Lewis Carroll - Alice Liddell as the Beggar Maid [1858]

Lewis Carroll - Alice Liddell as the Beggar Maid [1858], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Carroll's famous literary works, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872), were both written for Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of Christ Church, Oxford. For Carroll, Alice was more than a favourite model; she was his "ideal child-friend," and a photograph of her, aged seven, adorned the last page of the manuscript he gave her of Alice's Adventures Underground. 

The present image of Alice was most likely inspired by The Beggar Maid, a poem written by Carroll's favorite living poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in 1842. If Carroll's images define childhood as a fragile state of innocent grace threatened by the experience of growing up and the demands of adults, they also reveal to the contemporary viewer the photographer's erotic imagination. In this provocative portrait of Alice at age seven or eight, posed as a beggar against a neglected garden wall, Carroll arranged the tattered dress to the limits of the permissible, showing as much as possible of her bare chest and limbs, and elicited from her a self-confident, even challenging stance. This outcast beggar will arouse in the passer-by as much lust as pity. Indeed, Alice looks at us with faint suspicion, as if aware that she is being used as an actor in an incomprehensible play. A few years later, a grown-up Alice would pose, with womanly assurance, for Julia Margaret Cameron.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Albumen silver print from glass negative, 16.3 x 10.9 cm]