The Birth of a Genius

All his life, Carroll was a scholar; when he was not a student, he was a teacher, and until two years before his death, he was firmly imbedded in the life of Oxford University. Quite honestly, though, nothing very exciting ever happened in Carroll's life, apart from a trip to the Continent, including Russia. His vacations were all local ones, to his sister's home in Guildford, his aunt's home in Hastings, and to Eastbourne, the Lake Country, and Wales. He did not begin his formal schooling until the age of twelve, when he enrolled in Richmond Grammar School, ten miles from the Croft Rectory, but he had already received a thorough background in literature from the family library. Yet it was mathematics — and not English literature — that interested Carroll most. When he was very young, for example, Carroll implored his father to explain logarithms to him, presumably because he had already mastered arithmetic, algebra, and even most of Euclidian geometry.

Carroll entered Rugby in 1846, but the sensitive young child found the all-boys environment highly unpleasant; the bullying abuse, the flogging, and the caning was a daily part of school life. Nonetheless, Carroll was, despite his three years of unhappiness there, an exceedingly studious boy, and he won many prizes for academic excellence.

Carroll matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1851, and remained there for forty-seven years. But, two days after entering Oxford, he received word of his mother's death, something which deeply distressed him and seemed to have worsened his stammering. By all accounts, Carroll was not an outgoing student; with little money, and because of his stammer, his circle of friends always remained small. Yet in his academic work, he applied himself with the same energy and devotion that characterized his career at Rugby. He won scholarship prizes, honors in Classical exams, and also won a First Prize in Mathematics. His scholastic efforts were rewarded by a lifetime fellowship and a residency at Christ Church, so long as he remained unmarried and proceeded to take Holy Orders.

In 1854, the year Carroll took his B.A. degree, he began publishing poetry in the student magazines and in The Whitby Gazette. Carroll's writings had already established him as both a superb raconteur and humorist at Oxford, and in 1854, he began to seriously teach himself how to express his thoughts in proper literary form; it was at that time that his writings began to show some of the whimsy and fantasy that are contained in the Alice books.

In 1857, Carroll took his M.A. degree and was made "Master of the House." During those years, he immersed himself in literature, mathematics, and also in the London theater. He produced freelance humorous prose pieces and verses for various periodicals, explored theories of dual identities, wrote satires, published mathematical and symbolic logic texts, invented word games and puzzles, and took up photography, a hobby that would make him famous as one of the best Victorian photographers. In short, Carroll became a sort of lesser English equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci. He invented the Nyctograph, a device for writing in the dark, and he also invented a method of remote control self-photography. Helmut Gernshein, the author ofLewis Carroll: Photographer, calls Carroll's photographic achievements "astonishing"; in his estimation, Carroll "must not only rank as a pioneer of British amateur photography, but I would also unhesitatingly acclaim him as the most outstanding photographer of children in the nineteenth century."

His new duties notwithstanding, Dodgson was able to pursue his literary interests. In 1856 and 1857 he composed a set of literary pieces specifically for the journal The Train. These included “Solitude,” “Novelty and Romancement,” “The Three Voices,” “The Sailor’s Wife,” “Hiawatha’s Photographing,” “Upon the Lonely Moor,” and “Ye Carpette Knyghte.” Their tones range from serious to humorous; Dodgson’s disposition toward parody was expressed through “Hiawatha’s Photographing,” which retained the meter of its famous counterpart, and “Upon the Lonely Moor,” which parodied William Wordsworth‘s poem “Resolution and Independence“ (1802). “Upon the Lonely Moor” was later to serve as a model for the White Knight’s ballad in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). 

From 1858 until the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dodgson’s output included mathematical and literary topics, including The Fifth Book of Euclid (1858), A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry (1860), The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry(1861), The Enunciations of ... Euclid, Books I and II (1863), and A Guide to the Mathematical Student (1864). The number of such publications would grow as his career advanced, striking a peculiar and interesting juxtaposition between the abstract but acceptable world of numbers and the intangible and less credible one of fancy.