Charles Dodgson's famous photograph of Alice Liddell as the Beggar Maid

Despite the frequent assertions in biographies, and the many fictional and semi-fictional interpretations there have been, there has never been any real evidence to support the idea that Carroll was in love with the child Alice Liddell. His diaries contain no indications that he viewed her as any more noteworthy or special than her older or younger sisters. Indeed there are indications that if he favoured one of them, it was Ina, the oldest. Contemporary rumour also linked him with the teenage Ina, not Alice. The only, very vague, contemporary evidence connecting him with Alice romantically is a seemingly jokey rumor dating from a time when she was a young woman of 27, and not a child. Until very recently it was widely assumed that a certain page missing from Carroll's diaries had been cut out to conceal the much-hyped proposal of marriage, but the discovery of the cut pages in diary document has shown that this was almost certainly mistaken.

Even her role in the creation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland may have been exaggerated and simplified by the myth. The frequently-quoted 'fact' that the fictional Alice is based on Alice Liddell was actually denied by Carroll himself, who afterwards stated, on at least two occasions, that his 'little heroine' was entirely fictional. It's certainly true that the brief physical descriptions there are of fictional Alice in the books do not seem to in any way resemble Alice Liddell.