Lewis Carroll, born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in Cheshire, England (1832). As a child, he created magazines full of poems, stories and drawings to entertain his brothers and sisters. He received a degree in mathematics at Oxford and stayed there as a faculty member on the condition that he would enter the clergy and remain single. He lectured and wrote books on mathematics, and he took up photography as a serious hobby at a time when most people thought of it as more of a curiosity than an art form.
When he was 24 years old, a new dean arrived at Carroll's church, and brought his three daughters, Lorina Charlotte, Edith and Alice. Carroll befriended the three girls and began spending a lot of time with them. In July of 1862, while floating in a rowboat on a pond, he came up with the story of a girl's adventures in a magical underground world, and told it to the three girls. Carroll always remembered the day he invented Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Late in his life he wrote, "I can call it up almost as clearly as if it were yesterday�the cloudless blue above, the watery mirror below, the boat drifting idly on its way, the tinkle of the drops that fell from the oars, as they waved so sleepily to and fro, and (the one bright gleam of life in all the slumberous scene) the three eager faces, hungry for news of fairy-land ..." Alice begged him to write the stories down, and a few months later, he did, partly because he thought it had a good chance to sell a lot of copies. The book was illustrated by a well-known cartoonist named John Tenniel, and it was published in 1865. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, along with its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, became one of the most popular children's books in the world.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland begins:
"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do ... when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. There was nothing so very remarkable in that ... but, when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again."
Many biographers have made out Carroll to be a shy, awkward recluse who was only comfortable around young girls�but he was actually charming and sociable. Even though he never married, many of his friends were young women, and he wrote several love poems to them. He loved to hold dinner parties, and even made detailed charts of where his guests sat at the table and what they had to eat. He often went to the theater and to art exhibitions, and he took an extensive tour of Russia with his friend. He also wrote about 97,000 letters in his lifetime, as well as a pamphlet called "Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-Writing." He once said, "I'm beginning to think that the proper definition of 'Man' is 'an animal that writes letters.' " By the end of his life he was something of a celebrity, and he grew tired of all the admirers and autograph hunters who wanted to meet him.
