Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27, 1832 - January 14, 1898), also known as writer Lewis Carroll, was a Renaissance man of the Victorian era period people. He was an accomplished mathematician, poet, satirist, philosopher, inventor and photographer in the early days of the art form. However, most of us know him best as a children's author, thanks to Alice and her adventures in Wonderland with nonsense and tea. If you're just seeing him through the mirror, here are some other things you should know.

1. LEWIS CARROLL invented a way to write in the dark.

Like many writers, Dodgson was frustrated by the loss of good ideas that came to him in the middle of the night, so in 1891 he invented the nyctograph. The device was a card with 16 square holes (two rows of eight) that provided the user with a guide for entering a shorthand code of dots and dashes. Dodgson also believed it could be useful for blind people.

2. He suffered from a stutter for most of his life.

Dodgson had a difficult childhood. He developed a stutter — something he called “the hesitation” — at an early age. It stayed with him throughout adulthood and eventually became part of his personal mythology - including the unsubstantiated claim that he only stuttered around adults but had no problem speaking to children. A childhood fever also left him deaf in one ear, and a bout of whooping cough at age 17 crippled him for the rest of his life. Later in life, he suffered debilitating, hallucinating migraines, which doctors diagnosed at the time as epilepsy.

3. Carol is the dodo in Alice in Wonderland.

Dodgson provided the original story concept for Alice in Wonderland while on a boating trip with the children of the Liddell family (his boss Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford), and commemorated this event on July 4, 1862. Book yourself into the caucus. Alice is Alice Liddell, Lory is Lorina Liddell, Eaglet is Edith Liddell, Duck is colleague Reverend Robinson Duckworth, and Dodo is Dodgson himself. Popular stories have it that he used the bird as his caricature because his stutter led him to sometimes introduce himself as "Do-Do-Dodgson," but there is no evidence to support this claim.

4. Carroll explains his inspiration for Alice in the final chapter of Through the Looking Glass.

Throughout his life, Dodgson denied that Alice was based on any real-life person, but "A Ship Under a Sunny Sky," the poem that ends through a looking-glass, was a spelling of Ellie The acrostic poems of Si Pleasence Liddell.

5. He wrote 11 books on mathematics.

As a logician, Dodgson's work in linear algebra, geometry, and puzzles is noteworthy. He has written nearly a dozen books, ranging from "Fundamental Theory of Determinants and Their Application to Simultaneous Linear and Algebraic Equations" to "Logical Games" to "Committee and Election Theory." His interests and expertise were diverse; he also wrote the first printed proof of the Kronecker-Capelli theorem [PDF] and a conceptual system of better *** representations.

6. Alice’s story may be a satire on non-Euclidean mathematics.

Dodgson was a conservative mathematician who lived and worked in an era when the discipline was undergoing tremendous changes. In a 2010 column for ***, Melanie Bailey made a compelling case that Alice's Adventures modeled an earlier concept that featured imaginary numbers and quaternions. Mathematics, Dodgson scoffed at. The Cheshire Cat may represent the field's increasingly abstract concepts, while the overall absurdity of Wonderland may match the "absurdity" traditional Dodgson saw in his subject.

7. Some people believe that Carol is Jack the Ripper.

The list of people suspected of being Jack the Ripper is long, and, for some reason, the idea behind Alice is on it. The Ripper and Dodgson were contemporaries; the murder occurred in 1888, when Dodgson was in his 50s. Author Richard Wallace speculated that Dodgson grew up to become a serial murderer after experiencing a rigorous religious upbringing and potential bullying during his unhappy school years, following a successful teaching and writing career. Most theories stem from Wallace rearranging Dodgson's writing as a "confession." While Dodgson does bury codes and clues throughout his book, scrambling random passages into syntactically awkward statements about killing is more than just a stretch.

8. He is an accomplished photographer.

Beginning in his twenties and continuing for more than two decades, Dodgson created more than 3,000 photographic images, including portraits of friends and famous figures such as Alfred and Lord Tennyson , landscapes, and still images of skeletons, dolls, statues, paintings, and more. According to Lewis Carroll: A Biography, a biography of the artist by Morton N. Cohen, Dodgson had his own studio and briefly considered a career in photography in the 1850s Make a living as a teacher.

9. Carroll was a lifelong bachelor, which led to some speculation about his romantic interests.

Dodgson's photography has also been at the center of modern rethinkings of Dodgson's sexuality. The author was a lifelong bachelor, and 50% of his surviving photographs are depictions of young girls, including Alice Liddell, as well as several images of girls nude. The most famous of these is a portrait of Beatrice Hatch, the daughter of a colleague at Oxford University. Little is known about Dodgson's personal relationship, prompting speculation - especially by Cohen - that he had romantic feelings for 11-year-old Alice, but writer Caroline Leach hinted at redefining Dodgson as The pedophile is a myth born of ignorance of Victorian morals and the popularity of naked children in the art world, coupled with Dodgson's family withholding information about the writer's relationships with adult women.

10. Carol may have been one of the inspirations for the novel "Lolita."

Vladimir Nabokov, who translated "Alice in Wonderland" into Russian, once called Carroll "Lewis Carroll Carroll" because he was the first Humbert Humbert." Nabokov's suspicions centered on Carroll's photographs.

11. He became a deacon but never a priest.

Lewis Carroll, HULTON Archives/Getty Images

Much of Dodgson’s life has sparked speculation, including his refusal to become a clergyman, which coincided with his It was contrary to the rules of the Christian church during my stay there. He was ordained a deacon on 22 December 1861, but had to petition Dean Liddell to avoid becoming a priest. Once again, his stuttering seems a possible explanation for his refusal to enter the priesthood, but there is no evidence that it may have hindered his ability to preach. Other possible reasons included a love of theater (which the Bishop of Oxford disapproved of), tepid interest in the Anglican church, and a growing interest in alternative religions.