The Alice Behind Wonderland

"On a summer's day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera. In Alice Behind Wonderland, Simon Winchester uses the resulting image - as unsettling as it is famous - to take readers behind the lens. Dodgson's love of photography framed his view of the world, and was partly responsible for transforming a shy and half-deaf mathematician into one of the world's best loved observers of childhood. Using Dodgson's published writings, private diaries, and of course his photographic portraits, Winchester sheds light on the making of a classic work of English literature."--Back cover.