Lewis Carroll’s Hand-Colored Presentation Photograph of Alice Liddell—His Muse and Inspiration For Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The Deanery Garden, Christ Church, Oxford, July 1860. Presentation albumen print of Alice Liddell, hand-colored at Dodgson’s direction and presented to the Liddell family. Mounted to card. Print: 5 3/4 x 5 1/2 in. (146 x 140 mm). Original oval-shaped green velvet lining over modern oval mat, in contemporary gilt wooden frame, 11 1/2 x 10 in. (292 x 254 mm). Portion of original framer's label mounted on reverse ("J. Peake & Sons, 276, Westminster Bridge Rd"). The entirety housed within larger modern frame. Wakeling, The Photographs of Lewis Carroll: A Catalogue Raisonne IN-0613, No. 3

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) took this photograph of eight-year-old Alice Liddell in the Deanery Garden at Christ Church, Oxford, in July 1860. Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer and former student at Oxford, began photographing Henry and Lorina Liddell’s four children in the spring of 1856, shortly after Henry’s appointment as dean of Christ Church. It was not long after their arrival that Dodgson purchased his first camera and took up photography, an activity he would pursue for the next 25 years. During the early years of his photographic activities the Liddell children were some of his earliest and most frequent subjects, and Alice, in particular, one of his favorite photographic models. Over the course of their friendship, Dodgson came to hold Alice in the highest esteem, and later in life described her as his "ideal child-friend". It was only two years following this photograph that she would inspire Dodgson to pen his beloved story, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which would immortalize her forever.

From 1856-1870 Dodgson took approximately 35 known photographs of the Liddell children, the majority in the Deanery Garden. Of these photos, 11 were solely of Alice, who Dodgson shot in a variety of tableaux and costumes. The above image of Alice seated beside a potted fern was the tenth photograph Dodgson took of her. Compared to the first, taken in June 1857, and showing a slightly blurry half-length Alice in a chair, this image shows Dodgson's increased mastery of the medium, showing a full-length Alice in a more intentional and symbolic composition (in the Victorian language of flowers, ferns represented sincerity and fascination). It was the penultimate image of Alice that Dodgson ever took, and the last before his and the Liddell family's abrupt falling out, in the summer of 1863 (Dodgson's final image of Alice was taken 10 years later, on June 25, 1870).

As Dodgson was eager to please Alice's parents, he frequently gifted them photographs he took of their children. For particularly special photographs, Dodgson sometimes arranged for their hand-coloring by professional artists, and presented them to the family. This print is one of those special few, and is one of only two known examples of this image that he had hand-colored and then gifted to Alice and the family. Overall, it is one of only four known photographs Dodgson took of Alice that he similarly arranged to be hand-colored and then gifted to them. The other example of this image is a smaller half-length cased version (about 4 x 3 in.; 102 x 76 mm), and is currently in a private collection. The other two hand-colored examples of Alice are of her as the "Beggar Maid" (1858), one in the Berg Collection at NYPL, and the other in a private collection.

This print is one of only eight examples of this photograph known to currently exist. The others comprise: two in albums in the Parrish collection at Princeton University; the cased and hand-colored example mentioned above; one framed carte-de-visite and one within a triptych, both shared between the National Media Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, United Kingdom; one in an album in the Serge Kakou collection, Paris; and the print used in the Alice's Adventure Under Ground manuscript, now in the British Library. Edward Wakeling notes one final example, whose last recorded sale was by C.A. Stonehill, London, 1935-36, but whose current location is unaccounted for.

Along with the "Beggar Maid" image, this is the most well-known photograph Dodgson captured of Alice, and perhaps more than any other he took of her, is the one that is most intimately connected to the stories that bear her name. It was on a "golden afternoon" on July 4, 1862 that Dodgson took Alice and her sisters for a boat trip up the Thames, during which he entertained them with an extemporaneous fairy tale of a girl named Alice and her adventures in Wonderland. Enthralled by the story, the real Alice urged Dodgson to write it down for her, which he did over several drafts in the following months. Despite the family's cooling of relations in 1863, for a Christmas gift in 1864 Dodgson prepared for Alice a special manuscript version of the story, adorned with his own painstakingly drawn illustrations, and which he called Alice's Adventures Under Ground. As a coda, at the bottom of the final page, Dodgson made an ink drawing of Alice's portrait. Apparently dissatisfied with the result, he took a print of the present image, trimmed it down to show only Alice's head, and pasted it over the drawing. It was a significant gesture in appreciation of their friendship, without which the story would perhaps never have been set to paper.

Dodgson would go on to expand the manuscript version, and in 1865, publish it under his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. An instant bestseller, it has become enshrined as the greatest children's story ever written, and cemented Dodgson's reputation as a writer. For Alice, she kept some correspondence with Carroll over the years, but they largely led separate lives, and she evaded public recognition as his muse until much later in life. At Christ Church she was tutored by John Ruskin, and in 1880 she married Reginald Hargreaves, a former pupil of Dodgson's, and had three children. In 1932, then 80-years-old, she reminisced about her many photographic sessions with Dodgson as a child, writing, "We used to sit on the big sofa on each side of him while he told us stories, illustrating them by pencil or ink drawings as he went along...He seemed to have an endless supply of these fantastical tales...When we were thoroughly happy and amused at his stories, he used to pose us, and expose the plates before the right mood had passed...Being photographed was...a joy to us and not a penance as it was to other children. We looked forward to the happy hours in the mathematical tutor's rooms..."