Lewis Carroll Biography pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898)

2. Lewis Carroll Biography pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898) Charles was shy with adults and lived with the restraints of Victorian Society. He was essentially a wild and free spirit who once said, “People that don’t exist are much nicer than people that do.” Properly chaperoned by their governess, Miss Prickett (nicknamed “Pricks”—“one of the thorny kind,” and so the prototype of the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass), the three little girls paid many visits to the young mathematics lecturer in his college rooms. On July 4, 1862, Dodgson and his friend Robinson Duckworth, fellow of Trinity, rowed the three children up the Thames from Oxford to Godstow, picnicked on the bank, and returned to Christ Church late in the evening: “On which occasion,” wrote Dodgson in his diary, “I told them the fairy-tale of Alice's Adventures Underground, which I undertook to write out for Alice.” Much of the story was based on a picnic a couple of weeks earlier when they had all been caught in the rain; for some reason, this inspired Dodgson to tell so much better a story than usual that both Duckworth and Alice noticed the difference, and Alice went so far as to cry, when they parted at the door of the deanery, “Oh, Mr. Dodgson, I wish you would write out Alice's adventures for me!” Dodgson himself recollected in 1887.

4. Alice • Victorian Era • Birth of childhood for upper and middle classes • Children of lower classes worked in factories or on farms • Fantasy Genre • Literature to entertain rather than instruct • New knowledge while retaining childlike qualities The book is not an allegory; it has no hidden meaning or message, either religious, political, or psychological, as some have tried to prove.