DODGSON, CHARLES LUTWIDGE

This article appears in Volume V08, Page 370 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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DODGSON, CHARLES LUTWIDGE [" LEWIS CARROLL "J (18321898), English mathematician and author, son of the Rev. Charles

Dodgson

DODGSON, CHARLES LUTWIDGE

, vicar of Daresbury, Cheshire, was born in that

village

VILLAGE

on the 27th of January 1832. The literary life of " Lewis Carroll " became familiar to a wide circle of readers, but the private life of Charles Lutwidge

Dodgson

DODGSON, CHARLES LUTWIDGE

was retired and practically uneventful. After four years' schooling at Rugby, Dodgson matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in May 1850; and from 1852 till 187o held a studentship there. He took a first class in the final mathematical school in 1854, and the following year was appointed mathematical lecturer at Christ Church, a post he continued to fill till 1881. In 1861 he was ordained deacon, but he never took priest's orders, possibly because of a stammer which prevented reading aloud. His earliest publications, beginning with A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry (1860) and The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry (1861), were exclusively mathematical; but

late

LATE

in the year 1865 he published, under the pseudonym of " Lewis Carroll," Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a work that was the outcome of his keen sympathy with the imagination of children and their sense of fun. Its success was immediate, and the name of " Lewis Carroll " has ever since been a household word. A dramatic version of the " Alice " books by Mr Savile Clarke was produced at Christmas, 1886, and has since enjoyed many revivals. Mr Dodgson was always very fond of children, and it was an open

secret

SECRET (Lat. secretum, hidden, concealed)

that the

original

ORIGINAL

of " Alice " was a daughter of Dean Liddell. Alice was followed (in the " Lewis Carroll "

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

) by Phantasmagoria, in 1869; Through the Looking-Glass, in 1871; The Hunting of the Snark (1876); Rhyme and Reason (1883); A Tangled Tale (1885); and Sylvie and Bruno (in two parts, 1889 and 1893). He wrote skits on Oxford subjects from time to time. The Dynamics of a Particle was written on the occasion of the contest between Gladstone and Mr Gathorne

Hardy

(afterwards

earl

EARL

Cranbrook

CRANBROOK
CRANBROOK, GATHORNE

); and The New Belfry in ridicule of the erection put up at Christ Church for the bells that were removed from the Cathedral tower. While " Lewis Carroll " was delighting children of all ages, C. L. Dodgson periodically published mathematical worksAn Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867) 1
Euclid, Book proved Algebraically (1874); Euclid. and his Modern Rivals (1879), the work on which his reputation as a mathematician largely rests; and Curiosa Mathematica (1888). Throughout this dual existence Mr Dodgson pertinaciously refused to acquiesce in being publicly identified with " Lewis Carroll." Though the fact of his authorship of the " Alice " books was well known, he invariably stated, when occasion called for such a pronouncement, that " Mr Dodgson neither claimed nor acknowledged any connexion with the books hot published under his name." He died at Guildford, on the 14th of January 1898. His memory is appropriately kept green by a cot in the Children's

Hospital

, Great Ormond Street, London, which was endowed
perpetually by a public subscription.
See S. D. Collingwood, Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898).

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