Alice Liddell as Pomona by Julia Margaret Cameron - Original

Alice Liddell was the fourth of the ten children of Henry Liddell, ecclesiastical dean of Christ Church, Oxford, one of the editors of A Greek-English Lexicon, and his wife Lorina Hanna Liddell (née Reeve). She had two older brothers, Harry (born 1847) and Arthur (1850–53), an older sister Lorina (born 1849), and six younger siblings, including her sister Edith (born 1854) to whom she was very close, and her brother Frederick (born 1865). At the time of her birth, her father was the Headmaster of Westminster School but was soon after appointed to the deanery of Christ Church, Oxford. The Liddell family moved to Oxford in 1856. Soon after this move, Alice met Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), who encountered the family while photographing the cathedral on 25 April 1856. He became a close friend of the Liddell family in subsequent years. Alice was three years younger than Lorina and two years older than Edith, and the three sisters were constant childhood companions. She and her family regularly spent holidays at their holiday home Penmorfa, which later became the Gogarth Abbey Hotel, on the West Shore of Llandudno in North Wales. When Alice Liddell was a young woman, she set out on a Grand Tour of Europe with Lorina and Edith. One story has it that she became a romantic interest of Prince Leopold, the youngest son of Queen Victoria, during the four years he spent at Christ Church, but the evidence for this is sparse. It is true that years later, Leopold named his first child Alice and acted as godfather to Alice's second son Leopold. However, it is possible Alice was named in honour of Leopold's deceased elder sister instead, the Grand Duchess of Hesse. A recent biographer of Leopold suggests it is far more likely that Alice's sister Edith was the true recipient of Leopold's attention. Edith died on 26 June 1876, possibly of measles or peritonitis (accounts differ), shortly before she was to be married to Aubrey Harcourt, a cricket player. Prince Leopold served as a pall-bearer at her funeral on 30 June 1876.

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