Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born in 1832 into a high-church Anglican family and spent most of his life at Christ Church, Oxford, as a scholar, teacher, and reluctant deacon. In 1865 he published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Carroll, followed by Through the Looking-Glass in 1871 - both now cornerstones of Victorian literature. His facility with word play and logic produced Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark, poems in the genre of literary nonsense, and some of Alice's strange reasoning mirrored his published work on mathematical logic. He invented the word ladder puzzle (which he called "Doublets") and saw it run in Vanity Fair between 1879 and 1881. He died in 1898; a century later Westminster Abbey gave him a stone at Poets' Corner, and societies worldwide still gather around the work.