50 Fun Facts About Lewis Carroll

What was Lewis Carroll's real name?

He was a mathematician, photographer and Anglican clergyman as well as an author.

In which English county was Carroll born, at All Saints' Vicarage in Daresbury?

The church there now has stained-glass windows of Alice characters and a Lewis Carroll Centre opened beside it in 2012.

How many children were in Carroll's family?

He was the eldest boy and third eldest child; most of his siblings shared his speech impediment.

Which famous public school did Carroll attend from 1846, and dislike intensely?

He said no earthly consideration would make him go through the three years again, though his mathematics master called him the most promising boy he had taught.

What Latin inscription did the young Carroll write in his arithmetic textbook?

Beside one problem he scribbled 'Not a fair question in decimals'.

At which Oxford college did Carroll study, teach and live for the rest of his life?

It was his father's old college; he arrived in January 1851 and was summoned home two days later by his mother's death.

Which subject did Carroll lecture in at his Oxford college for 26 years from 1855?

He had graduated top of the list in the Final Honours School of Mathematics in 1854.

Which speech impediment did Carroll have, and refer to as his 'hesitation'?

He is said to have caricatured himself as the Dodo, from his difficulty saying 'Do-do-dodgson', though no first-hand evidence for that survives.

A childhood fever left Carroll with which lasting disability?

At 17 a bout of whooping cough probably caused the weak chest that dogged him in later life.

How was the pen name 'Lewis Carroll' constructed?

Charles Lutwidge became Carolus Ludovicus, then Carroll Lewis, then Lewis Carroll.

Which of these was one of the rejected pen names Carroll offered his editor alongside 'Lewis Carroll'?

Editor Edmund Yates chose from four options; the others were Edgar U. C. Westhill and Louis Carroll.

What was the first work published under the name Lewis Carroll, in March 1856?

It appeared in the magazine The Train, nine years before Alice.

Alice Liddell was the daughter of Henry Liddell, who held what post?

Liddell arrived in 1856 with his family; Carroll's sub-librarian's office was close to the deanery.

On what date did Carroll invent the outline of Alice during a rowing trip with the Liddell children?

The trips went to Nuneham Courtenay or Godstow; Alice begged him to write the story down.

What was the title of the handwritten manuscript Carroll gave the Liddells' daughter in November 1864?

Alice Among the Fairies and Alice's Golden Hour were rejected as titles for the published book.

Whose children's enthusiasm for the manuscript persuaded Carroll to seek publication?

MacDonald was a fairy-tale author and Carroll's friend and mentor.

Which publisher took the unfinished Alice manuscript in 1863 and 'liked it immediately'?

The expanded book came out in 1865 under the pen name he had first used nine years earlier.

Who illustrated the published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?

Carroll had drawn the manuscript himself but decided a real book needed a professional; Henry Holiday later illustrated the Snark.

Which monarch, in a story Carroll called 'utterly false', demanded his next book and got a treatise on determinants?

He never publicly linked the author of Alice with the mathematician Dodgson, which makes the tale even less likely.

What year is erroneously printed on the title page of the first edition of Through the Looking-Glass?

It actually appeared late in 1871; its darker mood may reflect his depression after his father's death in 1868.

The Hunting of the Snark follows a crew of nine tradesmen and which animal?

One famous pre-Raphaelite painter reputedly became convinced the poem was about him.

Whose name is spelled out by the acrostic poem at the end of Through the Looking-Glass?

Gertrude Chataway got the same treatment at the start of The Hunting of the Snark.

Carroll's late two-volume fairy tale, published in 1889 and 1893 and a comparative flop, is called what?

Its 'babytalk' baffled readers and it sold only 13,000 copies.

Which art form did Carroll take up in 1856 and practise for 24 years, becoming an amateur master?

He built his own studio at the college and made around 3,000 images, of which fewer than 1,000 survive.

Which of these was among Carroll's notable photographic sitters?

Others included Michael Faraday, Ellen Terry, Millais and Lord Salisbury.

Which photographic process kept Carroll slower than rivals who adopted dry plates in the 1870s?

He gave up photography abruptly in 1880 because keeping the studio going took too much time.

Where at his Oxford college was Carroll's photographic studio?

Many of his pictures of children were taken in the Liddell garden because good exposures needed sunlight.

Which still-popular puzzle did Carroll invent in 1878, transforming CAT into DOG one letter at a time?

He wrote a weekly column of them for Vanity Fair from 1879 to 1881; CAT to DOG goes CAT, COT, DOT, DOG.

Under what name did Carroll's letter-changing puzzle run in Vanity Fair?

The first appeared on 29 March 1879 and the last column on 9 April 1881.

What was the nyctograph, which Carroll invented?

It used a gridded card of sixteen squares and a symbol alphabet, so he need not get up and light a candle when an idea struck.

What was 'The Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case', which Carroll invented in 1889?

Its slipcase showed Alice on the front and the grinning cat on the back, and it came with his pamphlet on letter-writing.

According to the register he kept, roughly how many letters did Carroll write and receive in his life?

His advice on the subject appeared in 1890 as 'Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-Writing'.

Carroll devised an early version of which modern board game?

He also proposed fairer tennis tournament rules, a typewriter margin-justifier and two cryptographic ciphers.

Carroll's 1895 article on deductive reasoning, reprinted in Mind in 1995, is titled what?

Simon Blackburn answered it in 1995 with 'Practical Tortoise Raising'.

Carroll's 'Method of Trees' in Symbolic Logic Part II is the earliest modern use of what?

The second part was only published posthumously, by William Warren Bartley, prompting a reappraisal of his logic.

On 22 December 1861 Carroll was ordained as what in the Church of England?

He never went on to the priesthood, unique among senior students of his day, and Dean Liddell inexplicably let him stay anyway.

To which country did Carroll make his only trip abroad, in 1867?

He went with the Reverend Henry Liddon and passed through Belgium, Germany, Poland, Lithuania and France on the way.

How many volumes of Carroll's 13 diaries are missing?

About seven pages were also cut out, including 27 June 1863, the day of his unexplained break with the Liddell family.

According to the 'cut pages in diary' document, what did Mrs Liddell tell Carroll on 27 June 1863?

The note, written by his nephew from his aunts' recollections, suggests the famous break had nothing to do with Alice.

What condition where objects seem to shrink or grow is named for Carroll's most famous book?

It is a form of migraine aura; Carroll recorded his own first migraine with aura in his 1880 diary.

Which magazine ran Carroll's earliest work in 1854-56, alongside The Train?

He also appeared in the Whitby Gazette and Oxford Critic, and wrote for the family magazine Mischmasch.

Which pre-Raphaelite painter's family did Carroll often photograph in Chelsea from 1863?

He had met John Ruskin in 1857 and also knew Holman Hunt, Millais and Arthur Hughes.

Where did Carroll die of pneumonia in January 1898?

He was less than two weeks short of his 66th birthday and is buried at Guildford's Mount Cemetery.

In 1982 a memorial stone to Carroll was unveiled where?

His great-nephew did the unveiling; an asteroid, 6984 Lewiscarroll, followed in 1994.

How tall was the young adult Carroll?

He was slender with curly brown hair and, depending on who was describing him, blue or grey eyes.

How old was Carroll when his mother died, two days after he went into residence at Oxford?

She died at 47 of 'inflammation of the brain', perhaps meningitis or a stroke.

At which West End venue did Carroll watch the first major live production of Alice in 1886?

He remained in residence at his college until his death though he stopped teaching in 1881.

Carroll's real surname is attached to a Condorcet-based system in which field?

In 1884 he also proposed proportional representation with transferable votes, an idea now called liquid democracy.

Carroll was an early member of which body investigating ghosts and telepathy?

One of his letters suggests he accepted what was then called 'thought reading' as real.

Which BBC ruling followed the 2015 documentary The Secret World of Lewis Carroll?

The BBC Trust found participants had not been told about a disputed nude photograph the programme built its case on.