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the family’s image of her as ideal Victorian Mother), and six years after he left Oxford, they settled in the remote parish of Daresbury, where he was appointed curate (it was in the gift of Christ Church). The first eleven years of young Charles Dodgson’s life were spent in this crowded rural parsonage, dominated by his father’s strong intellectual personality and the rituals of Anglican piety and family games. During these first years of what his nephew called ‘complete seclusion from the world’,20 young Charles, his seven sisters and two brothers were educated at home by their mother, and subjected to a heavy daily dose of High Church Christianity from their father.

Though Stuart Dodgson Collingwood retails family anecdotes about his climbing trees and making friends with snails and toads or encouraging ‘civilised warfare among earthworms’,21 modern biographers have little to go on when trying to imagine Dodgson’s formative years in this formative place. His child friend Isa Bowman called him ‘the man who above all others has understood childhood’22 and Virginia Woolf thought that ‘childhood remained in him entire’ all his life, persisting as an ‘impediment in the centre of his being’.23 He said himself that children were ‘three-fourths’ of his ‘life’,24 and the cult of childhood was clearly central to his entire adult life. This makes it the more surprising that, apart from in a couple of early poems, Dodgson never talked about his own childhood, his family, early games or reading. In ‘Faces in the Fire’, written in 1860, he evokes ‘the happy place where I was born’, ‘an island farm’ amid ‘broad seas of corn’,25 and in ‘Solitude’ (the first poem to bear the signature of ‘Lewis Carroll’, written when he was twenty-one) he invokes ‘the golden hours of Life’s young spring/Of innocence, of love and truth’, affirming he would give all his adult wealth ‘To be once more a little child/For one bright summer-day’. These are surprising sentiments for a twenty-one-year-old student perhaps, but not for the period.26 They tell us more about the post-Wordsworthian romance of childhood than about Dodgson’s own early life.

In 1843, the Reverend Charles Dodgson, who by then had completed an edition of Tertullian commissioned by Pusey in addition to running his quiet Cheshire parish, acquired the larger, altogether less secluded parish of Croft on Tees in North Yorkshire, thanks to Bishop Longley’s intervention with the Prime Minister, Robert Peel. The vicarage at Croft was much grander, set in a big well-tended garden, close to the newly built railway and industrial Darlington. The family grew larger too, since before long Mrs Dodgson gave birth to another son. Thereafter the eleven Dodgson children seemed to thrive in the new rectory, with its greater space and access to the wider world. They were to remain a close-knit family throughout their long lives. One of their odder shared characteristics was a chronic stammer. Charles himself had to battle with a stammer all his life (he had regular speech therapy as an adult), and six of his seven sisters were stammerers too. The ‘Dodo’ of Wonderland represents the first syllables of his stammered surname – ‘Do-Do-Dodgson’ – and it may be that his fine ear for linguistic nonsense, and for semantic and logical impediments of all kinds, had some relation to his speech impediment.

In 1844 Charles’s school education began, setting up the rhythm that shaped the rest of his life. Henceforward, there was to be an oscillation between serious all-male academic life on the one hand and the company of young children – mainly girls – on the other. He went first as a boarder to Richmond School, ten miles from home, where his headmaster noticed ‘an uncommon share of genius’ and what was to become a highly characteristic inability to ‘rest satisfied without a most exact solution of whatever seems to him most obscure’. Two years later the fourteen-year-old Dodgson found himself further from home and from happiness in that archetypal nineteenth-century public school, Rugby, where he arrived shortly after