Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of English mathematician, photographer, and writer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson — whose 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass made him one of the most-iconic figures of Victorian English-language children's literature. He was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27, 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, into a clerical family — his father was a Church of England priest. He was the third of eleven children.

He attended Christ Church, Oxford (1851–1855), where he excelled in mathematics. He was elected a Mathematical Lecturer at Christ Church in 1855 — a position he held continuously for the 26 years until his 1881 retirement. He took deacon's orders in the Anglican Church but never proceeded to priesthood. The pen name Lewis Carroll — adopted in 1856 for his literary publications — is a Latinized inversion of his first two given names (Charles Lutwidge → Carolus Ludovicus → Lewis Carroll).

The Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) — originally told as an extempore story to the three young Liddell sisters (including Alice Liddell, the real-life inspiration for the title character) during an July 4, 1862 boat trip on the Isis river near Oxford — was first published in 1865 with illustrations by John Tenniel. The book and its 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass have continuously been among the most-published, most-translated, and most-adapted English-language children's books in literary history.

Carroll's substantial parallel photography work — primarily portraiture of the Liddell family, his Oxford colleagues, and other Victorian intellectuals — has been continuously cited as among the Victorian-era English-language portrait photography. His mathematical work was less commercially successful but remains continuously studied — particularly his logical-puzzles works including Symbolic Logic (1896) and his Doublets word-puzzle invention. He died on January 14, 1898, at age 65, in Guildford, Surrey, of pneumonia following influenza.

His name Lewis is from the Old French Louis (anglicized to Lewis), ultimately from the Old Germanic Hludwig meaning "famous warrior." Lewis has been continuously climbing in American naming since the 2010s vintage-revival wave.