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of Alice Liddell, who was acting ‘cox’ of our gig. I remember turning round and saying, ‘Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, I’m inventing it as we go along.’ I also well remember how, when we had conducted the three children back to the Deanery, Alice said, as she bade us good night, ‘Oh Mr Dodgson, I wish you would write out Alice’s adventures for me.’ He said he should try, and he afterwards told me that he sat up nearly the whole night, committing to a MS book his recollections of the drolleries with which he had enlivened the afternoon. He added illustrations of his own, and presented the volume, which used often to be seen on the drawing-room table of the Deanery.70

According to Duckworth’s miraculously condensed account, Dodgson narrated the story one afternoon, wrote it all up that evening at a sitting, and presented it to the Deanery soon after.

Alice herself left two accounts, confirming the golden-afternoon story but also modifying it. She told Dodgson’s first biographer:

I believe the beginning of “Alice” was told one summer afternoon when the sun was so burning that we had landed in the meadows down the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a new-made hayrick. Here from all three came the old petition of ‘Tell us a story’, and so began the ever-delightful tale. Sometimes to tease us – and perhaps being really tired – Mr Dodgson would stop suddenly and say, ‘And that’s all till next time.’ ‘Ah, but it is next time’, would be the exclamation from all three; and after some persuasion the story would start afresh. Another day perhaps, the story would begin in the boat, and Mr Dodgson, in the middle of telling a thrilling adventure, would pretend to go fast asleep, to our great dismay.71

She elaborated on this in an article written with her son in the Cornhill during the centenary year of Dodgson’s birth:

Nearly all of Alice’s Adventures under Ground was told on that blazing summer afternoon with the heat shimmering over the meadows where the party landed to shelter for awhile in the shadow cast by the haycocks near Godstow. I think the stories he told us that afternoon must have been better than usual, because I have such a distinct recollection of the expedition, and also, on the next day I started to pester him to write down the story for me, which I had never done before. It was due to my ‘going on and on’ and importunity that, after saying he would think about it, he eventually gave the hesitating promise which started him writing it down at all. This he referred to in a letter written in 1883 in which he writes of me as the ‘one without whose infant patronage I might possibly never have written at all.’72

She acknowledges, however, that both the poem and the Canon telescope the time of composition more than a little:

The result was that for several years, when he went away on vacation, he took the little black book about with him, writing the manuscript in his own peculiar script, and drawing the illustrations. Finally the book was finished and given to me. But in the meantime, friends who had seen and heard bits of it while he was at work on it, were so thrilled that they persuaded him to publish it.73

Alice Liddell (Alice Hargreaves by then), looking back nearly seventy years later, extends the timescale of writing but also of oral composition. On her account, the ‘golden afternoon’ was only one of a series:

As it is, I think many of my earlier adventures must be irretrievably lost to posterity, because Mr Dodgson told us many, many stories before the famous trip up the river to Godstow. No doubt he added some of the earlier adventures to make up the difference between Alice in Wonderland and Alice’s Adventures under Ground, which latter was nearly all told on that one afternoon. Much of Through the Looking-Glass is made up of them too, particularly the ones to do with chessmen, which are dated by the period when we were excitedly learning chess.74

Though we are bound to be a little sceptical about Canon