Edith Mary Liddell, born in the spring of 1854 and the fifth of the ten children of Henry George Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, died at Oxford on 26 June 1876 at the age of twenty-two, within a fortnight of becoming engaged. She was one of the three sisters in the boat on 4 July 1862 when Charles Dodgson first told the story that became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the family she belonged to is unusually well documented: census returns for the Deanery, General Register Office death indexes, Christ Church archives in Oxford, and nine surviving volumes of Dodgson’s diaries at the British Library.
Search for Edith Liddell Lewis Carroll and almost everything you find will be about her sister. Edith survives in the record as the third figure in the photographs, the middle name in a caption, the small girl at the front of the boat. Yet she was the one the family mourned hardest, the one a Pre-Raphaelite window in Christ Church Cathedral was built to remember, and the reason a young man of good family in Oxfordshire never married.
The Deanery family
Henry George Liddell (1811 to 1898) had been headmaster of Westminster School from 1846 before coming to Oxford as Dean of Christ Church in 1855, a post he held for thirty-six years. His name survives on the spines of classical dictionaries: the Greek-English Lexicon he compiled with Robert Scott is still in use. He had married Lorina Reeve (1826 to 1910) on 2 July 1846.
Ten children followed, and the family knew early loss. Edward Henry, always Harry, was born in 1847 and Lorina Charlotte, always Ina, in 1849. James Arthur Charles, born in December 1850, died before his third birthday in November 1853. Alice Pleasance arrived in May 1852 and Edith Mary in the spring of 1854. Then came Rhoda Caroline Anne in 1859, Albert Edward Arthur in 1863, who lived only weeks, Violet Constance in 1864, Frederick Francis in 1865 and Lionel Charles in 1868.
The three middle girls, Ina, Alice and Edith, were close enough in age to be treated as a set by everyone who knew them, and it is as a set that they enter photographic history. The Deanery at Christ Church, where they grew up, was a large household with a staff to match, and the domestic servants who kept it have their own documentary trail in the college accounts, as our guide to college servants at Oxford and Cambridge explains.
The photographer in the garden
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832 to 1898) was a Student of Christ Church and its mathematical lecturer, and he took up photography in the 1850s when the wet collodion process was still difficult, slow and filthy work. He photographed the Dean’s daughters repeatedly from 1856 onwards.
Edith is in a great many of those pictures. In the summer of 1858 he posed all three sisters on a sofa, Edith at one end with her hair loose. In 1860 he sat her alone beside a vase of foxgloves, her hands in her lap, looking slightly past the lens. Both prints came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2013 through the bequest of the illustrator Maurice Sendak, and both are now freely available.
Some accounts hold that it was Edith rather than Alice whose face Dodgson used for parts of his own illustrations to the manuscript Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. The claim is repeated more often than it is demonstrated, and the manuscript itself does not settle it. What is certain is that Dodgson photographed Edith often enough that her face is among the best recorded of any Victorian child who did nothing in particular to attract attention. Oxford was unusually well served by photographers in this period, both amateur and commercial, as our article on the Oxford college team photographs of 1893 describes.
The Eaglet and the boat trip
On 4 July 1862 Dodgson and his friend Robinson Duckworth took the three Liddell sisters up the Thames from Folly Bridge towards Godstow. Lorina was thirteen, Alice ten and Edith eight. To keep them entertained Dodgson invented a story about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole.
When the story was written out and later published, the boat party went into it in disguise. Dodgson became the Dodo, a joke on his stammer over his own surname. Duckworth became the Duck. Lorina became the Lory, a parrot, and Edith became the Eaglet. In the caucus race chapter the Eaglet speaks twice, both times to tell an adult to use plain English. It is a small part, given to the youngest, and it is the only fictional life Edith Liddell has ever had.
A prince at Christ Church
In 1872 Prince Leopold (1853 to 1884), the youngest son of Queen Victoria and later Duke of Albany, came up to Christ Church. He stayed four years and became a familiar figure at the Deanery.
A durable Oxford story holds that Leopold courted Alice. At least one biographer has argued that his attention was in fact directed at Edith. The evidence on either side is thin, and consists largely of later recollection rather than anything written at the time. What can be documented is what he did in the summer of 1876, which suggests the family mattered to him a great deal.
The engagement and the illness
In the middle of June 1876 Edith became engaged to Aubrey Harcourt (1852 to 1904) of Nuneham Courtenay, a few miles down the Thames from Oxford. He was the son of Edward William Harcourt (1825 to 1891), later Member of Parliament for Oxfordshire and then for Henley, and of Lady Susan Harriet Holroyd. He played cricket, without much distinction, and stood to inherit one of the larger estates in the county.
Within days of the engagement Edith fell ill. She died on 26 June 1876. The cause is given in different accounts as measles and as peritonitis, and the two are not necessarily in conflict, since peritonitis can follow an abdominal complication in a patient already weakened. No death certificate transcript has been published that settles it, which makes the General Register Office entry for the June quarter of 1876 worth ordering for anyone who wants the contemporary medical wording.
She was buried on 30 June. Prince Leopold was one of the pall-bearers, which for a dean’s daughter was extraordinary. Aubrey Harcourt lived another twenty-eight years and died unmarried in 1904.
Saint Catherine in the south choir aisle
Two years after her death a window was installed in the Remembrance Chapel at the end of the south choir aisle of Christ Church Cathedral. It was designed by Edward Burne-Jones (1833 to 1898) and made by Morris and Company in 1878. The window as a whole is dedicated to Edith’s memory, and the face of its central figure was modelled on a portrait of her.
The figure is Saint Catherine of Alexandria, patron of students, of young women and of philosophers. Burne-Jones had already used her in his earlier St Frideswide window in the cathedral’s Latin Chapel, where she appears teaching Frideswide to read. Putting Edith’s face on the patron saint of students, in the cathedral of the college her father governed, was a pointed piece of memorial design.
The Dean and his wife were later buried nearby. Visitors to the cathedral today walk past the window without knowing whose face they are looking at, which is the ordinary fate of memorials once everyone who remembers the person has gone.
What the archives hold
Edith left no papers of her own that have been published. She survives in other people’s records, which is the usual position for a young woman of her class and date, and it is why the surrounding archive matters so much.
Nine volumes of Dodgson’s diaries survive, running from 1 January 1855 to 23 December 1897. They were kept in the family after his death in 1898 and acquired by the British Library in 1969. Four volumes are missing, numbers one, three, six and seven, and the loss of the middle ones has fuelled a century of speculation about the Liddell family. The Lewis Carroll Society has published the full text of all nine surviving volumes in an annotated edition, which is the practical way in.
The Harcourt side is documented too. The Bodleian Library holds substantial Harcourt family archives, including papers of Edward William Harcourt, Aubrey’s father.
Genealogy research note: tracing the Liddell and Harcourt families
Edith Liddell died in 1876, which places her squarely inside the period of English civil registration and decennial census returns, and makes her one of the easier Victorian subjects to document from first principles. Her death should appear in the General Register Office index for the June quarter of 1876 in the Oxford registration district, and the certificate will give the cause of death in the words used at the time, which the published accounts do not agree on. The Deanery household, including Edith, her siblings and the resident servants, should appear in the census returns of 1861 and 1871.
Christ Church has its own archive in Oxford, separate from the university archives, covering the cathedral as well as the college, and it is the first place to look for anything concerning the Dean’s household or the cathedral’s memorials and burials. The Oxfordshire History Centre holds parish registers and local records for the city and county, including the Nuneham Courtenay parish in which the Harcourts sat. Probate records for Aubrey Harcourt, who died in 1904, can be found through the National Probate Calendar.
The death of a dean’s daughter at twenty-two was news, and so, nearly thirty years later, was the death of the last Harcourt of Nuneham. Both fell in the period of dense provincial press coverage, and you can search digitised newspapers for the death notices, funeral reports and family announcements that surrounded them, which routinely name relatives, executors and mourners that the certificates and the registers do not.
For the Dodgson side, the British Library holds the nine surviving diary volumes, and the Surrey History Centre holds the Dodgson Family Collection of letters, photographs and related material. Between them these two collections carry most of what survives in manuscript about the man who photographed Edith. Further Oxford record sets are gathered on our Oxford University records hub, and the general method for reading university and college archives is set out in our guide to historic university records.
Named individuals in this article on Edith Liddell Lewis Carroll
| Name | Dates | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Edith Mary Liddell | spring 1854 to 26 June 1876 | Fifth child of the Dean of Christ Church; the Eaglet of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland |
| Henry George Liddell | 1811 to 1898 | Father; headmaster of Westminster School 1846 to 1855; Dean of Christ Church 1855 to 1891; co-author of the Greek-English Lexicon |
| Lorina Reeve Liddell | 1826 to 1910 | Mother; married Henry Liddell 2 July 1846 |
| Edward Henry (Harry) Liddell | 1847 to 1911 | Eldest brother |
| Lorina Charlotte (Ina) Liddell | 1849 to 1930 | Eldest sister; the Lory |
| James Arthur Charles Liddell | 1850 to 1853 | Brother; died in infancy |
| Alice Pleasance Liddell | 1852 to 1934 | Sister; married Reginald Hargreaves in 1880 |
| Rhoda Caroline Anne Liddell | 1859 to 1949 | Younger sister |
| Albert Edward Arthur Liddell | 1863 | Brother; died in infancy |
| Violet Constance Liddell | 1864 to 1927 | Younger sister |
| Sir Frederick Francis Liddell | 1865 to 1950 | Younger brother; lawyer and First Parliamentary Counsel |
| Lionel Charles Liddell | 1868 to 1942 | Youngest brother |
| Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) | 1832 to 1898 | Student and mathematical lecturer of Christ Church; photographer of the Liddell sisters; the Dodo |
| Robinson Duckworth | 1834 to 1911 | Fellow of Trinity College Oxford; present on the 1862 boat trip; the Duck |
| Aubrey Harcourt | 1852 to 1904 | Of Nuneham Courtenay; engaged to Edith in June 1876; died unmarried |
| Edward William Harcourt | 1825 to 1891 | Aubrey’s father; naturalist; MP for Oxfordshire 1878 to 1885 and for Henley 1885 to 1886 |
| Lady Susan Harriet Holroyd | 19th century | Aubrey’s mother |
| Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany | 1853 to 1884 | Youngest son of Queen Victoria; at Christ Church from 1872; pall-bearer at Edith’s funeral |
| Edward Burne-Jones | 1833 to 1898 | Designer of the 1878 memorial window in Christ Church Cathedral |
| Robert Scott | 1811 to 1887 | Co-author with Henry Liddell of the Greek-English Lexicon |
| Maurice Sendak | 1928 to 2012 | Illustrator; bequeathed Dodgson’s photographs of the Liddell sisters to the Metropolitan Museum of Art |
Further reading for Edith Liddell Lewis Carroll
- The Victorian Web: St Catherine of Alexandria by Burne-Jones and Morris and Co.. The catalogue entry for the 1878 memorial window, confirming the dedication to Edith and the use of her portrait for the saint’s face.
- Metropolitan Museum of Art: Edith, Ina and Alice Liddell on a Sofa. Dodgson’s 1858 photograph of the three sisters, from the Sendak bequest and freely available under the museum’s open access policy.
- Metropolitan Museum of Art: Edith Liddell Seated Beside a Vase of Foxgloves. A single portrait of Edith from 1860, the clearest surviving photographic likeness of her.
- The Lewis Carroll Society: Charles Dodgson’s diaries. An account of the nine surviving volumes at the British Library, the four that are missing, and the published annotated edition.
- Surrey History Centre: the Dodgson Family Collection. Letters, photographs and family material relating to Dodgson and his relatives.
- Bodleian Archives and Manuscripts: Harcourt papers including those of Edward William Harcourt. The family archive for the Nuneham Courtenay Harcourts.
