Lewis Carroll

Oxford knew him as Dodgson: mathematics lecturer, deacon, photographer, a man of committees and ciphers. He wrote Euclid’s defense, symbolic logic, puzzles that bite, a way to count votes, university rows in pamphlet form, a snark hunt that ends in a vanishing, and two late novels so stuffed with sermons and talking creatures that the crowd would not follow. He never took priest’s orders. He wrote letters by the thousand. Wonderland ate the name. The don was still at his desk.