27 Jan 2023
On This Day
27 January 2023 Cheryl

27 January 1832: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is born

Charles Dodgson in June 1857 & a page from the manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground, 1864

The Cheshire cat was inspired by cheese molds from the Cheshire county in England, a dairy-rich area, where “grinning like a Cheshire cat” was a popular phrase, possibly because cats would have been so happy to live in a land of abundant dairy farms. Cheesemakers in the area molded the cheese with a cat’s grinning face, and sliced from the back, so that the cat would slowly disappear and the last part consumed was the head. [1]

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, whose last name is pronounced with a silent ‘g’, and who is better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, was born on 27 January 1832, in Cheshire, England. He was the third of eleven children to Charles Dodgson Sr, a clergyman, and his wife, Frances Jane Lutwidge, who came from a family of merchants.

As a very young child, Charles suffered a fever that left him deaf in one ear. In early childhood, he acquired a stammer, which he referred to as his “hesitation”, and it remained throughout his life. At the age of 17, he contracted whooping cough, which was probably responsible for his chronically weak chest in later life.

Dodgson exhibited an early aptitude for mathematics and demonstrated a vivid imagination. He was a precocious child, showing interest in storytelling and entertaining his siblings with imaginative tales.

In 1843, the Dodgson family moved to Yorkshire where Charles later attended Rugby School and his aptitude for mathematics continued to grow. In 1851, he entered Christ Church, Oxford, where he earned various academic honours. He would spend most of his academic career here, eventually becoming a mathematics lecturer at the college.

Dodgson’s connection with Alice Liddell, the inspiration for his famous works, began in 1856 when he met the Liddell family, and Alice, who was almost five years old, became a close friend. It was during a boat trip on the Thames River that Dodgson first told the story that would later become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The work was finally published in 1865 under the Lewis Carroll pen-name, which Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier.

Despite his literary success, Carroll continued his academic pursuits until his death. He passed away on 14 January 1898, in Guildford, Surrey, leaving behind a legacy of imaginative and enduring literature.