The Lewis Carroll Collections
Christ Church has a deep association with Charles Lutwidge Dodgson - better known as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, and many other works.
Carroll (1832-1898) matriculated at Christ Church in 1851. He received a first-class degree in mathematics and in 1856 he was appointed to a mathematical lectureship, a position he would hold for twenty-five years.
Between 1882 and 1891 he held the position of Curator of the Common Room. Carroll had an extremely successful career as a mathematician at Oxford. He maintained a lifelong interest in geometry, especially Euclid’s Elements and made contributions to the growing field of symbolic logic. His work on voting systems remains influential.
Christ Church Library holds manuscript and printed material relating to the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and some of his other publications; autograph letters and other manuscripts; photographs; editions of Carroll’s works and works by his friends and colleagues.
The Jon A. Lindseth Lewis Carroll collection, recently donated to Christ Church, covers all areas of Carroll’s output: over 200 autograph letters and other manuscripts; over 100 original Carroll photographs; an extensive number of significant early editions of his works, including the Alice books, The Hunting of the Snark and mathematical works such as The Game of Logic and Symbolic Logic. There are also very important holdings of translations and parodies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as well as a large reference collection.
These collections are in the process of being catalogued. Please contact the Library library@chch.ox.ac.uk if you would like further information or to arrange to see material.
