Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on January 27, 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, as the third of eleven children in a Church of England household. He had a knack for entertaining his siblings with homemade games, puzzles, and stories from an early age—a habit that would subtly influence everything he later published as Lewis Carroll.
He attended Christ Church, Oxford, where he eventually became a mathematics lecturer and spent most of his adult life. His academic work was serious and thorough: he published research on logic, Euclidean geometry, and voting theory. He was also ordained as a deacon in the Anglican Church, although he never pursued full priesthood and largely kept that aspect of his life distinct from his writing.
“The name Lewis Carroll originated from a playful Latin twist on his real name—Ludovicus for Lutwidge, Carolus for Charles—reversed and anglicized.”
He first used it in 1856 and intentionally kept the two identities separate. Dodgson the mathematician and Carroll the storyteller shared the same body but rarely overlapped.
The Alice stories began with a boat trip on July 4, 1862, when Dodgson spun an improvised tale to entertain the three daughters of his colleague Henry Liddell. The middle daughter, Alice Liddell, urged him to write it down. He did, and after considerable expansion and the addition of John Tenniel's now-iconic illustrations, it became *Alice's Adventures in Wonderland* in 1865. Its sequel, *Through the Looking-Glass*, followed in 1871 and featured some of his most famous verses, including *Jabberwocky*.
