The Alice Behind Wonderland

On a summers day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London.Simon Winchester deftly uses the resulting image--as unsettling as it is famous, and the subject of bottomless speculation--as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of English literature. Dodgsons 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 worlds best-loved observers of childhood. Little wonder that there is more to Alice Liddell as the Beggar Maid than meets the eye.