The World of Lewis Carroll, Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
| 1832 | The third of eleven children, Lewis Carroll is born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27 in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, the eldest son of the Reverend Charles Dodgson and Frances Jane Lutwidge Dodgson. |
| 1843 | The family moves to Croft, Yorkshire, where Charles se nior takes the position of rector. While looking after his siblings, young Charles shows signs of his creative gifts. He paints, puts on puppet shows, and writes plays and sophisticated poems. |
| 1844 | Charles enrolls in the Richmond School, Yorkshire, where he also boards. Previous instruction by his father makes him an excellent student of Latin and mathematics. |
| 1846 | He enters the Rugby public (in American terms, “pri vate”) school; he has a difficult time acclimating socially but performs admirably in his courses. |
| 1847 | Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Emily Bronte’s Wuther ing Heights are published. |
| 1850 | Charles enrolls at Christ Church college of Oxford Uni versity. |
| 1852 | He is made a life fellow of Christ Church. |
| 1854 | He graduates with honors. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is published. |
| 1855 | Charles becomes a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. He writes the first stanza of “Jabber wocky.” |
| 1856 | He invents the nom de plume “Lewis Carroll,” versions of his first and middle names in reverse order. Through out his life, he will publish mathematical works as Charles Dodgson and literature as Lewis Carroll. (For the sake of simplicity, from here on we refer to him as Lewis Carroll.) |
| 1856 | Carroll first meets the Liddell family when Alice Lid dell’s father takes a position at Oxford. He buys a camera and eventually becomes an excellent photographer. |
| 1857 | He earns his MA degree. |
| 1859 | Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is published. Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities is published. |
| 1861 | Carroll is ordained as a deacon but never becomes a priest. Around this time, he begins to keep a log of his correspondence; by the end of his life, his meticulous accounting records nearly 100,000 letters. |
| 1862 | Carroll and a friend take the Liddell sisters, including Alice, on a summertime river-boat ride. Carroll tells the girls the tale Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Alice asks him to write down the story for her. |
| 1863 | By February he has written a first draft. In June he dis cusses publishing the book with the Clarendon Press. |
| 1864 | Carroll has expanded the manuscript and engages Punch magazine cartoonist John Tenniel as illustrator. |
| 1865 | Tenniel finishes the illustrations and the Clarendon Press prints 2,000 copies of the book as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Despite the book’s great success, Carroll prefers to stay out of the public eye. |
| 1869 | Long fascinated by occultism, Carroll introduces ghosts into his work with the publication of Phantasmagoria and Other Poems. |
| 1871 | As a sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll pub lishes Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is published. |
| 1876 | Carroll’s long poem The Hunting of the Snark, An Agony in Eight Fits, a classic of nonsense literature, is published. |
| 1879 | Euclid and His Modern Rivals is published; demonstrat ing the usefulness of Euclid’s Elements in the teaching of geometry, it is written as a play with the ghost of Euclid as one of the characters. |
| 1881 | Carroll resigns his mathematical lectureship to focus on his writing. |
| 1882 | He takes the demanding position of curator of the Senior Common Room at Christ Church, Oxford. |
| 1883 | The poetry collection Rhyme? And Reason? is published. |
| 1885 | Carroll publishes A Tangled Tale, ten stories for children featuring linguistic play and mathematical “knots” to undo. |
| 1886 | The original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is published. |
| 1888 | Curiosa Mathematica, Part I: A New Theory of Parallels is published. |
| 1889 | Sylvie and Bruno, a story for children, is published. |
| 1890 | The Nursery Alice, Carroll’s adaptation for younger chil dren, with twenty enlargements from Tenniel’s illustra tions, is published. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is published. |
| 1892 | Carroll resigns as curator of the Senior Common Room. |
| 1893 | Sylvie and Bruno Concluded and Curiosa Mathematica, Part II: Pillow Problems Thought Out during Sleepless Nights are published. |
| 1896 | Symbolic Logic, which shows how to visually represent propositions in mathematical logic, is published. |
| 1898 | Lewis Carroll dies of pneumonia at Guildford, England, on January 14. |