Cоntents intrоductiоn chapter I. The life and work of Lewis Carroll

The door to Wonderland
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 Dean’s Garden is the garden in which the Liddell sisters often played. 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. This was a view also familiar to Dodgson from the period of time that he spent playing with the children in the nursery, and hence became the lovely garden Alice so desperately wanted to enter in the story.
On the far side of the Dean’s garden is the rear of the library. It was from the windows of this library that Dodgson, then in his post of Sub librarian, was able to look down into the garden and first saw Alice playing with her brother and sisters. Because of his interest in photography he later approached the Dean’s wife and obtained permission to photograph the children.
The flower border along the Deanery Wall was planted with plants mentioned in ‘Through the Looking Glass’.
Pictures from the same door, from the side of the Cathedral Garden:
Why the white rabbit is always late
In the Tom Tower hangs the bell called Great Tom. At five past nine every night the bell strikes one hundred and one times, which represents the original number of Undergraduates at the college. On the last strike all the Junior members were expected to be back in college.
The reason for ringing at five past nine is that Oxford is five minutes west of Greenwich. Therefore, five past nine (Greenwich Time) is in fact nine o’clock in Oxford time.
Time was only standardized in Britain with the coming of the railways and the need for reliable time tables. Christ Church obviously decided that change was a bad thing and that they would retain to the old Oxford time. Still to this day the services times in the Cathedral are five minutes past the hour and the Formal Hall is held at 7.20 whereas all the other colleges dine at 7.15.
Even as a child Dodgson had a great interest in the railways and invented railway games using the timetables. Perhaps that is why the White Rabbit was always running late; he was a Christ Church White Rabbit.