– Introduction –

Lewis Carroll was extraordinary. Writer, teacher, mathematician, clergyman, photographer, puzzler, poet, he was born on 27 January 1832 and died on 14 January 1898. During his sixty-six years, he did something that very few others have achieved in the entire history of humanity: he created an imaginary world and a raft of characters that became instantly famous across the globe. They are famous still, and, I reckon, will be for the rest of time. Lewis Carroll was a brilliant and complicated human being: tall, slim, awkward, amusing, shy, he had a unique way with words yet suffered from a life-long stammer. He was also an insomniac. This little book (conceived and compiled by me in the 1970s though entirely written by him in Victorian times) will show you how ingeniously this extraordinary man dealt with his sleepless nights.

Lewis Carroll has long been a hero of mine. I fell in love with the heroine ofAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland when I was a little boy living in London in the 1950s and was taken to a stage adaptation ofThrough the Looking-Glass starring a young Juliet Mills as Alice. I became fascinated by him in my early twenties when the veteran British entertainer Cyril Fletcher asked me to create a one-man show based on the life and work of Lewis Carroll. That’s when I learnt about his insomnia. In the first act of my one-man play, the great man was in his Oxford college rooms talking to himself as he tried (and failed) to get to sleep. In the second act, he was in bed having dreams (and nightmares) peopled by the characters he had created, from the Mad Hatter to the Frumious Bandersnatch. In the 1980s I devised anAlice in Wonderland board game that was produced by Spears Games, the manufacturers of Scrabble – a word-building game very like one Lewis Carroll had devised more than a century before.

In 2010, with the composer Susannah Pearse, I wrote a musical play calledThe Last Photograph, which explored both the mystery of why Lewis Carroll (one of the great pho