The author, Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll is the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Born in 1832, Dodgson was the son of a reverend who was also a distinguished scholar in mathematics. Dodgson was
the third eldest of eleven children—he had three brothers and seven sisters! As a child, Dodgson enjoyed entertaining his younger siblings with games and fantastical stories that
he invented.When Dodgson was twelve, he started boarding school, which he hated because of his severe shyness and frequent illnesses. He attended college at Oxford, where he earned a degree in mathematics and eventually became a teacher there. His lectures were reportedly quite dull and his research and publications do not represent any significant contributions to mathematics.
As a child and an adult, Dodgson loved games (including croquet, billiards, and chess), word and math puzzles, riddles, ciphers, and codes. He also loved theater and attending the opera. In addition to writing his famous Alice books, he also wrote numerous books on mathematics (all published under his real name), poetry, books for children, and even some mathematics books designed for children. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written almost as an accident of fate—Dodgson was on a boat trip on the Thames with a friend and three sisters, one of whom was Alice Liddell. Alice reportedly grew restless and requested a story with “lots of nonsense in it.” Dodgson obliged, improvising and composing the story as he was telling it. After the trip (and two other boat trips in which the Alice stories continued), Alice begged Dodgson to write it all down.
He eventually composed a manuscript which he originally called “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.” On the advice of author friends, he submitted the book for publication, and eventually changed the title to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because he worried that ‘under ground’ might appear to be about underground mining. Three years after the boat trip, in 1865, the book was published. The sequel, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There was published in 1871.
Today, after the Bible, the Koran, and the works of Shakespeare, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the most quoted book in the world. The story has been translated into 125 different languages and hundreds of editions have been published.
Source: Oregon’s Children’s Theater