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Lewis Carroll |
Charles L. Dodgson was a mathematics lecturer and tutor at Oxford, a tall man, fussy, brilliant, and deaf in one ear, with a tendency to stammer among adults but not among children. He wore gray gloves most of the time, walked ten miles in a day, and kept an index card on every dinner guest noting what had been served so as not to repeat the experience.
He had always written poetry. In 1856 he made friends with the family of his new dean, Henry Liddle, and on a picnic with ten-year-old Alice and her sisters in 1862, he made up a story that would become Alice in Wonderland. When it was published in 1865, Dodgson, as “Lewis Carroll”, became world-famous, and though he would write several other books, nothing he did came close to his first success.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |