Renowned Victorian author Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27, 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, England. The son of a clergyman, Carroll was the third child born to a family of eleven children. From a very early age he entertained himself and his family by performing magic tricks and marionette shows, and by writing poetry for his homemade newspapers. In 1846 he entered Rugby School, and in 1854 he graduated from Christ Church College, Oxford. He was successful in his study of mathematics and writing, and remained at the college after graduation to teach. His mathematical writings include An Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867), Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879), and Curiosa Mathematica (1888). While teaching, Carroll was ordained as a deacon; however, he never preached. He also began to pursue photography, often choosing children as the subject of his portraits. One of his favorite models was a young girl named Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean at Christ's Church, who later became the basis for Carroll's fictional character, Alice. He abandoned both photography and public speaking between 1880 and 1881, and focused on his writing.

Many of Lewis Carroll's philosophies were based on games. His interest in logic came purely from the playful nature of its principle rather than its uses as a tool. He primarily wrote comic fantasies and humorous verse that was often very childlike. Carroll published his novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, followed by Through the Looking Glass in 1872. Alice's story began as a piece of extemporaneous whimsy meant to entertain three little girls on a boating trip in 1862. Both of these works were considered children's novels that were satirical in nature and in exemplification of Carroll's wit. Also famous is Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky," in which he created nonsensical words from word combinations. Lewis Carroll died in Guildford, Surrey, on January 14, 1898.
 

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                                     A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

    Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869)
    The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits (1876)
    Further Nonsense Verse and Prose (1926) Edited by Langford Reed.
    The Collected Verse of Lewis Carroll (1932)
    The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (1939)
    Useful and Instructive Poetry (1954)
    The Humorous Verse of Lewis Carroll (1960)
    The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll (1982) Edited by Edward Guiliano.
 

Prose

    A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry (1860) Part I
    The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry (1861)
    A Guide to the Mathematical Student (1864) Part I
    Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
    The New Method of Evaluation (1865)
    The Dynamics of a Particle (1865)
    An Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867)
    The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically (1868)
    Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1872)
    The New Belfry of Christ Church, Oxford (1872)
    The Vision of the Three T's (1873)
    The Blank Cheque: A Fable (1874)
    Suggestions as to the Best Method of Taking Votes (1874)
    A Method of Taking Votes on More than Two Issues (1876)
    Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879)
    Doublets: A Word-Puzzle (1879)
    Rhyme? And Reason? (1883)
    Supplement to "Euclid and His Modern Rivals" (1885)
    A Tangled Tale (1885)
    Alice's Adventures Under Ground (1886)
    Three Years in a Curatorship, by One Who Has Tried (1886)
    The Game of Logic (1886)
    Curiosa Mathematica, Part I: A New Theory of Parallels (1888)
    The Nursery Alice (1889)
    Sylvie and Bruno (1889)
    Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-Writing (1890)
    Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893)
    Curiosa Mathematica, Part II: Pillow-Problems (1893)
    Syzygies and Lanrick: A Word-Puzzle and a Game (1893)
    Symbolic Logic, Part I: Elementary (1896)
    The Lewis Carroll Picture-Book (1899)
    Feeding the Mind (1907)
    For the Train (1932) Edited by Hugh J. Schonfield.
    The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch (1932)
    A Selection from the Letters of Lewis Carroll to His Child-friends (1933) Under the name Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Edited by Evelyn M. Hatch.
    Lewis Carroll, Photographer (1949) Edited by Helmut Gernsheim.
    Diaries of Lewis Carroll (1953) Edited by Roger Lancelyn Green, two volumes.
    Mathematical Recreations of Carroll (1958) Two volumes.
    The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (1960) Edited by Martin Gardner.
    Diversions and Digressions (1961)
    Symbolic Logic, Parts I and II (1977) Edited by William Warren Bartley.
    The Letters of Lewis Carroll, ed. Morton Cohen with the assistance of Roger Lancelyn Green (1979) Two volumes.
 
 

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