The Real Alice in Wonderland

Her name was Alice Pleasance Liddell ...

Alice Pleasance Liddell was born in 1852 and was the third child of the Dean of Christ Church College in Oxford, where a young Charles Lutwidge Dodgson worked. On the 25th of April in 1856, Dodgson went with a borrowed camera to photograph the Christ Church cathedral. He had no luck with his pictures, but he did find in the garden the three daughters of the Dean. This was his first meeting with Alice, who was one week away from her fourth birthday.

This meeting and the purchase of his own camera equipment was the start to a unique friendship between Dodgson and the Liddell children. Alice, in particular, was about to inspire him to become not only a photographer and companion, but an author of rare genius as well.

Photography was only one aspect of the friendship with the Liddell children. Dodgson escorted them to the University Museum, The Botanical Gardens and Magdalen College Deer Park. They would also walk through the town to Folly Bridge and rent a boat to row up and down the River Isis (the stretch of the Thames which flows through Oxford.)

In later years, Alice recalled:

 When we went on the river ... with Mr. Dodgson ... he always bought out with him a large basket full of cakes and a kettle. On rarer occasions we went out for the whole day with him and then we took a larger basket with luncheon ... cold chicken and salad and all sorts of good things. One of our favourite whole-day excursions was to row down to Nuneham and picnic in the woods there.

It was on a Tuesday in June 1862 that Dodgson organised such a party to picnic at Nuneham. Along with his sisters, Fanny and Elizabeth, and their Aunt Lucy, who were visiting at the time, the group also included the three Liddell sisters and Dodgson’s friend, Robinson Duckworth. After spending the day walking in the park, the group was caught in a sudden rainstorm. The adventure ended with evening tea in Dodgson’s rooms.

This damp outing would long have been forgotten but for its later transformation in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland where Alice finds herself in a pool of her own tears. In the story, the party becomes a congregation of birds: Lorina is the Lory, Edith the Eaglet and Duckworth the Duck, while Dodgson turned himself into Dodo, whose name sounded like “Do-do-dodgson”s when he stammered.

In 1880, Alice married Reginald Hargreaves. When Alice’s husband died in 1928, she needed money to pay death duties and sold the original Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland manuscript. Sotheby’s suggested a reserve of only £4000, but it fetched a staggering £15,400 (an enormous amount of money for those days). The manuscript then went to America.

In 1932, when she was 80, Alice published her memoirs, but died two years later, on 15 November 1934. Since then, the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into more than 125 different languages and there have been literally hundreds of editions. Alice Liddell’s son started collecting various editions in the 1920s and, when he died, he left a staggering collection of 250 different versions.