Lewis Carroll
Alice's Adventure in Wonderland
Bruno's Revenge and other Stories
Original Games and Puzzles
The Hunting of the Snark
Sylvie and Bruno
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
Through the Looking Glass
Introduction
(1832-98)

"'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'" (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)

"It's as large as life, and twice as natural" (Through the Looking Glass)

Born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Lewis Carroll grew up as the third of eleven children who were so artistically inclined as to produce magazines of word games and acrostics. He went to Rugby school and later became a lecturer in Mathematics at Oxford University between 1855 and 1881, having studied as an undergraduate at its prestigious Christ Church College. He wrote a number of books for children, most famously Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), written for Alice Liddell (the daughter of the head of Christ Church). Both this and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1872), are extremely popular to this day. They portray an extraordinary dream-inspired but internally logical world, devoid of the moral guidance inescapable in the other children's literature of the nineteenth century. Some see this as the reason for the books' initial success. However, their continued popularity might be ascribed to the distinctive illustrations of Punch man Sir John Tenniel; the appeal of Carroll's absurd yet memorably cast of anthropomorphised animals and his characters' extreme mixture of wit and weirdness. His nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876) is, in essence, more of the same but at sea and has since been turned into a moderately successful musical. The later children's work, Sylvie and Bruno (1889, vol. 2 1893) was expanded from "Bruno's Revenge", a short story published in Aunt Judy's Magazine in 1867. Besides mathematics and children's stories, Carroll was also a keen photography enthusiast. His particular penchant for photographing young girls is now viewed with some amount of probably quite unfounded suspicion. Also, he was an unbelievably fussy man who wrote no less than forty-eight letters of complaint to the steward at Christ Church while he taught there about everything from odours in rooms to the choice of meant for dinner. Nonetheless, his books are still popular amongst adults and children alike and have been translated into many languages - including Latin!

Links
The Lewis Carroll Birthplace Trust Contains a biography on his life and work and information about his birthplace.
lewiscarroll.org Archive of well-organized links to sites devoted to the wirter

  By PanEris using Melati.

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