Alice Liddell was 20 years old when Prince Leopold (the youngest son of Queen Victoria) arrived at Christ Church, as an undergraduate from 1872 until 1876. It is rumoured that there was a romance, but Alice was a ‘commoner’ and a marriage was not allowed. In 1880 Alice married Reginald Hargreaves. Dodgson was not present at her wedding, but did sent her, together with a friend, a present.
She had three sons, of which two died in WWI. She lived until her death at the estate Cuffnells, in Hampshire. It’s amusing to know that Alice called her first son Leopold (Prince Leopold became his godfather) and Leopold called his daughter Alice…
Alice was an educated woman, she painted and moreover lived the life of a land-lady.
In 1928, Alice sold her manuscript of "Alice's Adventures Under Ground", because she needed the money to pay death duties.
In 1932, when she was 80, Alice published her memoirs. She also went to New York because of the centenary of Dodgson’s birth and was made a Doctor in Literature by Columbia University. This was her last engagement on behalf of Wonderland, because at that age she got really exhausted of being ‘Alice in Wonderland’.
Alice died on 15 November 1934.
Drawings by Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll began making up stories about the adventures of a fictional little girl named Alice in order to please three real-life little girls, Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell, who were the daughters of his friend and Oxford colleague, Dean Liddell.
The story goes that Dodgson (Carroll), the three Liddell girls, and Dodgson's friend Reverend Duckworth (parodied as the Duck in Chapter 3) went on a boat trip up the river together on a summer afternoon in 1862. To amuse the little girls, Dodgson began telling silly stories about a pretend Alice, to the delight of the real Alice Liddell sitting in front of him. He continued telling these nonsense stories to the girls on several different occasions, and eventually he wrote them down in manuscript titled Alice's Adventures Underground.
Finally, in 1865, he published a revised version of this manuscript as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.
Alice Manuscript (Pdf)
Alice Manuscript (Pdf)
Online Manuscript (British Library)
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