Lewis Carroll (1832-98)

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, logician and photographer. He was educated at Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford, where he later became a lecturer in mathematics. His most famous writings are Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland (1865), and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). His works are within the genre of literary nonsense, and his ballads are also nonsense ballads full of wordplays and parodies. His nonsense had some ‘meaning’ in the Victorian Age when every traditional value had collapsed. Longing for a new sense of values, and suffering from stammering and pedophilia, made Carroll a nonsense writer who depicts the truth of life. (M. M.)