Lewis Carroll

Photography Begins at Oxford

Lewis Carroll was the pen name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson used for his literary career from 1856. The National Portrait Gallery explains that the name was derived by converting “Charles” through the Latin Carolus into Carroll and pairing “Lutwidge” with Lewis^*24. Carroll was a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church and began photographing in 1856 at the age of twenty-four. One early catalyst was the photographic work of his colleague Reginald Southey. NPG records note that Carroll saw Southey’s photographs in 1855 and responded with strong interest; his diary records that in March 1856 he ordered his first camera from a photographic supplier in London^*26. He therefore began photographing about nine years before the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and continued for twenty-four years alongside his literary work.

The History of Science Museum estimates that Carroll made about 3,000 photographs before giving up photography in 1880, of which fewer than 1,000 survive^*8. The catalogue raisonné published by UBC Press compares dispersed prints, negatives, albums, and provenance in order to reconstruct his work as a photographer and treats it as a sustained body of production distinct from his literature^*1. His sitters extended well beyond children to cultural figures such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Ellen Terry, Michael Faraday, and Alfred Tennyson. In 2018, the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Victorian Giants presented Carroll alongside Julia Margaret Cameron, Oscar Rejlander, and Clementina Hawarden as leading practitioners of Victorian art photography^*29.

Photography also became a social means through which Carroll moved among Oxford networks of college life, science, literature, and art. The History of Science Museum lists Michael Faraday, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais among his sitters and describes photography as a means through which he approached prominent figures^*7. The Oxford University Museum of Natural History preserves his portrait of the physician George Rolleston posed with museum specimens and notes that his sitters also included the photographers Julia Margaret Cameron and Sarah Angelina Acland^*11. Family portraits, photographs of children, records of university figures, and portraits of artists and scientists therefore occupied the same photographic activity, extending what began as a private interest into a visual record of Victorian intellectual and cultural networks.

Staged Portraiture

Early wet-plate portraiture required long exposures, and the NPG notes that Carroll’s outdoor portraits around 1856 could require sitters to remain still for roughly ten to forty seconds^*25. Within that duration, he carefully arranged posture and gaze while introducing costumes, props, and roles drawn from literature and legend. In The Met’s St. George and the Dragon, Alexandra Kitchin and her siblings enact characters from the legend of Saint George; the dedicated studio built above Carroll’s Christ Church rooms in 1872 and its store of costumes formed part of the photographic setting^*17. By repeatedly placing the same real person in different roles, Carroll made portraits that simultaneously recorded an identity and staged a story.

SFMOMA’s Dreaming in Pictures situates Carroll’s photographs within the nineteenth-century culture of the tableau vivant, or “living picture,” and describes the photographs as a kind of private theater performed by children^*2. Christ Church Library records that in 1863 Carroll rented the garden of a furniture shop on St Aldates as a shooting site and later expanded his facilities by building a dedicated studio above his Christ Church rooms^*30. Maintaining his own photographic space, costumes, props, and long-term relationships with models made it possible to develop a continuous form of staged portraiture beyond the single commissioned sitting typical of commercial studios.

Photography and Storytelling

For Carroll, the time spent taking a photograph and the time spent inventing a story often occupied the same space. His glass-roofed studio above his Christ Church rooms, installed in 1872, contained toys and theatrical costumes, and children could choose roles while participating in the sitting. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, describes how Carroll used stories, games, and magic tricks to relax young sitters and made the act of being photographed part of shared entertainment^*20. In the resulting photographs, the recognizable face of a real person is layered with a fictional role selected for the session.

In Mary J. MacDonald dreaming of her father and brother Ronald, the title’s reference to a “dream” links the reclining Mary MacDonald to a psychological story about her family^*22. Carroll’s repeated transformations of Alexandra Kitchin into a figure in Chinese-style dress, a figure in Greek-style costume, or a princess from a saint’s legend continue the same procedure: one body is placed into a succession of stories. Storytelling during the sitting, the choice of costume, and the assignment of fictional roles to real people brought Carroll’s literary imagination and photography together within the same everyday activity.

Private Albums

Carroll continually organized his prints into private albums. The Harry Ransom Center’s “Carroll’s first album” contains seventy photographs from 1856, along with his handwritten index and the inscription “Begun June 1856”^*10. Its Photographs Vol. III gathers more than one hundred portraits with an index, preserving his organization of prints by sitter and sequence^*5. Another unpublished album contains seventy-six photographs of family members, friends, landscapes, and reproductive images, placing portraits and everyday visual records in the same volume^*28. The album was an editorial space in which Carroll decided whom to photograph, which image to retain, and how relationships among sitters could later be consulted.

The albums were also a means by which Carroll showed his work as a photographer. The Harry Ransom Center’s Weld Album preserves sixteen albumen prints from around 1857, including Agnes Grace Weld, Tennyson’s son Hallam, and the sons of Julia Margaret Cameron, bringing family connections and cultural networks into one volume^*3. Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling’s study of the Princeton University Library Albums interprets four albums assembled by Carroll himself as volumes used to show photographs to friends, relatives, and people he might later photograph^*13. Organizing existing sitters and cultivating future photographic relationships were connected through the album.

Alice Liddell

Alice Pleasance Liddell was the daughter of Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church, and one of the principal models Carroll photographed repeatedly within a close relationship with the family. During a boating trip on the Thames on July 4, 1862, Carroll improvised a story for Alice and her two sisters that later developed into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; the V&A notes that Alice asked him to write the story down^*4. The real Alice was therefore closely connected to the origin of the book and also appeared repeatedly before Carroll’s camera. In the NGA’s Lorina and Alice Liddell in Chinese Dress, Alice and her sister Lorina pose in costume, combining a family portrait with a staged persona^*18.

Alice Liddell as “The Beggar Maid”, made in 1858 when Alice was about six, is a staged portrait inspired by Alfred Tennyson’s poem “The Beggar Maid”^*15. The National Portrait Gallery also preserves a portrait of Alice Liddell, and its collection record brings together her role in the history of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and her long study as one of Carroll’s photographic models^*16. In 2024, the Bodleian Libraries acquired an original albumen print of The Beggar Maid and the 1860 glass wet-plate negative for Alice Liddell Wearing a Garland, placing these works within the Victorian culture of photographing affluent children in thematic costume^*23. The period ideal of “childhood innocence” and contemporary questions about an adult photographer’s authority, a child model’s agency, and the later public display of private photographs now overlap in the reception of the same images.

Carroll’s photographs of the Liddells grew out of an ongoing relationship with the family. In a group portrait from spring 1860 in the National Portrait Gallery, Alice stands in the garden of the deanery at Christ Church with her sister Ina, brother Harry, and younger sister Edith; the museum notes that Carroll became close to the family as a colleague of their father, Henry Liddell^*21. The family garden, boating excursions, storytelling, and photography all belonged to the same social circle, and that continuity made it possible to photograph one child at different ages and in different roles.

Alexandra Kitchin

Alexandra Kitchin was the daughter of Carroll’s Christ Church colleague George William Kitchin and was known by the nickname “Xie.” SFMOMA notes that Carroll photographed her at least fifty times over eleven years, assigning her roles in exoticized dress, with a violin, as an allegorical figure, and in scenes with her siblings^*19. In The Met’s St. George and the Dragon, Alexandra plays the princess in the legend^*17. Across photographs made from childhood into adolescence, her physical growth and theatrical transformation were recorded together. Long-term relationships with children he knew, including Alice Liddell and Alexandra Kitchin, provided the social basis for this repeated portraiture.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, acquired a 1874 Xie Kitchin in 2024 and presents three image states of the albumen silver print online, noting that Alexandra was Carroll’s most frequently photographed model^*20. The Harry Ransom Center’s Lewis Carroll Photography Collection also preserves a sequence of different appearances by Alexandra in the 1870s: in fur, in nightclothes and a crown, in Chinese-style and Greek-style costumes, and in St. George and the Dragon^*27. Photographing one sitter across many years makes it possible to compare personal growth, transformation through costume, and narrative roles within a single sequence.

Edited by Morton N. Cohen, Lewis Carroll and the Kitchins brings together twenty-five previously unpublished letters to the Kitchin family and nineteen photographs. The material documents George Kitchin’s position as Carroll’s colleague at Christ Church and places Carroll’s photographic relationship with Alexandra “Xie” Kitchin within an ongoing relationship between the two families^*33. The letters preserve concrete details of requests for sittings, exchanges of prints, and the family contacts that supported repeated visits.

Images of Children and Ethics

Among the Victorian upper and middle classes, childhood was repeatedly represented in literature and art as a state associated with innocence, purity, and moral virtue. In its discussion of Alexandra Kitchin, SFMOMA connects Carroll’s photographs of children to this widely shared Romantic ideal of childhood and notes that parents brought daughters to him for similar portraits^*19. A culture that idealized children, the exchange of photographs among families, and the social networks of upper-class and intellectual circles that welcomed amateur photographers all supported the production and reception of these portraits.

Carroll’s photographs of children, especially the small number that include nudity, have often been treated sensationally in later biography and popular culture. SFMOMA’s account of Alexandra Kitchin describes a major shift in reception between the Victorian ideal of “childhood innocence” and sexualized interpretations that emerged in the twentieth century^*19. Family involvement at the time of production, the private exchange of photographs, and their later publication and museum display took place under different conditions. Contemporary ethical analysis is therefore concerned with specific questions of authority between an adult photographer and a child, parental involvement, and who had the power to own and make the photographs public, without treating speculation about the photographer’s psychology as evidence.

In 1978, Morton N. Cohen published Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of Nude Children as a separate booklet, isolating the surviving nude photographs for documentary study^*34. Carol Mavor’s later Pleasures Taken reread Carroll’s photographs of girls through several issues, including Victorian sexuality, loss, and the agency of the model^*35. Together the books document the changing critical language through which representations of children have been reconsidered since the late twentieth century.

SFMOMA’s Dreaming in Pictures offered a systematic reassessment of Carroll’s photographs as Victorian art photography^*6. The Musée d’Orsay exhibition likewise presented Carroll the photographer as an independent subject of study, returning portraiture, staging, and albums to photographic history alongside the literary reputation for which he was already famous^*14. The National Portrait Gallery’s Victorian Giants compared him with Julia Margaret Cameron, Oscar Rejlander, and Clementina Hawarden, showing shared experiments with costume, performance, and portraiture^*29. Scholarship has increasingly separated Victorian ideas of childhood, the social relationship between photographer and model, and the private exchange and later public display of photographs instead of reducing Carroll’s images of children to a single psychological explanation^*12.

Photography after He Stopped Photographing

Carroll’s engagement with photography continued after he stopped taking photographs himself in 1880. Lindsay Smith’s Lewis Carroll: Photography on the Move argues that he remained active as a collector and consumer, acquiring photographs at the theater, seaside resorts, and while traveling, and commissioning portraits from photographers whose work he admired^*9. After giving up the camera, he continued to select, buy, and commission photographs. Photography remained part of his life as a visual culture through which people, memories, and roles could be exchanged.

The Harry Ransom Center’s digital archive and photography collection preserve albumen prints and collodion negatives, portraits of children, images of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and self-portraits, allowing his work with children, cultural figures, self-representation, and negatives to be compared across the full range of his photographic activity^*27. The Center’s albums, Princeton’s album scholarship, and Wakeling’s catalogue raisonné have helped reconstruct Carroll’s photographs from material associated mainly with “Alice” into an independent body of photographic work sustained over decades. That reconstruction makes staged portraiture, private albums, relationships with models, and the collection and circulation of photographs legible within a single history of activity.

Helmut Gernsheim’s revised 1969 edition of Lewis Carroll, Photographer brought together Carroll’s portraits, staged photographs, and portraits of prominent figures as a study of a photographer at a moment when the history of British photography was itself becoming more established^*31. Morton N. Cohen’s 1998 Reflections in a Looking Glass, published in conjunction with a centenary touring exhibition, presented photographs of children, family, friends, colleagues, and public figures together with diaries and writings^*32. Between these studies lies a broader history of reception: from selections of celebrated photographs toward present-day scholarship that also examines albums, correspondence, relationships with sitters, and the circulation of images after they were made.