The Alice Behind Wonderland (review)

Simon Winchester has written a modest ninety-six-page study that focuses on the photographic back story of what he calls “one of the most memorable photographic likeness ever taken” (6): the famous image of the seven-year-old Alice Liddell posed as a beggar-maid, taken by Lewis Carroll in the Deanery Garden in summer 1858. Winchester’s focus on this single photographic image is both an asset and a limitation in this study. I found his The Professor and the Madman (1998) a fascinating and popular study of the odd relationship between James Murray and Dr. W. C. Minor, an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane who became a significant contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary. But The Alice Behind Wonderland is much less engaging and a bit of a disappointment. For such a slender book, it feels at times padded with tangential information.

Despite the title, Winchester does not provide the reader with any new insights into Alice Liddell, the muse for Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the model for several of his best-known child photographs. Readers interested in learning more about her and her relationship with Charles Dodgson would be better served by reading Colin Gordon’s Beyond the Looking Glass: Reflections of Alice and her Family (1982), Anne Clark’s The Real Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dream Child (1981), or Morton Cohen’s Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1995). Winchester acknowledges that Carroll scholarship is a rather crowded field, and that the best he hopes to do with this slender volume is to add “minutely to the patina of knowledge” (100). And while the story Winchester tells is well known, he does tell it well.

Rather than a biography of Alice Liddell or a study of Carroll as a writer, this book is a sort of brief photographic history that shows how the three key elements of Lewis Carroll, Alice Liddell, and the Thomas Ottwell Registered Double Folding camera, which Carroll purchased in 1856, all contributed to the production of the memorable photograph in 1858. Alfred, Lord Tennyson called the portrait “the most beautiful photograph he had even seen” (Collingwood 79), which is a bit self-serving, as the photograph is a visual narrative based on his poem “The Beggar Maid.” Published in 1842, the poem tells the story of the meeting between the North African King Cophetua and the beggar maid Penelophon. Carroll, along with William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Edward Burne-Jones, used it as an artistic model.

While not a photographic historian, Winchester makes effective use of Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling’s Lewis Carroll, Photographer: The Princeton University Albums (2002) and Helmut Gernsheim’s Lewis Carroll, Photographer (1949) for situating this image within the context of the trends of nineteenth-century photography and Carroll’s own sizable collection of photographs taken between 1856 and 1880. While Winchester makes references to other Carroll photographs, he only reproduces the single image in his volume; readers might want to refer to Taylor and Wakeling or Gernsheim while reading this book. But rather than a systematic study of Carroll as a photographer, Winchester provides a digressive meditation on the creation and possible meanings of this single image. His asides are sometimes more informative than his discussions of either Alice or Carroll. For instance, he provides a nice thumbnail description of Frederick Scott Archer, who invented the wet-plate collodion process that Carroll preferred. He also notes that it was Henry Acland, Regius Professor of Medicine, who provided Carroll with his first professional commission photographing the animal skeletons in the Oxford Museum of Natural History, among them that of a dodo. Acland was also the Liddell family doctor.

Winchester views Carroll as the “perfect type-specimen” of the relatively well-born, exceptionally clever member of the intelligentsia drawn to photography in England in the 1850s. Comparing and contrasting the daguerreotype, the calotype, and the wet-plate collodion processes, Winchester shows how the collodion method—Carroll’s preference—helped to democratize Victorian...