ABSTRACT
Long before he adopted his famous pseudonym of Lewis Carroll, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson began his writing career entertaining his family. Readers of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) may be unaware that the book resulted from an earlier manuscript. Carroll composed the manuscript Alice's Adventures Underground (1863) for Alice Liddell and her sisters, who were children of an Oxford University don. They had requested he record the story that he had told them during the memorable boat trip in Oxford on 4 July 1862. 1 But, Carroll's apprenticeship as a children's author began much earlier when he was still a child. Seventeen years before Wonderland, Carroll began a series of remarkable family magazines that he wrote and edited beginning when was thirteen years old, between 1845 and 1862. Four of Carroll's magazines—Useful and Instructive Poetry, The Rectory Magazine, The Rectory Umbrella, and Mischmasch—have been preserved and reprinted. But beyond acknowledging their existence, few critics besides Jean Gattegno have bothered to examine the family publications that were so instrumental in Carroll's development as a writer. Yet, these early works are the fertile soil from which his later, and best-known, children's books grew.
