Photo of Alice Liddell taken by Lewis Carroll

This famous photograph, taken in 1858, shows Alice Liddell, the real-life inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, dressed in theatrical rags — a popular Victorian theme for artistic portraiture. The image was made by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), a mathematics lecturer at Oxford and an early pioneer of photography.

Carroll was deeply fascinated by childhood and storytelling. His photographic portraits, though sometimes debated by modern viewers, were part of a broader 19th-century artistic tradition that romanticised innocence and imagination. Alice’s family, including her mother, approved of these sittings, and Carroll often worked with parental supervision.

This photograph was taken just a few years before Carroll would begin writing the story that would change children's literature forever: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865.

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