Lewis Carroll: A Study of His Life and Writing Advice

If you’ve heard of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, then you’ve heard of its creator: the man known as Lewis Carrol. While the book is now commonly abbreviated as Alice in Wonderland, it has—since its inception in 1865—become one of the most well-known and recognizable works of all time. If you see any depiction of a giant blue caterpillar smoking a pipe, you know it’s from Wonderland; if you see a blonde girl, usually wearing an apron, who has a reputation for believing unusual and crazy things, you know it’s meant to be Alice—the imagery Lewis Carroll has created has become some of the most iconic to ever exist in fiction, transcending the book itself and bypassing cultures and countries. Alice and the Wonderland she explores has appeared in everything from films, video games, and even opera—so let’s delve into the author behind this classic book and see what we can learn by examining his life and writing.

Carroll’s Life

First of all, Lewis Carroll isn’t the real name of the prolific legend—his real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and he was born on January 27, 1832. According to this Britannica article, he and the rest of his family lived in a country village so isolated and boring the most exciting thing the large family had to look forward to was watching a horse and carriage pass by, according to Franziska Kohlt. They didn’t have a lot of friends outside the family—but that didn’t stop the children from having fun, for Charles instantly “showed a great aptitude for inventing games” everyone could amuse themselves with. When he was 12, they moved to a town called Croft, where the family essentially made a self-published family magazine called the Rectory Magazine. Nowadays, Charles’ stories are the only ones that have survived, creating an easily accessible origin for his first published works. He attended Richmond School in Yorkshire but didn’t really like it, and rightfully so, because he endured bullies and illness, the latter of which left him deaf in one year. He was outstanding in the fields of classical studies and math, and he even got a scholarship to another college—although in those days the opportunity was called a studentship. Charles was at the top of his class and achieved a bachelor of arts degree in December of 1854. To maintain his studentship, however, it was required that he never married, and although—years after gaining the initial studentship, of course—he did consider marriage, it ultimately held no appeal to him, and so he was content to remain a bachelor.

Charles had a “stammer that he never fully overcame,” although he also had “unfailing good humor and was the sort of person who, despite his innate reticence, could be entertaining at dinner gatherings,” according to this article by the Poetry Foundation. He was someone who was naturally disciplined, a gifted student, and yet while he could achieve high performance within his studies, was also prone to “easy distraction”—in his diary of 1855, the then twenty-three-year-old Charles berated himself for getting distracted from his math studies and goofing off by reading and sketching instead. He seemed generally good-natured with a passion for learning, and, indeed, he would push himself to perform better and study harder, and soon he wrote “the best examination in mathematics the college would see in decades to come,” according to Franziska Kohlt.

Charles’ good nature, his stammer, and, as the Britannica article states, his natural association with children, having been the eldest of eight, led him to befriend the children of George Liddel, who was the dean of the Christ Church. This pleasant collision of circumstances is what caused him to meet Alice Liddel, the little girl who would inspire him to write the iconic Alice in Wonderland. Charles was also friends with the children of George Macdonald (who wrote one of my favorite childhood books, The Princess and the Goblin) as well as the poet Lord Tennyson. However, because the Liddel children—Alice, Lorina and Edith—were the only children at Christ Church, they “undoubtedly held an especially high place in his affections,” in the words of his Britannica page.

Carroll’s Famous Story

Today, the man who would be known as Lewis Carroll is mostly recognized as the man who penned “The Jabberwocky,” perhaps his most famous poem, and of course Alice in Wonderland, as well as its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. However, his books cannot be examined without inspecting the fascinating story behind his pen name first.

‘Lewis Carroll’ was his pen name, and a very clever Latinization of his own name: Franziska Kohlt writes that it was a “re-translated inversion”—in Latin, his name came out as 'Carolus Ludovicus', which turned into Carroll Lewis, and eventually Lewis Carroll. According to this article by Pook Press, Alice in Wonderland was a huge commercial success when it was released, and today, it’s regarded as “one of the finest examples of both the literary nonsense genre and children’s literature more generally.” His pen name was a secret everyone seemed to know about, and it got to the point where people excitedly viewing him as the author of Alice in Wonderland started to overshadow his other work. This piece from The Guardian states he loathed the fame Alice in Wonderland brought him.

According to a page on this Lewis Carroll exhibition website, Charles worked “fastidiously” to ensure his identity as a children’s author and as a scholar of mathematics remained separate. He went so far as to give people a letter he titled his Strange Circular, which declared that he and Lewis Carroll weren’t the same person and weren’t associated with one another: "Mr. Dodgson…neither claims nor acknowledges any connection with any pseudonym, or with any book that is not published under his own name.”

Amusingly, this did nothing in the long run, as he is now so well-known as Lewis Carroll his real name is as good as buried—and the people in his own time did nothing to stop this, as evidenced by his immense popularity; even Queen Victoria herself loved Alice in Wonderland.

Compared to other Victorian stories of the time, part of what makes Alice in Wonderland so intriguing is that Lewis Carroll refused to use it as a tool for imparting a moral lesson.  According to Dr. Oliver Tearle, an exchange from the book's ninth chapter demonstrates this as the mainstream Victorian attitudes adults held during that time face off against the “rebellious innocence” of children—in this case, Alice—with the “censorious morality of the adult.” The adult stops Alice from thinking, questioning, and wondering on her own, invalidating her natural curiosity and open-mindedness. Tearle argues the novel is an “exploration of a child’s journey through the world” as they make sense of everything around them and come to realize that “sometimes grown-ups—those authority figures the child is told to obey because they are older and wiser than she is—are the stupidest people in the room.”

Part of Alice in Wonderland’s longevity can be attributed to the fact it’s ripe for a nearly never-ending variety of opinions and interpretations—for better or for worse. For instance, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst of The Guardian writes that because so much of the plot revolves around food—like the famous ‘Drink Me’ bottle, which Alice is introduced to immediately upon entering Wonderland--some critics theorize the story is really about eating disorders, evidencing that Carroll was “rake-thin and rarely ate more than biscuit for lunch,” while others interpret the constant inclusion of food as a reference to the picnic teas he gave the three young Liddell children.

But, as Hannah Bergin from Culture State writes, perhaps it’s inevitable that Carroll’s story—like any great classic—would find itself under immense scrutiny. Critics and academics today scrutinize every detail of the story “in desperate attempts to uncover a potentially coded, more profound and perhaps sinister hidden meaning.” Some interpretations have certainly gone too far; this article by Hephzibah Anderson admits that some of them are too absurd to be entirely believable, such as claims the rabbit role Alice tumbles through is about the process of birth or, even more absurd, that her neck magically stretching is supposed to mean she had penis envy. As unpleasant and crazily far-reaching as some of these ideas are, Hannah Bergin states they all are “a testament to the work's essential timelessness that each era has been able to read its own fads and preoccupations into the story.”

How Carroll’s Story Influenced Today

The influence of Alice in Wonderland on current literature is almost too immense to fully comprehend—or to fully chronicle here. For instance, nearly everyone in Western culture is familiar with the film The Matrix which hugely impacted cinema and filmmaking forever; references to being stuck inside the Matrix or taking a red pill or a blue pill have surpassed the film itself and embedded themselves into our cultural consciousness—and that’s in addition to the gigantic achievement of altering cinema forever. This titan of a film has tons of nods to Alice in Wonderland, some up-front and others easier to miss—but the fact a hundred-year-old-classic book influenced the plot of a film that grew to be culturally impactful on its own really says something about the impact of the original story, about how it became so engrained in our culture, that the writers crafted allusions to it as easily as turning a page. Morpheus’s mysterious nature and sly grin evoke Carroll’s iconic Chesire Cat, the red and blue pills reference the food Alice eats in Wonderland—a rabbit hole is mentioned in the same breath—and most up-front of all is that protagonist Neo’s inciting incident begins with someone telling him to “follow the white rabbit,” which in his case is a rabbit tattooed in white ink. Just as The Matrix has engrained itself into popular culture, it is so deeply entrenched in references to Carroll’s story it wouldn’t feel the same without them.  

And yet, that is only scratching the surface of the epic influence of Alice in Wonderland. It’s so popular that it’s never been out of print since it was first published in the 1800s. Hephzibah Anderson, in the previously linked-to article, wrote that it has inspired film and silver screen adaptations, paintings, video games, a ballet, and even a neurological syndrome was named after it. This article barely manages to convey the depth and width of the story’s influence in a way that isn’t overwhelming—for overwhelming is the perfect descriptor of the book’s monumental impact on today; it’s influenced music, art, fashion, and been reimagined for T.V. shows like “Once Upon a Time,” “Riverdale,” and even the classic “The Twilight Zone.” Of course, the most well-known film adaptation is the hand-animated one released by Disney in 1952, but there was also a five-episode T.V. adaptation in 1985, a musical stage production as early as 1886, a digital reinterpretation of the story where she enters "wonderland," and even two operas based on the book, and its sequel, in 2015 and 2019.

Carroll’s Writing Style and His Legacy

In terms of prose, it’s easy to see why the book became popular—it’s very easy to understand. Character descriptions are simply worded while also being extremely vivid, such as describing wet birds as “birds with draggled feathers” in chapter three. It’s glaringly simple while also managing to convey everything the reader needs to know about their situation. They’re not merely wet, they are draggled.

Carrol wove depth into the simplicity, hiding it in plain sight and making the text rich as a result. He does this by using nonsense—but how can you use nonsense to add depth? Doesn’t that seem contradictory? Well, Shelley Kelber from Books Tell You Why writes that while Carroll’s nonsense can be viewed as meaningless, childish fantasies, there’s more to it than that, for “many of his seemingly childish ideas draw on complex ideas of the nature of language, truth, and logic”—even including political aspects in the nonsense, where nonsense chatter is used as a tool by characters in power to “override the protests” of the helpless characters in the scene, to “bewilder and exploit the weak and helpless.” She writes that the meaning of the nonsense Carroll uses “goes beyond the audience,” and that it’s an essential element in the story’s success for adults; it lets them “shake off the rules and shapes of everyday life and return to the unlimited and baffling visions of their childhood.”

As Carroll connected and surrounded himself with the joy of the children he loved most in his life, write as if you are giving a gift—whether that’s to another person or yourself. Instead of worrying about perfection, find joy in the sometimes nonsensical process of writing and go with the flow. Even when Carroll was writing the story destined to become a classic, he had no idea what was going to happen next. Embrace this feeling in your writing and you could end up creating something fantastic!

Carroll ultimately created a story that outlived and surpassed the culture and audience it was meant for. He wrote a story that is unique and unusual as it is timeless, and the novelty and nonsense of its narrative still makes it engaging for readers more than a hundred years after it was first written. His writing began as something to entertain a friend, and if the young Alice Liddell hadn’t repeatedly insisted that he publish the story, we wouldn’t have it on our shelves today. The man who became known has Lewis Carrol has left behind a legacy that is timeless in its enormity and awe-inspiring in its reach.