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Church until his death in 1898, nearly half a century later. His subsequent career as a bachelor clergyman and successful children’s writer, living at the heart of the academic and social establishment as a Christ Church don, was, like his childhood, an impeccably conventional one in almost all respects – but it had one deep-rooted anomaly at its heart: a dream of childhood, focused on the figure of a beautiful young girl.

It was in 1853, in his third year at Oxford, and after the death of his mother, that Dodgson wrote ‘Solitude’, in which he evoked an infant sobbing itself asleep ‘Upon a mother’s breast’, recalling ‘the golden hours of Life’s young Spring’, before declaring he would give everything ‘to be once more a little child/ For one bright summer’s day.’31 This anomalous cult of the child was to bring him fame through the Alice books and a certain social cachet through his camera, but in its wake it also woke shadowy rumours of scandal as a result of his increasingly obsessive fascination with girls before puberty, and his growing preoccupation with photographing them in as scantily clad a state as possible, in bathing drawers for example, or, preferably, in the nude. ‘A girl of about twelve is my ideal beauty of form’, he wrote in 1893, and ‘one hardly sees why the lovely forms of girls should ever be covered up.’32

The anomaly’s first name and incarnation was Alice Liddell, and it was in the shadow of Alice’s name and the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice books, that Dodgson lived his later life. The Liddell children first entered the young mathematics tutor’s life in 1856, the year after their father Henry Liddell – previously head of Westminster School, co-author of the famous Greek lexicon and a high-profile reformer – was, to the conservative Dodgson’s alarm, appointed Dean of Christ Church. It was Harry Liddell he met first (‘the handsomest boy I ever saw’),33 then Lorina. In April, however, the twenty-four-year-old Dodgson, then very much a novice at what was called the ‘black art’ of photography, tried to photograph the new Dean’s three small daughters, including the three-year-old Alice, in the Deanery Gardens.34 It wasn’t a success aesthetically (they wouldn’t keep still), but this first of innumerable attempts to photograph Alice and her sisters established him at the Deanery: ‘The three girls were in the garden most of the time, and we became excellent friends’, he wrote in his diary.35 In June he took the ten-year-old Harry Liddell rowing with him on the river, and soon afterwards the unchaperoned seven-year-old Lorina on another river trip. He noted that day in his diary with a ‘white stone’ (as he marked all special days).36 During the next few years there were many such days and Dodgson, despite his political differences with the Dean on many college issues, became a regular intimate of the Dean’s family, taking pictures, playing cards and croquet, telling jokes and stories, and messing about on the river. While he was by most accounts a rather dreary college tutor for undergraduates, he seems to have been in his element with the Deanery children, who clearly put him in touch with his familiar role as family entertainer under the Rectory Umbrella at Croft. During these years his intimacy with Alice grew, as the series of haunting, yet subliminally creepy photographs of her and her sisters show. As Michael Bakewell says, these ‘pictures tell us, if nothing else, he was in love with Alice.’37

But they don’t tell the whole story, and there is a frustrating gap in the written records just at this crucial point. Dodgson began keeping a diary in his third year in Oxford and went on doing so until his death. The thirteen volumes of these were available to his first biographer, but the two volumes that cover the years from April 1858 to May 1862, during which Dodgson’s intimacy with Alice was maturing, have disappeared (either lost, as the family subsequently maintained, or, more likely, destroyed).38 Furthermore, though they fortunately resume just in time to record the weeks leading up