‘Real' Alice in Wonderland artefacts fetch £2m-plus

Unique photographs, books, letters and other items belonging to the ‘‘real’’ Alice in Wonderland were sold for more than £2m.

Alice Liddell became the inspiration for perhaps the best-loved children’s story in English literature when, as a seven-year-old, she spent a ‘‘golden afternoon’’ on a river expedition with Lewis Carroll and her two sisters.

It was on that day, July 4, 1862, that Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, first told his story of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.

Alice, who died in 1934, and several succeeding generations of her family carefully preserved the items relating to her fictional namesake, which were tonight sold on behalf of the Alice Family Trust for a total of £2,008,275.

An American collector who is a graduate of Christ Church College, Oxford, where Carroll was once a don, purchased some of the major lots and promised to display them ‘‘back where they belong in Christ Church’’.

Among the items he bought were Alice’s photographic scrapbook, for £465,500, and the white vellum-bound copy of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which Carroll dedicated to Alice, for £157,250.

The book includes the author’s personal inscription: ‘‘to her whose namesake one happy summer day inspired his story’’, and was one of more than 370 editions of works by Carroll in the sale, many of them signed by Alice.

He also purchased a letter from Carroll to Alice written in 1891, one of only 11 in existence and the only one in private hands, for £91,250, a record for a Carroll letter.

Addressed to Mrs Hargreaves, as Alice had by then married, it reveals Carroll’s yearning for the days when she was a seven year old.

Referring to her husband, he writes: ‘‘It is hard to realise that he was the husband of one I can scarcely picture to myself, even now, as more than seven years old.’’

The famous Carroll photograph of Alice as a Beggar Girl also set a record, for a photograph by Carroll - going for £179,250, more than £120,000 above the estimate.

The auction took place in the same New Bond Street saleroom where the original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, also given to Alice by Carroll, went under the hammer in 1928 for £15,400 - setting a then world auction record for a literary manuscript.

Apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, the Alice books are the most widely and most frequently translated and quoted works.

They have been translated into more than 70 languages, including Swahili and Yiddish.