Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) — Biography & Facts

Lewis Carroll: The Logician Who Broke Logic for Fun

On 4 July 1862, rowing three young sisters up the Thames from Oxford, a stammering mathematics lecturer improvised a story to keep them quiet. The middle one, ten-year-old Alice Liddell, begged him to write it down. He did — by hand, with his own illustrations — and presented it to her in November 1864 as "Alice's Adventures Under Ground." Everything else in Charles Dodgson's life, including twenty-six years of teaching Euclid at Christ Church, has stood in its shadow ever since.

Daresbury and the Stammer

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on 27 January 1832 at Daresbury in Cheshire, the third of eleven children and the eldest boy. His father, also Charles, was a highly conservative Church of England clergyman who rose to be Archdeacon of Richmond; his mother was Frances Jane Lutwidge. He stammered from early childhood, and — contrary to the durable myth that he spoke fluently only with children — he stammered in adult and child company alike.

Rugby and Christ Church

He went to Richmond School at twelve and to Rugby at fourteen in 1846, where he was thoroughly unhappy and academically outstanding; his mathematics master judged him "a more promising boy" than the rest. He matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford in May 1850 and came into residence that January, two days before word reached him of his mother's death. In 1852 he took first-class honours in mathematics moderations, with a Second in classics alongside. He took his BA in 1854, standing first in the Final Honours School of Mathematics, and in 1855 secured the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship, which he held for twenty-six years until 1881.

The Deacon Who Stopped

He was ordained deacon on 22 December 1861 to satisfy the conditions of his fellowship. A year later, expected to proceed to the priesthood, he asked to be excused. Dean Henry Liddell refused, then reversed himself overnight for reasons nobody has established, allowing Dodgson to remain at Christ Church in plain breach of college rules. The explanations offered since include the stammer, which made preaching difficult, the Bishop's hostility to theatre-going, and simple doubt.

THE FREE TEST

How high is yours?

Twenty questions, eight minutes on the clock, and a percentile measured against everyone who has taken it. No sign-up.

Take the IQ test →

The Liddells

Liddell had arrived at Christ Church in 1856 with his family, including his daughters Lorina, Alice and Edith. Dodgson became close to them and took the children rowing to villages up the river. After the July 1862 trip and the manuscript that followed, George MacDonald's enthusiasm pushed him toward publication; Macmillan accepted, the working title "Alice Among the Fairies" was dropped, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland appeared in 1865 with John Tenniel's illustrations. It was an overwhelming commercial success. A rupture with the Liddells occurred in June 1863 for reasons now unrecoverable — the relevant diary pages are missing.

Through the Looking-Glass followed in late 1871, misdated 1872 on its first edition, darker in tone and possibly shaped by his father's death in 1868. It contains "Jabberwocky." The Hunting of the Snark came in 1876 to mixed reviews and seventeen reprintings by 1908.

Determinants, Trees and Tortoises

Under his own name he published The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically (1858, 1868), Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879), The Game of Logic (1887), the Curiosa Mathematica volumes (1888, 1892) and Symbolic Logic Part I (1896), with Part II posthumous. He produced the first printed proof of the Rouché–Capelli theorem and the determinant-evaluation technique still called Dodgson condensation. His symbolic logic introduced a Method of Trees, an early version of the modern truth tree, and anticipated mechanical validity tests and truth tables. His work on elections gave rise to Dodgson's method, a Condorcet system, and in 1884 he proposed proportional representation through multi-member districts with what amounts to liquid democracy. "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles," published in Mind in 1895, posed a regress problem about deductive inference that philosophers rediscovered a century later.

Cameras, Nyctographs and Word Ladders

Between 1856 and 1880 he pursued photography seriously from a studio on the roof of Tom Quad, making some 3,000 wet-collodion images of which fewer than 1,000 survive. He photographed Millais, Ellen Terry, Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron, Faraday and Tennyson. A survey by Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling of every surviving print found that just over half depict young girls, and that thirty surviving photographs show nude or semi-nude children. Dodgson maintained the work was purely aesthetic, and modern scholars remain divided: Hugues Lebailly situates it within Victorian conventions in which child nudes appeared on Christmas cards as emblems of innocence, while Karoline Leach's challenge to what she calls the Carroll Myth argues his diaries reveal far more interest in adult women than his biographers acknowledged. He abandoned photography in 1880 as dry plates displaced the process. He also invented the "Doublets" word ladder, which ran in Vanity Fair from 1879 to 1881, the Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case (1889), the nyctograph for writing in the dark, fairer tennis tournament rules, and at least two ciphers.

Why Charles Is Called a Genius

The distinctive quality is the traffic between his two domains. Dodgson's nonsense is not random: it is logic executed correctly on false premises, which is why "Jabberwocky" parses cleanly and why Wonderland's absurdities have the texture of proofs rather than of dreams. The same cast of mind produced "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles," a real problem about the foundations of inference that Mind was willing to print and that philosophers returned to a hundred years later, and the Method of Trees, which got to truth tables early.

The counter-case is put bluntly by the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive: "none of his mathematics books have proved of enduring importance except for Euclid and his modern rivals (1879) which is of historical interest." As a mathematician, MacTutor judges, he was "rather conservative but certainly thorough and careful" — competent rather than revolutionary. Twentieth-century scholars dismissed much of his output as merely recreational, and the rehabilitation led by Martin Gardner and William Warren Bartley in the late twentieth century restored the standing of his logic and voting theory without rescuing the mathematics proper. The honest position is therefore uncomfortable and specific: a first-rate literary imagination attached to a second-rate mathematician whose side-projects in logic and social choice happened to run decades ahead of their time. He earns the word on two children's books and a handful of papers he did not regard as his real work.

Legacy

Sylvie and Bruno (1889, 1893), the two-volume fantasy he took most seriously in later life, disappointed readers with its complexity and baby-talk and sold 13,000 copies. Dodgson died of pneumonia following influenza on 14 January 1898, two weeks short of his sixty-sixth birthday, at his sisters' house The Chestnuts in Guildford, and was buried at Mount Cemetery there. All Saints' Church in Daresbury commemorated his birthplace with Alice stained glass in 1935; a memorial stone was unveiled in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey in 1982; asteroid 6984 Lewiscarroll was named in 1994; and the Lewis Carroll Centre opened near his birthplace in 2012.