According to Carroll, “in a desperate attempt” and “without the least idea what was to happen afterwards,” he sent his heroine “straight down a rabbit-hole.”
Upon Alice’s urging, Carroll began writing down his tale. That he did not is strongly suggested by these lines from a letter Carroll wrote sometime after both Alice books had been published…
‘Mr.
After Alice's birth, her father was appointed as the dean of Christ Church, and in 1856, the Liddell family moved to Oxford. On November 26, 1864, he presented her with an elaborate hand-illustrated manuscript, titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.
When Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published a year later, Alice Liddell became immortalized as the inspiration for Carroll’s much-loved literary character.
Alice and her sisters were frequent models for Carroll’s photography, and he often took the children on outings.
On July 4th, 1862, Carroll and the Rev. Robinson Duckworth took the girls boating up the Isis.
Alice Liddell: Rare Photographs of the Real Alice in Wonderland, 1858-1872
Alice Liddell: the real Alice in Wonderland.
Alice Liddell was the middle daughter of Henry George Liddell, Dean of Christ Church at Oxford.
Tenniel is the only artist, who has drawn for me, who has resolutely refused to use a model, and declared he no more need one than I should need a multiplication table to work a mathematical problem! This time, he told the sisters about the adventures of a little girl in Wonderland, who fell down a rabbit hole. She died two years later.
Alice, Ina, Harry and Edith Liddell.
Entrusted with entertaining the young ladies, Dodgson fancied a story about a whimsical world full of fantastical characters, and named his protagonist Alice. However, in the following book, she becomes a minor character.
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First, he set them on 4 May (Liddell’s birthday) and 4 November (her “half-birthday”), and in Through the Looking-Glass the fictional Alice declares that her age is “seven and a half exactly”, the same as Liddell on that date.She practiced drawing, receiving lessons from John Ruskin, a famous artist and influential English art critic of the 19th century. June, 1860.
Lewis Carrol and Alice
Many of Carroll’s photographs of Alice and other children can seem downright prurient to our eyes.
As Carroll’s biographer Jenny Woolf writes in a 2010 essay for the Smithsonian, “of the approximately 3,000 photographs Dodgson made in his life, just over half are of children—30 of whom are depicted nude or semi-nude.”
Some of his portraits—even those in which the model is clothed—might shock 2010 sensibilities, but by Victorian standards they were… well, rather conventional.
Photographs of nude children sometimes appeared on postcards or birthday cards, and nude portraits—skillfully done—were praised as art studies […].
1859.
She had three sons, two of whom were killed in World War I. To help pay taxes after the death of her husband, Alice put the original Under Ground manuscript up for auction in 1928.
Alice traveled to the United States in 1932 to receive an honorary doctorate from Columbia University in celebration of the centennial anniversary of Carroll’s birth.
Reading downward, taking the first letter of each line, spells out Liddell’s full name.
The poem has no title in Through the Looking-Glass, but is usually referred to by its first line, “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky”.
A grown up Alice of Wonderland.
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Alice Hargreaves in 1932, at the age of 80.
(Photo credit: Royal Photographic Society / Getty Images.
The main character closely resembled Alice (not only in name), and some secondary characters resembled her sisters, Lorina and Edith. But unlike the fictional “Alice,” Alice Liddell grew up.
Edith, Ina and Alice Liddell. Victorians saw childhood as a state of grace; even nude photographs of children were considered pictures of innocence itself.
Alice Liddell as a beggar-girl, 1858.
Woolf admits that Carroll’s interest, as scholars have speculated for decades, may have been less than innocent, prompting Vladimir Nabokov to propose “a pathetic affinity” between Carroll and the narrator of Lolita.
The evidence for Carroll’s possible involvement is highly suggestive but hardly conclusive.
Burgett summarizes the claims as only speculative at best: “The entire controversy is an almost century-long debate, and one that doesn’t seem to be making any major progress in either direction.”
In a Slate review of Woolf’s Lewis Carroll biography, Seth Lerer also acknowledges the controversy, but reads the photographs of Alice, her sisters, and friends as representative of larger trends, as “brilliant testimonies to the taste, the sentiment, and perhaps the sexuality of mid-Victorian England.”
Alice Liddell, 1859.
Comparison with fictional Alice
The extent to which Dodgson’s Alice may be or could be identified with Liddell is controversial.
The two Alices are clearly not identical, and though it was long assumed that the fictional Alice was based very heavily on Liddell, recent research has contradicted this assumption.
Dodgson himself claimed in later years that his Alice was entirely imaginary and not based upon any real child at all.
A 20-year-old Alice, 1872.
There was a rumor that Dodgson sent Tenniel a photo of one of his other child-friends, Mary Hilton Badcock, suggesting that he used her as a model, but attempts to find documentary support for this theory have proved fruitless.
Dodgson’s own drawings of the character in the original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground show little resemblance to Liddell.
So taken was Alice Liddell with the story that she asked Dodgson to write it down for her, which he did when he soon sent her a manuscript under the title of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.
Historian Martin Gardner writes in The Annotated Alice (public library), originally published in 1960 and revised in a definite edition in 1999:
A long procession of charming little girls (we know today that they were charming from their photographs) skipped through Carroll’s life, but none ever took the place of his first love, Alice Liddell.
Dodgson, who had previously told stories to the Liddell children, readily agreed. These are real facts from the life of Alice Liddell Hargreaves.
In the novel "Maximus Grom: Escape from Eden" by Lilia Kim, Alice Liddell is one of the main characters, an agent of the Bureau of Information Security.