Alice in Wonderland

Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English (with Irish connections), conservative and high-church Anglican.

Most of Dodgson's male ancestors were army officers or Church of England clergy.

His great-grandfather, Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become the Bishop of Elphin.[1] His paternal grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in Ireland in 1803 when his two sons were hardly more than babies.[2] The older of these sons - yet another Charles Dodgson - was Carroll's father.

He went to Westminster School and then to Christ Church, Oxford.

He reverted to the other family tradition and took holy orders.

He was mathematically gifted and won a double first degree, which could have been the prelude to a brilliant academic career.

Instead, he married his first cousin Frances Jane Lutwidge in 1830 and became a country parson.[3][4]Dodgson was born in All Saints' Vicarage at Daresbury, Cheshire, near Warrington,[5] the eldest boy and the third child.

Eight more children followed. When Charles was 11, his father was given the living of Croft-on-Tees in the North Riding of Yorkshire, and the whole family moved to the spacious rectory.

This remained their home for the next 25 years.Charles's father was an active and highly conservative cleric of the Church of England who later became the Archdeacon of Richmond[6] and involved himself, sometimes influentially, in the intense religious disputes that were dividing the church.

He was high church, inclining toward Anglo-Catholicism, an admirer of John Henry Newman and the Tractarian movement, and did his best to instil such views in his children.

Young Charles was to develop an ambivalent relationship with his father's values and with the Church of England as a whole.This ebook version contains a last chapter of the author Lewis Carroll