The REAL Alice in Wonderland


Photo: Lewis Carroll / Getty Images

Here's a fun trivia for you for when you go see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland movie: did you know that there actually was a real alice? Her name was Alice Pleasance Lidell.

From The Real Alice in Wonderland gallery over at LIFE:

Before Alice ever set foot in Wonderland, there was Alice Liddell, the 10-year-old friend of an eccentric, stuttering lecturer in mathematics who would later find fame as a writer, under the name Lewis Carroll. (Pictured: A photo by Carroll of a 6-year-old Alice Liddell as "the Beggar-Maid" in 1858.)

Link


Charles Dogson (Lewis Carroll) took nude pictures of Alice and other young girls (6 have surfaced, others are presumed lost)

What to make of it is the big debate.

Some have said that he was a pedophile (possibly a celibate one), and that 6 pages torn from his diary were to conceal this (one unsubstantiated theory: that he had written about proposing to Alice, then 11).

Others say that this is a misunderstanding, that the nudes would have been perfectly normal for a well-know amateur photographer at the time.
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There's a great, recent-ish, historical fiction book out about Dodgson and Lidell. Alice I Have Been is the title, and the author is escaping me.

Of course, it is fiction, but I found it fairly fascinating and informative. Some portion of the book dealt with the very photograph shown here.
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The Smithsonian article is interesting. It's nice to see some common myths, such as the notion that Carroll was uninterested in adult women cleared up, as well as a clarification that there were no photos he took that were anything unusual for the time.
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nemo, the Smithsonian article is just as biased in the opposite direction. It presents evidence to "prove" that he was interested in adult women that's flimsier than the evidence that "proves" he liked little girls.
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