Lewis Carroll's Career

Charles Dodgson’s (or Lewis Carroll’s) professional literary career spans from 1865- till his death in 1898. When he was young, he wrote poems and small literary works, that he contributed to the family magazine Mishmasch. He also sent these small works to various magazines, achieving moderate success. Between 1854 and 1856, his work appeared in the national publications, The Comic Times and The Train, as well as smaller magazines such as the Whitby Gazette and the Oxford Critic. Dodgson’s career as a professional writer started with the publishing of a romantic poem called “solitude” that was published in The Trains under his pen name Lewis Carroll. Throughout his career he would go on to use this name under all his literary works. His next work was Alice’s Adventures in Wonder land. This was to be title that would make him famous. The book was published in 1865. The unanticipated commercial success of
the first Alice book changed Dodgson’s life in several ways. He became wealthy rather quickly and the name “Lewis Carroll” became renowned around the world. Though he achieved great commercial success, he continued with his post at Christ Church. Some years later in 1871, he published a sequel to the first Alice book titled Through the Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There. The sequel portrayed a darker tone than the first Alice book, and it is suggested that it was because of the troubles that Dodgson was going through during that time, dealing with his father’s death that put him into a deep depression for some years (Cohen, Morton N). Like its predecessor, Through the looking glass achieved great commercial success. In 1876, Dodgson published his last great literary work, The Hunting of the Snark. Unlike the Alice books, this work is a poem with a fantastical flare, but like the Alice books, it too achieved great success. His last novel, the two-volume Sylvie and Bruno, was published in 1889 and 1893 respectively. Due to its confusion baffling most readers, it achieved little success.


Before becoming a professional writer, Dodgson was a gentleman photographer. A recent study exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over fifty percent of his surviving work depicts young girls,though this may be a highly distorted figure as approximately 60% of his original photographic portfolio is now missing (Taylor, Roger; Wakeling, Edward). Dodgson also made many studies of men, women, male children and landscapes; his subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues and paintings, and trees.


Apart from writing poems and novels, Dodgson also excelled at writing arithmetic text books. He primarily worked in subjects of geometry, matrix algebra, and mathematical logic. He produced nearly a dozen of significant books which advanced the knowledge of the subjects for their time. The his mathematical work was so well received that it firmly placed him within the middle ranks of professional mathematicians during the period in which he worked, and he was one of the leading British mathematicians of the era.

Works Cited


Taylor, Roger; Wakeling, Edward. Lewis Carrol: Photographer. 25 February 2002.

Cohen, Morton N. Lewis Carroll: A Biography. Vintage Books. 26 November 1996.