LEWIS CARROLL, the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was born in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, on January 27, 1832. The eldest of eleven children, in 1850 Carroll entered Christ Church College at Oxford University and studied, worked, and lived there the remainder of his life. Concentrating his studies on mathematics and classics, Carroll earned bachelor's and master's degrees, and then lectured in mathematics from 1855 through 1881. He was ordained a deacon of the Church of England in 1861. While at Oxford, Carroll met Alice Liddell, the second daughter of Henry Liddell, the dean at Christ Church College. To her and her sisters he first told the "Alice" stories, which he later compiled into his famous Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1872), both of which owe their longstanding success in part to the whimsical illustrations of Sir John Tenniel, a famous cartoonist and artist. Carroll, whose hobbies included mathematical puzzles and photography, was fascinated by the limits imposed by paradoxes of language and thought, and these themes are strongly evident in the apparent nonsense of Alice's adventures. Carroll's later works include Phantasmagoria (1869), the mock-heroic narrative poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876), children's books Sylvie and Bruno (1889), and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), and many works on math and logic, which were published under his real name. Lewis Carroll died January 14, 1898.
