Works by Lewis Carroll

For 24 years the Oxford mathematician who wrote the Alice books as Lewis Carroll was also a photographer, and the children of friends, many of them dressed up for a part, were his most frequent sitters.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took up the camera in 1856, prompted first by his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge and later by his Oxford friend Reginald Southey. He worked with wet collodion on glass and needed strong daylight, so many sittings took place in the garden of the Liddells, the family of the Dean of Christ Church. He also had a studio of his own on the Tom Quad roof, where in June 1872 he photographed Julia and Ethel Arnold, aged ten and six. Both girls fix their eyes on some point off to the left. Decades later Ethel recalled that holding a pose for forty-five seconds was an ordeal for a nervous child.

Much of the work is make-believe. In Alice Liddell as "The Beggar Maid", from 1858, the Dean's daughter stands barefoot against a leafy stone wall in a torn white dress slipping off one shoulder, a hand cupped at her waist. Two years later she and her older sister Lorina wear embroidered Chinese tunics in front of an open parasol, with a cloth hung against a stone wall behind them (Lorina and Alice Liddell in Chinese Dress). Saint George and the Dragon, staged in 1875 with the Kitchin children, fits the whole story onto one small stage: the saint rides a rocking horse, a child under a leopard skin plays the dragon, and a girl in a little crown stands by as both captive and bride.

Other sitters are simply themselves. The bearded Reverend James Langton Clark holds his son Charles on his knee, both gripping one stick, and Xie Kitchin lies curled on a sofa among patterned cushions, her bare feet drawn up. In a self-portrait of 1857 Dodgson, then 25, half sits on a window ledge beside a climbing plant, hat in hand. The portraits of Kate, Flo and Polly Terry are modern gold-toned prints, made around 1980 from his collodion negatives. He also photographed painters, among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his family in their Chelsea garden. In 1880 he gave photography up, finding the studio too time-consuming to keep going; of some 3,000 pictures he made, fewer than 1,000 survive.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale Center for British Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago.