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Friday afternoon, July 4, 1862, a rowing party left Oxford to go on an outing up the Thames River. At the forward set of oars, dressed in white flannels and a straw boater, was Charles Dodgson, a thirty-year-old lecturer in mathematics. Rowing as well was his friend, Robinson Duckworth, another Oxford fellow. Their passengers, seated at the bow and stern of the gig, were the three young Liddell girls, daughters of the Dean of Christ Church, the college where Dodgson taught. The eldest, Lorina, who was thirteen, demanded that Dodgson tell them a story as he'd often done before. The middle sister, ten-year-old Alice, Dodgson's special favorite, seconded the request more nicely. And she asked that the story have nonsense in it. In most situations, Charles Dodgson was an intensely inhibited man. He hid out from life in his teaching position which required him to take nominal religious vows and remain unmarried. He was meticulous and proper and feared ridicule. When he had to talk to adults, he stammered, and the opinions he expressed were always conservative and conventional. Some of his students thought he was the most boring teacher they'd ever had. But there was another side to this man that could be brought out by a young girl encouraging him to talk nonsense. He didn't stammer then. Instead he became capable of saying anything at all that popped into his head. This is a rare gift. Most people aren't able to place everything they're sure they know on hold and then just make stuff up, saying whatever outrageous, unlikely or impossible thing happens to fly off the tongue next. But this shy young man, who ordinarily found speaking so difficult that his very fear of being made fun of turned him into a figure of fun, was practiced at doing this for the right sort of audience. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson had grown up in relative social isolation as the third child and eldest son of a country parson. He was a precocious boy who took his greatest pleasure in entertaining his seven sisters and three younger brothers. He set up a railroad line in the garden with stations and tickets. He dressed up as a sorceror in a brown wig and white robes and did magic for them. And he built a marionette theater where he performed puppet plays which he wrote himself. Over a period of time, from 1845 to this very year of 1862, he even produced a series of magazines by hand for his family featuring his own drawings and writings. The last of these, a scrapbook entitled Mischmasch, included a so-called "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry" written when he was twenty-three. It went: His explanation of this, after learned definitions of all the strange words, was: "Hence the literal English of the passage is: 'it was evening, and the smooth active badgers were scratching and boring holes in the hill-side; all unhappy were the parrots; and the grave turtles squeaked out.' " To this, he added: "There were probably sundials on the top of the hill, and the 'borogoves' were afraid that their nests would be undermined. The hill was probably full of the nests of 'raths', which ran out, squeaking with fear, on hearing the 'toves' scratching outside.

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