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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll): Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Alice in Won- derland) 1865 + John Tenniel: Alice in the Rabbit’s House + Dodgson: Alice Liddell as a beggar girl (1858).
Dodgson was an accomplished amateur photographer and a keen mathematician and logician be- fore he wrote his signature Alice in Wonderland, which embodies many aspects of these interests in a form of a ‘literary nonsense’ aimed at children. The book was developed from the verbal stor- ies he told the Liddell sisters (Alice and Lorina) over several long summer afternoon boating trips near Oxford, where Dodgson held a lectureship in mathematics. It was reading Martin Gardner’s wonderful The Annotated Alice (1960) that introduced me to the range and depth of the infiltration of mathematical and logical puzzles in Alice. And I had always admired the equally signature style of John Tenniel’s illustrations - those pen and ink drawings that became the wood-engravings printed in the first Alice edition. Here was a wonderful blend of a realistic drawing style fuzed with fantasy and surrealism - pictures that not only illustrated the text, but amplified it. Later I dis- covered more about Dodgson, how he had visited my home village of Freshwater, Isle of Wight several times, seeking the friendship of Alfred Tennyson and the society of fellow photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and other members of the loose-knit Freshwater Circle lampooned by Virginia Woolf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annotated_Alice
Of course this is the most successful children’s story of all time, but it was part of a tradition of children’s literature that had become commercially important in the 19th century, with increased literacy, the Education Acts of the 1870s and 1880s, and a growing realisation of the importance of early-years education (informed especially by the work of Frederick Froebel (Kindergarten Educa- tion 1826). Other famous works for children at this time included The Princess and the Goblin by George Macdonald (1858); Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1878); Beatrix Potter: The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) and Kate Greenaway:Pictures & Rhymes for Children (1879). Attitudes con- cerning children and their suitability as photographic models were very different in the 19th cen- tury to what they are now. There are several photographic genres that emerged during this time, including post-mortem portraits (mourning or memorial portraits of deceased infants); portraits of children used as part of institutional record-archives (such as the Dr Barnado’s photographic archive from 1874); family portraits - precious when disease was rife and infant mortality common; And individual portraits tracking the growth and maturity of a child. Then there were the likes of Charles Dodgson and Julia Margaret Cameron - artist-photographers who used children as vehicles for ideas about purity, about states of grace, about stainless pre-pubertal innocence, about angels, cherubs and putti. Dodgson photographed several young girls partly draped or nude - (Portrait of Alice Liddell as a Beggar Maid 1858, The Beatrice Nude and Evelyn Hatch 1879 - but also made many portraits of parents with their children (eg Reverend Childe Barker and his daugh- ter Theramina 1864, and all his work was deemed ethically normal at the time. However it is easy to understand the moral dissonance as we look back from the 21st century with our new sensibil- ity to these issues.”