Lewis Carroll 1832-1898 author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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(Free-Press-Release.com) January 31, 2011 -- Lewis Carroll 1832-1898 author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

One of the most famous Victorian authors and books is the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I thought it would be of interest to write about his life works.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on 27th January 1832 and is better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll who was an English author, Mathematician, Logician, Anglican Deacon and Photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through The Looking-Glass.

According to anecdotes, Dodgson was very shy and he even hid his hands continually within a pair of gray-and-black gloves. In 1867 he travelled with his friend and colleague Henry Parry Liddon to Russia, where they visited churches, museums and other places of interest. After this journey, he never again left Britain. Dodgson died on January 14, 1898. He was buried in Guilford Cemetery.

In spite of his stammer, Dodgson spoke easily with children, whom he often photographed, first with their clothes on. From July 1866, Dodgson began to take nude photographs, always with the permission of parents. During the next thirteen years, Dodgson took many nude studies, but before he died, he destroyed most the negatives and prints. Dodgson was careful not to show them to anybody, stating in a letter that "there is really no friend to whom I should wish to give photographs which so entirely defy conventional rules."

Dodgson had seven sisters. Although his attraction to young girls was well-known, he followed in their company the strict Victorian rules of behavior and morals, even if his feelings were more intense than he acknowledged in his diaries. He also had long friendships with mature women, but remained a bachelor. This side of his life has remained little examined.

During one picnic – on July 4, 1862, on a blazing summer afternoon – Dodgson began to tell a long story to Alice Liddell (died in 1934), his ideal child friend, who was the daughter of Henry George Liddell, the head of his Oxford college. The Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was born from these tales. The friendship with the Liddell family ended abruptly in June 1863, two years before Wonderland was published, and Dodgson turned his attention to other young friends.

According to some Oxford gossips, Dodgson had proposed marriage to Alice, aged eleven; for females the legal age to marry was twelve. However, the cause of the break between Dodgson and the Liddells is a mystery. Dodgson's relationship with the family remained formal, but in 1870 Mrs. Liddell Brough, Alice and her sister Ina to Dodgson's studio to be photographed. When Alice married Reginald Gervis Hargreaves in 1870, he gave the couple a watercolor of Tom Quad, one of the quadrangles of Christ Church in Oxford. Alice was absent from his funeral, no Liddells appeared.

Originally the book appeared under the title Alice's Adventures Under Ground. The story centers on the seven-year-old Alice, who falls asleep in a meadow, and dreams that she plunges down a rabbit hole, where finds herself first too large and then too small. She meets such strange characters as Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the King and Queen of Hearts, and experiences wondrous, often bizarre adventures, trying to reason in numerous discussions that do not follow the usual paths of logic. Finally she totally rejects the dream world and wakes up.

The sequel Through the Looking Class, appeared in 1871. It is perhaps more often quoted than the first, featuring the poems Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter. The artist John Tenniel refused to illustrate one chapter in Through the Looking Class because he thought that it was ridiculous. The chapter was published later in 1872 as The Wasp in a Wig. Dodgson himself always wished to be an artist and as a boy he illustrated all the manuscript magazines, which he made for his younger brothers and sisters. Dodgson's original drawings for Alice's Adventures Underground were published in 1961.

He was also well known for his poems “The Hunting of the Snark and “Jabberwocky”, all examples of the genre of Literary nonsense. He is noted for his facility at word play, logic, and fantasy, and there are societies dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works and the investigation of his life in many parts of the world, including the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States, and New Zealand.

Please visit my Funny Animal Art Prints Collection @ http://www.fabprints.com
My other website is called Directory of British Icons: http://fabprints.webs.com

The Chinese call Britain 'The Island of Hero's' which I think sums up what we British are all about. We British are inquisitive and competitive and are always looking over the horizon to the next adventure and discovery.

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