My interest in Lewis Carroll’s photography goes back to 1989 when I spent a memorable period poring over his albums and loose prints at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Since that time I have been continually drawn back to Carroll in the context of nineteenth-century photography. I am grateful to Roy Flukinger and staff at HRHRC for fuelling my original fascination and, more recently, to Linda Briscoe Myers for supporting that fascination in its ongoing form. While completing this project I have benefited from the expertise and advice of a number of other curators, archivists and librarians and I would like to acknowledge the help of Raven Amiro, Cindy Brightenburg, Charles Greene, Sarah Gibbings, Sriba Kwadjovie, Alexandra Loske, AnnaLee Pauls, Anne Totten and Jobi Zink.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Marcia Pointon for her long-standing interest in my work and for suggesting that I send the typescript to Reaktion Books. I thank Michael Leaman at Reaktion for his subsequent enthusiasm and insight while Alia Zapparova, Martha Jay and Vivian Constantinopoulos made the final stages of work a pleasure.
This book has benefited enormously from a publication grant from the Marc Fitch Fund to support the reproduction of images. I am most grateful to Director Christopher Catling and the Council of the Fund for the receipt of an award.
Family, friends and colleagues, always generous with their time, have in various ways encouraged and supported me. I thank in particular Isobel Armstrong, Patrizia Di Bello, Rachel Bowlby, Margaret Healy, Vicky Lebeau, Marcia Pointon, Vincent Quinn, Alan Sinfield, Jenny Taylor and Norman Vance. To Kerrie Smith I am especially grateful for help with the images. My loving and enduring thanks go to my husband David and our children Joe and Lily Rogers.
Invitations to speak at a number of institutions, including the ICA, Birkbeck College, the University of Oxford and Tate Britain, have allowed me to test my ideas. I am grateful to their audiences, together with my students at the University of Sussex, for their enthusiastic engagement. Earlier versions of chapters Four and Five appeared in Art History and the Journal of Visual Culture, for which Marquard Smith and Sam Bibby were respectively much valued readers.