Go Ask Alice
The lives of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and Alice Hargreaves (née Liddell) are inextricably linked, often to paradoxical effect. This sequence records some of the places where their lives and works are commemorated.
A few additional notes:
Dodgson was born in 1832 at All Saints Vicarage in Daresbury, Cheshire. The house has gone, commemorated just by this plaque.
Dodgson first told the story of Alice Underground to the Liddell sisters, while rowing upstream on the river Thames to Godstow on July 4 1862. He later recalled it as a ‘golden afternoon’, though the weather forecast for that day records it as ‘cool and rather wet’.
The White Rabbit statue in Llandudno was unveiled by David Lloyd George in 1933. The Liddell family had a holiday home there, but there is no hard evidence that Dodgson ever visited them.
The mosaics on the floor of the Vestibule at the National Gallery were created by Boris Anrep in the early 1930s.
Alice’s Shop opposite Christ Church College in Oxford, appears as ‘The Old Sheep Shop’ in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, where it is indeed owned by an old sheep.
Charles Dodgson died in 1898 while visiting his sisters in Guildford.
Alice Liddell married Reginald Hargreaves in 1880 and they lived in Lyndhurst in the New Forest. She died there in 1934.
