Story of Alice

Charles Dodgson was an Oxford mathematician who wrote as Lewis Carroll. Alice Liddell was the child he invented the Alice stories for. This biography follows their odd friendship and asks how it fed Carroll's imagination and shaped the making of Wonderland.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst draws on many unpublished sources and examines the two lives and the two books in close detail. He also accounts for the momentum Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) gathered in Victorian England, and for their hold on readers of every age a century and a half later.

Carroll appears here as an innovator who was also a stodgy traditionalist, bound to habit and routine. He wanted to keep things moving and to keep them exactly as they were, a double pull that echoes Alice running faster and faster in Looking-Glass Land just to stay in one place.

The account runs from the first stirrings of the Alice books in 1862 to Liddell's death in 1934. Along the way it opens onto the wider culture: the birth of photography, shifting ideas of childhood, murky questions about sex and sexuality, and the ties between Carroll's books and other Victorian literature.

As the Victorian era gave way to the modern one, Wonderland became a sheltered world apart, where the actual and the possible blurred. This is literary biography and cultural history in one.