The Alice Behind Wonderland

On a summer's day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London.

Simon Winchester deftly uses the resulting image—as unsettling as it is famous, and the subject of bottomless speculation—as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins o…