Alice’s Oxford

A guide and history of the town and young girl that inspired Lewis Caroll’s famous Alice stories.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are two of the most famous fantasies in world literature, and yet their roots are firmly in the nineteenth century and the university city of Oxford. Oxford’s streets, colleges, buildings, the River Thames, and the villages on its banks are imbued with hundreds of intricate connections to the books--from the hatters on the High Street to the dodo in the Museum of Natural History.

Their author, Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, spent most of his life as an academic at Christ Church, one of the largest and oldest of the Oxford colleges. His muse, Alice Liddell--who is the thinly disguised Alice of the books--was the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church and she grew up in the college. The Alice books began as stories told to Alice and her sisters. In these stories, Dodgson would incorporate local people, places, and events that they would recognize. But as the books developed, he included a much wider range of satire and caricature until Oxford itself became an eccentric wonderland. Alice’s Oxford, a guide and a history, explores the often curious and always entertaining glories of the city from the colleges to the river that Alice and Lewis Carroll knew and shared.

Peter Hunt is professor emeritus in children’s literature at Cardiff University and adjunct professor at Dublin City University, Ireland.