The great puzzle: Lewis Carroll and the child who inspired his most famous work

Born in 1832 in Daresbury, a village in northwest England, Dodgson was the third child of an Anglican clergyman, Charles Dodgson, and his wife, Frances. The household soon grew to include 11 children, which meant the boy never lacked for company. Dodgson could always be counted upon for making up games, telling his brothers and sisters stories, and writing magazines with them.

His nephew Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, in The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898), wrote that his uncle “invented the strangest diversions for himself… made pets of the most odd and unlikely animals, and numbered certain snails and toads among his intimate friends”.

While at school, he composed his first family magazine, Useful and Instructive Poetry, for his younger siblings. His instructor, Mr Tate, offered a review of his writing, stating that he showed some “creativity in replacing the inflexions of nouns and verbs, as detailed in our grammars”, a fault he was expected to grow out of.

When he turned 18 in 1850, he enrolled at Oxford and became a “senior student”—the equivalent of a fellow—at the university’s Christ Church college. The college stipulated that senior students had to be ordained as priests and take a vow of celibacy. However, Dodgson managed to evade the rule and lived at the college unmarried, until he died in 1898, barely two weeks before his 66th birthday.

From 1858 until the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dodgson’s work was academic: The Fifth Book of Euclid (1858), A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry (1860), The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry (1861), The Enunciations of … Euclid, Books I and II (1863), and A Guide to the Mathematical Student (1864).

He valued his privacy and came up with the pen name Lewis Carroll for his non academic work. For this, he simply translated the first two parts of his name, Charles Lutwidge, into Latin (Carolus Ludovicus). He then reversed their order (Ludovicus Carolus), and loosely translated the words back into English. And Lewis Carroll was born!

Carroll’s wit and humour have made his books among the most quoted works in the English language. His Alice in Wonderland became immensely popular as soon as it was published, and has influenced varied artists, including Walt Disney, Salvador Dali, James Joyce, and Jorge Luis Borges.

But the process of writing the blockbuster took a while and needed the involvement of one particular child.

In June 1855, a small entry in his diary noted, “The Times announces that Liddell of Westminster is to be the new Dean; the selection does not seem to have given much satisfaction in the college.”

This appointment was to change the course of the author’s literary career, on account of Dean Liddell’s then three-year-old daughter, Alice, who was to become Carroll’s forever muse.

Carroll’s friendships with young girls have been the cause of persistent speculation down the ages. In The Life of Lewis Carroll (1932), Langford Reed backed the author, writing that his dealings with children were innocent and that the children who knew him felt that he shared “a commonality with them that was almost on the level of a sacred kinship”.

The author’s adventures with photography, focusing on little girls, also brought him under the scanner. Of the approximately 3,000 photos he shot, just over half were of children —30 of whom were depicted nude or semi-nude.

Phyllis Greenacre, in her 1995 study Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of Two Lives wrote that the author’s desire to photograph little girls in the nude beyond infancy was “out of the ordinary during the Victorian period”, and suggested that “his abrupt abandoning of photography in 1880 may have been related to speculations regarding his hobby”.

But not before he found three ideal subjects for his camera – Alice Liddell and her sisters, the children of Dean Henry George Liddell, who often played in the deanery garden outside the college library. Eight-year-old Alice, with her elfin features, was particularly captivating. Carroll photographed her obsessively, and his Beggar Maid, in which a barefoot Alice wears a tattered off-the-shoulder dress offers a window into their indeterminate relationship.

Carroll’s friendship with the Liddell girls was mutual, and he often spirited them away for outings. He was particularly fond of putting together a picnic lunch and taking the girls boating on the Thames. On the sunny afternoon of July 4, 1862, a day out he later described as “golden”, Carroll told Alice the story that would be published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

On that stretch of the river between Oxford and Godstow, Alice Liddell, then 10, expressed girlish delight that the main character bore her name and asked Dodgson to write down the story.

The author’s fascination with Alice has come under scrutiny since then. Biographers and scholars have questioned the nature of his relationship with Alice. His ideas and comments didn’t help. “A girl of about 12,” he wrote towards the end of his life, “is my ideal beauty of form.” In words of pre-Freudian innocence, he could never see “why the lovely forms of girls should ever be covered up”.

All didn’t stay well between Carroll and the Liddells for long. The relationship with the family suffered a sudden rift in June 1863; not much is known why. The family never made any comment, and a page from Dodgson’s diary recording the days around the rift went missing.

But speculations ran rife. Biographer Morton N Cohen opined that the author’s desire to marry the child could have led to the parting of the ways. Anne Clark, Alice Liddell’s biographer, wrote that her descendants believed that Dodgson wanted to marry her, but that Alice’s parents “expected a much better match for her”.

Much later, in 1996, author Karoline Leach found the “cut pages in diary” document, a note allegedly written by Charles Dodgson’s niece, Violet Dodgson, which implied that the relationship was fractured due to gossip linking the author to “Ina”, Alice’s older sister Lorina, and the family governess. Jenny Woolf, in her 2010 biography, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, has offered another take, suggesting that the problem arose as Lorina was getting too attached to Dodgson.

In 1870, Carroll photographed his beloved Alice for the last time. Alice, then 18, doesn’t appear happy. Dressed in the prim and proper clothes of the time, she sits, her hands clasped in her lap, her expression stiff and bored. She had grown out of the relationship, it appeared.

However, people continued to try and fit Carroll’s relationship with Alice into a box. AME Goldschmidt presented his essay, Alice in Wonderland Psycho-Analysed (1933), at Oxford, suggesting that the author was suppressing a sexual desire for Alice and that her falling into the well was “the best-known symbol of coitus”.

Many other researchers joined the chorus. In 1945, Florence Becker Lennon wrote Victoria Through the Looking Glass, the first modern critical biography of Caroll, opining that he had an unhealthy attraction to Alice. “People have wondered what he did with his love life. Now it can be told. He loved little girls, but, like Peter Pan, he had no intention of marrying them,” she wrote, adding that the Alice was “the first and most favoured of his girlfriends”.

In The Story of Alice, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst viewed Carroll and Alice through a maze of “adventures” and “explanations”.

Alice in Wonderland continues to inspire countless theories about what the book truly represents – sex, desires, drugs, dreams, jokes, food, and more.

In 1995, Cohen, in his biography, wrote that we cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Carroll’s preference for drawing and photographing children in the nude. “He contended the preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his emotional attachment to children as well as his aesthetic appreciation of their forms, his assertion that his interest was strictly artistic is naïve. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself. Certainly he always sought to have another adult present when nude prepubescents modelled for him,” he wrote.

Debates still continue on whether the author was asexually obsessed with children or if his obsession was darker.

Will Brooker, author of Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture, writes, “Lewis Carroll is treated like a man you wouldn’t want your kids to meet, yet his stories are still presented as classics of pure, innocent literature.”

We may never really know, but the fact remains that Carroll’s Wonderland is a powerful idea, a momentous place, one that allows artists across mediums to “go down the rabbit hole” and create freely.

Kate Bailey, who curated Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser, a show at V&A in London in 2021, then stated that Alice in Wonderland has a phenomenal number of ideas and concepts, and offers space for creativity. “It really is this Bible for the imagination,” she said.

As far as Carroll’s fluid reputation goes, he wrote it himself in his blockbuster book: “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”

Teja Lele is an independent editor and writes on books, travel and lifestyle.

Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a teacher of mathematics at Oxford and a deacon of the Anglican Church, was said to be a “pure in heart”, devout scholar. But most of the world knows Dodgson as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The English author’s interests spanned literature, mathematics, logic, art, photography, theatre, religion, and science. His most notable works may be Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871), but he was also known for his proficiency with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems, Jabberwocky (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876), are standouts in the world of literary nonsense.

Born in 1832 in Daresbury, a village in northwest England, Dodgson was the third child of an Anglican clergyman, Charles Dodgson, and his wife, Frances. The household soon grew to include 11 children, which meant the boy never lacked for company. Dodgson could always be counted upon for making up games, telling his brothers and sisters stories, and writing magazines with them.

His nephew Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, in The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898), wrote that his uncle “invented the strangest diversions for himself… made pets of the most odd and unlikely animals, and numbered certain snails and toads among his intimate friends”.

While at school, he composed his first family magazine, Useful and Instructive Poetry, for his younger siblings. His instructor, Mr Tate, offered a review of his writing, stating that he showed some “creativity in replacing the inflexions of nouns and verbs, as detailed in our grammars”, a fault he was expected to grow out of.

When he turned 18 in 1850, he enrolled at Oxford and became a “senior student”—the equivalent of a fellow—at the university’s Christ Church college. The college stipulated that senior students had to be ordained as priests and take a vow of celibacy. However, Dodgson managed to evade the rule and lived at the college unmarried, until he died in 1898, barely two weeks before his 66th birthday.

From 1858 until the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dodgson’s work was academic: The Fifth Book of Euclid (1858), A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry (1860), The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry (1861), The Enunciations of … Euclid, Books I and II (1863), and A Guide to the Mathematical Student (1864).

He valued his privacy and came up with the pen name Lewis Carroll for his non academic work. For this, he simply translated the first two parts of his name, Charles Lutwidge, into Latin (Carolus Ludovicus). He then reversed their order (Ludovicus Carolus), and loosely translated the words back into English. And Lewis Carroll was born!

Carroll’s wit and humour have made his books among the most quoted works in the English language. His Alice in Wonderland became immensely popular as soon as it was published, and has influenced varied artists, including Walt Disney, Salvador Dali, James Joyce, and Jorge Luis Borges.

But the process of writing the blockbuster took a while and needed the involvement of one particular child.

In June 1855, a small entry in his diary noted, “The Times announces that Liddell of Westminster is to be the new Dean; the selection does not seem to have given much satisfaction in the college.”

This appointment was to change the course of the author’s literary career, on account of Dean Liddell’s then three-year-old daughter, Alice, who was to become Carroll’s forever muse.

Carroll’s friendships with young girls have been the cause of persistent speculation down the ages. In The Life of Lewis Carroll (1932), Langford Reed backed the author, writing that his dealings with children were innocent and that the children who knew him felt that he shared “a commonality with them that was almost on the level of a sacred kinship”.

The author’s adventures with photography, focusing on little girls, also brought him under the scanner. Of the approximately 3,000 photos he shot, just over half were of children —30 of whom were depicted nude or semi-nude.

Phyllis Greenacre, in her 1995 study Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of Two Lives wrote that the author’s desire to photograph little girls in the nude beyond infancy was “out of the ordinary during the Victorian period”, and suggested that “his abrupt abandoning of photography in 1880 may have been related to speculations regarding his hobby”.

But not before he found three ideal subjects for his camera – Alice Liddell and her sisters, the children of Dean Henry George Liddell, who often played in the deanery garden outside the college library. Eight-year-old Alice, with her elfin features, was particularly captivating. Carroll photographed her obsessively, and his Beggar Maid, in which a barefoot Alice wears a tattered off-the-shoulder dress offers a window into their indeterminate relationship.

Carroll’s friendship with the Liddell girls was mutual, and he often spirited them away for outings. He was particularly fond of putting together a picnic lunch and taking the girls boating on the Thames. On the sunny afternoon of July 4, 1862, a day out he later described as “golden”, Carroll told Alice the story that would be published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

On that stretch of the river between Oxford and Godstow, Alice Liddell, then 10, expressed girlish delight that the main character bore her name and asked Dodgson to write down the story.

The author’s fascination with Alice has come under scrutiny since then. Biographers and scholars have questioned the nature of his relationship with Alice. His ideas and comments didn’t help. “A girl of about 12,” he wrote towards the end of his life, “is my ideal beauty of form.” In words of pre-Freudian innocence, he could never see “why the lovely forms of girls should ever be covered up”.

All didn’t stay well between Carroll and the Liddells for long. The relationship with the family suffered a sudden rift in June 1863; not much is known why. The family never made any comment, and a page from Dodgson’s diary recording the days around the rift went missing.

But speculations ran rife. Biographer Morton N Cohen opined that the author’s desire to marry the child could have led to the parting of the ways. Anne Clark, Alice Liddell’s biographer, wrote that her descendants believed that Dodgson wanted to marry her, but that Alice’s parents “expected a much better match for her”.

Much later, in 1996, author Karoline Leach found the “cut pages in diary” document, a note allegedly written by Charles Dodgson’s niece, Violet Dodgson, which implied that the relationship was fractured due to gossip linking the author to “Ina”, Alice’s older sister Lorina, and the family governess. Jenny Woolf, in her 2010 biography, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, has offered another take, suggesting that the problem arose as Lorina was getting too attached to Dodgson.

In 1870, Carroll photographed his beloved Alice for the last time. Alice, then 18, doesn’t appear happy. Dressed in the prim and proper clothes of the time, she sits, her hands clasped in her lap, her expression stiff and bored. She had grown out of the relationship, it appeared.

However, people continued to try and fit Carroll’s relationship with Alice into a box. AME Goldschmidt presented his essay, Alice in Wonderland Psycho-Analysed (1933), at Oxford, suggesting that the author was suppressing a sexual desire for Alice and that her falling into the well was “the best-known symbol of coitus”.

Many other researchers joined the chorus. In 1945, Florence Becker Lennon wrote Victoria Through the Looking Glass, the first modern critical biography of Caroll, opining that he had an unhealthy attraction to Alice. “People have wondered what he did with his love life. Now it can be told. He loved little girls, but, like Peter Pan, he had no intention of marrying them,” she wrote, adding that the Alice was “the first and most favoured of his girlfriends”.

In The Story of Alice, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst viewed Carroll and Alice through a maze of “adventures” and “explanations”.

Alice in Wonderland continues to inspire countless theories about what the book truly represents – sex, desires, drugs, dreams, jokes, food, and more.

In 1995, Cohen, in his biography, wrote that we cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Carroll’s preference for drawing and photographing children in the nude. “He contended the preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his emotional attachment to children as well as his aesthetic appreciation of their forms, his assertion that his interest was strictly artistic is naïve. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself. Certainly he always sought to have another adult present when nude prepubescents modelled for him,” he wrote.

Debates still continue on whether the author was asexually obsessed with children or if his obsession was darker.

Will Brooker, author of Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture, writes, “Lewis Carroll is treated like a man you wouldn’t want your kids to meet, yet his stories are still presented as classics of pure, innocent literature.”

We may never really know, but the fact remains that Carroll’s Wonderland is a powerful idea, a momentous place, one that allows artists across mediums to “go down the rabbit hole” and create freely.

Kate Bailey, who curated Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser, a show at V&A in London in 2021, then stated that Alice in Wonderland has a phenomenal number of ideas and concepts, and offers space for creativity. “It really is this Bible for the imagination,” she said.

As far as Carroll’s fluid reputation goes, he wrote it himself in his blockbuster book: “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”

Teja Lele is an independent editor and writes on books, travel and lifestyle.