[[quoteright:325:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lewis-caroll_7798.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:325: The man himself.]]
->''"When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!"''
-->-- '''The White Queen''', from ''Literature/ThroughTheLookingGlass''

Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his PenName Lewis Carroll, was a writer, mathematician, photographer, and Anglican deacon. He was the author of ''Literature/AlicesAdventuresInWonderland'' and its sequel, ''[[Literature/ThroughTheLookingGlass Through the Looking Glass, and what Alice Found There]]''. He also wrote "Literature/{{Jabberwocky}}" and "Literature/TheHuntingOfTheSnark." Also ''Literature/SylvieAndBruno'' and more lesser-known works.

A popular source for the PublicDomainCharacter and still more, the ShoutOut.

Dodgson was also a mathematician who published several works on logic. As one might expect, these are filled with TextbookHumor and nonsensical examples, illustrating the point that in logic what matters is the form of propositions and not their content. His favorite number seems to have been 42.

!!Works by Lewis Carroll with their own trope pages include:
[[index]]
* ''Literature/AlicesAdventuresInWonderland'' (1864) and its sequel, ''Literature/ThroughTheLookingGlass'' (1871)
** "Literature/{{Jabberwocky}}", a poem inserted in ''Through the Looking-Glass''
* ''Literature/TheHuntingOfTheSnark'' (1874)
* ''Literature/SylvieAndBruno'' (1889, 1893)
[[/index]]
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!!Other works by Lewis Carroll provide examples of:
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* AnachronismStew: "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles" is full of it, with both characters mentioning various things that didn't exist in ancient Greece.
* DoubleMeaning: [[https://inkblotsandicebergs.wordpress.com/2018/01/15/square-poem-if-we-both-fall-in-love/ A love poem often attributed to Carroll]] suggests his skill with matrix algebra, as it's constructed in "square poem" format where it can be read both horizontally and vertically like a symmetric matrix.
* FriendToAllChildren: He loved to be around and entertain children, especially the real Alice Liddell, though the myths surrounding his life tend to overstate this. He had many adult friends as well. Downplayed in that he was very much more fond of small girls than of small boys.
* GratuitousIambicPentameter: "Hiawatha's Photographing" is a parody of Creator/HenryWadsworthLongfellow's narrative poem "The Song of Hiawatha". It's preceded by an introduction which is written as normal text, but stealthily follows the same meter as both poems (trochaic tetrameter).
* InstructionalDialogue (though not so much in the Alice books as in his less famous mathematical writings)
* IntergenerationalFriendship: With Alice. Yes, she was real.
* LastSecondPhotoFailure: In "Hiawatha's Photographing", all the posed portraits Hiawatha takes are failures, but the first one in particular is an example of this trope, when its subject makes a slight movement at exactly the wrong time.
* LiteralGenie: A popular myth is that when ''Literature/AliceInWonderland'' was published at the same time as a book of his on mathematical theory, UsefulNotes/QueenVictoria was so charmed by ''Alice'' that she requested Carroll to send her a copy of his next book immediately after it is published. A short time later he sent her "An Elementary Treatise on Determinants: With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraical Geometry", hot off the presses. This alas, is not true.
-->''Postscript to '''Symbolic Logic''': I take this opportunity of giving what publicity I can to my contradiction of a silly story, which has been going the round of the papers, about my having presented certain books to Her Majesty the Queen. It is so constantly repeated, and is such absolute fiction, that I think it worth while to state, once for all, that it is utterly false in every particular: nothing even resembling it has occurred.''
* MidwordRhyme: in "Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur."
* {{Neologism}}: Coined the words "chortle", "portmanteau", "snark", and several others.
* OurGhostsAreDifferent
* PerfectlyCromulentWord: Everywhere.
* {{Portmanteau}}: ''Through the Looking-Glass'' is the TropeNamer.
* RotatingArcs: When you start reading the puzzle-story sequence "A Tangled Tale", originally serialised in ''The Monthly Packet'', it appears that each "Knot" (chapter) is a separate one-off story. It's not until Knot IV that we return to the characters from Knot I, and it slowly becomes apparent that the whole thing is indeed a single [[KudzuPlot tangled tale]].
* SameFaceDifferentName: His books on mathematics were published under his real name, Charles Dodgson. But when it came time for him to write fantasy novels, he used the name "Lewis Carroll", the name by which he is far better known today.
* SillySpook: The nameless ghost in [[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/651/651-h/651-h.htm "Phantasmagoria"]] is a bit of a goof with a taste for awful puns. He also mooches food and drink off the narrator.
* SpeechImpediment: Suffered from a stutter throughout a life, which possibly inspired him caricaturing himself as the Dodo in ''Alice in Wonderland'', referring to the difficulty he had in pronouncing the start of his own surname.
* SignificantAnagram: Carroll was a master of word games, peppering his works with anagrams and acrostics and other sophisticated wordplay.
* ThisIsMyNameOnForeign: "Lewis Carroll" is a play on the Latin versions of his real first two names.
* ThriftyScot: In "The Lang Coortin'".
* WantonCrueltyToTheCommonComma: He held the view that the single apostrophe in the words "can't", "shan't" and "won't" weren't doing the job of indicating ''all'' the missing letters, so he wrote them "ca'n't", "sha'n't" and "wo'n't". An interesting example of the trope, in that he was following the rules of punctuation ''more'' consistently and logically than normal, and would probably have accused the normal method of perpetrating the wanton cruelty.
* YouAreFat: The narrator of the poem "Size and Tears" complains that he's being stalked by a rival who delights in mocking his stout figure.
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