Edward Wakeling

Renowned for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was also one of the most important amateur photographers of the Victorian era and the period’s finest photographer of children. From 1856 to 1880, Carroll took around three thousand pictures, the majority of which were portraits of family, friends, and colleagues. He also sought out and photographed celebrities of the day, including Alfred Tennyson, Samuel Wilberforce, Michael Faraday, William Holman Hunt, Henry Taylor, George MacDonald, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Ellen Terry, John Everett Millais, Charlotte Yonge, and Prince Leopold. Carroll’s remaining output includes images of landscapes and architecture, works of art, and skeletons; assisted self-portraits; and other miscellaneous pictures. Today, his photographs are highly prized and fetch enormous prices at auction. This catalogue raisonnÉ presents images of the nearly one thousand surviving photographs of Lewis Carroll-including many from private collections that have never been published-and provides information on their subjects/sitters, their locations, and the dates when they were taken, as well as extracts from Carroll’s private diaries that mention his relevant photographic activity and background information concerning known prints. Edward Wakeling, an internationally recognized Carrollian scholar, has also reconstructed Carroll’s lost register of his complete photographic opus. In addition to the catalogue, Wakeling discusses Carroll’s activity as a photographer, his contacts with other Victorian art photographers, and his nude studies, and he provides a full listing of the contents of Carroll’s various photographic albums. This is the most comprehensive study of Carroll’s photography ever produced, and it will be a standard work for anyone studying Victorian photography and for Lewis Carroll’s photographs in particular.

In their own time, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Algernon Charles Swinburne were highly successful writers. Part of the "Lives of Victorian Literary Figures" series, this three-volume facsimile edition draws together a range of biographical sources relating to these three celebrated Victorian authors.

In their own time, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Algernon Charles Swinburne were highly successful writers. Part of the "Lives of Victorian Literary Figures" series, this three-volume facsimile edition draws together a range of biographical sources relating to these three celebrated Victorian authors.

In their own time, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Algernon Charles Swinburne were highly successful writers. Part of the "Lives of Victorian Literary Figures" series, this three-volume facsimile edition draws together a range of biographical sources relating to these three celebrated Victorian authors.

In their own time, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Algernon Charles Swinburne were highly successful writers. Part of the "Lives of Victorian Literary Figures" series, this three-volume facsimile edition draws together a range of biographical sources relating to these three celebrated Victorian authors.

Long before he published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson ("Lewis Carroll" to the world) took up photography as a hobby. Unlike most of the other amateurs in his circle, he persevered to become a dedicated, prolific, and remarkably gifted photographer, creating approximately 3,000 images during his twenty-five years of photographic activity. This handsomely designed volume makes clear the remarkable extent and complexity of Carroll's photographic art. It publishes for the first time the world's finest and most extensive collection of Carroll photographs, many of which have never been reproduced before and are unknown even to committed Carroll enthusiasts. Roger Taylor's thorough and sophisticated discussion of Carroll as a photographic artist and as a prominent member of Victorian society reveals the man as never before, illuminating his relationships with the children he photographed in light of the idealism and social conventions of the day. This text, illustrated with exquisite tritone plates, is followed by Edward Wakeling's fully illustrated and thoroughly annotated catalogue of the entire Princeton University Library collection. It features, in addition to a trove of loose prints, four rare albums made by Carroll himself to showcase his work to friends, family, and potential sitters. Reproduced in album order, these images offer new insight into how Carroll thought about his work--and how he wanted it to be seen. Compelling portraits of Alice Liddell and other children are presented alongside those of eminent Victorians such as Alfred Tennyson and William Holman Hunt, as well as evocative landscapes, narrative tableaux, and wonderfully strange studies of anatomical skeletons. The catalogue is followed by a chronological register of every known Carroll photograph--a remarkable resource for anyone studying his career as a photographer. This sumptuous volume is the definitive work on Carroll's photography. All who admire Carroll and his writing, as well as everyone interested in Victorian England or the history of photography, will find it both essential and irresistible.