What was the real life of Alice in Wonderland. History of creepypasta Who is Alice Liddell

Fairy tale "Alice in Wonderland" has become a favorite not only for most children, but also for many adults. There is no person who has not heard about the adventures of Alice, but few people know the facts of the biography Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), which inspired him to create famous images. The main character had a real prototype - to whom the writer was very attached. It was precisely because the muse was too young that many absurd rumors and unfounded accusations arose, discrediting the name of the author.

Until now, Carroll's tale has not lost its popularity:

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Today a name for many Alice Liddell won't say anything. A clue may be the inscription carved on this woman’s gravestone: "The grave of Mrs. Reginald Hargreaves, Alice from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland."

Alice Liddell

The girl Alice Liddell, for whom Carroll wrote a fairy tale about her journey through an underground country, where she got through a rabbit hole, lived to be 82 years old. And she died 36 years after the death of the man who immortalized her.

There is still debate about what kind of relationship they had. They make all sorts of guesses, including very dirty ones.

Meeting in the garden

In April 1856, the children of Henry Liddell, dean of one of the colleges in the English university city of Oxford, went for a walk in the garden. On that spring day, a young mathematics teacher, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who sometimes published literary works under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, also happened to be there.

He was going to photograph the cathedral. Dodgson, a mathematician and author of works on this science, was much more fascinated by the humanitarian area of ​​​​life: photography, writing, poetry. Looking ahead, let's say that for a quarter of a century he taught at a college that was not at all what was of true interest to him.

So, photography - an innovation at that time - in 1856 was the main hobby of a 24-year-old mathematician, whose lectures were considered by students to be the most boring in the world.

In 1856 there were only 5 children in Mr. Liddell's family, Alice being the fourth oldest. (Later, five more babies were born.)

Lewis Carroll

Carroll was immediately inspired by the idea of ​​photographing the Liddell girls. It was girls - he adored them. And once he wrote in his diary: “I love children (just not boys).” Why only girls? The writer’s biographers have been wrestling with this question for decades.

Most come to a simple conclusion: Dodgson had 7 sisters and only 3 brothers! Since childhood, he was used to dealing with girls.

The young teacher asked the Liddell couple for permission to photograph their children. The parents agreed. Thanks to their consent, images of the Liddells Jr. were preserved for history.

An unusual child?

In 1856, Alice turned 4 years old. What exactly did this baby attract the attention of the mathematician-photographer? After all, after all, if he loved girls so much, then why didn’t he pay attention to her younger or older sister?

He was probably impressed by the stubborn expression on her face. Or maybe bright brown eyes... Who knows?

Photos of seven-year-old Alice taken by Lewis Carroll have reached us. In one of them, the girl looks quite decent: she is sitting in a white dress next to a flower pot.

And on the other she is barefoot, dressed in rags - apparently, she portrays a savage or a beggar. It was this photograph, dating back to 1859, that led researchers to think about Carroll's non-platonic intentions...

But let's go back to 1856. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson quickly became a friend of the Liddell family. His daughters were in awe of him - he was ready to spend almost all his free time with the girls. They frolicked in the park, fooled around, and went boating. About one of these boat trips, Carroll wrote an acrostic poem, the first letters of the lines of which form the words: Alice Pleasence Liddell (the baby's full name). Here is the beginning of this poem, which was included in the book “Alice Through the Looking Glass”:

Oh, what a bright day it was!
Boat, sun, shine and shadow,
And lilacs bloomed everywhere.
The sisters listen to the story
And the river carries us away.

On the same walk, Carroll began to tell Alice and her sisters about the girl’s adventures in a magical land. The passengers of that boat - thirteen-year-old Lorina, ten-year-old Alice and eight-year-old Edith - asked their older friend not to shut up. His favorite Alice demanded to invent a story in which there would be “more nonsense and inventions.” The main character was, of course, Alice.

But there was also room for her sisters. Lorina turned into Lori the parrot, who convinced everyone of her seniority and intelligence. Edith got the role of Ed the eaglet. Carroll portrayed himself as a Dodo bird - he mocked his own stutter, which prevented him from correctly pronouncing the surname Dodgson.

Why did Carroll choose Alice as the heroine of his book? Why was he attracted to this particular girl? After all, the Liddells had two other daughters close to her age. Apparently, it was Alice who especially did not want to become an adult. And the writer unmistakably sensed this in her. After all, he himself did not have the slightest desire to turn from a boy into an adult man.

The main character of the book is a very unusual girl for that time. On the one hand, she is well-mannered (after all, the daughter of a scientist), on the other hand, Alice is very spontaneous - she asks any questions without hesitation. There is no English stiffness in her!

On that sunny day in 1862, Alice began to beg her friend to put the story of her adventures in the Underground Country (as Wonderland was originally called) into a book.

That's what Lewis Carroll did...

In 1926, this handwritten copy of the work for children, which by that time had become a classic, was sold at Sotheby's auction by Mrs. Alice Hargreaves for £15,400. After the death of her husband, the woman had nothing to pay the bills for the house...

In 1865, Carroll published the book at his own expense. And she was noticed! Why? The fact is that the story about the adventures of a junior schoolgirl in a non-existent world, full of nonsense and wordplay, was something completely unprecedented in English children's literature of the Victorian era. In those days, all works for children were of a Christian edifying nature. They were mainly about the struggle between good and even better. And here - such a phantasmagoria...

What connected them?

The more time passed since Carroll's death in 1898, the more dirty speculation was expressed specifically regarding his friendship with little Alice Liddell. Some researchers directly spoke about the writer’s pedophilia. A new surge of discussions on this topic was caused by Vladimir Nabokov’s book “Lolita,” published in 1955, about the sexual relationship of an adult man and a young girl.

Almost all of Lewis Carroll's life was spent in the Victorian era. At that time, young girls were considered asexual. Did the writer really have a different point of view? Yes, he loved to photograph naked youngsters who had not yet matured. He liked to correspond with young girls.

But there is no information that his relationship with his children - and with Alice Liddell in particular - went beyond talk. Perhaps in another era everything would have turned out differently. But the Victorian era is Victorian because its morals were Puritan. And dirty thoughts entered few people’s heads. Thank God, no dirt could stick to Carroll and Alice.

How did the relationship between the writer and the very young Miss Liddell end? This is how it should have ended: the girl grew up. And Carroll lost all interest in her. And he gradually parted ways with the large Liddell family. At first Lewis did not please Mrs. Liddell.

Some researchers say that the sensitive mother suspected the young man of dirty intentions. But there is no evidence of this: Carroll’s diaries from those years have not survived. Alice didn’t say a bad word about her friend.

What happened to her in adult life? It is known that Alice did some painting. At the age of 28, she married landowner and cricketer Reginald Hargreaves. She became a housewife. She gave birth to three sons from him. Her two eldest children died in the First World War. Alice lived in the countryside...

A young, pretty woman with a harsh expression on her face looks at us from adult photographs. Nothing special: it’s hard to spot her as a girl from Wonderland.

The last time the sisters, whose maiden name was Liddell, met with Lewis Carroll in 1891 - 7 years before his death. It was a conversation between old friends.

Alice Hargreaves died in 1934. 2 years before her death, she received a certificate of honor from Columbia University for inspiring the writer to create an immortal book.

Maria KONYUKOVA

Henry George Lidell

Lorina Hannah Lidell (Reeve)

Reginald Jervis Hargreeves

Alan Niveton Hargreaves
Leopold Reginald "Rex" Hargreeves
Caryl Liddell Hargreaves

Biography

Alice at age 7, 1860, photo by Lewis Carroll

Alice Liddell was the fourth child of Henry Liddell (6 February 1811 - 18 January 1898) - a classical philologist, dean of one of the colleges at Oxford and co-author of the famous Liddell-Scott Greek dictionary - and his wife Lorina Hannah Liddell (née Reeve) ( March 3, 1826 - June 25, 1910). Parents spent a long time choosing a name for the baby. There were two options: Alice or Marina. But the parents settled on Alice, considering this name more suitable. Alice had two older brothers - Harry (born in 1847) and Arthur (born in 1850) - who died of scarlet fever in 1853, an older sister Lorina (born in 1849) and six other younger brothers and sisters, including younger sister Edith (born 1854), with whom she was very close.

After Alice's birth, her father, who had previously been headmaster of Westminster School, was appointed dean of Christ Church, and in 1856 the Liddell family moved to Oxford. Alice soon met Charles Latwidge Dodgson, who encountered her family on April 25, 1856, while photographing the cathedral. He became a close family friend in subsequent years.

Alice grew up in the company of two sisters - Lorina was three years older, and Edith was two years younger. During the holidays they holidayed with the whole family on the west coast of north Wales at Penmorpha Country House (now the Gogarth Abbey Hotel) on the West Coast of Llandudno in North Wales.

Many wonderful artists studied with Alice's father, and he was a friend of the royal family. Alice's adolescence and youth coincided with the heyday of the creativity of the Pre-Raphaelites (predecessors of Art Nouveau). She studied drawing and was given painting lessons by John Ruskin, the famous artist and the most influential English art critic of the 19th century. Ruskin found great abilities in her; she made several copies of his paintings, as well as paintings by his friend William Turner, the great English painter. Later, Alice posed for Julia Margaret Cameron, a photographer also close to the Pre-Raphaelites, whose work dates back to the golden age of English photography.

According to some reports, Mr. Dodgson approached Alice's parents with a request to allow him to ask for her hand when she grew up. However, there is no exact data about this. It is quite possible that this is part of the “Lewis Carroll and Alice myth” that arose later. On the page dedicated to the writer, you can read more about the myth. Another “myth” is also known: in her youth, Alice and her sisters went to travel around Europe and on this trip they met Prince Leopold, the youngest son of Queen Victoria, when he lived in Christ Church. According to the "myth" Leopold fell in love with Alice, but the evidence for this fact is weak. The fact that the Liddell sisters dated him is real, but modern biographers of Leopold believe that there is a high probability that he was infatuated with her sister Edith. In any case, Leopold was among Edith's pallbearers at her funeral on June 30, 1876 (she died on June 26 from measles or peritonitis (surviving data vary)).

After her death, Alice's body was cremated and her ashes were buried in the churchyard of St Michael and All Angels Cathedral Church in Lyndhurst in Hampshire.

Acrostic poem “ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL” from “Alice Through the Looking Glass”

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
L ingering onward dreamily
I n an evening of July -

C hildren three that nestle near,
E ager eye and willing ear,
P leased a simple tale to hear -

L ong has paled that sunny sky:
E chooses fade and memories die.
A utumn frosts have slain July.

S till she haunts me, phantomwise,
A lice moving under skies
N ever seen by waking eyes.

C hildren yet, the tale to hear,
E ager eye and willing ear,
L ovingly shall nestle near.

I n a Wonderland they lie,
D reaming as the days go by,
D reaming as the summers die:

E ver drifting down the stream -
L ingering in the golden gleam -
L ife, what is it but a dream?

• In the poem at the conclusion of Through the Looking Glass, one of Carroll's finest works of poetry, he recalls a boat ride with the three Liddell girls when he first told Alice in Wonderland. The poem is written in the form of an acrostic: the first letters of each line spell out the name - Alice Plaisnes Liddell.

The making of "Alice in Wonderland"

• In the science fiction pentalogy Riverworld by writer Philip José Farmer, a character named Alice Liddell Hargreeves is introduced. The text of the first novel of the pentalogy mentions that at the age of eighty she was awarded a Certificate of Honor from Columbia University for the important role she played in the creation of Mr. Dodgson's famous book. These are real facts from the life of Alice Liddell Hargreaves.

• In the novel “Maximus Thunder. Escape from Eden" by Lilia Kim one of the main characters is Alice Liddell, an agent of the Information Security Bureau.

• Minor planet named after Alice Liddell

On May 4, 1852, in England, a girl Alice was born into the Liddell family. She was destined to go down in history as the prototype of Alice in Wonderland - the heroine of the fairy tale created by Lewis Carroll (the literary pseudonym of the mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). Alice Liddell was the fourth child of Henry Liddell, a classical philologist, dean of one of the colleges at Oxford and co-author of the famous Liddell-Scott Greek dictionary, and his wife Lorina Hannah Liddell. Parents spent a long time choosing a name for the baby. We settled on Alice, considering this name more suitable. Alice had two older brothers, Harry and Arthur, who died of scarlet fever in 1853, an older sister, Lorina, and six other younger brothers and sisters. Alice was very close to the youngest Edith. Lorina and Edith are featured as minor characters in Alice in Wonderland.

At the beginning of 1856, Henry Liddell received an offer to take the post of dean at Oxford. He did not keep him waiting long for an answer, and on February 25, the Liddell family went to Christ Church.

At the time, Carroll was working as a mathematics teacher. From the window of the library, where he loved to spend time, there was a beautiful view of the lawn and flower garden in front of the new dean’s house, where children often played.

On April 25, 1856, Alice met Lewis Carroll. That day, he and his friend Reginald Southey went down into the garden to photograph the cathedral. As usual, the dean’s children were running around in the garden, among whom was little Alice. Lewis decided to photograph the children, but it was not so easy. They ran a race and had no intention of stopping their fun. But Carroll knew how to communicate with children: he used to easily manage seven sisters. He soon became friends with the Liddell children.

They enjoyed playing with the young teacher. Carroll often had tea parties together, came up with various fun games, walked with the children in the park and went boating.

On July 4, 1862, Lewis Carroll and his friend Robinson Duckworth took a boat up the Thames in the company of Henry Lidell's three daughters: thirteen-year-old Lorina, ten-year-old Alice, and eight-year-old Edith. This day, as the English poet W. Hugh Auden would later say, “is as memorable in the history of literature as the 4th of July in the history of America.”

The walk started from Folly Bridge near Oxford and ended five miles later in the village of Godstow with a tea party. Throughout the journey, Carroll told his bored companions the story of a little girl, Alice, who went in search of adventure.

The girls liked the story, and Alice asked Carroll to write the story down for her. He began writing the manuscript the day after the trip. The writer subsequently noted that the journey down the rabbit hole was improvisational in nature and was, in fact, “a desperate attempt to come up with something new.”

Alice Liddell wrote: "I think Alice's story begins on that summer day when the sun was so hot that we landed in a clearing, abandoning the boat for shade. We sat down under a fresh haystack. The whole trio was there." started the old song: “Tell a story” - and so began a delightful fairy tale.”

During the next boat ride, it started to rain and everyone got very wet, which became the basis for the second chapter - "Sea of ​​Tears". That day, the writer developed the plot and story of Alice in more detail, and in November Carroll began seriously working on the manuscript.

To make the story more natural, he researched the behavior of the animals mentioned in the book. According to Carroll's diaries, in the spring of 1863 he showed the unfinished manuscript of the story to his friend and adviser George MacDonald, whose children greatly enjoyed it. Macdonald, like his other friend Henry Kingsley, would later advise publishing the book. Carroll included his own sketches in the manuscript, but used illustrations by John Tenniel in the published version.

Lewis Carroll hand-wrote the first manuscript of Alice's Adventures Underground for Alice. He finished it in February 1863, and sent it to Alice, at the rector's house, only in November 1864. The manuscript, consisting of only four chapters, was accompanied by thirty-seven drawings by the author and a photograph of Alice at the age of 7 at the end (there was a drawing first) and was called "Alice's Adventures Underground - A Christmas Gift to My Sweet Girl in Memory of a Summer Day."

Between these dates, Carroll began negotiations with the Clarendon publishers in Oxford about publishing it at his own expense. However, first he prepared a new version of the manuscript, supplemented. For example, such famous scenes as meeting the Duchess, meeting the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Tea Party, which were not in the original version, were added. The theme of the trial of Knave, barely outlined in the manuscript, was widely developed. As a result, in 1865, a fairy tale with drawings by John Tenniel was published under the well-known title “Alice in Wonderland.”

Since November 1856, Carroll begins to experience hostility towards himself on the part of Mrs. Liddell. Mrs. Liddell's dissatisfaction with the relationship between Carroll and her daughters grew more and more, and in 1864 she forbade any walks or meetings of girls with the writer and destroyed all his letters to Alice. In the 70s, relations with Alice's parents completely deteriorated. Carroll also damaged his relationship with Henry Liddell when he spoke ironically about the architectural improvements at the college that Alice's father wanted to implement.

Regarding the existing hypothesis that Carroll asked for Alice’s hand in marriage from the Liddells, the writer’s biographer Morton Cohen writes: “I changed my point of view on Carroll’s relationship with Alice when in 1969 I came across a photocopy of the writer’s diary entries. As I began to read them - and we are talking specifically about the complete diary entries given to me by Carroll's family, and not about those published excerpts from which twenty-five to forty percent of the original text was removed - I discovered countless fragments and passages of great significance. It was these details that the writer’s family wanted to hide from prying eyes. Most of the photographs Carroll took were destroyed, and none of the nude photographs survived.
When I first encountered the unpublished pages of the diary, I noticed that there was another dimension to Lewis Carroll’s “romanticism.” Of course, it is very difficult to come to terms with the idea that a strict, well-known clergyman of the Victorian era could have liked little girls, and liked them to such an extent that he had a desire to ask for the hand of one or even more of them... I am firmly convinced that “that in marriage he would be happier than if he remained single, and it seems to me that the tragedy of his life was precisely that he could not get married.”

Alice's adolescence and youth coincided with the heyday of the Pre-Raphaelite creativity. Many wonderful artists studied with Alice's father, and he was a friend of the royal family. She studied drawing and was given painting lessons by John Ruskin, the famous artist and the most influential English art critic of the 19th century. Ruskin found Alice to have great abilities; she made several copies of his paintings, as well as paintings by his friend William Turner, the great English painter. Later, Alice posed for Julia Margaret Cameron, a photographer also close to the Pre-Raphaelites, whose work dates back to the golden age of English photography.

In 1870, Carroll took the last photograph of Alice, then a young woman, who came to meet the writer, accompanied by her mother. Two meager notes, made by Carroll in old age, tell about the writer’s sad meetings with the one who was once his muse.

One of the last meetings took place in 1888, Alice was accompanied by her husband, Mr. Hargreaves. Carroll makes the following entry: “It was not easy to put together in my head her new face and my old memories of her: her strange appearance today with the one who was once so close and beloved “Alice”.”

On September 15, 1880, in Westminster Abbey, 28-year-old Alice married Reginald Hargreaves, who was a student of Dr. Dodgson. He was famous for being one of the best marksmen and cricketers in the county. From him she gave birth to three sons - Alan, Leopold (both died in the First World War) and Caryl (there was a version that he was named after Carroll, but the Liddells denied this). In her marriage, Alice was an ordinary housewife and became the first president of the Women's Institute in the village of Emery-Don.

After the death of her husband in 1926, Alice, in order to pay the utility bills of her house, put up for auction a handwritten copy of Alice's Adventures Underground, given to her by Carroll. Sotheby's estimated its value at £15,400 and was eventually sold to one of the founders of the Victor Talking Machine Company, Eldridge R. Johnson, on the centenary of Lewis Carroll's birth at Columbia University. 80-year-old Alice personally attended this ceremony. After Carroll's death, the book was purchased by a consortium of American bibliophiles. Today the manuscript is kept in the British Library.

At the age of 80, Alice Liddell Hargreaves received a certificate of honor from Columbia University for the important role she played in the creation of Carroll's famous book.

On November 16, 1934, at the age of 82, Alice Liddell died. After her death, her body was cremated and her ashes were buried in the cemetery of the Church of St. Michael and All Angels. The plaque next to Alice Liddell Hargreaves' real name is forever engraved: "Alice from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland."

On July 4, 1865, the first edition of Lewis Carroll's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published.

"Alice in Wonderland" is probably one of the most famous works in the world. Meanwhile, the main character of the story had a very real prototype, Alice Liddell. Lewis Carroll wrote his famous work by telling her fairy tales.

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The Real Alice from Wonderland, photograph by Lewis Carroll, England, 1862.

Alice Liddell lived a long and happy life. At the age of 28, she married Reginald Hargreaves, a professional cricketer for Hampshire, and had three sons. Unfortunately, both of the elders, Alan Niveton Hargreaves and Leopold Reginald "Rex" Hargreaves, died in the First World War. Alice died at her home in Westerham in 1934, aged 82.

The tale was originally called Alice's Adventures Underground, and a handwritten copy of it, given to Alice by Lewis Carroll, was sold for £15,400 to Eldridge R. Johnson, one of the founders of the Victor Talking Machine Company, in 1926.

After Johnson's death, the book was purchased by a consortium of American bibliophiles. Today the manuscript is kept in the British Library.

Alice was 80 years old when, while on a visit to the United States, she met Peter Llewelyn Davies, the one who inspired J. M. Barrie's famous work Peter Pan.

The minor planet 17670 Liddell is named in honor of Alice Liddell.

Some more rare original photographs of the real Alice in Wonderland.