The Cathedral Garden was a garden they were not allowed to enter – only the Dean was allowed to cross that garden, and so a young Alice would have seen her father disappearing through this door into a pretty garden, which she and her sisters could only see from the window of their nursery. The Dean’s Garden is the garden in which the Liddell sisters often played. The door from the Deanery garden to the Cathedral Garden in Christ Church, Oxford, must have been the little door behind the curtain in the hallway. The Queen of Heart’s impulsive and absurd calls for beheadings may therefore be a way of ridiculing this longstanding practice of executions, and represent Carroll’s opinion on the matter ( Abate). Off with his head!Īt the time Carroll wrote “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, state-sanctioned executions were a subject of public controversy and heated debate in England. However, as the spiral staircase behind the High Table in Hall was built in 1906, this claim can be doubted. So it is said that it was the inspiration for the Rabbit Hole. Dean Liddell would use the staircase and appear in Tom Quad on his way home to the Deanery. Behind this door is a very narrow spiral staircase which descends to the senior common room, then to a corridor which emerges in Tom Quad. After dinner the senior members did not drop down amongst the undergraduates but went through a panelled door to the left of the spot where Liddell’s portrait is now hanging. It is said that the ‘Rabbit Hole’ can be found in the dining hall in Christ Church, Oxford.Īlice’s father would have dined at the High Table with other senior members of the college. The present Cathedral Garden then belonged to one of the Cannons who subsequently gave permission to the Dean to use the door as a short cut to the Cathedral. Therefore he was notorious for being late for services. When Alice was a child, there was no west entrance to the Cathedral and the Dean would normally have had to leave the Deanery, walk along Tom Quad, around the Cloisters and into the Cathedral through the south door. Origins of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland The White Rabbitĭean Liddell, Alice’s father, could very well have been the White Rabbit, for the Dean was always running late too. Origins of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
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