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The Worlds of Gilbert and Sullivan

Lewis Carroll was in fact born Charles Lutwidge  Dodgson on 27 January 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, where his father was vicar. After attending Rugby School, Charles graduated from Christ Church College Oxford with first class honours in mathematics in 1854. The following year he was appointed mathematics lecturer at Christ Church. During his time there he published several books on Mathematics and some miniature masterpieces which (to Charles' intense surprise) took the literary world by storm, and delighted children of all ages. 

It is said that Queen Victoria enjoyed the story of Alice in Wonderland so much she requested a copy of his next publication to be sent to her personally. Good as his word he obliged, but the Queen was completely taken aback when she received an almost unreadable treatise on mathematics from him!!

He took the name Lewis Carroll as a pseudonym to publish these children's stories which he thought might damage his professional reputation as the Revd. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, mathematics lecturer at Christ Church College in the University of Oxford.

The Adventures were made up to amuse the three daughters of Dean Liddell of whom Alice, aged eight, was one. She was undoubtedly the books' heroine. His memory as Lewis Carroll is immortalised by the perpetual endowment of a cot in the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital in London.

The two Alice books, Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, are assured the immortality usually reserved for larger Victorian masterpieces. The chapters in these two books are:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

1. Down the Rabbit-Hole
2. The Pool of Tears
3. A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale
4. The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
5. Advice from a Caterpillar
6. Pig and Pepper
7. A Mad Tea-Party
8. The Queen's Croquet Ground
9. The Mock Turtle's Story
10. The Lobster-Quadrille
11. Who Stole the Tarts?
12. Alice's Evidence

Through the Looking-Glass - And What Alice Found There

1. Looking-Glass House
2. The Garden of Live Flowers
3. Looking-Glass Insects
4. Tweedledum and Tweedledee
5. Wool and Water
6. Humpty Dumpty
7. The Lion and the Unicorn
8. "It's My Own Invention"
9. Queen Alice
10. Shaking
11. Waking
12. Which Dreamed It?

Imagine the start of these magnificent stories for children of all ages. A peaceful and highly potential scene: A man and three children gently rowing in a boat on the Isis during a Summer afternoon in Oxford. "Tell us a story, tell us a story . . ."  So, in the words of the great man himself . . .

All in the golden afternoon . . .

Would you like to enter that magic land and join in that Golden Afternoon? Click the optimistic fisherman > > >

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