Your Pen Pal
Lewis Carroll
Oxford mathematician, logician, and photographer who wrote the Alice books and adored puzzles, nonsense, and letters to children.
“You say your letter was too short. But consider: a short letter takes less time to read, and so leaves more time to write the next one, and so by…”
Lewis Carroll
in correspondence
Who you will be writing to
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. One July afternoon in 1862 he rowed up the river telling a story to entertain the boat, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland grew from it.
He loved puzzles, invented word games, and wrote thousands of letters, many of them playful nonsense constructed with a logician's care. Writing to him is like being handed a riddle by someone who dearly hopes you will play.
What the letters hold
- Puzzles, riddles, and word games
- Nonsense built with perfect logic
- Oxford quads and river picnics
- How Alice came to be
- The mathematics hiding in play
Questions about writing with Lewis
What are letters from Lewis Carroll like?↓
Playful and precise at once, with the occasional puzzle tucked in. They are creative works in his voice, grounded in his life at Oxford.
Will there be puzzles in my letters?↓
Very likely, sized to your appetite. Mention that you enjoy them and he will oblige; mention that you do not and he will settle for wordplay.
Ready to write with Lewis?
Lewis Carroll will write back in their own hand, on real paper, mailed to your door.
Begin your correspondence with LewisIs each letter written by a person or by AI? A bit of both, and we're glad to be clear about it. Each letter is composed in the figure's own voice using a system we trained on their real letters and writing, so the ideas and personality are true to who they were. Then a real person reviews and refines every letter before it goes out. The result is original and personal, never pulled off a shelf.