Alice’s Father: Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church (2024) by John Witheridge.

The father of Alice Liddell, the eponymous heroine of Alice in Wonderland, was a formidable Victorian and an important and influential figure in the annals of the University of Oxford. A brilliant Greek scholar, talented artist, teacher and administrator, Henry George Liddell devoted over fifty years of his long life to Christ Church.

After nine years in London as Head Master of Westminster School, Liddell returned to Christ Church as the Dean, and during the next thirty-six years he initiated and encouraged extensive reforms, improvements and new buildings in one of the most important and eventful periods in the college’s history.

Liddell undertook, with Robert Scott, the herculean task of compiling the celebrated Greek-English Lexicon known to generations of classicists as Liddell & Scott. He also exercised a significant role in the governance of the University itself, the Bodleian Library, the University Museum and Galleries, and the University Press.

It was in the deanery garden that the mathematical lecturer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson first befriended and photographed the Liddells’ daughters, and it was at Christ Church that his celebrated Alice stories were written. This biography explores what it was like to live in the heart of a college favoured by princes and peers.

Review by Thomas Longford (1974, Theology).