“Alice” is a Real Girl
It all started on the oddly-named “golden afternoon” of July 4, 1862. On that cloudy and drizzly day, as most days are in London, Carroll entertained the three young daughters of Oxford Vice-Chancellor Henry Liddell with an improvised story about a girl who falls down a rabbit hole and into another dimension.
Alice Liddell (1852 – 1934), the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s fictional character Alice in ‘Alice in Wonderland’. She is posing as ‘The Beggar-Maid.’ (Photo by Lewis Carroll/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
One of those girls was — you guessed it — 10-year-old Alice Liddell. Probably since she was the title character, Alice asked Carroll to write the story down. His original handwritten manuscript is lost, but a second, longer version was published some three years later. Apropos of nothing, Alice Liddell was (much later) romantically linked with England’s Prince Leopold, who was Queen Victoria’s youngest son.