Rev Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Oxford. However, he is better known as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and many other tales.
Dodgson was born in 1832, and the great success of his fantastic stories has been attributed to the fact that, unlike most material for children at the time, they had no obvious moral to them and did not claim to teach anything. He was a keen amateur photographer, with a particular interest - looked at nowadays askance - in photographing young girls, whose friendship, we are told, he valued very highly.
The famous story was first related on a boating trip on the River Isis not too far from Oxford. Rev Dodgson was accompanied by Alice Liddell and her sisters, Edith and Lorina.As an old lady in the 1920s, Alice recalled the circumstances.
"I believe the beginning of Alice was told one summer afternoon when the sun was so burning hot that we had landed in the meadows down the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a new-made hayrick. Here, from all three of us came the old petition of `tell us a story', and so began the ever delightful tale."
Dodgson in his diary confirms Alice's recollection of a warm sunny afternoon and, more than that, the diary tells us when it was - it was the entry for July 4th, 1862, 138 years ago today. But literary historians looked up the Oxford rainfall records and discovered that there was a significant amount of rainfall in the 12 hours prior to 2 a.m. on July 5th. They concluded that the afternoon of the 4th must have been dull and rather wet - and that the diary entry must be spurious.
Since conventional weather maps for the early 1860s do not exist, modern meteorologists seeking to resolve this controversy had to rely on contemporary weather reports from British harbours published in the London Times. Using these as one might modern weather observations, they reconstructed weather maps for the period in question. Such an analysis showed that an active front had passed the Oxford area in the early morning of July 4th and another moved in from the west late that evening - to give the rain already noted in the records. In between, however, in the early afternoon of the July 4th, a weak ridge of high pressure would have allowed for fine conditions and a vindication of the evidence provided to posterity by the main protagonists.