GYLES BRANDRETH

- Introduction -

Lewis Carroll was extraordinary. Writer, teacher, mathematician, clergyman, photographer, puzzler, poet, he was born on 27 January 1832 and died on 14 January 1898. During his sixty-six years, he did something that very few others have achieved in the entire history of humanity: he created an imaginary world and a raft of characters that became instantly famous across the globe. They are famous still, and, I reckon, will be for the rest of time. Lewis Carroll was a brilliant and complicated human being: tall, slim, awkward, amusing, shy, he had a unique way with words yet suffered from a life-long stammer. He was also an insomniac. This little book (conceived and compiled by me in the 1970s though entirely written by him in Victorian times) will show you how ingeniously this extraordinary man dealt with his sleepless nights.

Lewis Carroll has long been a hero of mine. I fell in love with the heroine of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when I was a little boy living in London in the 1950s and was taken to a stage adaptation of Through the Looking-Glass starring a young Juliet Mills as Alice. I became fascinated by him in my early twenties when the veteran British entertainer Cyril Fletcher asked me to create a one-man show based on the life and work of Lewis Carroll. That's when I learnt about his insomnia. In the first act of my one-man play, the great man was in his Oxford college rooms talking to himself as he tried (and failed) to get to sleep. In the second act, he was in bed having dreams (and nightmares) peopled by the characters he had created, from the Mad Hatter to the Frumious Bandersnatch. In the 1980s I devised an Alice in Wonderland board game that was produced by Spears Games, the manufacturers of Scrabble - a word-building game very like one Lewis Carroll had devised more than a century before.

In 2010, with the composer Susannah Pearse, I wrote a musical play called The Last Photograph, which explored both the mystery of why Lewis Carroll (one of the great photographers of his time) suddenly decided to give up taking pictures and the nature of his relationship with the young actress, Isa Bowman, who famously played Alice on stage and, less conspicuously, holidayed with Carroll in Eastbourne when she was in her late teens and he was in his late forties. It's an intriguing story. He was a most intriguing man.

Lewis Carroll wasn't his real name, of course. He was a clergyman's son, born at All Saints' Vicarage in Daresbury in Cheshire in the north of England, and christened Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the oldest boy and the third oldest of his parents' eleven children. Most of his male forebears were either army officers or Anglican clergymen. His great-grandfather, another Charles Dodgson, had been Bishop of Elphin in Ireland. His paternal grandfather, again a Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in Ireland in 1803, when his two sons were still boys. The older of these two, yet another Charles, was Lewis Carroll's father. A brilliant mathematician (he got a double first at Christ Church College, Oxford), he decided against an academic career, married his first cousin, Frances Jane Lutwidge, in 1830, and became a country parson.

When our Charles Dodgson - the Lewis Carroll to be - was eleven, his father was offered the living of Croft-on-Tees and the family moved to Yorkshire where they stayed for the next twenty-five years. Dodgson Senior became the Archdeacon of Richmond and young Charles was sent to Richmond Grammar School, aged twelve, and then to Rugby School, aged fourteen. He was not happy at Rugby. 'I cannot say,' he later wrote, 'that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again . I can honestly say that if I could have been . secure from annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would have been comparative trifles to bear.' He was not bullied himself, but the younger boys were. According to his first biographer, his nephew, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, 'even though it is hard for those who have only known him as the gentle and retiring don to believe it, it is nevertheless true that long after he left school, his name was remembered as that of a boy who knew well how to use his fists in defence of a righteous cause.'

He stood up for the younger boys - and he was clever. 'I have not had a more promising boy at his age since I came to Rugby,' reported his mathematics master, R. B. Mayor. He left Rugby at the end of 1849 and went to Christ Church College, Oxford, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

At Oxford, like his father, Charles Dodgson secured a double-first. In 1855 he won the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship and he later became a Student (or Fellow) of the college. In 1861 he was ordained a deacon in the Church of England, though he was always more a teacher than a preacher. In The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, Stuart Collingwood wrote, 'his Diary is full of such modest depreciations of himself and his work, interspersed with earnest prayers (too sacred and private to be reproduced here) that God would forgive him the past, and help him to perform His holy will in the future.'

The Reverend Charles Dodgson was clearly a bit of an oddity. He had a slightly ungainly gait because of a knee injury and as a boy he had had a fever that left him hard of hearing in one ear. At seventeen he had severe whooping cough which left him with a chronically weak chest. His stammer - which he called his 'hesitation' - was a nuisance, but not wholly debilitating. He was ready to take part in parlour entertainments, playing charades, singing songs, reciting verse. He was shy, but not reclusive. He had friends in Oxford and beyond. In 1857 he became friendly with the great John Ruskin. In the early 1860s, he got to know Dante Gabriel Rosetti and his family and took photographs of them in the garden of their house in Chelsea in London. He knew other artists of note, including William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Arthur Hughes. He was a bit of an artist himself. He was a pioneering portrait photographer. And, of course, he was a writer - an inveterate correspondent (he wrote and received as many as 98,721 letters during his lifetime, according to the special letter register which he devised) and a prolific author of verse, fantasy fiction, and scholarly papers.

From a young age, Charles Dodgson was writing poetry and short stories for the Dodgson family's own home-made magazine, Mischmasch. At Oxford he began sending humorous contributions to professional publications. In 1855, when he was twenty-three, he admitted, '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, he published his first piece of work under the name by which we know him now. The work was a romantic poem entitled 'Solitude' and it appeared in The Train under the authorship of 'Lewis Carroll'. The pen name was a play on his real name. 'Lewis' was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for 'Lutwidge', and 'Carroll' was a popular Irish surname similar to the Latin name Carolus, from which comes the English name 'Charles'. This was Dodgson's thinking: 'Charles Lutwidge' translated into Latin as Carolus Ludovicus, then translated back into English as 'Carroll Lewis', then reversed to make 'Lewis Carroll'. The name was chosen by The Train's editor, Edmund Yates, from a list of four submitted by Dodgson, the others being Louis Carroll, Edgar U. C. Westhill, and Edgar Cuthwellis - the name I have given to the editor of the small volume you are kindly holding in your hand now.

1856 was a notable year in the life of Charles Dodgson. It was the year in which he took up the new art form of photography. It was the year in which 'Lewis Carroll' was born. It was the year, too, when Henry Liddell, formerly headmaster of Westminster School in London, arrived at Christ Church, Oxford, as the new Dean, bringing with him his young family. Charles Dodgson became friends with Liddell's wife, Lorina, and their children, particularly the three Liddell sisters: Lorina (known as Ina), Edith, and Alice. With an adult friend, he would take the Liddell children on rowing trips (first the son, Harry, and later the three girls) along the river Isis.

In the summer of 2023, I was honoured to unveil a plaque on the Isis riverbank marking the anniversary of a rowing trip that proved a landmark in the story of children's literature. On this expedition, on 4 July 1862, with his friend, the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, assisting with the rowing, Dodgson extemporised the outline of the story that would become one of the most famous children's stories ever written. Dodgson invented the tale for Alice Liddell and her sisters and, eventually, at Alice's insistence, he wrote it down. In November 1864, when he was thirty-two and Alice was twelve, he presented her with a handwritten, illustrated manuscript entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground.

In 1863, he had taken the unfinished manuscript to the publisher, Macmillan, who liked it immediately. After...