“There was once a little girl named Alice.”
So begins the story by Charles Dodgson, a math professor at Cambridge who wrote under the pen name Lewis Carroll, to his neighbor, the young Alice Lidell. It would become the classic “Alice in Wonderland.”
Melanie Benjamin was inspired to fictionalize the real-life Alice when she saw photographs of the girl taken by Dodgson at the Art Institute of Chicago. Alice, who was 7 years old in 1859, stared into the photograph with an expression beyond her years. “They were the eyes of a woman,” Benjamin writes.
Benjamin portrays Alice as a precocious child reared in a strict Victorian household, where governesses reign and children don’t stray far from the nursery.
Dodgson resembles “a hero of a romance novel” to the young Alice, and he showers her with attention. Eventually something happens between the two — what exactly transpired between the young girl and her neighbor remains a literary mystery — but all contact between the Lidell family and Dodgson was abruptly cut off.
One thing is certain, though; the “odd, intense friendship” between the professor and child has resulted in one of the most enduring children’s stories. The novel doesn’t just fill in the blanks of a literary life, but tells the story of someone who was more than a muse; Alice may have been immortalized as a girl but, as Benjamin imagines, she grew up to be a great woman.
Alice I Have Been
by Melanie Benjamin
Delacorte Press