The blonde-haired girl in a blue dress with a white pinafore has become one of the most iconic children’s book characters of all time.
From the moment she fell down the rabbit hole, Alice, along with the strange and fantastical creatures she meets in Wonderland, has captured the hearts and minds of readers for over 150 years.
But what many don’t know is that the fictional Alice was inspired by a real one. Meet Alice Pleasance Liddell, the real-life Alice in Wonderland.
This Alice, with a brown chestnut bob, olive skin, and dark, curious eyes was born in 1852 to Henry George and Lorina Liddell.
Her father was a well-respected scholar and her mother a notorious beauty who married above her station. In 1856, her father got the job of a lifetime, becoming Dean of Christ Church at his Alma Mater, Oxford.
Her father moved Alice and her siblings Henry, Ida, and Edith to Oxford when Alice was only four years old, and it was in the Christ Church Deanery where she would grow up and make friends with the man who would inscribe her into fiction.
Alice first met Lewis Carroll, or the Rev Charles Dodgson, as she would have known him, within a year of moving to Oxford.
He was 24 at the time and a math professor. Carroll was friendly with the Liddell parents and first met Alice’s older siblings Henry and Ina.
On April 25th, 1856 he documented his first sighting of the young Alice after going to the Deanery “to try to take a photograph of the Cathedral…The three little girls were in the garden most of the time, and we became excellent friends: we tried to group them in the foreground of the picture but they were not patient sitters,” Carroll concluded the entry with his personal monicker for especially good days, “I mark this day with a white stone.”
Carroll was notoriously fond of children and quickly took to the striking, precocious Alice.
He invited her and her sisters on outings, took the girls up to his rooms to be photographed, and invented many games, riddles, and stories to tell them.
It was on July 4th, 1862, when Alice was ten, that Carroll, along with his colleague Robinson Duckworth, took the Liddell girls on a boating expedition up the Thames that would go down in history. It was during this outing, after the girls begged for a story, that Carroll concocted a tale about a little girl who falls down a rabbit hole, calling it Alice’s Adventures Underground.
Enchanted by the story, Alice begged Carroll to write it down for her. He did, bringing into the world the first draft of what would become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Not everyone was thrilled by Alice and Carroll’s friendship, least of all Mrs. Liddell. She may have been suspicious of Carroll’s interest in her daughter, and while she was not put out by the girls having adult friendships (Alice was also close with the English philosopher and critic John Ruskin) she likely did not believe Carroll to be of good enough social standing. Lorina Liddell came from a significantly less privileged background than her husband and was greatly concerned with introducing, and eventually marrying her daughters to the “right” people.
In 1863, when Alice was eleven, the Liddell family cut ties with Carroll rather abruptly and forbade him from seeing Alice. The reason for this estrangement remains unknown as the pages of his diary that are presumed to reveal the origin were removed by someone in his family, and Alice’s mother destroyed all of Carroll’s letters to Alice. Years later, Alice’s sister, Ina, wrote to Alice discussing what she shared with the biographer Florence Becker Lennon: “I said his manner became too affectionate to you as you grew older and that mother spoke to him about it.” What exactly happened remains unknown to this day.
And while much thought has been given to the profound effect this rift had on Carroll, there is far less interest in Alice’s life after this point. Yet, she was only eleven by the time her friendship with Carroll ended and had her entire life ahead of her. She grew into a smart, beautiful, and charming young woman with a significant pool of suitors. In 1872, when Alice was twenty, Queen Victoria’s youngest son Prince Leopold began attending Christ Church and quickly became a regular at the Deanery. Prince Leopold was rumored to have fallen in love with Alice, with a fellow student recalling that “everywhere he went, Alice was with him.” Much to Mrs. Liddell’s chagrin, Queen Victoria married her son to the German Princess Helen Frederica Augusta, crushing the romance between Leopold and Alice.
The pair remained fond of each other, however, with Prince Leopold naming his daughter Alice and Alice Liddell naming her second son Leopold.
Instead, Alice married Reginald Hargreaves, the son of a wealthy mill owner and a former pupil of Carroll’s. Hargreaves proposed in 1880 when Alice was twenty-eight. They married in Westminster Abbey eight weeks later. Carroll was, rather conspicuously, not invited to the wedding, but did send the couple a gift. After the wedding, Alice left Oxford for the Hargreaves’ estate Cuffnells.
Alice was an excellent mistress of Cuffnells and made good use of the estate by hosting balls and glamorous parties. Yet there was an air of grief about her. Her beloved sister Edith had died in 1872, the same year her affair with Prince Leopold ended. “Everyone who knew her commented on an air of sadness…never far from the surface. However much she laughed and sang, however much she indulged that insatiable curiosity, the sadness was somehow always there,” a friend wrote of Alice. This is an attribute she no doubt shared with her old friend Carroll.
Unfortunately, Alice’s greatest tragedy was yet to come: Her two eldest sons Alan and Leopold were killed while fighting in WWI. This period of profound grief also coincided with economic hardship. Like so many English country estates, Cuffnells proved incompatible with the age of industry, and the income from the land was no longer enough to sustain their lifestyle. Reginald began selling off large parcels of the property before dying in 1926.
In her old age, Alice’s only family was her younger son (notably named Caryl). Her son made some poor investments, and along with the decreased income of Cuffnells, Alice was forced to sell a little green leather notebook she had kept locked away for many years, the original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Underground.
The manuscript sold for a world record price of 15,400 pounds and has been the property of the British Museum since 1948.
Immediate money woes resolved, Alice settled into a quiet life, yet her connection with Carroll was not quite finished. In 1932, on the one-hundredth anniversary of Carroll’s birth, a new opportunity presented itself: a late-in-life career as “the real Alice.” Columbia University invited Alice to participate in an elaborate series of celebrations commemorating the beloved story. At eighty years old, she left the English countryside for the bright lights of Manhattan.
Treated to parties, interviews, and even receiving an honorary doctorate from Columbia, it must have truly felt like Wonderland for the old woman.
Yet she also confessed to her son Caryl that she “was tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is–only I do get tired.”
Alice Liddell passed away peacefully in 1934, at eighty-two years old. She was with her beloved son Caryl when she died.
Few children can claim to have as great an impact on literature as Alice Liddell, and yet her life is often completely overshadowed by her fictional counterpart.
What we do know is that this beautiful, intelligent, enchanting child-turned-woman inspired not only Carroll, but the prince of England, much of Manhattan, and millions of readers who were inspired by the story she helped to create. Thank you, Alice.
