Guiding the reader through the period surrounding the production of Carroll's best-known works, this book contains extracts from his letters to family, friends and colleagues, to Alice Liddell, the inspiration behind the original "Alice", and to other young girls he befriended, to his illustrator, Tenniel, and to eminent writers and artists such as Tennyson and Rossetti. Excerpts from Carroll's diaries, plus many of his own photographic portraits, give further insights into this complex man, while the illustrations, which include many of his own photographs, suggest the visual sources that might have fired his imagination and depict the Victorian world in which he lived.