The famed polymath Carroll was not only the author of the enduringly popular Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but also a mathematics professor and a noted photographer.

Alexandra “Xie” Kitchin, the daughter of a fellow professor at Christ Church College at Oxford, was one of Carroll’s favorite models. He photographed her at least fifty times over eleven years: in exotic costume, playing the violin, as an allegorical figure; playing with her brothers. Carroll’s photographs of Xie and other children, including Alice Lidell, the model for the protagonist in his famous books, present a romantic ideal of childhood widely held in the Victorian period. To Carroll’s contemporaries, such photographs represented childhood purity and virtue, and parents brought their daughters to be photographed by him in this fashion.

In the 1930s, however, when the concept of Victorian repression became culturally pervasive, Carroll’s work became the object of much unfounded speculation about the photographer’s supposed predilection for little girls.