Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are enshrined as a great literary achievement. The excitement around Tim Burton’s recent 3D film reminds me that this Victorian story has never gone out of fashion.

England is famous for children’s stories, and Charles Dodgson’s story created for Alice Liddell (at age 5 or 6) on an Oxford punt, is quintessentially so. It is also one of the rare English children's stories that feature a heroine. It so inspired his contemporaries that many stories taking up the thread of Alice's adventures appeared in print soon after Alice In Wonderland was published. It may even have been the cornerstone of a wealth of girls' literature at the beginning of the 1900s, culminating in their annuals and magazines later in the century.

Alice In Wonderland was being published and avidly read through the turn of the century and must have kept women and children at home secure in the arms of such a safe Victorian fantasy while two world conflicts raged about them. Later, mid-century, a new and more brutal writing was emerging, and interest waned. Serious educators were not going to set exams on the appearance of the Jabberwocky and no one seemed to connect the 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves...' of Lewis Carroll to the language James Joyce was supposed to have invented although now it is easy (to see) Carroll's influence on him. Though Alice’s nursery period was not to last.

This reversed in the 80s and 90s, with children’s books selling in greater quantities, and thus scholarship from GCE to PhD again embraced it. There were books written about Carroll's sources, his poetry, his mathematical equations and all sorts of cults began in the faddish and fetishistic fashions of the third millennium.

Along with the focus on this rather darker side of Alice and her adventures, there are of course its detractors who point out that photographs Lewis Carroll took of young girls, although always in proper Victorian dress, bordered on paedophilia. This ‘other’ side of the Victorian era has been documented, in contrast to the Victorian morals. What actually happened in the lives of ordinary folk is more likely to be learned from letters, family histories, personal journals and autobiographies than well-known novelists, such as Dickens and the Brontes. The publishers in those days adhered to the conventional line.

Today one sees Lewis Carroll’s photos in a more liberal light, particularly considering members of the Catholic clergy having been shown as prime perpetrators. Like Catholic priests, he had no children of his own and these photographs could have been a way into the World of Children through which he had to peer in order to champion them. And champion them he did. The sadistic repression of young Victorian ladies was cruel, both at home and at school. When he advised his young charges to go paddling with him at the beach, even bringing them safety pins with which to tie up their voluminous petticoats, we can draw two conclusions. Either he had a passion for their ankles or he simply wanted to see them run about and enjoy the freedom of the beach, which was only just becoming socially acceptable as a prerequisite for it being popular.

Carroll’s Alice was never able to leave home and go in search of adventure, she is a heroine who may never escape 'the nothingness'; a little girl who will always reside in the never-never land of childhood. Though "Alice in Wonderland", the film, also sees Alice as a nubile young girl with the possibility of a real life before her, although this possibility does not appear until the very end of the movie.