In the Victorian Period journeys took also the form of fantastic dreams to incredible lands which hid controversial realities. A master of these oniric journeys was ….Lewis Carroll (1832- 98), pseudonym of the English writer and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He invented his pen name by translating his first two names into the Latin Carolus Lodovicus and then anglicizing it into Lewis Carroll.
Son of a clergyman and first of 11 children, Carroll began at an early age to entertain himself (divertirsi)and his family with magic tricks (trucchi), marionette shows, and poems.
He graduated from
Carroll took deacon’s orders in 1861, but he was never ordained a priest, partly because he was afflicted with a stammer (balbuzie) that made preaching (predicare) difficult and partly, perhaps, because he had discovered other interests. Among them was photography, at which he became very expert. He like especially to photograph children. Alice Liddell, one of the three daughters of Henry George Liddell, the dean of
As a mathematician, Carroll was conservative and derivative. As a logician, he was more interested in logic as a game than as an instrument for testing reason.
In 1867 Carroll travelled through Europe and
In 1881 Carroll resigned his lectureship at
He died on 14 January 1898 at his sisters’ home The Chestnuts and he now lies buried with many of his siblings at The Mount cemetery in Guildford,