Lewis Carroll's fascination with children inspired his contributions both to writing and to portrait photography. He is known primarily as the author the children's classics Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), written for Alice Liddell, daughter of Carroll's friend Dean Liddell. Alice was also the subject of one of Carroll's first successful photographs taken in 1856. Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the eldest son of the Reverend Charles Dodgson. He was educated at Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford, where he lived from 1851 until his death in 1898. In 1852 he became a student of Christ Church and four years later began to lecture in mathematics. In 1861 he was ordained a deacon. In 1855 Carroll's uncle, an amateur photographer, introduced him to the calotype process, but it was not until Carroll had seen the annual exhibition at the Photographic Society of London in January 1856 that photography became his passion. On his return to Oxford Carroll and another student together bought wet-collodion apparatus. He was self-taught, and for locations used his rooms in college, the Deanery, or sometimes hired a studio. He photographed his intellectual contemporaries, including the Rossettis, Alphonse Legros, Arthur Hughes, and Alexander Munro. He stopped taking pictures abruptly in 1880.
Artist Bibliography
1899
Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson. The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (Rev. C.L. Dodgson). London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899.
1949
Gernsheim, Helmut. Lewis Carroll: Photographer. London: Parish, 1949.
1980
Carroll, Lewis. Lewis Carroll and the Kitchins: Containing twenty-five letters not previously published and nineteen of his photographs, edited by Morton N. Cohen. New York: Argosy Bookstore, 1980.
1980
Gernsheim, Helmut. Lewis Carroll, A Victorian Photographer. Paris: Editions du Chêne, 1980.