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Alice Pleasance Hargreaves ( née Liddell, ;This phonetic version of her name, with emphasis on first, rather than second syllable as sometimes mispronounced, is confirmed by the rhyme current in Oxford at the time (attributed by some to Dodgson himself but called by others a piece of "undergraduate doggerel"): "I am the Dean and this is Mrs Liddell. She plays the first, and I the second fiddle." Quoted in 4 May 1852 – 16 November 1934) was an English woman who, in her childhood, was an acquaintance and photographic subject of Lewis Carroll. One of the stories he told her during a boating trip became the classic 1865 children's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She shared her name with "Alice", the story's protagonist, but scholars disagree about the extent to which the character was based upon her.
Alice was three years younger than Lorina and two years older than Edith, and the three sisters were constant childhood companions. She and her family regularly spent holidays at their holiday home, Penmorfa, which later became the Gogarth Abbey Hotel, on the West Shore of Llandudno in North Wales.
When Alice was a young woman, she set out on a Grand Tour of Europe with Lorina and Edith. One story has it that she became a romantic interest of Prince Leopold, the youngest son of Queen Victoria, during the four years he spent at Christ Church, but the evidence for this is sparse. It is true that years later, Leopold named his first child Alice and acted as godfather to Alice's second son, Leopold. However, it is possible Alice was named in honour of Leopold's deceased elder sister instead, the Grand Duchess of Hesse. A recent biographer of Leopold suggests it is far more likely that Alice's sister Edith was the true recipient of Leopold's attention.cited in Leach, Karoline In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, p. 201 Edith died on 26 June 1876, The Cathedral Church of Oxford, a Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See, p. 101 possibly of measles or peritonitis (accounts differ), shortly before she was to be married to Aubrey Harcourt, a cricket player.Will Brooker, Alice's adventures: Lewis Carroll in popular culture, p. 338 Prince Leopold served as a pall-bearer at her funeral on 30 June 1876.
During World War I, she joined the Red Cross as a volunteer, for which she was awarded a medal currently on display in the Museum of Oxford. She took to referring to herself as "Lady Hargreaves", but no basis existed for such a title. A. S. Byatt, " The Story of Alice: innocence through the looking-glass", The Spectator, republished in The Weekend Australian, 11–12 April 2015, Review, p. 16. Retrieved 19 December 2017 For most of her life, Alice lived in and around Lyndhurst in the New Forest, in the county of Hampshire.
After her husband's death in 1926, the cost of maintaining their home, Cuffnells, was such that she deemed it necessary to sell her copy of Alice's Adventures under Ground (Lewis Carroll's earlier title for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). The manuscript fetched £15,400 (), nearly four times the reserve price given to it by Sotheby's auction house. It later became the possession of Eldridge R. Johnson and was displayed at Columbia University on the centennial of Carroll's birth in 1932. Alice was present, aged 80, and it was on this visit to the United States that she met Peter Llewelyn Davies, one of the brothers who inspired J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. After Johnson's death in 1945, the book was purchased by a consortium of American bibliophiles and presented to the British people "in recognition of Britain's courage in facing Hitler". The manuscript is held by the British Library.
In the meantime, Dodgson had decided to rewrite the story as a possible commercial venture. Probably with a view to canvassing his opinion, Dodgson sent the manuscript of Under Ground to a friend, the author George MacDonald, in early 1863.Dodgson's MS diaries, vol.8, p. 89, British Library The MacDonald children read the story and loved it, and this response probably persuaded Dodgson to seek a publisher. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with illustrations by John Tenniel, was published in 1865, under the name Lewis Carroll. A second book about the character Alice, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, followed in 1871. In 1886, a facsimile of Alice's Adventures Under Ground, the original manuscript that Dodgson had given Liddell, was published.
In 1996, Karoline Leach found what became known as the "Cut pages in diary" document—a note allegedly written by Dodgson's niece, Violet Dodgson, summarising the missing page from 27–29 June 1863, apparently written before she (or her sister Menella) removed the page. The note reads:
This might imply that the break between Dodgson and the Liddell family was caused by concern over alleged gossip linking Dodgson to the family governess and to "Ina" (both Alice's older sister and her mother were named "Lorina"). In her biography, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, Jenny Woolf suggests that the problem was caused by Lorina becoming too attached to Dodgson and not the other way around. Woolf then uses this theory to explain why "Menella would remove the page itself, yet keep a note of what was on it." The note, she submits, is a "censored version" of what really happened, intended to prevent Lorina from being offended or humiliated at having her feelings for Dodgson made public.Woolf, Jenny (2010). The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful, and Sometimes Lonely Man Who Created Alice in Wonderland. St. Martin's Press.
It is uncertain who wrote the note. Leach has said that the handwriting on the front of the document most closely resembles that of either Menella or Violet Dodgson, Dodgson's nieces. However, Morton N. Cohen in an article published in the Times Literary Supplement in 2003 said that in the 1960s, Dodgson's great-nephew Philip Dodgson Jacques told him that Jacques had written the note himself based on conversations he remembered with Dodgson's nieces.Cohen, Morton N., "When Love was Young", Times Literary Supplement, October 2003 Cohen's article offered no evidence to support this, however, and known samples of Jacques' handwriting do not seem to resemble the writing of the note.See discussion on the Lewis Carroll e-list, Autumn 2003 After this incident, Dodgson avoided the Liddell home for six months but eventually returned for a visit in December 1863. However, the former closeness does not seem to have been re-established, and the friendship gradually faded away, possibly because Dodgson was in opposition to Dean Liddell over college politics. Christ Church & Reform
There are at least four direct links to Liddell in the two books. First, he set them on 4 May (Liddell's birthday) and 4 November (her "half-birthday"), and in Through the Looking-Glass the fictional Alice declares that her age is "seven and a half exactly", the same as Liddell on that date. Second, he dedicated them "to Alice Pleasance Liddell". Third, in the first book, the Dormouse tells a story which begins, "Once upon a time there were three little sisters... and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie." The name Liddell was pronounced with the accent on the first syllable and would sound like "little" as spoken with the "T" sound softened. Also the name "Lacie" is an anagram of "Alice", while "Elsie" refers to Lorina, whose second name was Charlotte, giving her the initials L. C. "Tillie" refers to Edith's family nickname of "Matilda".Gardner, Martin, The Annotated Alice 1970, chap. VII
Fourth, there is an acrostic poem at the end of Through the Looking-Glass. Reading downward, taking the first letter of each line, spells out Liddell's full name. The poem has no title in Through the Looking-Glass, but is usually referred to by its incipit, "A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky".
A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—
Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—
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.
Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?
In addition, all of those who participated in the Thames boating expedition where the story was originally told (Carroll, Duckworth, and the three Liddell sisters) appear in the chapter "A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale" – but only if Alice Liddell is represented by Alice herself.
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