27th January: Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll was born on this date in 1832, Here are some facts about him:

1. His real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. The name Lewis Carroll is a linguistic 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.
2. He could have been known as Edgar Cuthwellis, Edgar U. C. Westhill or Louis Carroll, but the editor of the magazine which published his first work under that name chose Lewis Carroll from the list of pen names Dodgson himself submitted.
3. He did write some books under his own name. He was a mathematician and wrote some scholarly books on the subject for which he used his real name. There is a tale which says that Queen Victoria read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and liked it so much that she demanded Carroll's next book be dedicated to her. She was duly presented with one of his mathematical works! However, there is no evidence this is true.
4. He was one of eleven children and as a youth wrote puppet plays and a family magazine to entertain his siblings. The magazine was called Mischmasch and is notable for containing the earliest version of the poem "Jabberwocky".
5. He was brought up in the High Anglican Church and was groomed from an early age to be ordained as a priest. He got as far as being ordained as a deacon but refused to seek ordination as a priest, even though the rules of his college demanded he should. For reasons unknown, the Dean of the college decided to waive the rules in his case and so he became the only senior student of his time not to be a priest.
6. He was an advocate of letter writing. Dodgson wrote and received as many as 98,721 letters in his lifetime and even published an essay about how to write better letters. He also invented "The Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case" for people to keep their Postage stamps in. He would sometimes write letters backwards, so the recipient would have to hold the letter to a mirror in order to read it.
7. He was a keen photographer and even considered it as a career. He photographed a range of subjects, although today's scholars tend to home in on the fact that he took pictures of young girls, sometimes naked young girls, leading to speculation that he was a paedophile. However, it's also true that naked children were a common symbol for innocence in Victorian times and taking pictures of them was common. People used pictures of naked children on their Christmas cards.
8. Carroll suffered from chronic migraines, epilepsy, stammering, partial deafness, and ADHD.
9. After his death, it was discovered that several volumes of his diaries were missing and pages had been removed from the remaining ones. There is much speculation about why this should be, including his family destroying them because they might have brought the family into disrepute, or Carroll himself suffering from depression and removing pages in which he'd written about events he wanted to forget.
10. He could write 20 words a minute, a page of 150 words in seven and a half minutes, and 12 pages in two and a half hours - but despite being a mathematician, he wasn't able to balance his bank account and often went overdrawn.