Darlington Rd, Richmond, North Yorkshire DL10 7BQ, United Kingdom
Dodgson attended Richmond Grammar School (now part of Richmond School) in Yorkshire in 1844-45.
Gallery of Lewis Carroll
1849
Lawrence Sheriff St, Rugby CV22 5EH, United Kingdom
In 1846, at the age of fourteen, Dodgson was sent to Rugby School, he left the school in December 1849.
College/University
Gallery of Lewis Carroll
1851
St Aldate's, Oxford OX1 1DP, United Kingdom
At age 20, Charles was awarded a studentship (called a scholarship in other colleges) to Christ College (now Christ Church) in Oxford in 1850. He went into the residence as an undergraduate there on the 24th of January, 1851.
Career
Gallery of Lewis Carroll
1857
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
Gallery of Lewis Carroll
1860
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
Gallery of Lewis Carroll
1862
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898) with Mrs George Macdonald and four children relaxing in a garden.
At age 20, Charles was awarded a studentship (called a scholarship in other colleges) to Christ College (now Christ Church) in Oxford in 1850. He went into the residence as an undergraduate there on the 24th of January, 1851.
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
(Brooks and hedges divide the lush greenery of looking-gla...)
Brooks and hedges divide the lush greenery of looking-glass land into a chessboard, where Alice becomes a pawn in a bizarre game of chess involving Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Lion and the Unicorn, the White Knight, and other nursery-rhyme figures.
(The problem of evaluating π, which has engaged the attent...)
The problem of evaluating π, which has engaged the attention of mathematicians from the earliest ages, had, down to our own time, been considered as purely arithmetical.
(Lewis Carroll's magnificent nonsense poem, The Hunting of...)
Lewis Carroll's magnificent nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark, features an unlikely cast of characters drawn from the Jabberwocky in Through the Looking Glass.
(The object of this little book is to furnish evidence, fi...)
The object of this little book is to furnish evidence, first, that it is essential, for the purpose of teaching or examining in Elementary Geometry, to employ one textbook only secondly, that there are strong a priori reasons for retaining, in all its main features, and especially in its sequence and numbering of propositions and in its treatment of parallels, the Manual of Euclid and thirdly, that no sufficient reasons have yet been shown for abandoning it in favor of any one of the modern Manuals which have been offered as substitutes.
(Lewis Carroll's short dialogue What the Tortoise Said to ...)
Lewis Carroll's short dialogue What the Tortoise Said to Achilles playfully questions the principles of logic. Problems arise and branch out from Zeno's paradox, beginning with Achilles attempting to pass the tortoise in the race, but ultimately failing through the tortoise's clever arguments.
A Guide to the Mathematical Student in Reading, Reviewing, and Working Examples
(Books about Mathematics consider problems that encompass ...)
Books about Mathematics consider problems that encompass quantity, space, and rates of change, test theories by with mathematical methods, derive statistical models that estimate actual activity to improve our understanding of real phenomena.
(Mischmasch was a periodical that Lewis Carroll wrote and ...)
Mischmasch was a periodical that Lewis Carroll wrote and illustrated for the amusement of his family from 1855 to 1862. It is notable for containing the earliest version of the poem Jabberwocky, which Carroll would later expand and publish in Through the Looking-Glass.
Lewis Carroll, pseudonym of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a British logician, mathematician, photographer, and novelist. He was a teacher of mathematics at Oxford and a deacon of the Anglican Church. He was especially remembered for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. His poem The Hunting of the Snark is nonsense literature of the highest order.
Background
Lewis Carroll was born as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on the 27th of January 1832 in the small parish of Daresbury, United Kingdom. The eldest boy of Frances Jane Lutwidge and Charles Dodgson in a family of eleven children, he was rather adept at entertaining himself and his siblings. His father was perpetual curate from 1827 to 1843 when he became rector of Croft in Yorkshire, a post he held for the rest of his life, though later he became also archdeacon of Richmond and a canon of Ripon cathedral. His father was a highly-respected conservative Anglican church figure of his time, and he raised his son to hold the same traditional values. Most of Dodgson's male ancestors were army officers or Church of England clergy.
Education
Dodgson attended Richmond Grammar School (now part of Richmond School) in Yorkshire in 1844-45. As a boy, Carroll excelled in mathematics and won many academic prizes. In 1846, at the age of fourteen, Dodgson was sent to Rugby School. When he left the school in December 1849, it could well be said that he had satisfied the academic hopes his family had for him. After Rugby, he spent a further year being tutored by his father. At age 20, he was awarded a studentship (called a scholarship in other colleges) to Christ College in Oxford in 1850. He went into the residence as an undergraduate there on the 24th of January, 1851.
Dodgson excelled in his mathematical and classical studies in 1852, on the strength of his performance in examinations. In 1854 he gained a first in mathematical Finals, coming out at the head of the class and proceeded to a Bachelor of Arts degree in December of the same year. In 1856 he received a Master of Arts degree.
Dodgson began writing at an early age. While at the Richmond School in 1845, Dodgson composed Useful and Instructive Poetry, his first family magazine, this book was finally published over 100 years later, in 1954.
Charles Dodgson was appointed as a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University in 1855. In 1857 he was appointed as a tutor, with an income of £300 per year. His new duties notwithstanding, Dodgson was able to pursue his literary interests. His job was to prepare Christ Churchmen (for it was all men) to pass examinations in mathematics. Dodgson worked primarily in the fields of geometry, matrix algebra, and mathematical logic. He retired from Oxford University in 1881.
Charles also produced many pamphlets and ten books on mathematical topics, including The Fifth Book of Euclid in 1858, A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry in 1860, The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry in 1861, The Enunciations of Euclid, Books I and II in 1863, and A Guide to the Mathematical Student in 1864. In some of these, he exhibited unusual methods, for rapid arithmetic, for example. Others featured innovative ideas that foreshadowed developments in the twentieth century, for instance in voting theory.
Apart from serving as a lecturer in mathematics, he was an avid photographer and wrote essays, political pamphlets, and poetry. Dodgson created a number of fine photographs. Beginning in his mid-20s and continuing for over two decades, Dodgson created over 3000 photographic images, including portraits of friends and notable figures like Alfred, Lord Tennyson, landscapes, and stills of skeletons, dolls, statues, paintings, and more. According to Lewis Carroll: A Biography, Morton N. Cohen’s biography of the artist, Dodgson had his own studio and briefly considered making a living as a photographer in the 1850s.
From 1849 to 1853 Dodgson produced The Rectory Umbrella, eight manuscript magazines, of which four are extant. Fancy was a strong element of the pieces appearing in The Rectory Umbrella. The brief essay titled Pixies, under the general heading Zoological Papers was written as though such beings actually existed and foreshadows the preface of Sylvie and Bruno Concluded that was written in 1893, in which Dodgson speaks convincingly of the existence of fairies.
Dodgson loved to entertain children, and it was Alice, the daughter of Henry George Liddell, who can be credited with his pinnacle inspiration. During an afternoon picnic with Alice and her two sisters, Dodgson told the first iteration of what would later become Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. When Alice arrived home, she exclaimed that he must write the story down for her. He fulfilled the small girl's request, and through a series of coincidences, the story fell into the hands of the novelist Henry Kingsley, who urged Dodgson to publish it. The book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was released in 1865. It gained steady popularity, and as a result, Dodgson wrote the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There in 1871.
In 1889, Charles Dodgson engineered The Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case to stimulate letter writing. He also developed several games, including an early variant of Scrabble. Dodgson developed the earliest modern use of today's logic trees, a graphical technique for determining the validity of complex arguments that he called the method of trees. This was a step towards automated approaches to solving multiple connected problems of logic.
As was the case with many of his literary contemporaries, Dodgson also contributed widely to newspapers and magazines. Beginning in 1854 with two anonymous contributions to the Oxonian Advertiser, he published a wide variety of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in newspapers and magazines. In 1856 and 1857 he composed a set of literary pieces specifically for the journal The Train. These included Solitude, Novelty and Romancement, The Three Voices, The Sailor’s Wife, Hiawatha’s Photographing, Upon the Lonely Moor, and Ye Carpette Knyghte. Dodgson's humorous and other verses were collected in 1869 as Phantasmagoria and Other Poems and later separated as Rhyme? and Reason? in 1883 and Three Sunsets and Other Poems, that was published posthumously in 1898.
Charles Dodgson was a deeply spiritual man, and this informed all aspects of his life. He worked on many projects, including an essay in which he was applying his skills in logic to proving that a benevolent God would not allow eternal damnation to exist, which makes a remarkable statement about his openness to exploring the world around him and considering beliefs other than those he learned growing up.
But while Charles Dodgson expressed flexibility in some areas, he was resolute in his basic beliefs of decency and reverence. He took great exception if anyone used the name of God in vain or in humor, and would never attend any theatrical enterprise that bore the slightest whiff of disrespect or indecency. It was not unusual for him to read bible lessons to his child friends as part of the informal betterment he offered them.
On the 22nd of December 1861, Dodgson was ordained as a member of the clergy. However, he would not proceed to the priesthood since he deemed himself unsuited.
Politics
Charles Dodgson was politically conservative.
Views
Quotations:
"I believe that when you and I come to lie down for the last time if only we can keep firm hold of the great truths Christ taught us, our own utter worthlessness and His infinite worth; and that He has brought us back to our one Father and made us His brethren, and so brethren to one another, we shall have all we need to guide us through the shadows. Most assuredly I accept to the full the doctrines you refer to that Christ died to save us, that we have no other way of salvation open to us but through His death, and that it is by faith in Him, and through no merit of ours, that we are reconciled to God and most assuredly I can cordially say, "I owe all to Him who loved me, and died on the Cross of Calvary."
"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
"It’s no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then."
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality."
"I'm not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different from yours."
"Everything is funny if you can laugh at it."
"If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is certain to disagree with you sooner or later."
"One of the secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others."
"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end, then stop."
"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."
Membership
Charles Dodgson was a member of the Society for Psychical Research.
Personality
Charles Dodgson was shy and self-effacing, yet having an expressive critical ability.
As his diaries and letters indicate, Dodgson was a meticulous young man. In his diary entries for 1855, when he was twenty-three, Dodgson reveals his frustration for failing to do his mathematics, having been enticed into the more attractive activities of reading and sketching. Dodgson’s disciplined, and at times exacting, nature was only one side of a complex personality. He was also known for his unfailing good humor and was the sort of person who, despite his innate reticence, could be entertaining at dinner gatherings.
Physical Characteristics:
Charles Dodgson had a rough childhood. He developed a stutter at an early age that stuck with him throughout adulthood. A childhood fever also left him deaf in one ear, and about of whooping cough at 17 weakened his chest for the rest of his life. Late in life, he developed debilitating, aura-hallucinating migraines and what doctors at the time diagnosed as epilepsy. Shortly before his 66th birthday, he caught a severe case of influenza, which led to pneumonia and his death.
Interests
mathematics, logic, photography, art, theater, religion, science, literature