The Real Life Alice | Lewis Carroll's Wonderland | Absolute History

150 years ago this book was published it would become one of the greatest children's stories ever and it all began here one summer's day the Reverend Charles Dodgson took ten-year-old Alice little and her sisters on a boat trip along the River Thames but girls were absolutely enchanted by his stories and the power of Carroll's imagination has enthralled millions of readers from John Lennon to James Joyce Alice hands down for me is from the one always has been it's absolutely a magical ride in terms of children's literature ever a revolutionary product and it's unlike of course anything that had ever been written for children before the book is fantastic and brilliant I would give it five stars it's good they say that after the bible and shakespeare lewis carroll is the most potent author on earth these are the foreign language editions of alice we have aboriginal II here French German Japanese only a handful of people would have known at the time that Charles Dodson a math stone at Christ Church Oxford was also Lewis Carroll and that the inspiration for the book was a real Alice Alice little the Dean's daughter for years the relationship between Carol and Alice little has been the subject of speculation I think he was in love with her but I don't think he would have admitted that to himself Harold's reputation has also been dogged by questions about his child friends and the photographs he took of them that is quite disturbed it isn't that's a little girl in a very adult pose and in the course of our research we've uncovered new material that adds to this controversy my gut instinct is by Lewis Carroll what was really going who knows so what was it that led to the creation of Carroll's masterpiece Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and what are we to make of the controversies surrounding him you probably recognize Christchurch as the dining hall at Hogwarts and in fact Lewis Carroll who taught here created the Harry Potter of his day so how did this rather dry mathematics lecturer manage to create such a fantastical world and what was the nature of his relationship with the real Alice [Music] it's Alice day in Oxford every 4th of July they celebrate the day in 1862 when Lewis Carroll told Alice and her sisters the story of Alice in Wonderland we all know the story don't we Alice was getting very tired of sitting by her sister on a riverbank when suddenly a white rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her eye this she falls asleep what she follows a white rabbit who leads her down a hole it's ambiguous she finds herself an underground chamber with a tiny little door she sees a bottle with the words drink me on it and she goes through all sorts of nasty experiences since she met the Cheshire cats I just go to a tea party a tea party yes yes she meets this strange character stressed because they're being so mad then there is a weird game of croquet the cards were like painting the roses red horse or coming home with a pole eventually Alice loses her temper and she comes out at the end saying you're nothing but a pack of cards don't ask me I love this book I always have I was just captivated by Lewis Carroll's completely surreal imagination and transported off to Wonderland I'm 57 and I first read the book when I was seven years old and I have read it every year at least once since then so I've read it at a minimum 50 times it's possible that my character Lyra is a sort of descendant of that sin that she's a matter of fact child in a world of large and strange things she doesn't fully understand so probably I stole that yeah so why has this book captivated children and adults actually four hundred and fifty years as someone learning deals because it is the universal literature it captures brilliantly how a child responds to the world at a time when some of the categories that unfortunately we start to take for granted when we're a bit older are yet fluid so the barriers between dream and reality all of these remain porous in ours and he grasps beautifully what what the psychology of that situation is like [Music] it was in the corner of this famous quote at Christchurch right over there that Lewis Carroll wrote down his story Alice in Wonderland it's now actually an internet cafe for students and over here was where Alice little live she was the Dean's daughter and the inspiration for the book little did Alice know that the story would come to dominate her life in 1932 as an old lady she visited New York where she was captured on film for the first time so how did those adventures come to be created it really began here in Oxford when Lewis Carroll first met Alice little she was around four at the time he was 24 a newly qualified maths Tom it was a relationship which seems unusual to say the least to modernize he was try a methodical punctilious Alice little said that he looked as if he had a poker stuck up him he was seen her so operates everything was neat fixed orderly I mean it's hard not to think of him as somebody had a mild form of OCD in those days Don's at Christchurch had to take holy orders and they had to be celibate so Charles Dodson became the Reverend Dodson though he never converted to full priesthood if he had become a fall priest he may be encouraged to take on a parish and he would have found that pretty daunting he had a speech impediment and so reading a service was not easy for him his mouth would open but the words wouldn't come out Carol spent almost his entire adult life a bachelor dong behind the cloistered walls of Christ Church and even though he wrote both the Alice books here he kept his identity secret he instructed the porters at Christ Church to return to sender any letters that came to Lewis Carroll he also though he was a very keen photographer he didn't like being photographed himself and that's probably was because he didn't want people to recognize him in the street he didn't want fans coming up to him Carol was more than a keen photographer he was a pioneer of a new art form he took hundreds of photographs of writers friends artists and celebrities but one person stands out above all of us there is no photographic image of Alice which is not arresting startling like you know the people who knowledge become supermodels who the camera is in love with it was when Lewis Carroll was working in the library at Christ Church that he first spotted Alice playing with her sisters in the Deanery next door so this is his office when he was a sub librarian as you can see the plan is quite impressive so that is where he would almost certainly have first seen Alice Alice doodle for the very first time because that's where the littles lived that's where they lived and that's where the girls were playing Alice's father was appointed Dean of Christ Church which at the time was the place to go they were a glamorous family they had parties they had musical evenings they were friends with royalty Lewis Carroll who was really drawn to all three little girls initially because they were all photogenic charismatic and upper-class he had just got his first camera and the friendship develops really with him trying to get them to sit for photographs [Music] as you might expect for such a meticulous man lewis caroll kept very detailed Diaries and here's an interesting entry for April the 25th 1856 he was on a visit to the Deanery the three little girls were in the garden most of the time and we became excellent friends we tried to group them in the foreground of the picture but they were not patient sitters I marked this day with a white stone and that's what Karen always does when it was a particularly special day they became tremendous friends all all three girls I even even though Alice was obviously singled out as the special one she was pushy imperious shaking her hair heels you say shaking the fringe out of her face instead of bossing everyone around under here is one of the original plates shot by Lewis Carroll I'm allowed to have a look but obviously it's incredibly valuable a very delicate from the light side oh my goodness this is fantastic what I'm looking at is a negative and here she is at around 6 years old you'd get the sense of a rather strong personality a self possessed little girl she was a beautiful child she had an assurance that her sisters didn't and how all the systemic and didn't like being photographed she found it really self-conscious making but you can imagine Alice loving it you would go over to the Deanery and entertain the children and he would be in the nursery the governess was property there and he would teach some magic tricks and he would read stories to them he would go almost every day and of course he would have the girls to his rooms as well oh he got really quite involved in their lives and they went out on outings it seems an almost continuous round of being with them and then as they got to an age where they could leave the confines of Christchurch he organised boat trips and so began one of the most famous boat trips in literary history as Carol and his friend Robinson Duckworth took Alice Edith and lorina little up the River Thames to Godstow I'm very much looking forward to retracing the steps and this is this is the same boat yard it is yeah it's the same same family-run company here we go well I've managed the first stage I haven't fallen in very good precedent it wasn't the best time that Carol told them stories by any means but the crucial difference that day was the Alice for whatever reason pleaded with us to write the stories down Alice asked him tell me a story tell me a story and he would really in on his oars again no not this time next time and the girls would say it is next to him now tell me a story so he unwillingly began on the story of Alice in Wonderland he clearly was making it up as he went along he had no notes he hadn't planned it he just started the story of Alice following the right rabbit down the rabbit hole and we have her own account don't we've what happened that day here in the first biography of Lewis Carroll and she says I believe the story of Alice was told one summer afternoon when the Sun was so burning that we'd landed in the meadows down the river deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found which is under a new maid Henrik the story Carol told them wasn't all make-believe it was also full of in jokes and references to real places like this the famous treacle world not far from the river scene isn't it from the mad tea-party when he says once upon a time there were three little girls the Dormouse and the name is for Elsie LaCie and Tillie and they lived at the bottom of the world that's indeed LaCie as an anagram for Alice myself Elsie right back to the two capital letters L see we get lorina Charlotte is the oldest actually and then Chile was the family nickname for younger readers so all three of them are there the journey ended four miles upstream with a picnic on the riverbank at Godstow Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank precisely yep and here we are on the bank yeah yeah and I think you know the reality of that day is reflected probably in that first line and even what happens next you know that I was seeing the rabbit to the white rabbit go down the rabbit hole and I'm following you know there are still rabbits to be seen on this part of the Thames Bank [Music] here we have Lewis Carroll's own account of that famous golden afternoon on July 4th 1862 Duckworth and I made an expedition up the river to Godstow with the three littles now on the other page he writes later he says on which occasion I told him the fairy tale of Alice's Adventures underground which it undertook to write out for Alice she was the one who nagged him to tell the story so in that sense she was the crucial one it took him out I think a year or so but eventually he did write it down for her and he presented it to her as a Christmas present he had written it out by hand himself and then drawn all the pictures and this is it the original version of the children's masterpiece Alice's Adventures underground just look at the detail in this I mean it's like an illuminated manuscript it's so lovingly done [Music] over here we have the large Alice she's grown so big and next to her the white rabbit and I think it's intriguing the way that Lewis Carroll has drawn this picture himself because it's almost like the white rabbit is a kind of suitor to the much bigger more formidable Alice and he's ended it with a photograph which he's taken of Alice and very last page but in fact what was discovered later on underneath that there's a drawing that he made himself in keeping with his obsessive perfectionism there are no mistakes in this manuscript no crossings out no blotches Carol practiced his layout and his drawings in advance here you've got a real rabbit they dream from a naturist handle as he develops gradually metamorphose into a fairy tale rabbits with a rather sad face he's hunched over something kind of mournful characteristic what do we have here so this is the number of phases so this is Paris version four hours and she's looking slightly during this long a distracted slightly distance must move the characters seem to be slightly mournful and that might just be he's not very good as an artist or it might be that there's something about rhonda land in which the characters seem to be trapped as if for then it's like an open prison because it's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland they're just there as extras after encouragement from friends and making the most of his connections to the publisher Alexandre Macmillan Carrol decided that Alice should go into print he'd already been thinking of a new name for his book I love this bit he's playing around with which title to have Alice's are in Elfland question mark the masterpiece could have been called that and then he has Alice's Adventures in Wonderland question mark Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865 the timing couldn't have been better david copperfield great expectations the water babies all published in the same era this is the moment when Victorian literature finds the child so the child is becoming really into focus which is the moment where Carol chooses this astonishing dream book and here it is the final published version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland see the amount of trouble that Lewis Carroll has taken in his whole involvement in this book for example the color here this is the water babies also published by Macmillan hitting the fairly standard dark green cover Lewis Carroll was adamant that he wanted red red was the color that was going to appeal to children but what's particularly interesting is the fact that there are stories in here the daunt in his original manuscript the gift that he made to Alice little so the most famous episode of all really the mad tea-party that wasn't in the original version but it is here and best of all we have illustrations by John Tenniel he's the famous punch illustrator who Lewis Carroll persuaded to illustrate his book we mustn't underestimate the importance of tami-lynn in this success of these books they are sensationally good illustrations and he was very particular and he sent them back again and again I didn't tell you I must have got a bit fed up with him at the end nothing is there in the middle of a lot of texts like this one for example the story flows around the illustration just make a huge difference to have the illustrations as part of the part of the page rather than a separate little page on their own and then something which must have seemed so innovative at the time is that famous bit of the story which is the the mouse's tail and here we have the original copper plates that were unused to print the drawings so you can see the difficulty the types that I must have had and getting it going right down the page just like a mouse's tail and here's the the plates were the Cheshire cat illustration and you can really see the kind of detail that John Tamiya used in order to produce one of the most famous images from Alice Alice the first female lead in children's literature and the most memorable sheera self-confident isn't she she's wonderfully untroubled by the bizarre circumstances in which she finds herself Alice is the voice of common sense if you had a crazy character as the protagonist in a crazy world what was the difference where's the story she's quite feisty she's quite funny she challenges the traditional colleges and also and she challenges everything that she's expected to obey in real life in some other ways she keeps her composure and that makes her a very unusual heroine what other child heroine from the 19th century is like that Jane Eyre not not many it's hard to appreciate just how revolutionary a book Alice in Wonderland was completely this is an example for sort of thing that was popular before this is the history of the Fairchild family no pictures there are some conversations but mostly the finger-wagging variety and there's one episode near the beginning which which is notorious the father notices the children have been quarreling and to show them they shouldn't quarrel what does he do take their toys away no Sansa bed without any supper no he takes them to a gallows to see an executed criminal who's rotting in his chains things I really like about Carroll's book is the way that it's rather subversive about those sort of preachy books oh this is fantastic bit here where Alice is trying to decide whether to drink that famous bottle and she says she wants to see whether it's what poison or not for she had read several nice little histories about children have got burnt and eaten up by wild beasts and many other unpleasant things all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them such as a red-hot Poker will burn you if you touch this in it I knee actually goes ahead and drinks it anyway yes she's a rebel the irony of course is that this rebel was created by a man who positively embraced order it's the mark of someone who loves her and she loved smashing up the croaky game breaks all the rules the hoops moved with mallets of flamingoes the caucus-race would be another example all have won and also have prizes and somebody that rule-bound seems to be very excited about when the rules can be broken I think it's very interesting the original circumstances in which he started telling the story I mean in the boat going up the river Harrell wasn't the only person rowing his academic colleague from Trinity College Robinson Duckworth was rowing stroke so he had to speak to Robinson Duckworth as well as to Larina and Alice and Edith and therefore a lot of the jokes appeal to a fellow academic I mean they're jokes about philosophy and logic and mathematics some wonderful pieces of logic in this book but I don't want to go among mad people Alice remarked oh you can't help that said the cat we're all mad here I'm mad you're mad how do you know I'm mad said Alice you must be said the cat or you wouldn't have come here the other thing is it's pretty frightening it's a strange almost nightmarish world I remember Alice growing herb neck very taut really freaked me out because they are freaky that terror that you have a falling down a hole and you don't know whether you'll ever get to reach the bottom eight that's something that is very very strong in a child's memory Alice's encounters with the weird creatures of Wonderland are actually a much more literal account of what adults look like to children than we as adults like to think and the fact that they they shout things you don't understand like you know off with his head which isn't that different so go to your bed it was Virginia Woolf who said that peril could remember much more vividly what childhood felt like than most of us can once we ceased to be children so are there clues in Carroll's own childhood that helped us to understand this special empathy with children he was born near Warrington in 1832 his father was a clergyman in the village of DARS Bree Carroll was the eldest son and he was surrounded by or by little girls there were two brothers but lots and lots of sisters when cow was 11 the family moved to a large rectory near Darlington he kept his siblings entertained with homemade magazines full of stories and cartoons he became their leader and entertainer he had a natural talent in storytelling over a hundred years later an amazing discovery was found under the floorboards the what was then the nursery oh this is a letter from his mother that is his mother's handwriting so he's kept that and I suppose that's one of the real clues to show that this really did belong it's a Datsun family yes that's a little teapot lid will the teapot lid of course we know from the other story from the x4 the caucus room yes yeah we have three little terraces of some of the stories that we get today I'm having if we've got the Mad Hatter's Tea Party the thimble from the caucus race and death [Music] we don't know exactly when these treasures were planted or by whom but whenever it was it's as though carol was telling us something not just about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland but also about himself by the time he arrived at Christchurch he may have left his childhood behind but he carried the idea of it with him and from then on children and child friends would remain at the center of his life well he's supposed to have said that they were 3/4 of his life and I do think they were very important to him and I think he saw them partly as a sort of refuge against thee from the adult world when Carroll wrote to his child friends he wrote as one of them his letters are mini works of art like this letter with pictures instead of words or this one written in the shape of a spiral or this where he's pretending to be afraid this was a man who came alive in a different sense with children but what exactly was going on with Carroll's relationship with children and what was the nature of the relationship with Alice little despite the wonder of his books these are the questions that always hang over Carol and this is where the arguments begin amongst Carol experts he once asked Alice for a lock of her hair was that a lover's token today we may well think that a lock of hair is a love token I mean what did it mean then and she was just a young girl so I think it's really it's very difficult to describe I mean it's that the character of the man is one that enjoyed the friendship of children but there is no sense of a love interest in this at all he was emotionally involved there's just no question about that and that's why I can't bear these critics who say that he was he only had a paternal interest in the girl so that won't do I think he was in love with her but I don't think he would have admitted that to himself what makes alice in wonderland' I would argue such a powerful book is the very fact of Carole's repressed attraction to Alice among the photographs Carol took of Alice in the Deanery garden is this one still controversial to this day it shows Alice dressed as a beggar made with her ragged dress falling off her shoulder it's quite a challenging Rock isn't it it's a very challenging work and the fact that you can just see one of her nipples is something that a lot of view is fine slightly disturbing as if there is a little little flash of sexuality there it looks a little as if it's a kind of come on gesture but the fact that she's holding her hand to her body is because in photography if she was outstretched that would shake and that would blur the picture no other reason would it been as disturbing to a Victorian audience no I'm taking photographs of middle-class children to rest stop this was an absolutely standard piece of acting out but it's the most famous one because as you say the gaze pins us and we don't know how to read her the picture may be ambiguous but one thing is certain the special friendship between Carol and Alice little resulted in one of the greatest children's books ever written and yet by the time Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published that friendship had come to an abrupt end why a year or so after the boat trip to Godstow in June 1863 something happened and Ruth Carroll was exiled from the Deanery to find out what happened the obvious place to come would be here to his diaries but when you look inside pages are missing just looking along here you can see where there's been a razor cut when his nieces inherited his Diaries they cut out a number of pages and we have to put bits and pieces together to try to think of what might have happened in the Deanery for five months following this apparent rift there's no mention of the little girls and the diaries at all until we come to December the fifth and there's a theatrical evening at the very end of that day Lewis Carroll writes mrs. little and the children were there but I held aloof from them as I have been all this time held aloof such an interesting phrase what was really going on it's my theory that Alice's mother was the cause of the split Carroll's manner grew too affectionate to Alice Alice's mother was a dreadful snob she was known as the Kingfisher in Oxford and she wanted Kings princes Earl's Dukes for her daughters so she stamped on it and she burnt all the letters that Alice had received from dodging in the wastepaper basket in the Deanery evidence of that my grandfather mentions that it happened yep it's a story in my family so was Carroll's attachment to Alice the cause of the rift it's possible but there may be other explanations in this archive in Woking where the Carroll family papers are kept an intriguing piece of evidence a scrap of paper points in two other directions Alice's sister lorina or ena as she was known and the governess Mary Prickett this is a note written by the niece who cut out the pages and it's actually called cut pages in diary she writes Elsie Lewis Carroll learns from mrs. little that he's supposed to be using the children as a means of paying court to the governess he's also supposed to be courting ena that's Alice's older sister so what this suggests is the rift wasn't anything to do with his relationship with Alice but in fact was about the governess or her sister it's true that there were rumours at the time about Carol and lorina and also about the governess and that's what this scrap of paper is referring to however there another document a letter written by lorina to Alice when they were both in their 80s in it Loreena informs Alice that she's just been interviewed by a biographer and she's worried about the explanation she's given for the rift I said his manner became too affectionate to you as you grew older and that neither spoke to him about it and that offended him so he ceased coming to visit us again as one had to give some reason for all intercourse ceasing this letter appears to point things back to Alice although it can be read two ways we don't know which word was supposed to stress is it I said his manner became too affectionate to you in other words he paid badly he maybe try to kiss her or is it I said his manner became too affectionate to you because actually it was me that he was after and I had to get some excuse to throw her off the scent why would it have been worse for him to be affectionate towards marina than to Alice marina was the oldest daughter she was above the age of consent the age of consents was 12 so for Carol to kiss her would have meant something different in everyone's eyes than him kissing a very little girl like Alice because to us it seemed so much worse the suggestion that mother had banned girl from the house of being too affectionate towards a little girl yeah exactly it's tempting of course to think of Carol as a Victorian jimmy savile but in fact we have dozens and dozens and dozens of records from girls who he befriended who made it clear that there's a kind of ritual to their friendship it involved kissing them chastely and that was it but for him it was almost a way of proving that his intentions were pure or possibly is a very repressed man this was as far as he felt he could safely go we have various bits of evidence which can be twisted and turned and shaped in different ways but ultimately it comes down to that what do we think was going on inside his head so the mystery of the rift remains unsolved all we know for sure is that in June 1863 Carroll was exiled from the Deanery and when he was eventually invited back in December that year his relationship with the family had become formal and distant he was asked back for tea but then everything changed everything changed they grew apart there's a rather sad last final picture he took of her she looked sad and the mood is sad she looks rather wistful in a way there I think it mirrors the portrait that Carroll the last one that he took of her I think um I think she looks sad I mean her beloved sister Edith had died by then I think you can see that itch tin to her face because it's the kind of wonderful Brio that she had as a little girl has gone hasn't it Alice had grown up on the surface she'd forgotten Carol her childhood friend she married a man called Reginald Hargreaves but chose a revealing name for one of her sons which he gave my grandfather the name of Carol which she always denied incredibly had any resonance tool but you can't help think come on for Carol the real Alice may have left his life but the fictional Alice lived on he couldn't stop recreating her first in the famous sequel through the looking-glass and what Alice found there then in merchandise and spin-offs him it's not about the money it's more about trying to maintain contact with his dream child the part it also I think goes back to his own childhood being safe in this little paradise she was a strange distorted version of him so little Alice will never grow up and even though Carol himself had a many who always go back to it again and again it's as if he wanted to be that ideal dream child did he simply want to be her or was this something else as well over his lifetime Carol accumulated hundreds of child friends he'd meet them on railway journeys and at the seaside his pockets brimming with puzzles and games he basically picks them up he picks them up in trains he picks them up at friends houses and of course they're not alone they're always accompanied by the parents their nurses their governor says they're kind of collecting of children became an astonishing way of life was really going who knows it certainly would raise eyebrows these days from social services and parents and it did raise some eyebrows then well I think people are quite often very quick to criticize thinking about things as they are in this day and age I think one always has to put oneself back to the period in which these events took place and I mean there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that you know things were improper or anything like that was there ever any complaints about his behavior towards children either from the children themselves or their parents I don't know of any at all and I started this man for over 40 years so I think if there had been any I would have found them by now the interesting thing here is that he's first biographer dajin Collingwood he does seem to have distorted the record in order to suggest that the child friends were younger than they actually were because when he was writing this biography at the end of the 19th century it seemed fine for a bachelor to spend his time with little girls but very questionable for him to spend his time with sexually adult young women and so he slightly twisted the evidence to make them younger with very odd consequences of course for peril subsequent reputation since we now take precisely the opposite the picture though gets complicated because Carol not only collected children he photographed them in his studio and in some of those images the children are naked he did have a sort of obsession with innocence and childhood innocence and these days we would not have considered it possible for a photographer to photograph young children in the new absolutely inconceivable you know they'd be bundled off to prison as quick as you but in those days he could do that and it was sort of yes that's all right he said he's an artist she's a photographer and the children of poverty know nothing wrong getting on tour and there wasn't actually probably I think Carol thought of childhood as innocent like many people he thought the human body was a supremely beautiful thing and he thought the most supremely beautiful form of human body was the female body before puberty Dodson himself I think was a heavily repressed beautiful without doubt many of the suggestions about his relationship with children being unhealthy is totally unfounded and in my view totally false there are many people who misunderstand loose cow because they haven't done their homework there are people who strongly could test that won't they they'll say actually what he was interested in was the innocence of childhood which was almost like a cult in Victorian times I think that's what Peter files are interested in this the parent innocence of children it's a problem isn't it it's a problem when somebody writes a great book and they're not a great person these days naked photographs of children are really not acceptable in our own culture I think it's it was different in those days because there are so many Victorian pictures showing naked children I mean if you look at Julia Margaret Cameron for example who was his contemporary she had pictures of naked children so what are we to make of Lewis Carroll's relationship with his child friends and in particular the nude photographs I'll be honest I'm such a big fan of his work that I'm quite resistant to the idea of exploring any possible dark side and it's certainly true that in the Victorian period images of naked children were more widespread but there's no doubt that some of the images are really quite disturbing so are we imposing the sensibility of the 21st century back into the Victorian era or simply trying to protect an author whose work we love Carroll's photographs of young naked children are undoubtedly controversial but towards the very end of filming and after completing our interviews with the Carroll experts in this program we stumbled across this if authentic it would completely change our ideas about Carroll our researcher found this photograph in a French Museum it's attributed to Lewis Carroll and it's labeled lorina little now Carroll took lots of photographs of lorina but this one is shockingly different it's a full frontal picture of a naked young teenager a picture which no parent would ever have consented to so is it genuine well here are some photographs we know Carroll took of lorina a Christchurch is this the same girl whoever the young girl is she certainly doesn't look at ease so was this taken by Lewis Carroll it certainly needs investigating [Music] I didn't really expect that my adventures in search of Lewis Carroll would take me through a door marked French Riviera and look there may be no real way of discovering who took this photograph or even if it really is of Larina little Barbie image isn't allowed out of the country so coming here to Marseille and subjecting it to experts tests may be the best way of discovering more clues this isn't the first time the images been examined in 1993 the Carroll expert Edward weakling judged it to be inauthentic when he compared it to known Carroll photographs would subjecting the original to forensic tests suggest something different Nicholas Burnett is a pitcher conservationist with specialist knowledge of 19th century photography there is something quite strange isn't about the pair of us looking back into the eyes of this girl and it's a young girl isn't it and making picture of a young girl yeah yeah yeah absolutely we've brought Nicholas here to the Musa Cantigny in Marseille to examine the photograph it says Larina little L Carol Cole M C so I think I think that's a dealers inscription saying what it is and where it came from Cole probably is short for collection the Musa Cantigny don't use the letters M C on their photographs so we don't know what M C stands for we do know that the photograph used to be held by the gallery Tex Braun in Paris after the death of the owners in 1986 it was donated here but is it dated from the early 1860s when carol was photographing the little girls damaged on the surface there's a big crease up here corners been torn off there's some scratches you can see little brown spots on her face it's a very slow growing mold very difficult to fake convincingly it looks like it's got a very thin albumin coating helping of course his egg white so that's a little peak there yep that's very thin that's what you'd expect from the 1850s 1860s so we can rule out a modern fake so we've established that the photograph was taken around the same time that Carol was seeing the littles what about the kind of camera being used for this well he used an auto bubbles folding camera it's the sort of camera that would have been taken with two wooden boxes one slightly smaller the other just sliding into each other was the photograph developed using the same method that Carroll used this was called the wet collodion process in which chemicals are poured over a glass negative a little bit earlier than this it would have been from the paper negative and then it would have been quite so crisp this print has been printed from awake loading negative so can you just given what you've been looking at so far can you sum up for us what we know and what we don't know about this photograph well it's taken using a negative process that Carroll used it's printed on the sort of paper that he used about the right date so so far everything everything fades we have an inscription on the old mount saying Loreena little and el carril but is there anything on the back of the print itself the way to find out is by thinning down the corners Carroll began using his studio in 1863 he typically numbered his pictures although some of the records for the early 1860s are missing one would expect inch principie numbered but this print has been cropped the negative is larger than the photograph so it's possible that it was there and it's been snipped off anything that what does that mean do you think for the absence of one doesn't really prove anything because as I say might have been trimmed off overall we've put this photograph through a number of different tests and you've given us your scientific opinion about it all what's your gut instinct my gut instinct is is by Lewis Carroll yeah why is that just everything about it really you know that was so interesting because I half expected our expert to say no this couldn't possibly have been taken by Lewis Carroll it was from the wrong period or was actually an out-and-out fake but in fact even though we didn't find an inscription by Lewis Carroll himself we now know that was developed using the same process as Carroll would have been used a similar camera and actually that it dates from the period when lorina little herself would have been a young teenager back in London I'm on my way to see forensic energy analyst David Anne Lee he works as an expert witness in court cases he's going to compare the characteristics in known photographs of lorina at different ages with a photograph that we found if we start with the eyebrows that the image of the top areas of the old arena as an adult the image in the middle is the young girl arena and the one at the bottom is the girl in your photograph there are certain similarities the line of the eyebrows is consistent and there is a further consistency in their depth at various points if we then go on to the eyes you can see that there is a fairly hooded appearance and this feature appears consistent both with the girl in the photograph and of lorina if we look at the nose again in terms of the width of the nose of the nation here the point between the eyes the bridge and the width of the ailee the fleshy pads on the side of the nose there those are all broadly consistent as is the apparent form of the nostrils to my inexpert eye they do look remarkably similar they are similar and that there's certainly no indications there of a significant difference and then the upper and lower lips these to me are most interesting of the features that we see here all three images appear to show a Cupid's bow in the upper lip but most injury Stingley the lower lip is fairly prominent and protruding in the center and on the right hand side but over on the left it fades away and that's evident here in the girl on the photograph here on the young girl arena and still evident to a degree here in the older arena overall what are you able to tell us about this photograph well if I was doing a comparison such as this for a court case I would say forensic ly speaking we would say that there is moderate support for the contention that the girl in the photograph is Larina as shown in the other images as this is not for a court case unprepared to get off the fence a little bit and say that in my opinion I would say it so we can't say for certain this is a photograph of the rena little but we have established that is not a fake it's a genuine photograph and it's from the exact period when Louisville little herself would have been a young teenager if true this casts a further troubling light on the life of Lewis Carroll and also offers a possible explanation for that mysterious rift between him and the little family so this is where our investigations have taken us now of course we've got no provenance directly linking Carroll with this photograph but why would someone bother to label it as lorina little she was a pretty obscure figure at the time the questions which hang over this photograph mirror the larger controversies about Lewis Carroll's life ideas which are strongly resisted by his many admirers who say that we're trying to impose modern values on a very different age perhaps we'll never find out the real truth about Lewis Carroll however much we delve bard has become to celebrate the 150th anniversary of this book we can marvel at the way this pedantic cloistered mathematics Don has managed to capture the imagination of children throughout the world the man however flawed has written a work of genius that's been rediscovered generation after generation [Music]

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 395,069

Rating: 4.8061166 out of 5

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, alice in wonderland 1933, alice in wonderland full movie, the real alice, the real alice in wonderland, the real alice in wonderland story, lewis carroll alice in wonderland, lewis carroll, alice liddell, alice in wonderland, writer documentary, writer documentary bbc

Id: LiRqu4ipTU0

Length: 55min 58sec (3358 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 21 2020