From Street Girl to Roman Goddess: The Creation of Multiple Visual Alices from 1858 to 1872
From Street Girl to Roman Goddess: The Creation of Multiple Visual Alices from 1858 to 1872

Summary/Abstract: Victorian representations of childhood are found in a wide variety of cultural texts, from literary descriptions to visual images. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865) is no different in this sense. However, Alice’s character is one of the first of its kind to behave as a cross-media figure, thus becoming a fantasy literature heroine as well as a popular cultural icon. This paper focuses on Alice’s artistic representations in three forms: (a) Lewis Carroll’s verbal art; (b) the photographic prints of the “real” Alice Liddell taken in 1858 and 1872 by Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron respectively; and (c) the visual illustrations by Carroll and by John Tenniel (1864 and 1865, respectively). The aim of the paper is to discuss whether Alice was ever a “real” Victorian girl, by examining her multiple representations in the given corpus. It also aims at analysing Alice’s visual characteristics in order to reveal Alice as a visual concept of her times.

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