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pastime.67 Once more the pages of the diary that record this crisis have been torn out.68 In 1885, however, undeterred, he took up sketching young girls in the nude in the studio, and to commission pictures of them from his artist friend Gertrude Thomson. Many of his late letters concern these interests in nude children, and in a letter to his sister Mary of 1893 he had to defend himself against ‘a good deal of utter misrepresentation’ about all this. Rumours had continued to circulate. In another letter of 1893 he calls himself a ‘sentimental old fogey’,69 but quite how all this related to the Christian vision of Love in his sermons and at the close of Sylvie and Bruno is an open question. Nowadays, no doubt, the police and the Social Services would have become involved, but in general the families of his child friends appeared to raise no objections. He died in January 1898 in Guildford, working to the end on the proofs of The Three Sunsets and the second part of Symbolic Logic. After a small-scale family funeral, he was buried in a modest tomb in the churchyard there.

However we understand it, Dodgson’s intense fascination with young girls is the prismatic anomaly at the heart of his life – and his two unparalleled masterpieces, the Alice books. Though he never matched their art or popularity again, they transformed his life, and the rest of it was lived in their shadow. Dodgson continued to take an obsessional interest in their fate until he died. He not only went on revising the lay-out and punctuation of the twin Alice books until 1897, when he produced his final corrected text, but he also published the MS facsimile of Alice’s Adventures under Ground in 1886, marketing the cheaper ‘People’s Edition’ in 1887 to reach a wider audience, producing the embarrassingly awful shorter ‘Nursery Alice’ for younger children in 1890, kept an eye on translations into European languages, fostered stage adaptations, coached actresses who played Alice in the theatre, wrote ‘“Alice” on the Stage’ for The Theatre in 1887, and revelled in a series of commercial spin-offs like Alice biscuit tins and umbrellas. Part of the reason for this was no doubt commercial – Dodgson was a shrewd business man – part of it was aesthetic – he loved to supervise and control every stage of the production of his works, and make them as near perfect as possible. More than this, however, I would guess that such activity linked him to his most creative moment, his literary birth as an author, his ever-multiplying audience of children, and the story’s first listener and heroine, Alice Liddell.

3: The Genesis of Alice

The story of the composition of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is almost as well known as the book. Indeed it forms part of the story itself. If the character of the author has an intimate bearing on the book, so does the character of its first listeners, its setting and its heroine.

Most of the protagonists have left accounts of the origin and development of Alice’s Adventures, but the most prominent of them is condensed in the opening poem of the book itself. The verse prelude or ‘frame’ poem anchors the text in the ‘golden afternoon’ when he first improvised it for three children in a boat on a river:

Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:

Thus slowly, one by one,

Its quaint events were hammered out—

And now the tale is done,

And home we steer, a merry crew,

Beneath the setting sun.

On this model the whole ‘tale’, though growing ‘slowly’, was hammered out on that one golden afternoon and was finished by the journey home that evening.

When they came to record their recollections of Dodgson after his death, two of the other passengers on the boat confirmed this miraculous tale of the tale. Canon Duckworth told his first biographer:

I was very closely associated with him in the production and publication of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. I rowed stroke and he rowed bow in the famous Long Vacation voyage to Godstow, when the three Liddells were our passengers, and the story was composed and spoken over my shoulder for the benefit