Lewis Carroll

Autobiography

Lewis Carroll a pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson who was born on January 22, 1832 at Daresbury - Cheshire, UK. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman. Lewis Carroll first attended school in Richmond (1844-1845) in order to prepare his entry in Rugby a famous English "public school," where he was admitted in the year 1846. He did an internship and was little attracted to sports. Carroll had a very bad memory regarding sports and he never developed any interest regarding memorizing it. In 1851 at Christ Church College (Oxford) the future of Lewis Carroll began which made him the permanent member of the college. In the year 1854 he successfully completed his BA (equivalent to a license) and simultaneously became a teacher and an assistant librarian at Christ Church in the following year. He was than promoted to lecturer (Professor) (Gardner, p. 15).

He contacted the director of a weekly comic magazine Edmund Yates and started to submit poems and short stories in the magazine. In a monthly magazine The Train which replaces previous magazine in 1856, Charles Dodgson published eight pieces between 1856 and 1857 under the pen name Lewis Carroll. He chose this pen name with the help of Yates. That was the time when the passion for photography developed in Carroll and he remains a pioneer in the field. He put hundreds of models and some famous figures of that time including the poet Alfred Tennyson and Prince Frederick of Denmark, but in photography he especially focused children and undressed girls. Lewis Carroll spent a lot of time inventing new games for children (doublets, Lanrick, Syzygies all language games). He also plays his invented games with children and corresponds with "friends-children." By the 1880 he abruptly discarded his favorite hobby of photography.

That is why most of the writings of Lewis Carroll are intended for children. His masterpiece includes The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland which appeared in 1865, Through the Looking Glass in 1871, The Hunting of the Snark in 1876 and Sylvie and Bruno in 1889.

In between 1874 and 1888 he published several works on mathematics under his real names which include The Game of Logic (1887), Two Logical Paradoxes in 1894 and the first volume of Symbolic Logic (1896) which remains unfinished.

After giving up the field of teaching at Christ Church in 1881 Lewis Carroll on the other hand gave the logic course at Lady Margaret Hall an academic institution at Oxford which was reserved for young girls. Lewis Carroll literary work includes booklets, stories, poems and novels. He remains with Edward Lear one of the masters of "nonsense"

A work primarily symbolic

Readers who are aware with the works of Lewis Carroll will observe in the phrases of Lewis Carroll that a lot of things reminding the world and being constantly strangely propositional logic of Alice in Wonderland. On the other hand through The Looking Glass which is other side of the mirror where the concepts come alive suddenly in ...