It was also the time when the eccentric inventor came to light. The White Knight in Through The Looking-Glass is the forefather of such boffins and, while he bears an obvious resemblance to Don Quixote – the eccentric hero of Cervantes’ great Spanish novel – it is generally agreed that Carroll intended the White Knight to be a parody of himself. With the repeated phrase, “It’s my own invention,” he proudly explains a number of the ingenious contraptions that are hanging from his saddle.

These each have some major design fault – for example, a box for keeping clothes and sandwiches is positioned upside down so rain can’t get into it, but its contents have fallen out. Pointless precautions are very much in the White Knight’s line too, like the mousetrap in case the horse’s back becomes infested with mice, and its ankle-spikes to guard against shark-bites.

Carroll was perhaps being a little unkind to his own genius as an inventor. Among his creations was the travelling chess-set, with pegs to fix the pieces into the board, while in 1880 he conceived what may be seen as a prototype of the board-game Scrabble, which he named Doublets. This, another type of Carroll’s beloved word games, preceded the crossword, the first example of which (by British-born journalist Arthur Wynne) only appeared in an American newspaper in 1913.

A matter of logic

As well as being a mathematician, Carroll was also a logician, a branch of learning that was eventually superseded in the universities by philosophy. Propositions in logic contained all the formal rigour (and some would say elegance) of equations in algebra. Whether something held water logically was a matter of fine-tuned analysis.

A famous example is what's known as a syllogism, sometimes known as circular reasoning: 'Socrates was a man. I am a man. Therefore I am Socrates.' Faulty deductions of this type are still much used in modern-day argument. See whether you can spot an instance of it next time you hear a politician being interviewed!

The Wonderland and Looking-Glass worlds are riddled with logical conundrums, to which the seven-year-old Alice is impressively alert. Subjected to an oral examination by the Red and White Queens, to qualify her to become a Queen herself towards the end of Through the Looking-Glass, Alice is asked what remains when a bone is taken away from a dog.

She reasons that the bone wouldn't remain as she would have taken it, the dog wouldn't remain since it would come after her, and therefore she wouldn't remain either. So the answer must be nothing. The Red Queen retorts that she is "wrong as usual". The correct answer allegedly is that "the dog's temper would remain", because if the dog had departed, its temper would be left behind. "Alice said, as gravely as she could, 'They might go different ways.' "

Fixing images

Of all the technologies, the one Carroll was most involved with was photography. The technique of fixing an image onto paper had been simultaneously developed by French and British pioneers in the early 19th century. English founding father William Henry Fox Talbot invented a means of transferring a photographic negative on to another piece of paper as a positive image. He called his new invention the “calotype”.

By the 1850s, Frederick Scott Archer had perfected the wet collodion process, which captured the image on a glass plate coated with light-sensitive chemicals. Carroll took his first pictures using this technique in 1856.

Carroll was regarded as one of the foremost artistic photographers of his day, collaborating on a number of pictures with another great early practitioner, Julia Margaret Cameron. Among Carroll’s early subjects was the six-year-old Alice Liddell, whom he photographed in various naturalistic and imaginative poses in the years before the famous boat-trip was undertaken. Cameron, too, was to photograph Alice as a grown woman in 1872.

Carroll was also something of a celebrity snapper. Among his sitters were the painters William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, scientist Michael Faraday, poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, actress Ellen Terry and even Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria’s youngest son – with whom Alice Liddell herself enjoyed a courtship that would have culminated in marriage, had it not been for the Queen’s concern that her son didn’t marry beneath his station.

It was the portraits of children, though, some of them hand-tinted to look like watercolours, for which Carroll has become best-known. When you consider that even the highly advanced collodion process required sitters to remain perfectly still for at least 40 seconds, to prevent blurring, the clarity of his studies of small children is all the more remarkable.

Although Carroll only published just over 100 pictures during his lifetime, we know his total output ran into thousands. In July 1880, he suddenly gave up – perhaps because he came to see it as too time-consuming – and never picked up a camera again.

The story's end

Ironically, it may well have been that updated technology was indirectly responsible for Carroll’s death in 1898 at the age of 65. On a visit to his sisters in Guildford, he developed the symptoms of influenza, and died after complications that led to pneumonia. It has been speculated that the cause could have been a new heating system he’d had installed in his home to replace the old gas burners. Use of this gave him the heavy chill that worsened over time into the fatal illness.