One sunny summer afternoon a man went out on the river at Oxford with his boss's daughter. The result was one of the most enchanting stories the world has known.
The man was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson mathematics lecturer at Oxford, better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll. The girl was the ten-year-old daughter of the head of Dodgson's college. Her name was Alice. And the story that he told her was Alice in Wonderland.
Dodgson was a shy man and he stammered. But he had an eccentric sense of humour, and was at ease with children.
He was also an accomplished photographer. He took pictures of eminent nineteenth-century men, and he is famous for his portraits of little girls.
Some of the characters in Alice in Wonderland were actually caricatures. Carroll gave them the mannerisms of professors and Oxford personalities that he and Alice Liddell both knew.
But when the story was published as a book in 1865 it delighted everybody with its comic invention and dream-like fantasy. In 1871 another 'Alice' story was published - Through the Looking Glass.
Queen Victoria was so taken with the stories that she asked for a copy of everything else that Lewis Carroll had written.
She was surprised when a pile of mathematical treatises was delivered to the palace the next day.
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