Lewis Carroll Trivia
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49 free Lewis Carroll trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Lewis Carroll trivia quiz is about Charles Lutwidge Dodgson himself rather than the plot of Alice: the Cheshire vicarage he was born in, the stammer he called his 'hesitation', the Oxford college he never left, the boat trip up the Thames on 4 July 1862 and the way his pen name was built out of Latin. The easy questions cover the real name, the two Alice books, the illustrator, the college and the little girl who begged him to write the story down. The harder end covers the rejected pseudonyms Edgar Cuthwellis and Louis Carroll, the puzzle he sold to Vanity Fair, the nyctograph for writing in the dark, the stamp case, the roof-top photographic studio, the sitters from Tennyson to Faraday, the only foreign trip he ever made, the mathematics published under his real name, the missing diary pages and the Queen Victoria story he called 'utterly false in every particular'. Every answer was checked against Carroll's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. For the books themselves, our Alice in Wonderland quiz is the natural next stop.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Lewis Carroll's real name?
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He wanted a pen name for the pieces he was getting into print, and his editor picked Lewis Carroll from a list of four he offered.
Q 02In which English county was Carroll born, at All Saints' Vicarage in Daresbury?
Cheshire
Cheshire. The county was linked to a grin long before Alice: people were already saying 'to grin like a Cheshire cat' in the 1700s, so he borrowed the cat's smile from an old saying.
Q 03Young Carroll wrote a series of what for his ten siblings?
Magazines
Magazines. All eleven children were meant to contribute, but he ended up writing nearly everything in the surviving issues himself.
Q 04Which public school, the setting of Tom Brown's School Days, did Carroll attend and dislike intensely?
Rugby
Rugby. He wrote that no earthly consideration would make him repeat his three years there, yet his maths master said he had not taught a more promising boy at the school.
Q 05Alice's journey in Through the Looking-Glass is plotted as the moves of which game?
Chess
Chess. Alice starts as a white pawn on the second square and is promised a crown when she reaches the eighth, just as a pawn is promoted to a queen.
Q 06At which Oxford college did Carroll study, teach and live for the rest of his life?
Christ Church
Christ Church. His place there depended on staying unmarried and taking holy orders, and he held it, along with his college rooms, until he died.
Q 07Which nonsense poem by Carroll gave English the word 'chortle'?
Jabberwocky
Jabberwocky. 'Chortle' is thought to blend chuckle and snort, and Alice can only read the poem at all by holding its back-to-front print up to a mirror.
Q 08Which speech impediment did Carroll have from early childhood?
A stammer
A stammer. He called it his 'hesitation', and the tale that it vanished around children doesn't hold up: many of his child friends remembered it.
Q 09A boyhood illness left Carroll with which lasting disability?
Deafness in one ear
Deafness in one ear. Whooping cough in his teens did further damage, probably causing the weak chest that troubled him for the rest of his life.
Q 10How was the pen name 'Lewis Carroll' constructed?
His first names Latinised, re-Englished and reversed
His first names Latinised, re-Englished and reversed. He also offered his editor an anagram of the same two names, Edgar Cuthwellis, which lost out to this one.
Q 11In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Hatter asks why a raven is like what?
A writing-desk
A writing-desk. The Hatter admits he hasn't the slightest idea of the answer, and Carroll later confirmed that he invented the riddle with no answer at all.
Q 12The pen name Lewis Carroll first appeared in print in 1856 on which kind of work?
A serious poem
A serious poem. Biographers name either 'Solitude' or 'The Path of Roses', both printed in The Train that year, so the name now tied to nonsense began on earnest verse.
Q 13Alice Liddell's father, Henry Liddell, held which post at Carroll's Oxford college?
Dean
Dean. As head of the college he could marry and live in, unlike its unmarried fellows, and Carroll's library office sat close to the family's house.
Q 21The Snark hunters include a Bellman, a Baker, a Butcher and which animal?
A beaver
A beaver. It sits making lace and keeps well away from the Butcher, who can only kill beavers, until a shared fright turns the two into friends for life.
Q 22The poem that closes Through the Looking-Glass hides Alice Liddell's full name using which device?
An acrostic
An acrostic. The first letters of its 21 lines spell out Alice Pleasance Liddell, and he opened The Hunting of the Snark with the same trick for another child friend.
Q 23Carroll's last novel, a fairy tale in two volumes that never matched Alice's success, is called what?
Sylvie and Bruno
Q 14On 4 July 1862 Carroll first told the Alice story to the Liddell girls while doing what?
Rowing on the Thames
Rowing on the Thames. Alice begged him to write the tale down, and he spent more than two years turning it into a handwritten, illustrated book for her.
Q 15What was the title of the handwritten manuscript Carroll gave the Liddells' daughter in November 1864?
Alice's Adventures Under Ground
Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Alice Liddell sold it at auction in 1928, and American book lovers later bought it and gave it to Britain, where the British Library keeps it.
Q 16Whose children's delight in the Alice manuscript persuaded Carroll to seek a publisher?
George MacDonald's
George MacDonald's. The fairy-tale writer's wife read it to their children, and six-year-old Greville declared he wished there were 60,000 volumes of it.
Q 17Which publisher brought out Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865?
Macmillan
Macmillan. The first printing was pulled over poor print quality, and only about twenty of those copies are known to survive, making them some of the rarest Victorian books.
Q 18Who illustrated the first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?
Sir John Tenniel
Sir John Tenniel. Carroll had drawn the pictures for his handwritten version himself, but decided a printed book needed a professional and hired the Punch cartoonist.
Q 19In a tale Carroll called 'utterly false', Queen Victoria asked for his next book and received what?
A mathematics treatise
A mathematics treatise. The tale needs Alice's author and the Oxford mathematician to be openly one man, and he took great pains to keep the two apart in public.
Q 20In Through the Looking-Glass, which character explains the hard words of a nonsense poem to Alice?
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty. He tells her 'slithy' is like a portmanteau, with two meanings packed into one word, and that is how blended words came to be called portmanteaus.
Sylvie and Bruno. Its fairy scenes sit beside grown-up arguments about religion and politics, which his own nephew and biographer thought had scared off hundreds of readers.
Q 24In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, who keeps ordering 'Off with their heads'?
The Queen of Hearts
The Queen of Hearts. For all the shouting, nobody loses a head: the Gryphon tells Alice it is all her fancy and that they never execute anybody.
Q 25Which eminent Victorian sat for Carroll's camera in 1857?
Alfred Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson. A camera was Carroll's way into grand company: as a little-known young don he could still ask the Poet Laureate, Michael Faraday or Ellen Terry to sit for him.
Q 26At Wonderland's Mad Tea-Party, which sleepy animal sits between the Hatter and the March Hare?
The Dormouse
The Dormouse. It dozes through most of the party, and the last thing Alice sees as she walks off is the other two trying to stuff it into the teapot.
Q 27Where at his Oxford college was Carroll's photographic studio?
On the roof of Tom Quad
On the roof of Tom Quad. Early plates needed strong daylight, which is also why he took so many of his portraits outdoors in the Liddells' garden.
Q 28Which word puzzle did Carroll invent in the 1870s?
The word ladder
The word ladder. You change one letter at a time, always leaving a real word, so CAT becomes DOG by way of COT and DOT, and he set them in a weekly column for two years.
Q 29In Wonderland's croquet game, what do the players have to use as mallets?
Flamingos
Flamingos. The balls are live hedgehogs and the hoops are soldiers bent double, and all three keep wandering off in the middle of the game.
Q 30What was the nyctograph, which Carroll invented?
A tablet for writing notes in the dark
A tablet for writing notes in the dark. It spared him getting up to strike a light when an idea woke him: he traced a code of dots and strokes through sixteen square holes in a card.