ALICE BEHIND WONDERLAND

A young girl seven years old maybe, naked of shoulder and chest and dressed in decorously disarranged linen rags is lazing coquettishly against a crumbling garden wall of limestone and sandstone, standing in a corner in her bare feet. She looks with a calm directness right into the camera lens, her face bearing an expression of impish, secret knowledge, a winsome look that manages to be both confident and disturbing. The picture is a portrait of Alice Pleasance Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of Christchurch College, Oxford, the great classicist and lexicographer Henry Liddell. Charles Dodgson, who had befriended the girl and already photographed her several times, encouraged her on this occasion to dress for him as a starveling and beggar-maid. The result is one of the most memorable photographic likenesses ever taken, heavy with uneasy resonances, but later having powerful literary consequences and association that remain with us to this day. Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, took the photograph on a summer's day in 1858 with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London. Acclaimed biographer Simon Winchester deftly uses the image, as unsettling as it is famous, as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of English literature, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Dodgson's love of photography framed his view of the world and was partly responsible for transforming a shy and half-deaf mathematician into one of the world's best-loved observers of childhood. The book marks the origins of Dodgson's lifelong fascination with very young girls, how he encountered a very different world when sent to Rugby School in 1846 and his keen interest in astronomy and symbolic logic and his academic life in Oxford when it was his time to invent himself a wholly new life and live on an entirely different plane. 110pp. Oxford University Press.