Beyond these bare facts, there is a mass of uncertainty and even mystery. For many years the imagery associated with the name 'Lewis Carroll' was easy enough to identify with words like 'paedophile', 'perpetual child', 'scholar-saint', 'innocent dreamer of children'. He was viewed as a strange deviant resident in an ivory tower or dreaming spire; a shy stammering childlike man in a boat, surrounded by little girls, avoidant of adult society. Recent research has shown that most of this imagery is untrue or simplistic. But what, then is the deeper reality of Lewis Carroll? And how did such mythic and false images proliferate? These are currently the most fascinating and crucial questions for anyone interested in Carroll and his 'Alice'. A large section of this website is devoted both to opening up these questions and to looking for some answers.
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