You could have safe­ly bet that at some point in this series of blogs I was always going to vis­it a cer­tain trin­i­ty of British uni­ver­si­ty dons who have done more for the lit­er­ary fan­ta­sy genre world­wide than, well, any oth­er trin­i­ty of uni­ver­si­ty dons. Huge. Immense. The Ronal­do, Mes­si and Mbap­pé of children’s fan­ta­sy lit­er­a­ture — I am talk­ing of course about Lewis Car­roll, C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien. If your bet had been an accu­mu­la­tor you would be quids in, too, because I shall cer­tain­ly be vis­it­ing C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien at some point in the future, but for today let’s look at the grandad­dy, that long-time maths pro­fes­sor at Christ Church Oxford, Charles Lutwidge Dodg­son AKA Lewis Car­roll (1832–1898).

Lewis Car­roll, what an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter! First and fore­most, he was a math­e­mati­cian and long-time uni­ver­si­ty schol­ar, spe­cial­is­ing in geom­e­try, alge­bra and log­ic; under his real name, he pub­lished eleven books on maths-relat­ed sub­jects. He was also an avid puz­zler and is cred­it­ed with the inven­tion of the “word lad­der” – you know it, that puz­zle that involves chang­ing one word into anoth­er, one let­ter at a time. He loved word play, amply dis­played in his non­sense poems Jab­ber­wocky (1871) and The Hunt­ing of the Snark (1876).

How­ev­er, it is of course Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (com­mon­ly Alice in Won­der­land) for which Lewis Car­roll will be for­ev­er remem­bered. As we all know, it details the sto­ry of a girl named Alice who falls through a rab­bit hole (and boy, don’t we hear that phrase a lot these days: “going down a rab­bit hole”?) into a fan­ta­sy world of anthro­po­mor­phic crea­tures. Car­roll first out­lined his sto­ry whilst out on row­ing trips on the Thames near Oxford which he often under­took with mem­bers of the Lid­dell fam­i­ly (Hen­ry Lid­dell being the Dean at Christ Church).

When he told the sto­ry to Henry’s daugh­ter Alice Lid­dell, she begged him to write it down, which he duly did and then passed the man­u­script to anoth­er friend and men­tor, the nov­el­ist George Mac­Don­ald. The enthu­si­asm of the Mac­Don­ald chil­dren for the sto­ry encour­aged Car­roll to seek pub­li­ca­tion, and so he approached Macmil­lan Pub­lish­ers, who loved it. After the pos­si­ble alter­na­tive titles were reject­ed – Alice Among the Fairies and Alice’s Gold­en Hour – the work was final­ly pub­lished as Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land in 1865 (fol­lowed up of course by Through the Look­ing-Glass, and What Alice Found There in 1871). The rest, as they say, is his­to­ry.

The artist John Ten­niel pro­vid­ed a bril­liant set of wood-engraved illus­tra­tions for the book, of which we can see a gallery of some of the uni­ver­sal­ly famil­iar char­ac­ters here: