Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)
Lewis Carroll’s real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
He was born in Daresbury in Cheshire, England on 27th January 1832.
He had three younger brothers and seven sisters.
When he was eleven, the family moved to a small village in Yorkshire. Charles enjoyed doing magic tricks, writing poems and stories to entertain his brothers and sisters.
Charles Dodgson went to famous Rugby School from 1846 to 1850.
After that, he went to Oxford University’s Church college to study Classics and Mathematics.
In 1855 he became a teacher of Maths at Christ Church, where he spent most of the rest of his life. He never married.
Charles was a very good photographer, and he loved to photograph children. One girl he often photographed was Alice Liddell.
He spent a lot of time with Alice and two of her sisters, Lorina and Edith, playing with them and telling them interesting stories.
One sunny afternoon in 1862, Charles took the girls on the river Thames. The children asked Dodgson to tell them a fairy tale. So he told them an amazing story about a little girl called Alice and her adventures in a magical underground world.
Carroll’s most famous book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through The Looking Glass (1871), began as stories he told the Liddell girls.
The Alice books were very popular.
Charles Dodgson wrote several other stories and various funny “nonsense” poems. “The jabberwock”
However, people remember Charles best for the strange and amazing stories about a little girl called Alice.
Translated into lots of languages, the book is one of the most popular and most famous in the world.