Charles Dodgson aged about 25

He left Rugby at the end of 1849 and, after an interval which remains unexplained, went on in January 1851 to Oxford: to his father's old college, Christ Church. He had only been at Oxford two days when he received a summons home. His sweet and beloved mother had died of "Inflammation of the Brain" -- perhaps meningitis or a stroke -- at the age of forty-seven. Whatever Dodgson's feelings may have been about this death, he recorded nothing of them for posterity, and indeed there is no record of his ever mentioning his mother either in the private diary he began keeping two years after her death, or in any surviving letters. The reasons for this curious silence can only be guessed at, yet there are indications that the image of the loving mother was an exceedingly meaningful one to Dodgson, possibly too meaningful and too painful to be directly alluded to even in his most private writing. After Frances Jane's death, her sister Lucy moved in with the family to take care of the children. She remained a much-loved member of the household until her death in 1880, and Dodgson's diaries and letters are full of quietly affectionate references to 'Aunt L'.

At Oxford Charles Dodgson the undergraduate may not always have worked hard, but he was exceptionally gifted and achievement came easily to him. In December 1852 he achieved a first in Honour Moderations, and shortly after he was nominated to a Studentship (the Christ Church equivalent of a fellowship), by his father's old friend Canon Edward Pusey. He was to remain a Student at Christ Church for the rest of his life.

The young adult Charles Dodgson was about six foot tall, slender and handsome in a soft-focused dreamy sort of way, with curling brown hair and blue eyes. At the unusually late age of seventeen he suffered a severe attack of whooping cough which left him with poor hearing in his right ear and was probably responsible for his chronically weak chest in later life, but the only overt defect he carried into adulthood was what he referred to as his "hesitation" -- a stammer he had acquired in early childhood and which was to plague him throughout his entire life. It is part of the mythology that Carroll only stammered in adult company, and was free and fluent with children, but there is nothing to support this idea. Many children of his acquaintance remembered the stammer; many adults failed to notice it. It came and went for its own reasons, but almost certainly not as a simplistic manifestation of fear of the adult world. Dodgson himself seems to have been far more acutely aware of it than most people he met. But, although his stammer troubled him -- even obsessed him sometimes -- it was never bad enough to stop him using his other qualities to do well in society.

In direct contradiction of the myth, he was not a desperately shy man. In fact he was naturally quite gregarious, egoistic enough to relish a certain amount of attention and admiration. At a time when people devised their own amusements, when singing and recitation were required social skills, this youth was well-equipped as an engaging entertainer. He could sing tolerably well and was not afraid to do so in front of an audience. He was adept at mimicry and story-telling. He was something of a star at charades. He could be charming, pushy, manipulative, with the kind of ready sensitivity that girls and women of a certain kind are apt to find irresistible. His diaries give little away about his spiritual and emotional life, but there are brief hints at a soaring sense of the spiritual and the divine; small moments that reveal a rich and intensely-lived inner life. 'That is a wild and beautiful bit of poetry, the song of "call the cattle home",' he suddenly observed, in the midst of an analysis of Kingsley's novel Alton Locke :

I remember hearing it sung at Albrighton: I wonder if any one there could have entered into the spirit of Alton Locke. I think not. I think the character of most that I meet is merely refined animal... How few seem to care for the only subjects of real interest in life.

This moment of unusual frankness, allowing the sense of himself as a deeply feeling, somewhat unusual human being out of step with the 'refined animal' of polite society, gives us a rare glimpse of young Dodgson's inner mind. Alas he says nothing more of what he considered the 'only subjects of real interest' to be.

Perhaps unsurprisingly in such an emotional young man, with so many competing interests in his life, his early academic career veered between high octane promise, and irresistible distraction. Through his own laziness, he failed an important scholarship, but still his clear brilliance as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship, which he continued to hold for the next 26 years. It was a job he probably did for the money and the consequent 'independence' it gave him, having little enjoyment in his work. His real ambitions lay outside academia. He wanted to be a writer. From earliest adolescence, if not before, he was writing; poetry, short stories, for his family magazines, and by the mid 1850s he was sending his work to various magazines, already enjoying moderate success. Between '54 and '56, his work appeared in the national publications, The Comic Times and The Train, as well as smaller magazines like the Whitby Gazette and the Oxford Critic. Most of his output was comic, sometimes sharply satirical. But his standards and his ambitions were exacting. "I do not think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication (in which I do not include the Whitby Gazette or the Oxonian Advertiser), but I do not despair of doing so some day," he wrote in July 1855. Years before Alice, he was thinking up ideas for children's books that would make money: 'Christmas book [that would] sell well...Practical hints for constructing Marionettes and a theatre'. His ideas got better as he got older, but the canny mind, with an eye to income, was always there. < In addition, he never had any shortage of other interests to distract him. He loved the theatre and the arts in general and the happiest times of his young life were spent away from Oxford enjoying the artistic pleasures of London. Then, in 1856 he took up the new art form of photography. He excelled at it and it became an expression of his very personal inner philosophy; a belief in the divinity of what he called "beauty" by which he seemed to mean a state of moral or aesthetic or physical perfection. This, along with his lifelong passion for the theatre was to bring him into confrontation with the Moral Majority of his day and his own family's High Church beliefs.

According to his biographer and nephew Stuart Collingwood, young Charles began to keep a diary almost as soon as he could write, and he apparently kept it regularly, as Collingwood says there was only one notable gap - for the three years that Dodgson as at Rugby School. Strangely, all record of these very early diaries seems to have vanished. However in about 1853 Dodgson began a new series of numbered diary volumes which he continued to keep until his death, and most of these do survive, although even here the record is not complete.

Some time after his death, some members of his family deliberately cut out and destroyed certain pages, while four of the 13 volumes, including two consecutive ones covering the years 1858-62 went missing and have never been recovered.

The fate of these volumes and the reasons why his descendants took scissors and razor to his life's record is just one of the many mysteries and anomalies that surround the man who was 'Lewis Carroll'. Most of this missing material dates from a single decade (between 1853 and 1863), and is so extensive that it amounts to five and a half years of missing time. Over half the record for a single ten-year period of Dodgson's life is thus missing and we currently have no firm idea of why. The loss of this material means that there is very little information about what he was doing or thinking during this very important and formative time. The story is fragmentary and there is more unknown than there is known.

Ina, Alice and Edith Liddell, photographed by Dodgson,

In 1856 he published his first piece of work under the name that would make him famous. A very predictable little romantic poem called "Solitude" appeared in The Train under the authorship of 'Lewis Carroll'.

In the same year, Christ Church acquired a new Dean (head of college), when Thomas Gaisford died and was replaced by one Henry George Liddell, who brought with him a young wife and children, all of whom would figure largely in Dodgson's life over the following years. Dodgson quite quickly became close friends with the mother and the children. They were a beautiful family. The mother, Lorina, was a "beauty of the Spanish type", and her children had inherited her dark comeliness which was exactly the kind Dodgson liked to photograph. He made many studies of the family, especially his three favourites the sisters Ina, Alice and Edith. Although the diaries covering the period of the developing friendship are now missing, it appears that his friendship with the family blossomed, and there became something of a tradition of his taking the children out on the river for picnics at Godstow or Nuneham.

It was on one such expedition, in 1862, that Dodgson invented the outline of the story that eventually became his first and largest commercial success -- the first Alice book. Having told the story and been begged by Alice Liddell to write it down, Dodgson was evidently struck by its potential to sell well. After consulting various friends, including the author George MacDonald, he took the MS to Macmillan the publisher who liked it immediately. Bravely, or crazily, Dodgson undertook to pay for the cost of publication himself in return for 90% of the royalties. Even though his income was well above the national average at £500 per annum, this was still a considerable risk. In the end, though, the gamble was to pay off, and by the end of his life the two 'Alice' books had grossed him approximately £50,000.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, under the pen-name Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier -- Lewis Carroll.