London calling. London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
This day in London history time.
This day is May 4th.
So all together now,
Happy Birthday Alice in Wonderland.
Or at least… the little girl, the little Alice who started all that glorious, wondrous nonsense.
Alice Pleasance Liddell. Flesh and blood. London-born.
And what a place to be born, 19 Dean’s Yard. In the shadow of Westminster Abbey.
And you can count on it, on our Old Westminster Walk, we stroll past the birthplace of Alice in Wonderland.
And make no mistake about it. It is a kind of rabbit hole.
Only in London, you don’t fall down it.
You walk through it.
Through an arched entryway.
Into a secret yard.
Pause by a 14th-century passage that leads to a smaller yard just off the main yard.
Think Russian dolls – a doll within a doll within a doll…
And before you know it…
There’s the little round window looking out over Little Dean’s Yard.
You might just catch a glimpse of that little girl’s face pressed against it.
When it all comes together like that… well, sharp intake of breath because the world’s gone a bit peculiar.
Wonderland indeed. Here you are in Dean’s Yard. Westminster Abbey looming. Green sward. Ancient houses. History pressing in from every side. Far far from the madding crowd. Well, not that far, only a stone’s throw. But they don’t find their way in here.
And then – just there – that ancient, shadowy arch. People have been passing through that arch for seven centuries.
Peer through it.
That’s Little Dean’s Yard. The main schoolyard of Westminster School.
And suddenly the penny drops.
Because what a place of wonder it must have been for little Miss Liddell.
Her father is Headmaster. This is her playground. Her theatre. Her daily backdrop. Echoing with footsteps, voices, Latin, laughter. And boys. Lots of boys.
A world that is overwhelmingly masculine. Competitive. Hierarchical. Ritualised. Slightly absurd.
And she – this small, bright, little girl, this toddler – looking on, but not quite of it.
Not one of the boys. Not entirely outside it either.
In between.
Watching.
Absorbing.
“There’s no use going back to yesterday,” says Alice in the book, “because I was a different person then.”
You can almost feel that here. The sense of shifting ground. Of identities not quite fixed. Of rules that look solid until you touch them and they wobble.
And this isn’t just any schoolyard.
This is – may I remind you –Westminster School. A place that has produced some very serious names – the poet John Dryden, the architect Christopher Wren, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, later A. A. Milne. To name but a few.
But in the 1850s, in Alice’s own time, it’s not the famous names that matter. It’s the type. Bright boys. Boisterous boys. Boys acting out roles in a system far older than any of them.
A little kingdom of curious creatures, behaving in curious ways.
And right at the centre of it all, presiding over this slightly mad world, is her father.
The Headmaster.
And that brings us back to that little round window. That’s the ground zero rabbit hole.
The rabbit hole that’s still there if you know where to look.
It’s the merest little porthole in the Headmaster’s house – 19 Dean’s Yard.
Alice is only three. Not tall enough to see out of it on her own. But we can see her being lifted up. Held there for a moment. Looking out at that strange, noisy world just out there, just outside of her house.
Wide-eyed, that toddler, that wee lass is taking it all in.
The bustle. The noise. The boys running, jostling, shouting, posturing.
You begin to understand the line: “We’re all mad here.”
And then – just as she’s getting her bearings in this curious Westminster world – everything changes.
Her father is appointed Dean of Christ Church. Oxford.
Exit London. Enter a whole new Wonderland.
Into that scene walks a young don.
Lewis Carroll – Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
Camera in hand. Photography, the new magic trick of the age.
He meets Alice in the Deanery garden. She’s not quite four. He’s in his twenties. Slightly shy. A stammer. But with children, especially these children, he comes alive.
Games. Croquet. Stories. River outings on the Isis.
And then comes the golden afternoon. July 4th, 1862.
A boat. A picnic. Three girls. A don pressed into service as storyteller.
Out it comes. Improvised. A girl named Alice. A fall. A rabbit hole. A world where logic loops and language somersaults.
“Curiouser and curiouser!” as Alice says.
The real Alice – now ten – is enchanted.
“Write it down.”
And he does. Carefully. Lovingly. A green notebook. One of the most treasured manuscripts in the British Library.
And the world tilts.
And then tilts again, because the story takes a turn. The friendship between Dodgson and the Liddell family breaks. Abruptly. Mysteriously. Letters destroyed. Diary pages missing.
We don’t quite know what happened.
What we do know is that the warmth cools. The stories, though, are already loose in the world.
And Alice grows up.
A celebrated beauty. Suitors gather.
Even royalty circles briefly.
But in the end she marries Reginald Hargreaves in 1880.
A Westminster Abbey wedding.
A return, in a way, to where she began.
They settle at Cuffnells in the New Forest. A fine Georgian house. Acres of land. A life of comfort and hosting. Three sons.
Until history intrudes. The First World War takes her two eldest boys. The estate falters. The great house begins its slow decline.
And then, late in life, a curious twist.
She becomes famous again.
Not for what she has done.
But for what she once was.
America beckons.
Columbia University honours her. She is fêted, photographed, celebrated.
And she is weary of it.
“Tired of being Alice in Wonderland.”
There’s something almost heartbreaking in that.
The tiny lass who once peered out of that little round window in Dean’s Yard… watching a strange, noisy, rule-bound world…
…is now fixed forever as the girl the world would never stop calling Alice in Wonderland.
She dies in 1934. Eighty-two years old. Her ashes returned to Lyndhurst. Cuffnells will not long survive her.
But the story… the story is indestructible.
And it’s a bit of London magic really that it starts here. Not in Oxford. Not on a river.
In a London courtyard.
Dean’s Yard.
A place you can stand in. A place one of the great classic London Walks takes you to.
Takes you past the house where Alice in Wonderland was born. Takes you past that rabbit hole, the little round window.
Like Alice peering out of her window we peer through that ancient archway into Little Dean’s Yard.
And when the light is right – and the guide is on form – the map starts to talk, the layers peel back, and for just a moment…
London tilts.
And you realise you’ve stepped, without quite noticing, into Wonderland.
Happy birthday, Alice in Wonderland.
And for the rest of you, that’s your London fix for today.
See you tomorrow.