I Heart Classics

1. Carroll’s real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.  Lewis Carroll was just a pen name.
2. Carrol, unfortunately, suffered from several ailments including a stammer, deafness in one ear (a result of a fever he had as a young boy), epilepsy and ADHD!
3. Besides being the writer of one of the world’s most beloved children’s books of all time, Carroll was a deacon and a math teacher at Oxford.
4. Carroll first told the story of Alice on July 4, 1862, during a boating picnic trip on the Isis branch of the Thames.
5. In his youth, Carroll liked to dabble in photography (just as the art was beginning); however, some of his portraits (mainly of little girls) were seen as controversial and eventually led him to stop his photographic endeavors. 
6. Carroll was an intensely private man during his life.  When he died, four of his 13 personal diaries were destroyed or lost.  The remaining nine are missing pages, prompting speculation into Carroll’s inner workings.
7. Carroll published several books on mathematics under his real name (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) including Two Books of Euclid (1860), Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867), Examples in Arithmetic (1874), and Curiosa Mathematica, Part I: A New Theory of Parallels (1888).
8. Carroll’s epitaph reads, “Where I am there shall also my servant be.”
9. The pen name, ‘Lewis Carrol’ (which he started to use in 1856), is an anglicized form of his given name (‘Lewis’ is an anglicized form of ‘Ludovicus’ which is Latin for ‘Lutwidge’; while, ‘Carroll’ is from ‘Carolus’, the Latin for Charles).
10. He had 10 siblings! Seven sisters (Frances, Elizabeth, Caroline, Mary, Margaret, Louisa, and Henrietta) and three brothers (Skeffington, Wilfred, and Edwin).
11. Carroll gave the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to his wife, Alice Liddell, as a Christmas present in 1864.
12. Since Carroll’s copyright ended in 1907, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has never gone out of print.
13. After reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Queen Victoria, having loved the book, suggested that Carroll dedicate his next book to her!  And so, his next work, An Elementary Treatise on Determinants was presented to the Queen.

1. “If you drink much from a bottle marked ‘poison’ it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.”
   
2. “Curiouser and curiouser!”
   
3. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
   
4. “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, because I’m not myself, you see.”
   
5. “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” said Alice.
   “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the cat. “We’re all mad here.”
   
6. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
   “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
   “I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
   “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
   
7. Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
   
8. “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice, “But a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”
   
9. “Now, I give you fair warning,” shouted the Queen, stamping on the ground as she spoke, “Either you or your head must be off, and that in about half no time! Take your choice!”
   
10. “Beware the Jabberwalk, my son!
    The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”

In honor of Lewis Carroll’s 179th birthday, here are some awesome pieces of art inspired by his most famous work, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

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