“Lewis Carroll,” creator of the brilliantly witty Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was a pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a shy Oxford don with a stammer.

He was born at Daresbury, Cheshire on January 27, 1832, son of a vicar. As the eldest boy among eleven children, he learned early to amuse his siblings by writing and editing family magazines. He was educated at Christ Church College, Oxford, where he lectured in mathematics from1855 to 1881. In 1861 he was ordained as a deacon.

Dodgson’s entry into the world of fiction was accidental. It happened one “golden afternoon” as he escorted his colleague’s three daughters on a trip up the river Isis. There he invented the story that might have been forgotten if not for the persistence of the youngest girl, Alice Liddell. Thanks to her, and to her encouraging friends, Alice was published in 1865, with drawings by the political cartoonist, John Tenniel. After Alice, Dodgson wrote Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869), Through the Looking-Glass (1871), The Hunting of Shark (1876, and Rhyme? and Reason? (1883).

As a mathematician Dodgson is best known for Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879). He was also a superb children’s photographer, who captured the delicate, sensuous beauty of such little girls as Alice Liddell and Ellen Terry, the future actress. W.H. Auden called him “one of the best portrait photographer of the century.” Dodgson was also an inventor; his projects included a game of arithmetic croquet, a substitute for glue, and an apparatus for making notes in the dark. Though he sought publication for his light verse, he never dreamed his true gift–telling stories to children–merited publication or lasting fame, and he avoided publicity scrupulously Charles Dodgson died in 1898 of influenza.

From Publishers Weekly

Publishing a newly illustrated edition of a children's classic is a risky undertaking: Is there really a need, for example, for another excursion down the rabbit hole with Alice? However, when the work is graced with Weevers's elegant watercolors, the answer is a resounding yes. Encountering the sublime cover painting, the reader senses instantly that here is no commonplace Alice : only slightly bedraggled, the plucky heroine paddles valiantly through the pool of tears, with stately birds and a solitary mouse in tow. In this volume Weevers ( The Hare and the Tortoise , Herbert Binns and the Flying Tricycle ) has produced his most sophisticated and lavishly detailed paintings to date. A magnificently liveried, haughty lobster sneers as he grooms fastidiously; a dolorous King of Hearts and his indignant consort preside at a tasty trial, heedless of the courtroom banner proclaiming Amor vincit omnia --love will certainly not conquer this pair. Rendered in a traditional style, unlike the surrealistic approach chosen by Anthony Browne in his recent edition of Alice , these illustrations are set amidst a treasure trove of Victoriana: Alice plummets past a dusty bell jar surrounded by crumbling leatherbound volumes, the Duchess perches on a Chinese oriental carpet beside a tufted leather footstool. This is an Alice to revisit again and again. Ages 8-up.