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he published over 200 books and pamphlets, as Warren Weaver calculated.61 These include over sixty popularizing works on mathematics and logic, from Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879) to Symbolic Logic (1896); thirty or so devoted to games and puzzles, from Croquet Castles, devised for the Liddells in 1863, to Lawn Tennis Tournaments: The True Way of Assigning Prizes (1883) and his own Game of Logic (1886); a further fifty, taking part in quarrels and contentions at Christ Church, mostly revolving around disputes with the two reformers Jowett and Liddell (the most important of these being collected in Notes by an Oxford Chiel in 1874); and a further fifty or so on miscellaneous public subjects ranging from proportional representation, antivivisectionism (Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection, 1875), to The Stage and the Spirit of Reverence (1888) – one of the perennial bees in his clerical bonnet – and a belated pamphlet, ‘Resident Women Students’ (1896), finally endorsing the principle of higher education for women, not at Oxford itself but in a separate women-only university.62 Many of these ephemeral works cast some light on the mind-set which gave the world the Alice stories and are important for that reason, but it is doubtful that they would be read today were it not for the enduring appeal of the Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark.

Dodgson’s great period was from 1862 to 1876, when he published his dark parodic nonsense epic, The Hunting of the Snark. ‘Had he died in his mid-forties’, one of his biographers reminds us, ‘posterity would have lost much of C. L. Dodgson and little of Lewis Carroll.’63 Even the ultimately misconceived Sylvie and Bruno was originally conceived between the two Alice stories. Dodgson resigned his mathematics lectureship in 1881, but stayed on as a Senior Student of his college, preferring to give occasional lectures on logic at girls’ schools than teach undergraduates. After retirement, he published his most ambitious book on logic, Symbolic Logic, in 1896; his one collection of serious poems, Three Sunsets (1893); and his most ambitious children’s books, the two parts of Sylvie and Bruno, in 1889 and 1893. These were intended, he said, to combine the ‘innocent merriment’ of childhood, with ‘thoughts… not wholly out of harmony with the graver cadences of Life.’64 Though Sylvie and Bruno has its place in the donnish tradition of romance-oriented children’s writing that leads from George Mac-Donald to C. S. Lewis, it’s largely unreadable and unread. Despite its dizzying experiments with time and interlocking narrative, the intrusive adult viewpoint of the narrative and the increasingly didactic preoccupations of the narrator prevent the huge contraption taking off. At its close, ‘not Sylvie’s but an angel’s voice was whispering “IT IS LOVE”.’65 Here, as throughout his last years, the graver cadences have taken over.

Dodgson became increasingly reclusive, ‘lonely’, and moralistic, and, though he liked to dub himself the ‘agèd agèd man’ (after the character in the song from Through the Looking-Glass) his work rate never slackened. Nor, despite his increasingly moralizing public persona, did his taste for the company of young girls, as can be seen in a characteristic letter of 1892:

For my old age I have begun to set ‘Mrs Grundy’ entirely at defiance, and to have girlfriends to brighten, one at a time, my lonely life by the sea: of all ages from ten to twenty-four. Friends ask, in astonishment, ‘did you hear of any other elderly clergyman having young lady-guests in this way?’ and I am obliged to confess I never did: but really I don’t see why they shouldn’t. It is, I think, one of the great advantages of being an old man, that one can do many pleasant things, which are, quite properly, forbidden to a younger man.66

In fact, he had been setting Mrs Grundy at defiance for years, and even as a much younger man doing just these things which he suggests are ‘properly’ forbidden. He had given up nude photography in 1880, soon after Mr and Mrs Owen began to ‘condemn’ this (to him) innocent