Little Miss Liddell

The Alice Behind Wonderland

Time & Life Pictures / getty Images

by Simon Winchester

Oxford, 128 pp., $16.95L

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) was a pedophile, by the standards of today. Of course, by the standards of today, no parent would have knowingly allowed him to take that famous photograph of the 7-year-old Alice Liddell—the one of her dressed in ragamuffin clothes, posed against the garden wall, a too-old look of allure in her eye, and her nipple exposed through the drop-shouldered dress. The picture is a pedophile’s dream, a pervert’s fantasy of a child who understands and would welcome a grown man’s sexual advances, and if the 26-year-old Carroll had taken it in the summer of 2008 instead of 1858, he might well have ended up in jail.

 So what are we to make of the fact that, in a High Victorian summer, and for years afterward, no one seemed particularly to mind? Either such indifference indicts the 19th century, or it indicts the 21st; with regard to sexuality, either the Victorians were a sick, sick people, or we are.

“Alice Liddell as The Beggar Maid”—as the picture is carefully labeled in Carroll’s display album—is one of nearly 3,000 photographs he took through the 1850s and ’60s before abandoning his interest in the new technology. Now, in The Alice Behind Wonderland, the popular writer Simon Winchester takes the picture as a starting point for accounts of photographic history, Oxford University, book publishing, and the progression by which a shy, half-deaf mathematician named Charles Dodgson became, under his pen name of Lewis Carroll, the most famous children’s author in the world—to say nothing of Winchester’s forays into Muscular Christianity, the headmasters of Rugby School, Anglican theology, and the grown Alice’s romance with Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria’s youngest son.