BBC The Secret World of Lewis Carroll

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 Liddell and her sisters

on a boat trip along the River Thames.

The 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 number one, always has been.

It's absolutely a magical ride.

In terms of children's literature, a revolutionary book.

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 Aborigine here,

the French, German, Japanese.

Only a handful of people would have known at the time

that Charles Dodgson,

a maths don at Christchurch, Oxford,

was also Lewis Carroll.

And the inspiration for the book was a real Alice -

Alice Liddell, the dean's daughter.

For years, the relationship between Carroll and Alice Liddell

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.

Carroll's reputation has also been dogged by questions

about his child friends,

and the photographs he took of them.

That is quite disturbing. It is.

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 it's by Lewis Carroll. What was really going on?

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 recognise 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?

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.

APPLAUSE

I'm clearly Alice. And I'm the Mad Hatter.

Mad Hatter, March Hare and Alice.

Everyone in here like...Alice. Alice. Yes.

We all know the story, don't we?

Alice is getting very tired

of sitting by her sister on a river bank,

when suddenly a white rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.

Either she falls asleep, or she follows a white rabbit,

who leads her down a hole. It's ambiguous.

She finds herself in an underground chamber with a tiny little door.

And the key was on the table and she couldn't reach it.

She sees a bottle with the words "DRINK ME" on it.

And she goes through all sorts of nasty experiences.

Then she met the Cheshire Cat.

Alice go to a tea party.

Tea party. Yes. Yes.

She meets this strange character.

That'd be me. HE CHUCKLES

Erm, who's a bit...deluded.

Alice, um, got a bit stressed because they were being so mad.

Then there is a weird game of croquet.

The cards were, like, painting the roses red.

Eventually, Alice loses her temper.

And she comes out at the end saying,

"You're nothing but a pack of cards!"

Well, don't ask me about Alice In Wonderland.

ALL LAUGH I'm just here for the fun!

I love this book. I always have. I was just captivated

by Lewis Carroll's completely surreal imagination,

and transported off to Wonderland.

I even played Alice when I was a young girl, in the village play.

'This is where I grew up.

'Ditchling, in Sussex.

'When I was 11, the village put on a version

'of Alice Through The Looking Glass,

'and I'm on my way back for a reunion.'

Strange sensation. I do remember you, I remember both of you.

I thought I might not, but I really do. Yes, absolutely.

Well, I can't say you don't look a day older, but... ALL LAUGH

There's actually a recording of the production over here.

CRACKLY RECORDING

'This is the Ditchling Players' performance

'of Alice Through The Looking Glass, January 1969.'

'Of course...' INDISTINCT

'Well, here I am.

'I'm getting very tired. Where is Humpty Dumpty?

'ALL: He's here!'

MUSIC AND LAUGHTER ON TAPE

SWITCHES OFF RECORDING

I'm not sure I like listening to my own voice back nowadays,

let alone when I was 11! It feels very...

But what is really charming is hearing the audience laughing. Yes.

And really, you know, enjoying it. Yes, they certainly loved it.

# The Walrus and the Carpenter

# Were walking close at hand... #

I had no idea I was acting in such a psychedelic production. No!

ALL LAUGH

Alice broke box office records.

In Ditchling! ALL LAUGH

"There was a...general praise for ten-year-old Martha Kearney,

who plays Alice.

"This was a performance that will be remembered in Ditchling for some time."

And this is, yes, this was the one that was used a lot,

wasn't it, to play the...

Yes, that's why it's almost... ..game of chess.

Very much, kind of, Lewis Carroll's amazing imagination

to have a game as the centre of it all.

He does that in Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, as well.

There's playing cards there. Yes. He loves that idea of playing games.

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 a minimum 50 times.

It's possible that my character, Lyra, is a descendant of Alice,

in 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, yes.

So, why has this book captivated children -

and adults actually - for 150 years?

Alice In Wonderland endures because it is 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 Alice and he grasps, beautifully,

what the psychology of that situation is like.

It was in the corner of this famous quad 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 Liddell lived.

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.

It is a great honour and a great pleasure to come over here.

And I think now my adventures overseas

will be almost as interesting as my adventures underground were.

So, how did those adventures come to be created?

It really began here in Oxford,

when Lewis Carroll first met Alice Liddell.

She was around four at the time.

He was 24, a newly qualified maths don.

It was a relationship which seems unusual, to say the least,

to modern eyes.

He was dry, methodical,

punctilious...

Alice Liddell said that he looked as if he had a poker stuck up him,

he was, you know, so upright.

Everything was, you know, neat, fixed, orderly.

It's hard not to think of him as someone who had a mild form of OCD.

In those days, dons at Christchurch had to take Holy Orders,

and they had to be celibate,

so Charles Dodgson became the Reverend Dodgson,

though he never converted to full priesthood.

If he had become a full 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.

Carroll spent almost his entire adult life a bachelor don,

behind the cloistered walls of Christchurch,

and even though he wrote both the Alice books here,

he kept his identity secret.

He instructed the porters at Christchurch

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.

That probably was because he didn't want people to recognise him

in the street, he didn't want fans coming up to him.

Carroll 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 others.

There is no photographic image of Alice

which is not arresting, startling.

Like, you know, the people who nowadays become supermodels,

who the camera is in love with.

'It was when Lewis Carroll was working in the library

'at Christchurch that he first spotted Alice,