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to the genesis of Wonderland and the famous river expedition that June, the diaries are interrupted once again for the three days in late June 1863 when Dodgson’s intimacy with Alice and the other Liddells was abruptly terminated for ever by her mother, the formidable, socially ambitious Lorina Liddell. Mrs Liddell also destroyed all his letters to Alice.39 It is one of the great ironies of Dodgson’s life that by the time Wonderland was published in 1865, making her about the most famous seven-year-old girl in history and him the most famous children’s writer, their relationship was a thing of the past and Dodgson was banned from the Deanery. We don’t know why the kissing had to stop, or what brought to an end the stories, photos and river expeditions which provide the frame for Wonderland, but stop they did. When he saw the Liddell children again the following December, the diary records ‘I held myself aloof from them, as I have done all this term.’40

There were family rumours that Dodgson proposed to Alice, but was rejected – either because she was too young, or that he in his thirties was too old, or that this obscure young mathematics don didn’t match Mrs Liddell’s notoriously snobbish expectations for her daughters (she liked hobnobbing with royalty and is probably parodied in the references to ‘Kingfishers’ in Dodgson’s skit on the Dean’s architectural taste, ‘The Vision of the 3 T’s’).41 Romance with teenagers, like stuttering, was evidently something to which the Dodgson boys were prone, for at about the same time Dodgson was head over heels in love with Alice, his younger brother Wilfred fell in love with another teenage Alice, the fourteen-year-old Alice Donkin. Unlike Charles, however, Wilfred went on, after a decent interval, to marry her (in 1862 Charles had photographed her prophetically as a teenage bride in a bizarrely composed photo ‘The Elopement’). In a diary entry in 1866 Dodgson describes a conversation about Wilfred and ‘A.L.’ (presumably, Alice Liddell) as ‘a very anxious subject’. It was such an ‘anxious subject’ for everyone concerned that none of the interested parties ever discussed it again in public. Recalling her memories of Wonderland seventy years later, Alice Hargreaves (as she then was) steers well away from any mention of her or the celebrated author’s feelings, and though Dodgson spoke later of Alice as his ‘ideal child friend’,42 he never explained the nature of their friendship or the dramatic rift that separated them.

By the time he published Through the Looking-Glass in 1872, he was writing ‘as if she was dead’.43 Its opening verses (‘Child of the pure unclouded brow’) speak of Alice and the author being ‘half a life asunder’, while the closing poem (‘A boat beneath a sunny sky’) reads like an elegy for Alice, though it was written when she was still in her teens. In fact the coda to her adventures through the mirror is almost Hardyesque in its wintry words and lyric attenuations: ‘Long has paled that sunny sky:/ Echoes fade and memories die:/ Autumn frosts have slain July./ Still she haunts me phantomwise/ Alice moving under skies/ Never seen by waking eyes.’ Alice has become a figure in his dream.

The nature of Dodgson’s love of Alice remains a subject of speculation. On the evidence of his surviving letters and diaries, Dodgson, though a most self-conscious writer, was not a man with a very intense self-consciousness or interest in his own motives or feelings. Dodgson the photographer ‘had a horror’ of being photographed himself.44 Similarly while his diaries and letters diligently record his daily visits, meetings, and journeys, including his rendezvous with children, they tell us remarkably little about his feelings – in complete contrast to the diaries of his younger contemporary Kilvert with their vivid insights into that other bachelor cleric’s voyeuristic interest in young girls. In his diaries Dodgson regularly commemorates his meetings with Alice and the other Liddells during their years of close contact (he was obviously half in love with the whole family) by marking