Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), an Oxford mathematics lecturer who told the first version of Alice to three children on a boat trip in 1862. The books work because the nonsense is rigorous: the Wonderland characters argue with perfect internal logic from absurd premises, and Alice is usually the only one reasoning correctly. A good deal of what circulates as Carroll is not his — “if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there” appears in neither Alice book — and several well-known lines belong to Through the Looking-Glass rather than Wonderland. Both are distinguished here.