Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Born in 1832, he was educated at Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was appointed lecturer in mathematics in 1855, and where he spent the rest of his life. In 1861 he took deacon's orders, but shyness and a stammer prevented him from seeking the priesthood. His most famous works, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872), were originally written for Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of his college. Charles Dodgson died of bronchitis in 1898.
Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Cambridge and past President of Clare Hall College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. Among her works are Darwin's Plots (1983; third edition, 2009), George Eliot (1986), Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (1989), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996) and Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996).
Lewis Carroll, born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98), grew up in Cheshire in the village of Daresbury, the son of a parish priest. He was a brilliant mathematician, a skilled photographer and a meticulous letter and diary writer.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, inspired by Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church in Oxford, was published in 1865, followed by
Through the Looking-Glass in 1871. He wrote numerous stories and poems for children including the nonsense poem
The Hunting of the Snark and fairy stories
Sylvie and Bruno.