The fairy persona takes on the aspect of a censoring adult who attempts to interfere with Charles no matter which way he turns. The poem “My Fairy” in Useful and Instructive Poetry seems to reflect some of the frustrations Dodgson may have experienced over one issue or another. Tate reassured the elder Dodgson his son would most likely outgrow. Tate, his instructor, was later to comment that the younger Dodgson was given toward some “creativity in replacing the inflexions of nouns and verbs, as detailed in our grammars,” a fault which Dr. While at the Richmond School in 1845, Dodgson composed Useful and Instructive Poetry, his first family magazine, for the edification of his seven-year-old brother, Wilfred Longley Dodgson, and his five-year-old sister, Louisa Fletcher Dodgson this book was finally published over 100 years later, in 1954. Nurtured by a loving mother and father, Dodgson began writing at an early age. made pets of the most odd and unlikely animals, and numbered certain snails and toads among his intimate friends.” In The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898), Carroll’s nephew Stuart Dodgson Collingwood wrote that his uncle “invented the strangest diversions for himself.

The third of 11 children, Dodgson’s secluded, quiet, and protected early childhood stands in ironic contrast to the impact he was to have on the world of Victorian children’s literature.

His best-known works, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There (1872) are still enjoyed by readers throughout the world and have been adapted for radio, television, and motion pictures.īorn in the small parish of Daresbury on January 27, 1832, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known by his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll) was the son of Charles Dodgson, archdeacon, and Frances Jane Lutwidge. Self-effacing, yet having an expressive critical ability reveling in the possibilities of fancy, though thoroughly at home with the sophisticated nuances of logic and mathematics, Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was an individual who, through his rare and diversified literary gifts and power of communication, left an indelible mark upon the imaginations of children and adults both during his generation and in generations to come.

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