Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898)

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson famous for writing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass.

Connections with North East England

• Spent early childhood in Croft-on-Tees, North Yorkshire
• Alice Liddell’s father was Dodgson’s Oxford neighbour, but they had in common a connection with the North East. Henry Liddell, born near Sunderland, had industrial interests in the area, and Dodgson, who holidayed in the North East whenever he could, met the family there. He sketched Alice’s sister Frederika on Roker beach, near Sunderland, where Spottie’s Hole in Holey Rock was the entrance to an underground passage, thought to lead to Hylton Castle. It was later bricked up, and does not feature in current guides, but the beach is still popular with tourists. Where more exciting to take your children than to a beach that is also the entrance to Wonderland?
• was the family of Alice Liddell, the little girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland. 
• Whitburn beach is sometimes refereed to as “The Walrus and the Carpenter” beach. Carroll wrote the poem while staying at his cousins’ house in Whitburn.
• Lewis Carroll had a connection with Sunderland as he visited his sister Mary, who married the Reverend Charles Edward Stuart Collingwood and visited his cousin, the Misses Wilcox of Whitburn.
• A bronze sculpture of a walrus is located beside the lake ay Mowbray Park, by the Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens.
• ?the first walrus Carroll ever saw was a stuffed one donated to the Sunderland Museum by his uncle's seafaring colleague, Captain Joseph Wiggins. 
• The children’s playground in Mowbray Park features giant chess pieces as a tribute to Sunderland’s connection to Carroll.
• Alice in Sunderland, in which graphic novelist Bryan Talbot suggests that Lewis Carroll's greatest source of inspiration was the gritty north east.
• "This very pretty and funny book ought to become a great favourite with children. It has this advantage, that it has no moral, and that it does not teach anything." -- The Sunderland Herald 25 May 1866 
• Inspiration from the Lamberton Worm?