He also took up the “black arts” of photography, an outre, transgressive link with the make-believe of childhood. The young mathematician soon found the pen name for his fantasies, rejecting “Edgar Cuthwellis” in favour of “Lewis Carroll”. Douglas-Fairhurst is well-equipped to elucidate the mysteries of that earnest cocktail of frivolity and convention, the don’s life. He arrived at Christ Church in 1851, and would never really leave.Ĭhrist Church was the Vatican of an academic and social establishment, a hothouse of eccentricity where Dodgson would be utterly at home. After his sisters and their jigsaw puzzles, teenage Charles was now maturing among mid-Victorian youth and higher mathematics, a precociously brilliant logician on course for Oxford and the ministry. Virginia Woolf believed that this held the key to the man, and was always “an impediment at the centre of his being”.Ĭharles’s father Skeffington Dodgson had wanted his son to follow him into the church, and sent him to that staff college for muscular Christians, Thomas Arnold’s Rugby school. As well as limericks and nonsense poetry, he also put on shows in his marionette theatre, and contributed to the family’s Rectory Magazine, for which, says Douglas-Fairhurst, young Charlie was “editor, leading author, illustrator, printer, publisher and distributor”.Ĭhildhood was the idyll Dodgson never quite recovered from, a parallel world where time stood still. “Charlie” became its entertainer, a fount of “jokes, riddles, fun, poetry and tales”. Childhood was the Dodgson family project. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was the eldest son of a high church country clergyman, and had seven sisters.
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