Lewis Carroll Photographs the Rossetti Family

This photograph of the Rossetti family was taken by Charles Luttwidge Dodgson, later  known as Lewis Carroll, the author of the Alice books. An  Oxford mathemetician, Dodgson was also an avid amateur photographer. In the fall of 1863, Dodgson took a series of photographs in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's back garden at 16 Cheyne Walk in London. This photograph shows Dante Gabriel Rossetti standing, at left; his sister, the poet Christina G. Rossetti, seated on the step; their mother, Frances Lavinia Rossetti, seated next to her; and another sibling, William Michael Rossetti, standing at right. Missing from the picture is the other Rossetti daughter, Maria Francesca. The Rossetti children are in their early to mid thirties in this photograph. At the time the photograph was taken, Dante Gabriel was a celebrated painter and a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement; Christina Rossetti was a critically admired poet and author of Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), which her brother had illustrated; and Lewis Carroll had written, but not yet published,  one of the most famous illustrated books of the Victorian period, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with numerous wood-engraved pictures after John Tenniel's designs. Carroll admired both Christina's poetry and Dante Gabriel's design for her book, and had been reading Goblin Market on the famous day he took the Liddell sisters for an outing on the river and began telling them the story of "Alice's Adventures Underground," July 4, 1862.