Route 1: Christ Church and beyond

ALICE and LEWIS CARROLL

A guided walk following in the footsteps of Alice Liddell, Charles Dodgson and Isa Bowman

Compiled by

DEBORAH MANLEY

who thanks Ruth Diamond and Olga Samuels for the illustrations, Edward Wakeling of the Lewis Carroll Society, Philip Opher and Sue Upton for their help

Spring 1991

HERITAGE TOURS PUBLICATIONS

17 Edith Road OXFORD OX1 4QB

Tel: (0865) 241845

Opening Hours

Pembroke College

9am until dusk daily

Alice’s Shop

Oct – Apl: Mon – Sat 10am – 4.30pm

May – Sep: Mon – Sat 9.30am – 5.30pm

Sundays: 12 – 3pm

Christ Church

Mon – Sat: 9.30am – 6pm

Sundays: 1 – 5.30pm

(Oct — mid-April closes at 4.30pm)

Entrance fee

Christ Church Picture Gallery

(also separate entrance from Oriel Square)

Entrance fee

Mon – Sat: 10.30am – 1pm; 2 — 5.30pm

Sundays: 2 – 5.30pm

(Oct — April closes at 4.30pm)

Botanic Gardens

Daily 9 — 5pm (closes 4.30 in winter)

Magdalene College

Daily 2 — 6.15pm

Museum of the History of Science

Mon — Fri: 10.30am — 1pm; 2.30 — 4pm

Wadham College

Daily 1 — 4.30pm

University Museum

Mon — Sat: 12 — 5pm

University Parks

Daylight hours through the year

Salter’s Boatyard

Mid-May — mid-Sep

Short trips from 11am

Trips to Abingdon (passing Nuneham Courtney)

in morning and afternoon

Tel: (0865 243421)

Worcester College

Term time: Daily 2 — 6pm

Vacations: 9 — 12pm; 2 — 6pm

Port Meadow

Open every day all year

Introduction

Other town trails in this series are concerned with Oxford’s buildings, urban spaces and its parklands and gardens. This trail follows a shy, and somewhat eccentric, mathematics lecturer with a stammer and two young girls — Alice Liddell and Isa Bowman — around the city. It guides you through the places of Oxford that shaped some of the events that the shy Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) related in his classic children's books, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Although there are no direct references to Oxford places in the books, there are many links which the Liddell girls (Alice, Edith and Lorina) would have recognised. Edith and Lorina themselves appear as the Eaglet and the Lori; Dodgson and his friend Robinson Duckworth are the Dodo and the Duck… and Alice, of course, is Alice.

In Sir John Теnniel’s drawings the children would have seen familiar faces and places: the sheep shop in St Aldate’s; the fire dogs in the Great Hall of Christ Church; the eel traps at Godstow; the Mad Hatter himself and possibly the Ugly Duchess.

But the Alice stories arc just a strand in the flow of stories with which Dodgson entertained his child friends over the years — and just a pan of the flow of writing from his pen. Particularly of interest along the trail are the words he wrote to protect Oxford as he knew it.

Route 1: Christ Church and beyond

Alice Liddell, the little girl who was the heroine of Wonderland and the world beyond

the Looking Glass, moved into the Deanery at Christ Church on 25th February 1856. She was nearly four years old. So it is at Christ Church that the main part of the trail begins.

Before you begin… take yourself into Wonderland by experiencing the sense of relative size that Alice found when she fell down the rabbit hole. You can sense this in many, many places in Oxford, but for your first experience start outside the entrance to Christ Church to St Aldate’s. You will be standing under the rooms where Charles Dodgson lived from 1868 until his death in 1898. Across the road is Pembroke Square, leading to the entrance to Pembroke College on the left. Enter the College, turn right in the front quadrangle and go through the linking passage (in winch you feel quite large) and out into Chapel Quad (where the sudden space makes you shrink). Then, still staying small, cross Chapel Quad to the gate in the far wall to the left — where, on entering the little garden, you will become large again — and ready ‘for something interesting to happen’ without it being necessary to drink anything.

* * * * *

From now on we follow the trail in widening circles. The epicentre is Christ Church where Charles Dodgson was an undergraduate and then a Student (equivalent of a Fellowship), and where Alice lived as the daughter of the Dean (the head of the college and the priest in charge of the Cathedral). From there the trail moves out — as they did — into the streets of Oxford and beyond.

From Pembroke Square, walk down St Aldate’s towards the river. At 83 is the shop were once Alice made purchases from a shopkeeper with a bleating voice. The real shop is the mirror image of Alice’s shop and is now called Alice’s Shop and is devoted to the sale of souvenirs related to Alice and her creator.

Directly opposite Alice’s Shop are the gates to the War Memorial gardens. Walk through them and enter Christ Church through Meadow Buildings. (Admission fee.) Like the White Rabbit, hum along — perhaps feeling large in the cloister as you go. You might pause to take in the video in the vestry which gives you a quick introduction to Christ Church, or to compare the door of the Chapter House (now housing the Treasury and gift shop) with the door at which Queen Alice knocked imperiously in Through The Looking Glass.

For the present pass by the Cathedral and go straight into Tom Quad — 264 feet by 261 feet, and the largest quadrangle in Oxford. Walking along the east side of the quad from the Cathedral to the Deanery, you will be seeing the exact same view that Alice would have seen frequently although the Cathedral was not linked to the Great Quadrangle until 1873. The Deanery faces onto the Quad in the north-east corner. Alice herself described it as ‘a fair-sized house, one side of which looks onto Tom Quad, while the other looks onto a garden which is also overlooked by Christ Church Library... Charles Dodgson was for some years (1855-57) sub-librarian and the window of his room looked down into the garden. It was in this house, built by Cardinal Wolsey, but adapted to the comforts of the modern day that we spent the happy years of childhood.’

PIC

You cannot see into the gardens where on the afternoon of 25th April 1856 Alice and her two sisters, Lorina who was six, and Edith who was two, were playing when two young men appeared with a strange collection of apparatus. They were a 24-year-old mathematics don, Charles Dodgson, and a friend, come to take photographs of the Cathedral from the Deanery garden. ‘The three little girls were in the garden most of the time,’ Dodgson recorded in his diary that day, ‘and we became excellent friends: we tried to group them in the foreground of the picture, but they were not patient sitters.’ The children would naturally have been fascinated by the preparation, which Dodgson later described in a poem.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 793