Literature From a young age, Dodgson wrote poetry and short stories, contributing heavily to the family magazine
Mischmasch and later sending them to various magazines, enjoying moderate success. Between 1854 and 1856, his work appeared in the national publications
The Comic Times and
The Train, as well as smaller magazines such as the
Whitby Gazette and the
Oxford Critic. Most of this output was humorous, sometimes satirical, but his standards and ambitions were exacting. In July 1855, he wrote: "I do not think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication (in which I do not include the
Whitby Gazette or the
Oxonian Advertiser), but I do not despair of doing so someday." In March 1856, Dodgson published his first piece of work under the name that would make him famous. A romantic poem called "Solitude" appeared in
The Train under the authorship of "Lewis Carroll". This pseudonym was a play on his real name:
Lewis was the anglicised form of
Ludovicus, which was the Latin for
Lutwidge, and
Carroll an Irish surname similar to the Latin name
Carolus, from which comes the name
Charles. This pseudonym was chosen by editor
Edmund Yates from a list of four submitted by Dodgson, the others being Edgar Cuthwellis, Edgar U. C. Westhill, and Louis Carroll.
Alice books , 1865. for Lewis Carroll's
Through the Looking-Glass, including the poem "
Jabberwocky" In 1856, Dean
Henry Liddell arrived at
Christ Church at
Oxford University, bringing with him his young family, all of whom would figure largely in Dodgson's life over the following years, and would greatly influence his writing career. Dodgson became close friends with Liddell's wife, Lorina, and their children, particularly the three sisters Lorina, Edith, and Alice Liddell. He was widely assumed for many years to have derived his own "Alice" from
Alice Liddell; the
acrostic poem at the end of
Through the Looking-Glass spells out her name in full, and there are also many superficial references to her hidden in the text of both books. It has been noted that Dodgson himself repeatedly denied in later life that his "little heroine" was based on any real child, and he frequently dedicated his works to girls of his acquaintance, adding their names in acrostic poems at the beginning of the text.
Gertrude Chataway's name appears in this form at the beginning of
The Hunting of the Snark, and it is not suggested that this means that any of the characters in the narrative are based on her. to nearby
Nuneham Courtenay or
Godstow. It was on one such expedition on 4 July 1862 that Dodgson invented the outline of the story that eventually became his first and greatest commercial success. He told the story to Alice Liddell and she begged him to write it down, and Dodgson eventually (after much delay) presented her with a handwritten, illustrated manuscript entitled ''Alice's Adventures Under Ground'' in November 1864. Critical literature has often proposed
Freudian interpretations of the book as "a descent into the dark world of the
subconscious", as well as seeing it as a satire upon contemporary mathematical advances. The overwhelming commercial success of the first Alice book changed Dodgson's life in many ways. The fame of his alter ego "Lewis Carroll" soon spread around the world. He was inundated with fan mail and with sometimes unwanted attention. Indeed, according to one popular story,
Queen Victoria herself enjoyed
Alice in Wonderland so much that she commanded that he dedicate his next book to her, and was accordingly presented with his next work, a scholarly mathematical volume entitled
An Elementary Treatise on Determinants. Dodgson himself vehemently denied this story, commenting "... It is utterly false in every particular: nothing even resembling it has occurred"; and it is unlikely for other reasons. As
T. B. Strong comments in a
Times article, "It would have been clean contrary to all his practice to identify [the] author of Alice with the author of his mathematical works". He also began earning quite substantial sums of money but continued with his seemingly disliked post at Christ Church. Its somewhat darker mood possibly reflects changes in Dodgson's life. His father's death in 1868 plunged him into a depression that lasted some years. but was enormously popular with the public, having been reprinted seventeen times between 1876 and 1908, and has seen various adaptations into musicals, opera, theatre, plays and music. Painter
Dante Gabriel Rossetti reputedly became convinced that the poem was about him. He soon excelled at the art and became a well-known gentleman-photographer, and he seems even to have toyed with the idea of making a living out of it in his very early years. About 60% of Dodgson's original photographic portfolio was deliberately destroyed. Dodgson also made many studies of men, women, boys, and landscapes; his subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues, paintings, and trees.,
Christina Rossetti,
Frances Polidori and
William Michael Rossetti His pictures of children were taken with a parent in attendance and many of the pictures were taken in the Liddell garden because natural sunlight was required for good exposures. During the most productive part of his career, he made portraits of notable sitters such as
John Everett Millais,
Ellen Terry,
Maggie Spearman,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
Julia Margaret Cameron,
Michael Faraday,
Lord Salisbury, and
Alfred Tennyson. He used the
wet collodion process; commercial photographers who started using the
dry-plate process in the 1870s took pictures more quickly. He often altered his photographs through blurring techniques or by painting over them. He exerted his agency of this craft by literally rewriting the text created by the image to produce a new dialogue about childhood. However, popular taste changed with the advent of
Modernism, affecting the types of photographs that he produced.
Inventions To promote letter writing, Dodgson invented "The Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case" in 1889. This was a cloth-backed folder with twelve slots, two marked for inserting the most commonly used penny stamp, and one each for the other current denominations up to one shilling. The folder was then put into a slipcase decorated with a picture of Alice on the front and the
Cheshire Cat on the back. It intended to organise stamps wherever one stored their writing implements; Carroll expressly notes in
Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-Writing it is not intended to be carried in a pocket or purse, as the most common individual stamps could easily be carried on their own. The pack included a copy of a pamphlet version of this lecture. cent Another invention was a writing tablet called the
nyctograph that allowed note-taking in the dark, thus eliminating the need to get out of bed and strike a light when one woke with an idea. The device consisted of a gridded card with sixteen squares and a system of symbols representing an alphabet of Dodgson's design, using letter shapes similar to the
Graffiti writing system on a
Palm device. Dodgson devised a number of games, including an early version of what today is known as
Scrabble. Devised sometime in 1878, he invented the "doublet" (see
word ladder), a form of brain-teaser that is still popular today, changing one word into another by altering one letter at a time, each successive change always resulting in a genuine word. For instance, CAT is transformed into DOG by the following steps: CAT, COT, DOT, DOG. The games and puzzles of Lewis Carroll were the subject of Martin Gardner's March 1960
Mathematical Games column in
Scientific American. Other items include a rule for finding the day of the week for any date; a means for justifying right margins on a typewriter; a steering device for a velociman (a type of tricycle); fairer elimination rules for tennis tournaments; a new sort of postal money order; rules for reckoning postage; rules for a win in betting; rules for dividing a number by various divisors; a cardboard scale for the
Senior Common Room at Christ Church which, held next to a glass, ensured the right amount of liqueur for the price paid; a double-sided adhesive strip to fasten envelopes or mount things in books; a device for helping a bedridden invalid to read from a book placed sideways; and at least two
ciphers for
cryptography. In 1884, he proposed a proportional representation system based on multi-member districts, each voter casting only a single vote, quotas as minimum requirements to take seats, and votes transferable by candidates through what is now called
liquid democracy. == Mathematical work ==