There are various possible approaches to Alice in Wonderland, first published 150 years ago this April. One way to cope with the mountain of print inspired by Lewis Carroll [aka Charles Dodgson] and Alice Liddell, his haunting child-friend, is to follow the Gryphon’s advice. “No, no!” exclaims this crotchety heraldic creature during the Lobster Quadrille, insisting on “adventures” before analysis. “Explanations take such a dreadful time.”

In The Story of Alice, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, an Oxford don, has explored Dodgson/Carroll and Alice through a braid of “adventures” and “explanations”. It’s a strategy that yields fascinating insights, even though both the writer and his child-muse ultimately slip through our fingers. With Carroll, the denser the documentation, the greater the enigma. Appropriately, on the cover of Sgt Pepper, he appears between Marlene Dietrich and TE Lawrence.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was the eldest son of a high church country clergyman, and had seven sisters. Childhood was the Dodgson family project. “Charlie” became its entertainer, a fount of “jokes, riddles, fun, poetry and tales”. As well as limericks and nonsense poetry, he also put on shows in his marionette theatre, and contributed to the family’s Rectory Magazine, for which, says Douglas-Fairhurst, young Charlie was “editor, leading author, illustrator, printer, publisher and distributor”.

Childhood was the idyll Dodgson never quite recovered from, a parallel world where time stood still. Virginia Woolf believed that this held the key to the man, and was always “an impediment at the centre of his being”.

Charles’s father Skeffington Dodgson had wanted his son to follow him into the church, and sent him to that staff college for muscular Christians, Thomas Arnold’s Rugby school. After his sisters and their jigsaw puzzles, teenage Charles was now maturing among mid-Victorian youth and higher mathematics, a precociously brilliant logician on course for Oxford and the ministry. He arrived at Christ Church in 1851, and would never really leave.

Christ Church was the Vatican of an academic and social establishment, a hothouse of eccentricity where Dodgson would be utterly at home. Douglas-Fairhurst is well-equipped to elucidate the mysteries of that earnest cocktail of frivolity and convention, the don’s life. The young mathematician soon found the pen name for his fantasies, rejecting “Edgar Cuthwellis” in favour of “Lewis Carroll”. He also took up the “black arts” of photography, an outre, transgressive link with the make-believe of childhood.

To be a Victorian photographer, says Douglas-Fairhurst, required “the knowledge of a chemist, the eye of an artist, and the patience of a saint”. The craft suited Dodgson, and the art inspired Carroll. He could prolong his fascination with childhood by photographing little girls, ideally in the nude. “A girl of about 12,” he wrote towards the end of his life, “is my ideal beauty of form.” In words of pre-Freudian innocence, he could never see “why the lovely forms of girls should ever be covered up”.

Perhaps only in Oxford would this not seem unusual. The dean of Christ Church, the classical scholar Henry George Liddell, and his bossy wife had three ideal subjects for the amateur photographer. They were Alice Liddell and her sisters, who played in the deanery garden outside the college library where Dodgson worked at his linear equations. Mid-Victorian Oxford revelled in the discreet charm of little girls. Carroll, asked if children ever bored him, replied simply: “They are three-fourths of my life.”

Pretty eight-year-old Alice, especially, captivated the young man. She had dark, elfin features, and the kind of fashionable clothes that made her look, says Douglas-Fairhurst, “rather like a well-dressed doll”. Dodgson photographed her obsessively. One extraordinary window on to their relationship is The Beggar Maid, in which a barefoot Alice wears a tattered white dress in a pose of off-the-shoulder flirtation. Douglas-Fairhurst is far too sophisticated a literary critic to put it like this – though he’s excellent on the sentimental rhetoric of this romance – but Dodgson was caught up in the biggest “adventure” of all. He was evidently in love.

This was the mood in which he and a friend named Duckworth took a boat trip with the three Liddell girls up the Thames to Godstow on the afternoon of 4 July 1862. Previous river trips had been full of adventure. A few weeks before, they had been caught in a thunderstorm and had to dry off in a bankside cottage. Later, as the origins of “Alice” became lost in myth, several outings morphed into a single “golden afternoon”. Actually, meteorological records show that 4 July was dreary not dreamy, being “cool, and rather wet”. More poignant still, the famous expedition on which Dodgson became forever Carroll and began to spin the tale that would become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was an end not a beginning, the ecstatic climax of his relationship with the most famous little girl in English literature.

Already, from 1858 to 1862, Dodgson’s peculiar intimacy with Miss Liddell had become the subject of intense Oxford gossip, with suggestions that the strange young Christ Church don had even proposed marriage and been rebuffed by the girl’s parents. In the age of Rolf Harris, what the critic Hugh Haughton has called “Dodgson’s mysterious paedophile sexuality” can make for queasy reading.

In June 1863, there was a crisis whose true meaning has never been fully clarified. On 25 June, after another boat trip, Dodgson records “a pleasant expedition with a very pleasant conclusion”. Was this, some have speculated, a stolen kiss? We shall never know. But Mrs Liddell was furious about something. There was a decisive break with the family. The corresponding page for June was torn out of Carroll’s diary.

When Carroll saw Mrs Liddell and her daughters six months later at Christmas he writes that he “held aloof from them, as I have done all this term”. But Christ Church gossip filtered into upper-class conversation. Years later, Lord Salisbury noted that “They say that Dodgson has half gone out of his mind in consequence of having been refused by the real Alice (Liddell)”. Like the best fairytales, Alice in Wonderland is edged with the tragedy of broken dreams.

Douglas-Fairhurst wrestles with our need to make Dodgson’s sexuality “fit into established modern categories”. No question: he was as camp as custard, signing letters, in purple ink, “from your affectionate little fairy friend, Sylvie”, and displaying such effeminacy that to some of his students he was “Louisa Caroline”. Still, concludes Douglas-Fairhurst, the quest for answers “cannot be satisfied by anything we know” and he reaches “the probable conclusion” that Carroll’s “strongest feelings were sentimental rather than sexual”.

Sigh.

What, meanwhile, of Alice Liddell’s adventures? The Story of Alice also explores what this strange, thwarted passion did to Alice herself. In the two dream-books, she is a vivid and opinionated character surrounded by exotic caricatures, a believably cross little girl who is by turns generous and snobbish, keen to please, self-obsessed, and tormented by the question “Who am I?” In real life, she became a sphinx without a riddle. Like the boy model for Peter Pan who never grew up, and like Christopher Robin who is always saying his prayers, Alice Liddell was irritated by Dodgson’s fixation. In 1870, her mentor photographed his beloved Alice for the last time. It’s a shocking photo: exquisitely dressed, her hands clasped before her, looking stiff, awkward and even embarrassed, 18-year-old Miss Liddell’s expression hovers between contempt and boredom.

Her post-Wonderland career was as unfulfilled as Dodgson’s. She continued to inspire hopeless romance. John Ruskin had a dalliance with her that was interrupted by her parents. The Prince of Wales’s son, Leopold, pursued her briefly while he studied at Christ Church. Would this be a fairy tale with a real Prince Charming? In the end, on 15 September 1880, Miss Liddell married Reginald Hargreaves, a decent, dull, and rich Old Etonian, at a ceremony in Westminster Abbey. In her new life as Mrs Hargreaves, Alice followed the conventions of Victorian domestic fiction: she had eight servants and three sons, two of whom were killed in the first world war.

By then, Carroll himself was dead, carried off by bronchial pneumonia at the comparatively early age of 65. His work was already part of the English imagination, and beginning to filter into global consciousness. Captain Scott took copies of both Alice books on his Antarctic explorations. As an old lady, Alice Hargreaves became a minor literary celebrity in the US, but wrote to her surviving son Caryl (an interesting choice of name): “I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland!”

So, finally, to the “Explanations”. Next to the Bible and Shakespeare, Alice in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass are said to be the most quoted works of English literature. “Nonsense” is a peculiarly English genre, but Carroll’s apparently inconsequential wordplay is replete with consequences. As the Queen of Hearts says: “Every joke should have a meaning.” Douglas-Fairhurst is the latest recruit to an army of Alice analysts baffled to distraction by the quest for answers to the Alice conundrum.

“Who in the world am I?” is Alice’s refrain. It’s a question she answers when she meets the caterpillar on his mushroom. “I can’t explain myself,” she says, “because I’m not myself, you see.” The psychological grip in which Carroll holds his reader is all to do with a search for identity in which, teasing, he supplies more questions than answers. Possibly that reflects Dodgson’s unresolved dialogue with his own childhood. These dream-books are hypnotically nostalgic. Virginia Woolf identified this when she observed that “these are not books for children. They are the only books in which we become children”.

And so this bizarre kaleidoscope of fantasy, logic and autobiography gets refracted through the crazy lens of nonsense to become a unique and marvellous dreamworld. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst loves these books to the point where, he says, they have given meaning to his own life. He has interrogated them with the severity of a queen, the subtlety of a caterpillar, and the allusive sympathy of a mock turtle. The Story of Alice is the best book on the myriad enigmas of Carroll’s heart-breaking wonderland I have ever read.

The Story of Alice is published by Harvill Secker (£25). Click here to buy it for £20

Lewis Carroll: A Life

27 January 1832 Born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, son of a country parson, in Cheshire.

1843 The family move to Croft-on-Tees, Yorkshire, where Charles is home-educated and develops a stammer that will trouble him throughout his life.

1846 Enters Rugby school, where he excels academically but is very unhappy.

1850 Matriculates at Oxford as a member of his father’s old college, Christ Church. Two days after he arrives, his mother dies of “inflammation of the brain”, aged 47.

1854 Obtains first-class honours in mathematics, with the highest marks in his year, despite his self-confessed inability to work hard.

1855 Wins the Christ Church mathematical lectureship, which he holds for the next 26 years.

1854 Begins publishing poems and short stories in national publications. Starts moving in the pre-Raphaelite circle, making friends with John Ruskin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Arthur Hughes.

1856 Buys his first camera. Meets and becomes friends with the new dean of Christ Church, Henry Liddell, his wife Lorina and his young family, Lorina, Edith and Alice Liddell, all of whom will figure hugely in his life – and his photography. Later in the year, he publishes Solitude, his first poem under the name Lewis Carroll.

1861 Ordained a deacon – but applies for permission not to become a priest.

4 July 1862 The three Liddell sisters, Carroll and his friend Robinson Duckworth take one of many boat trips on the river Isis in Oxford. Carroll tells the story of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland for the first time and Alice Liddell begs him to write it down for her.

June 1863 Another boat trip with the Liddell girls ends in a mysterious “crisis”, leading to a decisive break with the family. Relations are never restored.

26 November 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is first published by Macmillan, with illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. The book receives poor reviews but is an enormous commercial success and is said to be adored by Queen Victoria. It has not been out of print since.

1871 Sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is published, with Carroll’s great nonsense poem Jabberwocky included.

1876 Publishes The Hunting of the Snark.

1880 Abruptly ceases photography after 24 years and 3,000 images.

1881 Resigns from teaching mathematics in order to have more time for his publishing projects but remains at Christ Church in various capacities until his death.

14 January 1898 Dies of pneumonia at the age of 65. Marta Corato