Renowned as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on January 27, 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, the eldest boy of a family of eleven children, to Charles Dodgson, an Anglican clergyman, and Frances Jane Lutwidge. At the age of twelve, he was sent to Richmond Grammar School, and in 1850 he enrolled at the University of Oxford, from which he graduated in 1854. His talent as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship in 1855, which he continued to hold for the next twenty-six years. He wrote many books on mathematics and logic, enjoyed inventing puzzles and games and playing croquet. While teaching, Carroll was ordained as a deacon; however, he never preached.

In 1855, dean Henry Liddell arrived at Christ Church College with his wife, their son, Harry, and daughters Lorina, Alice and Edith. Carroll loved to entertain their children. Alice Liddell remembers spending many hours listening to Carroll’s fantastic tales. On a sunny afternoon of 4 July 1862, while rowing Lorina, Alice, and Edith, up the Thames for a picnic, he told them a fantastic tale of a little girl, named Alice, who fell through a rabbit-hole. When Alice arrived home, she exclaimed that he must write the story down for her. Carroll began writing the text almost immediately, and in 1864, he gave Alice a present: a bound manuscript titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. The manuscript fell into the hands of the novelist Henry Kingsley, who urged Carroll to publish it. Illustrated by John Tenniel, the book was released in 1865 as an expanded version of the original manuscript, with the title Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Gratified by the reception of the novel, Carroll wrote the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There, which was published in 1871, again illustrated by Tenniel. In the sequel, Alice enters into a mirror world, laid out like a chessboard.