Alice Liddell was the fourth child of Henry Liddell, a classical philologist, dean of one of the colleges at Oxford and co-author of the famous Liddell-Scott Greek dictionary. Alice had two older brothers who died of scarlet fever in 1853, an older sister Lorina and six other younger brothers and sisters.
After Alice's birth, her father was appointed dean of Christ Church, and in 1856 the Liddell family moved to Oxford. Soon Alice met Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He became a close family friend in subsequent years.
Alice grew up in the company of two sisters - Lorina was three years older, and Edith was two years younger. On holidays, together with the whole family, they vacationed on the west coast of north Wales in a country house, now the Gogarth Abbey Hotel.
Many wonderful artists studied with Alice's father, and he was a friend of the royal family. Alice's adolescence and youth coincided with the heyday of the creativity of the Pre-Raphaelites (predecessors of Art Nouveau). She studied drawing, and painting lessons were given to her by John Ruskin, the famous artist and the most influential English art critic of the 19th century. Ruskin found great abilities in her; she made several copies of his paintings, as well as paintings by his friend William Turner, the great English painter. Later, Alice posed for Julia Margaret Cameron, a photographer also close to the Pre-Raphaelites, whose work dates back to the golden age of English photography.
According to some reports, Mr. Dodgson approached Alice's parents with a request to allow him to ask for her hand when she grew up. However, there is no exact data about this. It is quite possible that this is part of the “Lewis Carroll and Alice myth” that arose later. On the page dedicated to the writer, you can read more about the myth.
Alice married Mr Reginald Hargreaves.
Afterwards she met with Charles Dodgson several times, they remained friends.
The making of "Alice in Wonderland"
On July 4, 1862, while out on a boat, Alice Liddell asked her friend Charles Dodgson to write a story for her and her sisters Edith and Lorina. Dodgson, who had previously had to tell stories to the Liddell children, making up events and characters as he went along, readily agreed. This time he told his sisters about the adventures of a little girl in the Underground Country, where she ended up after falling into the White Rabbit's hole. The main character very much resembled Alice (and not only in name), and some of the secondary characters resembled her sisters Lorina and Edith. Alice Liddell liked the story so much that she asked the narrator to write it down. Dodgson promised, but still had to be reminded several times. Finally, he fulfilled Alice's request and gave her a manuscript called "Alice's Adventures Underground." Later the author decided to rewrite the book. To do this, in the spring of 1863, he sent it to his friend George MacDonald for review. New details and illustrations by John Tenniel have also been added to the book. Dodgson presented a new version of the book to his favorite for Christmas in 1863. In 1865, Dodgson published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. The second book, “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” was published six years later, in 1871. Both tales, which are well over 100 years old, are still popular today, and the handwritten copy that Dodgson once gave to Alice Liddell is kept in the British Library.
In the science fiction pentalogy Riverworld by writer Philip José Farmer, a character named Alice Liddell Hargreeves is introduced. The text of the first novel of the pentalogy mentions that at the age of eighty she was awarded a Certificate of Honor from Columbia University for the important role she played in the creation of Mr. Dodgson's famous book. These are real facts from the life of Alice Liddell Hargreaves.
In the novel “Maximus Thunder. Escape from Eden" by Lilia Kim, one of the main characters is Alice Liddell, an agent of the Information Security Bureau. However, in the next book she becomes a minor character.
"Alice in Wonderland" and "Alice Through the Looking Glass" are one of the most beautiful, phantasmagoric, mysterious works for children. And who knows, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (known to us under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll) would have had the idea to create these works if a little girl, the daughter of his friend, the charming Alice Liddell, had not appeared in his life...
Alice Pleasence Liddell was born on May 4, 1852. It was she who became the prototype for the character Alice from the book “Alice in Wonderland” (as well as one of the prototypes for the heroine in the book “Alice Through the Looking Glass”).
Alice or Marina?
Alice Liddell was the fourth child of Henry Liddell, a classical philologist, dean of one of the colleges at Oxford and co-author of the famous Liddell-Scott Greek dictionary, and his wife Lorina Hannah Liddell (née Reeve). Parents spent a long time choosing a name for the baby. There were two options: Alice or Marina. But the parents settled on Alice, considering this name more suitable.
Alice had two older brothers, Harry (born 1847) and Arthur (born 1850), who died of scarlet fever in 1853, an older sister, Lorina (born 1849), and six younger siblings, including younger sister Edith (born 1854), with whom she was very close.
Meeting with Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
After Alice's birth, her father, who had previously been headmaster of Westminster School, was appointed dean of Christ Church, and in 1856 the Liddell family moved to Oxford. Alice soon met Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who encountered her family on April 25, 1856, while photographing the cathedral. He became a close family friend in subsequent years.
Lewis Carroll was a bachelor. In the past, it was believed that he was not friends with members of the opposite sex, making an exception for actress Ellen Terry.
“Carroll’s greatest joy was his friendships with little girls. “I love children (not boys),” he once wrote. ...Girls (unlike boys) seemed amazingly beautiful to him without clothes. Sometimes he drew or photographed them naked - of course , with the permission of the mothers...Carroll himself considered his friendship with the girls to be completely innocent; there is no reason to doubt that it was so. Moreover, in the numerous memories that his little girlfriends later left about him, there is not a hint of any. or violation of decency,” Martin Gardner said about it.
In Victorian England at the end of the 19th century, girls under 14 were considered asexual. Carroll's friendship with them was, from the point of view of the morality of that time, a completely innocent quirk. On the other hand, being too close to a young woman (especially in private) was strictly condemned. This could have caused Carroll to declare his acquaintances women and girls to be little girls, and to underestimate their age.
Alice grew up in the company of two sisters - Lorina was three years older, and Edith was two years younger. During the holidays they holidayed with the whole family on the west coast of north Wales at Penmorpha Country House (now the Gogarth Abbey Hotel) on the West Coast of Llandudno in North Wales.
The history of the creation of "Alice in Wonderland"
On Friday 4 July 1862, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and his friend Robinson Duckworth sailed up the Thames in a boat with the three daughters of Oxford University Vice-Chancellor Henry Liddell: thirteen-year-old Lorina Charlotte Liddell, ten-year-old Alice Pleasence Liddell and eight-year-old Edith Mary Liddell. This day, as the English poet W. Hugh Auden would later say, “is as memorable in the history of literature as the 4th of July in the history of America.”
The walk started from Folly Bridge near Oxford and ended five miles later in the village of Godstow with a tea party. Throughout the journey, Dodgson told his bored companions the story of a little girl, Alice, who went in search of adventure.
The girls liked the story, and Alice asked Dodgson to write the story down for her. Dodgson began writing the manuscript the day after the trip. He subsequently noted that the journey down the rabbit hole was improvisational in nature and was, in essence, “a desperate attempt to come up with something new.”
Alice Liddell wrote: "I think Alice's story begins on that summer day when the sun was so hot that we landed in a clearing, abandoning the boat for shade. We sat down under a fresh haystack. The whole trio was there." started the old song: “Tell a story” - and so began a delightful fairy tale.”
On June 17, 1862, Dodgson, in the company of his sisters Fanny and Elizabeth, Aunt Lutwidge and the girls, again went for a walk on another boat to Nunham. That day it started to rain and everyone got very wet, which became the basis for the second chapter - “Sea of Tears”. During this walk, the writer developed the plot and story of Alice in more detail, and in November Carroll began seriously working on the manuscript.
To make the story more natural, he researched the behavior of the animals mentioned in the book. According to Dodgson's diaries, in the spring of 1863 he showed the unfinished manuscript of the story to his friend and adviser George MacDonald, whose children greatly enjoyed it. MacDonald, like his other friend Henry Kingsley, would later advise publishing the book. Carroll included his own sketches in the manuscript, but used illustrations by John Tenniel in the published version.
On November 26, 1864, Dodgson gave Alice Liddell his work entitled "Alice's Adventures Underground", with the subtitle - "A Christmas Present to the Dear Girl in Memory of a Summer's Day", consisting of only four chapters, to which he attached a photograph of Alice at the age of 7 .
In the preface to his translation of Carroll’s fairy tale, B. Zakhoder cites an excerpt from “a letter from Lewis Carroll to a theater director who decided to stage the fairy tale about Alice on stage”:
"...What kind of person did I see you, Alice, in my imagination? What are you like? Loving is, first of all: loving and tender; gentle, like a doe, and loving, like a dog (forgive me for the prosaic comparison, but I don’t know the land of love is purer and more perfect); and also courteous: polite and friendly with everyone, with the great and the small, with the mighty and the funny, with kings and worms, as if you yourself were a royal daughter in an embroidered golden outfit. And also, trusting, ready. to believe in the most impossible fable and accept it with the boundless trust of a dreamer; and, finally, curious, desperately curious and cheerful with that cheerfulness that is given only in childhood, when the whole world is new and beautiful and when grief and sin are just empty words. sounds that mean nothing!
As time passed, in 1928 Alice Liddell was forced to sell the manuscript at Sotheby's for £15,400. The book was purchased by the American collector A. S. Rosenbach. In 1946, the handwritten fairy tale again went up for auction, where it was valued at 100 thousand dollars. At the initiative of Library of Congress employee L. G. Evans, a collection of donations was announced to fund the purchase of the book. In 1948, when the required amount was raised, a group of American philanthropists donated it to the British Library as a sign of gratitude for the role of the British people in the Second World War, where it is kept to this day.
"Alice in the Wonderland"
"Alice Through the Looking Glass" is a children's book by English mathematician and writer Lewis Carroll, written in 1871 as a sequel to the book "Alice in Wonderland." In this case, Alice has not one, but two prototypes with that name. The first prototype was the same Alice Liddell; the second prototype, related to the role of Alice, is unfortunately unknown.
Artist Alice, model Alice
Many wonderful artists studied with Alice's father, and he was a friend of the royal family. Alice's adolescence and youth coincided with the heyday of the creativity of the Pre-Raphaelites (predecessors of Art Nouveau). She studied drawing and was given painting lessons by John Ruskin, the famous artist and the most influential English art critic of the 19th century. Ruskin found great abilities in her; she made several copies of his paintings, as well as paintings by his friend William Turner, the great English painter. Later, Alice posed for Julia Margaret Cameron, a photographer also close to the Pre-Raphaelites, whose work belongs to the golden age of English photography.
Myths about Alice: marry Lewis Carroll or Prince Leopold?
According to some reports, Mr. Dodgson approached Alice's parents with a request to allow him to ask for her hand when she grew up. However, there is no exact data about this. It is quite possible that this is part of the “Lewis Carroll and Alice myth” that arose later.
Another “myth” is also known: in her youth, Alice and her sisters went to travel around Europe and on this trip they met Prince Leopold, the youngest son of Queen Victoria, when he lived in Christ Church. According to the "myth" Leopold fell in love with Alice, but the evidence for this fact is weak. The fact that the Liddell sisters dated him is real, but modern biographers of Leopold believe that there is a high probability that he was infatuated with her sister Edith.
Marriage and children
On September 15, 1880, Alice married Mr. Reginald Hargreaves, who was a student of Dr. Dodgson. From him she gave birth to three sons - Alan Niveton Hargreaves, Leopold Reginald "Rex" Hargreaves (both died in the First World War) and Caryl Liddell Hargreaves (there is a version that he was named after Carroll, but the Liddells themselves deny this), and one daughter - Rose Liddell Hargreaves.
Last meeting
She last met Charles Dodgson in 1891, when she and her sisters visited him in Oxford. 7 years later, on January 14, 1898 in Guildford, Surrey, Charles Dodjohnson died. Alice Liddell herself died on November 15, 1934 at the age of 82.
Planet Liddell
In the science fiction pentalogy Riverworld by writer Philip José Farmer, a character named Alice Liddell Hargreeves is introduced. The text of the first novel of the pentalogy mentions that at the age of eighty she was awarded a Certificate of Honor from Columbia University for the important role she played in the creation of Mr. Dodgson's famous book. These are real facts from the life of Alice Liddell Hargreaves.
In the novel “Maximus Thunder. Escape from Eden" by Lilia Kim, one of the main characters is Alice Liddell, an agent of the Information Security Bureau.
The minor planet 17670 Liddell is named in honor of Alice Liddell.
“I adore all children,” Carroll once said, “except boys.” He met Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, in Oxford while he was looking for young models for photographs. It was a pastime for her during the summer of 1862 while Carroll worked on one of his most remarkable linguistic inventions. Even when she became an adult, the memory of their friendship continued to haunt him: Carroll had a way with children, as he could make them remain still for the duration of the exposure, i.e. 45 seconds. In this portrait, the most famous of Carroll's images, this effect is emphasized by the stillness of the figure in the small "Pre-Raphaelite" space and the suspicion in Alice's eyes that she is the victim of a dark adult joke. Later, Alice served as the prototype for the most Pre-Raphaelite portraits of J.M. Cameron.
Alice as a beggar
More than 140 years have passed since the publication of Alice in Wonderland, but historians and writers have not been able to understand what role the life of its author, Charles L. Dodgson, actually played in the writing of this masterpiece of world literature and the life of its author. better known to everyone under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, the real Alice is Alicia Liddell. Very few true facts have been preserved, and therefore the relationship between Carroll and Alice became the object of idle fiction and speculation. Carroll's muse is compared with Dante's Beatrice and Lolita, who seduced Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita. In the published “Diaries” of Carroll there is no description of precisely that period that became a turning point in the life of both the author himself and his heroine. Evidence of the relationship between Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll that has survived to this day allows us to divide their entire acquaintance into three periods.
Alicia Liddell
Years of intimacy. The story began in 1855, when Henry George Liddell was appointed dean at Christ Church, where the young Dodgson was already working. The new dean arrived accompanied by his wife and four small children: Harry, Lorina, Alicia and Edith. Dodgson, who was very fond of small children, very soon became friends with the girls and became a frequent guest in the Liddell house. The restraint with which Carroll describes his meetings with Alice is extremely surprising, and yet on April 25, 1856, a record appears that the writer went for a walk with his three sisters.
Alice (right) with her sisters
By that time, Carroll was already acquainted with the eldest of the Liddell sisters, the youngest at that time was only two years old, and therefore it is logical to assume that the writer was amazed precisely by the meeting with four-year-old Alice, whom he had never seen before. But the name of this girl did not appear in Carroll's diary entries until May 1857, when the writer gave Alice a small present for her fifth birthday. Rumors spread around the college where Dodgson taught about his relationship with the governess of the Liddell children, after which the writer noted in his diary that “from now on, when in society, I will avoid any mention of girls, except in those cases when it is not will arouse no suspicion." Beginning in November 1856, Carroll began to experience hostility towards himself from Mrs. Liddell. From the writer’s diary, apparently, the entries dedicated to the period from April 18, 1858 to May 8, 1862, disappeared forever, namely, it formed the basis of the masterpiece created somewhat later - “Alice in Wonderland.” The famous summer boat ride took place on July 4, 1862.
Alicia Liddell
Alice Plaisnes Liddell was not an “ordinary girl” at all. She was the daughter of the rector of Christ Church College, Oxford University, many wonderful artists studied with her father, and he was a friend of the royal family. Alice's adolescence and youth coincided with the heyday of the creativity of the Pre-Raphaelites (predecessors of Art Nouveau), and she herself was, so to speak, a girl of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. She studied drawing and was given painting lessons by John Ruskin, the famous artist and the most influential English art critic of the 19th century (once a student of Rector Liddell). Ruskin found great abilities in her; she made several copies of his paintings, as well as paintings by his friend William Turner, the great English painter. Later, Alice posed for Julia Margaret Cameron, a photographer also close to the Pre-Raphaelites, whose work dates back to the golden age of English photography. (By the way, in his letters Carroll often mentions Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the leader of the Pre-Raphaelites.) In general, Mr. Dodgson guessed Alice correctly
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was very shy, which made his life very difficult. Besides, he stuttered. In the presence of children - especially Alice - both shyness and stuttering disappeared. He often went to the rector's house to play with Alice and her two sisters (of course, having previously received an invitation from Mrs. Liddell); the girls came to visit him (with their mother’s permission, of course); they walked together, went boating, went out of town (of course, in the presence of the governess Miss Prickett - and it turned out that most often the five of them). During one of these walks, as is known, he composed a fairy tale for her, which later became famous.
Alicia and Lorina Liddell
Conflict with the Liddells. Mrs. Liddell's dissatisfaction with the relationship between Carroll and her daughters grew more and more. In 1864, she completely banned any walks and meetings between the writer and the girls and destroyed all the letters Alice received from Carroll. And the writer himself, apparently, tore out from his diaries that have reached us, pages that mention precisely this period of the break in relations with the Liddells.
Regarding the existing hypothesis that Dodgson asked for Alice's hand in marriage from the Liddells, the writer's biographer, Morton Cohen, writes: “I changed my point of view on Carroll’s relationship with Alice when, in 1969, I came across a photocopy of the diary entries. writer. As I began to read them - and we are talking specifically about the complete diary entries given to me by Carroll's family, and not about those published excerpts from which twenty-five to forty percent of the original text was removed - I discovered countless fragments and passages of great significance. It was these details that the writer’s family wanted to hide from prying eyes. (Most of the photographs Carroll took were destroyed, and none of the nude photographs survived. In reality, Carroll gradually unmasked his models, and finally, in 1879, he began taking photographs of girls “in the costume of Eve,” as he himself wrote about it in diary: “naked girls are completely pure and delightful,” he writes to one of his friends, “but the nakedness of boys must be covered” - approx.).
Alicia Liddell
The publisher of the published Diaries, Roget Lancelot Grewn, never even saw these lines written by Carroll, because he worked only with a typewritten copy of the diary entries. When I first encountered the unpublished pages of the diary, I noticed that there was another dimension to Lewis Carroll’s “romanticism.” It is certainly difficult to reconcile with the idea that a strict, well-known clergyman of the Victorian era could have liked little girls, and liked them to such an extent that he had a desire to ask for the hand of one or even several of them.
Now it seems to me that he asked the hand of Alice Liddell from her parents. Of course, he did not say: “I would like to marry your eleven-year-old daughter” or anything like that; but perhaps asked “can I hope that, after six or eight years, if I still have the same feelings for your daughter, our union will be possible?” I think that later he considered the possibility of marrying other girls several more times, and he should have gotten married. I am firmly convinced that he would have been happier in marriage than if he had remained single, and it seems to me that the tragedy of his life was precisely that he could not marry.”
Alicia Liddell
Cooling in relationships. Carroll's subsequent meetings with the prototype of the heroine of his books were extremely rare and unnatural. After one of them, in April 1865, he wrote: “Alice has changed a lot, although I strongly doubt that for the better. She may be entering puberty." The girl was twelve years old at that time. In 1870, Carroll took the last photograph of Alice, then a young woman, who came to meet the writer, accompanied by her mother. Two meager notes, made by Carroll in old age, tell about the writer’s sad meetings with the one who was once his muse.
One of them took place in 1888, and Alice was accompanied by her husband, Mr. Hargreaves, who was once a student of Dodgson himself. Carroll makes the following entry: “It was not easy to put together in my head her new face and my old memories of her: her strange appearance today with the one that was once so close and beloved “Alice”.”
Edith, Lorina and Alice Liddell
Another passage tells of the meeting of the almost seventy-year-old Carroll, who could not walk due to problems with his joints, with Alice Liddell:
“Like Mrs. Hargreaves, the real “Alice” was now sitting in the dean’s office, I invited her to tea. She could not accept my invitation, but was kind enough to come to see me for a few minutes in the evening along with her sister Rhoda.”
[In Carroll's memoirs, these two scenes are presented as a kind of triangle of images - the awkward presence of the husband, the imprint of time on the woman's face, and the ideal girl from the memory. Nabokov in his “Lolita” combines these two scenes into one, when the desperate Humbert meets for the last time with the matured Lolita, living with some vulgar type].
Rhoda was the youngest of the Liddell daughters; Carroll cast her as Rose in the Flower Garden in Alice Through the Looking Glass, and Alice came to Oxford on the occasion of her father's retirement.
Alicia Liddell
Carroll's invitation letter to an old acquaintance contains a professional reference to the linguistic concept of the dual meaning of words:
“You may prefer to come accompanied by someone; I leave the decision up to you, only noting that if your spouse is with you, I will accept it with great (crossed out) great pleasure (I crossed out the word “great” because it is ambiguous, I’m afraid, like most words). I met him not long ago in our break room. It was hard for me to come to terms with the fact that he was the husband of the one whom I still, even now, imagine as a seven-year-old girl.”
Dodgson suffered from insomnia: he spent nights trying to find solutions to complex mathematical problems. He worried that no one remembered his scientific works, and at the end of his days, tired of Carroll’s fame, he even said that “he had nothing to do with any pseudonym or book published under my real name.”
Alicia Liddell
Nabokov's novel gave names to this brand of eroticism. Only here we can probably talk about eroticism, perhaps platonic. Apparently, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson could only possess a woman - or more precisely, a little girl - only in his imagination. And even then only in those moments while the photography lasted (the words “forty-two seconds” run through the book about Alice in Oxford like an obsessive motif). And it looks like the author of "Alice" died a virgin. (As young Chukovsky wrote in his Diary, old maids and old virgins are the most unhappy people in the world.)
It's amazing that much of Alice's time has survived to this day. The elm planted by Alice on the wedding day of the Prince of Wales lived until 1977 (then, like many of his neighbors in the alley, he fell ill with fungal elm disease, and the trees had to be cut down). The famous Punch magazine (where Teniel, the first Alice illustrator, worked) closed just this year. But the devils, rabbits and gargoyles that decorate the windows of the Oxford University Museum are there forever.
In Lewis Carroll’s book “The Logical Game,” where he teaches the art of reasoning logically, drawing correct conclusions from - not exactly incorrect, but unusual premises - there is the following problem: “No fossil animal can be unhappy in love. The oyster is unhappy in love.” love." The answer is also the conclusion: “The oyster is not a fossil animal.”
Lorina Liddell
09.04.2016 0 10551
Today a name for many Alice Liddell won't say anything. A clue may be the inscription carved on this woman’s gravestone: "The grave of Mrs. Reginald Hargreaves, Alice from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland."
Alice Liddell
The girl Alice Liddell, for whom Carroll wrote a fairy tale about her journey through an underground country, where she got through a rabbit hole, lived to be 82 years old. And she died 36 years after the death of the man who immortalized her.
There is still debate about what kind of relationship they had. They make all sorts of guesses, including very dirty ones.
Meeting in the garden
In April 1856, the children of Henry Liddell, dean of one of the colleges in the English university city of Oxford, went for a walk in the garden. On that spring day, a young mathematics teacher, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who sometimes published literary works under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, also happened to be there.
He was going to photograph the cathedral. Dodgson, a mathematician and author of works on this science, was much more fascinated by the humanitarian area of life: photography, writing, poetry. Looking ahead, let's say that for a quarter of a century he taught at a college that was not at all what was of true interest to him.
So, photography - an innovation at that time - in 1856 was the main hobby of a 24-year-old mathematician, whose lectures were considered by students to be the most boring in the world.
In 1856 there were only 5 children in Mr. Liddell's family, Alice being the fourth oldest. (Later, five more babies were born.)
Lewis Carroll
Carroll was immediately inspired by the idea of photographing the Liddell girls. It was girls - he adored them. And once he wrote in his diary: “I love children (just not boys).” Why only girls? The writer’s biographers have been wrestling with this question for decades.
Most come to a simple conclusion: Dodgson had 7 sisters and only 3 brothers! Since childhood, he has been accustomed to dealing with girls.
The young teacher asked the Liddell couple for permission to photograph their children. The parents agreed. Thanks to their consent, images of the Liddells Jr. were preserved for history.
An unusual child?
In 1856, Alice turned 4 years old. What exactly did this baby attract the attention of the mathematician-photographer? After all, after all, if he loved girls so much, then why didn’t he pay attention to her younger or older sister?
He was probably impressed by the stubborn expression on her face. Or maybe bright brown eyes... Who knows?
Photos of seven-year-old Alice taken by Lewis Carroll have reached us. In one of them, the girl looks quite decent: she is sitting in a white dress next to a flower pot.
And on the other she is barefoot, dressed in rags - apparently, she portrays a savage or a beggar. It was this photograph, dating back to 1859, that led researchers to think about Carroll's non-platonic intentions...
But let's go back to 1856. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson quickly became a friend of the Liddell family. His daughters were in awe of him - he was ready to spend almost all his free time with the girls. They frolicked in the park, fooled around, and went boating. About one of these boat trips, Carroll wrote an acrostic poem, the first letters of the lines of which form the words: Alice Pleasence Liddell (the baby's full name). Here is the beginning of this poem, which was included in the book “Alice Through the Looking Glass”:
Oh, what a bright day it was!
Boat, sun, shine and shadow,
And lilacs bloomed everywhere.
The sisters listen to the story
And the river carries us away.
On the same walk, Carroll began to tell Alice and her sisters about the girl’s adventures in a magical land. The passengers of that boat - thirteen-year-old Lorina, ten-year-old Alice and eight-year-old Edith - asked their older friend not to shut up. His favorite Alice demanded to invent a story in which there would be “more nonsense and inventions.” The main character was, of course, Alice.
But there was also room for her sisters. Lorina turned into Lori the parrot, who convinced everyone of her seniority and intelligence. Edith got the role of Ed the eaglet. Carroll portrayed himself as a Dodo bird - he mocked his own stutter, which prevented him from correctly pronouncing the surname Dodgson.
Why did Carroll choose Alice as the heroine of his book? Why was he attracted to this particular girl? After all, the Liddells had two other daughters close to her age. Apparently, it was Alice who especially did not want to become an adult. And the writer unmistakably sensed this in her. After all, he himself did not have the slightest desire to turn from a boy into an adult man.
The main character of the book is a very unusual girl for that time. On the one hand, she is well-mannered (after all, the daughter of a scientist), on the other hand, Alice is very spontaneous - she asks any questions without hesitation. There is no English stiffness in her!
On that sunny day in 1862, Alice began to beg her friend to put the story of her adventures in the Underground Country (as Wonderland was originally called) into a book.
That's what Lewis Carroll did...
In 1926, this handwritten copy of a work for children, which by that time had become a classic, was sold at Sotheby's by Mrs. Alice Hargreaves for £15,400. After the death of her husband, the woman had nothing to pay the bills for the house...
In 1865, Carroll published the book at his own expense. And she was noticed! Why? The fact is that the story about the adventures of a junior schoolgirl in a non-existent world, full of nonsense and wordplay, was something completely unprecedented in English children's literature of the Victorian era. In those days, all works for children were of a Christian edifying nature. They were mainly about the struggle between good and even better. And here - such a phantasmagoria...
What connected them?
The more time passed since Carroll's death in 1898, the more dirty speculation was expressed specifically regarding his friendship with little Alice Liddell. Some researchers directly spoke about the writer's pedophilia. A new surge of discussions on this topic was caused by Vladimir Nabokov’s book “Lolita,” published in 1955, about the sexual relationship of an adult man and a young girl.
Almost all of Lewis Carroll's life was spent in the Victorian era. At that time, young girls were considered asexual. Did the writer really have a different point of view? Yes, he loved to photograph naked youngsters who had not yet matured. He liked to correspond with young girls.
But there is no information that his relationship with his children - and with Alice Liddell in particular - went beyond talk. Perhaps in another era everything would have turned out differently. But the Victorian era is Victorian because its morals were Puritan. And dirty thoughts entered few people’s heads. Thank God, no dirt could stick to Carroll and Alice.
How did the relationship between the writer and the very young Miss Liddell end? This is how it should have ended: the girl grew up. And Carroll lost all interest in her. And he gradually parted ways with the large Liddell family. At first Lewis did not please Mrs. Liddell.
Some researchers say that the sensitive mother suspected the young man of dirty intentions. But there is no evidence of this: Carroll’s diaries from those years have not survived. Alice didn’t say a bad word about her friend.
What happened to her in adult life? It is known that Alice did some painting. At the age of 28 she married landowner and cricketer Reginald Hargreaves. She became a housewife. She gave birth to three sons from him. Her two eldest children died in the First World War. Alice lived in the countryside...
A young, pretty woman with a harsh expression on her face looks at us from adult photographs. Nothing special: it’s hard to spot her as a girl from Wonderland.
The last time the sisters, whose maiden name was Liddell, met with Lewis Carroll in 1891 - 7 years before his death. It was a conversation between old friends.
Alice Hargreaves died in 1934. 2 years before her death, she received a certificate of honor from Columbia University for inspiring the writer to create an immortal book.
Maria KONYUKOVA
Meeting in the garden
In April 1856, the children of Henry Liddell, dean of one of the colleges in the English university city of Oxford, went for a walk in the garden. On that spring day, a young mathematics teacher, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who sometimes published literary works under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, also happened to be there.
He was going to photograph the cathedral. Dodgson, a mathematician and author of works on this science, was much more fascinated by the humanitarian area of life: photography, writing, poetry. Looking ahead, let's say that for a quarter of a century he taught at a college that was not at all what was of true interest to him.
So, photography - an innovation at that time - in 1856 was the main hobby of a 24-year-old mathematician, whose lectures were considered by students to be the most boring in the world.
In 1856 there were only 5 children in Mr. Liddell's family, Alice being the fourth oldest. (Later, five more babies were born.)
Lewis Carroll
Carroll was immediately inspired by the idea of photographing the Liddell girls. It was girls - he adored them. And once he wrote in his diary: “I love children (just not boys).” Why only girls? The writer’s biographers have been wrestling with this question for decades.
Most come to a simple conclusion: Dodgson had 7 sisters and only 3 brothers! Since childhood, he has been accustomed to dealing with girls.
The young teacher asked the Liddell couple for permission to photograph their children. The parents agreed. Thanks to their consent, images of the Liddells Jr. were preserved for history.
An unusual child?
In 1856, Alice turned 4 years old. What exactly did this baby attract the attention of the mathematician-photographer? After all, after all, if he loved girls so much, then why didn’t he pay attention to her younger or older sister?
He was probably impressed by the stubborn expression on her face. Or maybe bright brown eyes... Who knows?
Photos of seven-year-old Alice taken by Lewis Carroll have reached us. In one of them, the girl looks quite decent: she is sitting in a white dress next to a flower pot.
And on the other she is barefoot, dressed in rags - apparently, she portrays a savage or a beggar. It was this photograph, dating back to 1859, that led researchers to think about Carroll's non-platonic intentions...
But let's go back to 1856. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson quickly became a friend of the Liddell family. His daughters were in awe of him - he was ready to spend almost all his free time with the girls. They frolicked in the park, fooled around, and went boating. About one of these boat trips, Carroll wrote an acrostic poem, the first letters of the lines of which form the words: Alice Pleasence Liddell (the baby's full name). Here is the beginning of this poem, which was included in the book “Alice Through the Looking Glass”:
Oh, what a bright day it was!
Boat, sun, shine and shadow,
And lilacs bloomed everywhere.
The sisters listen to the story
And the river carries us away.
On the same walk, Carroll began to tell Alice and her sisters about the girl’s adventures in a magical land. The passengers of that boat - thirteen-year-old Lorina, ten-year-old Alice and eight-year-old Edith - asked their older friend not to shut up. His favorite Alice demanded to invent a story in which there would be “more nonsense and inventions.” The main character was, of course, Alice.
But there was also room for her sisters. Lorina turned into Lori the parrot, who convinced everyone of her seniority and intelligence. Edith got the role of Ed the eaglet. Carroll portrayed himself as a Dodo bird - he mocked his own stutter, which prevented him from correctly pronouncing the surname Dodgson.
Why did Carroll choose Alice as the heroine of his book? Why was he attracted to this particular girl? After all, the Liddells had two other daughters close to her age. Apparently, it was Alice who especially did not want to become an adult. And the writer unmistakably sensed this in her. After all, he himself did not have the slightest desire to turn from a boy into an adult man.
The main character of the book is a very unusual girl for that time. On the one hand, she is well-mannered (after all, the daughter of a scientist), on the other hand, Alice is very spontaneous - she asks any questions without hesitation. There is no English stiffness in her!
On that sunny day in 1862, Alice began to beg her friend to put the story of her adventures in the Underground Country (as Wonderland was originally called) into a book.
That's what Lewis Carroll did...
In 1926, this handwritten copy of a work for children, which by that time had become a classic, was sold at Sotheby's by Mrs. Alice Hargreaves for £15,400. After the death of her husband, the woman had nothing to pay the bills for the house...
In 1865, Carroll published the book at his own expense. And she was noticed! Why? The fact is that the story about the adventures of a junior schoolgirl in a non-existent world, full of nonsense and wordplay, was something completely unprecedented in English children's literature of the Victorian era. In those days, all works for children were of a Christian edifying nature. They were mainly about the struggle between good and even better. And here - such a phantasmagoria...
What connected them?
The more time passed since Carroll's death in 1898, the more dirty speculation was expressed specifically regarding his friendship with little Alice Liddell. Some researchers directly spoke about the writer's pedophilia. A new surge of discussions on this topic was caused by Vladimir Nabokov’s book “Lolita,” published in 1955, about the sexual relationship of an adult man and a young girl.
Almost all of Lewis Carroll's life was spent in the Victorian era. At that time, young girls were considered asexual. Did the writer really have a different point of view? Yes, he loved to photograph naked youngsters who had not yet matured. He liked to correspond with young girls.
But there is no information that his relationship with his children - and with Alice Liddell in particular - went beyond talk. Perhaps in another era everything would have turned out differently. But the Victorian era is Victorian because its morals were Puritan. And dirty thoughts entered few people’s heads. Thank God, no dirt could stick to Carroll and Alice.
How did the relationship between the writer and the very young Miss Liddell end? This is how it should have ended: the girl grew up. And Carroll lost all interest in her. And he gradually parted ways with the large Liddell family. At first Lewis did not please Mrs. Liddell.
Some researchers say that the sensitive mother suspected the young man of dirty intentions. But there is no evidence of this: Carroll’s diaries from those years have not survived. Alice didn’t say a bad word about her friend.
What happened to her in adult life? It is known that Alice did some painting. At the age of 28 she married landowner and cricketer Reginald Hargreaves. She became a housewife. She gave birth to three sons from him. Her two eldest children died in the First World War. Alice lived in the countryside...
A young, pretty woman with a harsh expression on her face looks at us from adult photographs. Nothing special: it’s hard to spot her as a girl from Wonderland.
The last time the sisters, whose maiden name was Liddell, met with Lewis Carroll in 1891 - 7 years before his death. It was a conversation between old friends.
Alice Hargreaves died in 1934. 2 years before her death, she received a certificate of honor from Columbia University for inspiring the writer to create an immortal book.
Maria KONYUKOVA
