Collection Online as of October 2, 2023
Julia and Ethel Arnold
Lewis Carroll
(British, 1832–1898)
Albumen print from wet collodion negative
Image: 14.9 x 12.5 cm (5 7/8 x 4 15/16 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.)
John L. Severance Fund 1996.11
Location
not on view
Description
Best known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, mathematician, lecturer, and church deacon Charles Dodgson was an avid amateur photographer. His subjects were wide ranging but he has become best known for his portraits of children, which avoid the formal, formulaic quality of studio portraiture of the time. Julia was 10 and Ethel was 6 when this photo was taken in Dodgson’s rooftop studio at Christ Church College, Oxford, on June 15, 1872. Ethel reminisced 57 years later that the times spent with Dodgson were “oases of brightness in a somewhat gray and melancholy childhood.” She also remembered that “for a nervous child . . . to keep still for forty-five seconds at a time was no mean ordeal.”
Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll (Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) British, 1832-1898
Known primarily as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872), the enigmatic Lewis Carroll was also a mathematician, poet, novelist, and photographer. A lifelong teacher and writer of children's books, it is perhaps no surprise to find the photography of children his principal focus. Born in Daresbury, Cheshire, and educated at Rugby and Oxford, Carroll lectured in mathematics for 25 years at the prestigious Christ Church College at Oxford. His best known photographic subject is probably the daughter of the dean of Christ Church, Alice Liddell, his model for the heroine of the Alice adventures.
Carroll's photographic activity took place largely from 1856-80. At his death he left some 3,000 negatives, among them portraits and tableaux of children, along with portraits of various members of his cultured circle: Lord Tennyson, Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Michael Faraday. Carroll's fine images of children are noted for their exceptional combination of innocence and revelation, leaving many viewers guessing even to the present day as to his ultimate motives and intentions. T.W.F.