Charles Dodgeson (1832-1898), whose pen name “Lewis Carroll” became famous for Alice in Wonderland, was evidently fascinated by questions of symmetry and asymmetry. This was notable particularly in Through the Looking Glass, where mirrors, opposites, and chess moves are prominent themes.

This may have been, at least in part, due to his own facial asymmetry. Photographs of him as a young man show bony overgrowth of his right upper orbital rim, causing it to impinge on the palpebral aperture. It does not seem to have changed noticeably in images taken when he was middle-aged, and may have been due to fibrous dysplasia. Because of the deformity, photographic portraits of him avoid frontal views and stick to full or partial profiles.

Alice’s descriptions of growing larger and then smaller in Alice in Wonderland have led to the suggestion that Carroll himself might have experienced the perceptual aberrations of macropsia and micropsia as manifestations of either temporal lobe epilepsy or migraine. However, there is little evidence to support such speculations.

For images see the following web sites: http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/carroll_lewis/carroll_lewis.shtml http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/PictDisplay/Dodgson.html