The Photographs of Lewis Carroll: A Catalogue Raisonné

Renowned for Alices Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was also one of the most important amateur photographers of the Victorian era and the periods 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. Carrolls 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 Carrollincluding many from private collections that have never been publishedand provides information on their subjects/sitters, their locations, and the dates when they were taken, as well as extracts from Carrolls private diaries that mention his relevant photographic activity and background information concerning known prints. Edward Wakeling, an internationally recognized Carrollian scholar, has also reconstructed Carrolls lost register of his complete photographic opus. In addition to the catalogue, Wakeling discusses Carrolls 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 Carrolls various photographic albums. This is the most comprehensive study of Carrolls photography ever produced, and it will be a standard work for anyone studying Victorian photography and for Lewis Carrolls photographs in particular.