9. Lewis Carroll was obsessed with his friend’s daughter, his muse for the heroine in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
In 1862, while on a boat trip, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote under the pen name Lewis Carroll, entertained three of his friend’s daughters with a silly story that he made up about a girl named Alice who fell down a rabbit hole. Ten-year-old Alice Liddell enjoyed the story so much that she asked her father’s friend to write it down. He eventually did so, expanding upon it and publishing it as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. Alice’s influence on the story is uncertain, but there is much commentary on the relationship between the author and his supposed muse.
There is intense speculation that Dodgson may have been a pedophile. He photographed nude children and young girls, but he denied throughout his life that his art (and his storytelling) had any erotic elements. Some of his later biographers claim that his excessive interest in prepubescent girls to be an obsession, rather than a stylistic choice. Others insist that naked children were symbols of innocence in the Victorian period, and his work reflects the artistic trends of the era.
There is also some suggestion that the end of Dodgson’s friendship with the Liddell family roots from his desire to marry the young Alice. While their relationship remains a controversy between modern scholars, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland became a best-seller. Alice Liddell kept the copy that Dodgson wrote for her, then titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, throughout her entire life. Financial difficulties forced her to sell her original manuscript in 1926 when she was in her seventies; it is now housed in the British Library.