Lewis Carroll| Selected portraits of Alexandra ‘Xie’ Kitchin, 1870 and 1873

Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson]

Selected portraits of Alexandra ‘Xie’ Kitchin, 1870 and 1873

2 albumen prints, comprising 'The Prettiest Doll in the World' and 'Xie Kitchin (Danish)’ (115 x 72mm. and 140 x 102mm.), mounted to an album page from the ‘Kitchin Family Book’ compiled by Vernon Parry Kitchin, great nephew of the sitter’s father, together with a transcript from a letter (quoted below) and a cutting referring to the auction sale in these rooms of Alexandra Kitchin's copy of Alice in Wonderland (22 March 1926), 4 cartes-de-visite copies of the same sitter and other family members by various photographers on the reverse, framed and glazed (471 x 377 mm.); accompanied by a second page from the same album with 4 additional photographic family portraits by various photographers mounted back-to-back. 

"The friendship with Mr Dodgson dated from my father's days as Tutor at Christ Church, Oxford, and Dodgson himself was evidently very fond of my mother, judging from his letters to her, full of whimsies. I remember him most clearly, when he used to take our photographs and let us watch him developing them in his college rooms - the stuffy smell of the dark room, the water running, and the ruby light. There are quantities of photos, especially of "Xie", with whom he fell in (fatherly) love when Alice Liddell grew too old and Dodgson was choked off by her rather snobby mother. We were about 7 and 8, I expect." (from a letter by G. Herbert Kitchin to V.P.K., January 1935) 

Alexandra (Xie) Kitchin, the daughter of Lewis Carroll's friend and Oxford University colleague Rev. George W. Kitchin, was one of Carroll's most frequent subjects. He took at least 50 known images of her from when she was five to the age of sixteen. He did not photograph any of his other child subjects for so long a period; this highly significant series uniquely shows his subject growing from young girlhood into adolescence.  

LITERATURE:

Edward Wakeling, The Photographs of Lewis Carroll: A Catalogue Raisonné (Austin, 2015), 1893 and 2132