Christ Church was a rich source of inspiration for a famous book.
Beneath the dreaming, snowy spires, damp smoke drifts down the cobblestone streets that sing to the strains of fairy tales, bells and choirboys. Oxford and Christmas are a 
bit like the holly and the ivy.
The ghosts of Christmases past who roam the corridors of one of Oxford’s largest colleges, Christ Church, are an impressive bunch: students who became prime ministers, viceroys, governors-general, philosophers, writers – and, of course, Canterbury’s founder, John Robert Godley, who named Christchurch, New Zealand, after his old student stomping ground.
In Christ Church’s Great Hall hangs a portrait of a man who came to study mathematics at the college in 1851, then stayed for the rest of his life. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson presented a now-famous Christmas gift to a daughter of the dean of Christ Church. For Dodgson was also Lewis Carroll, his gift to Alice Liddell a handwritten manuscript that would eventually become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
As well as being a mathematics teacher and an Anglican clergyman, Dodgson was a keen amateur photographer, and he often took pictures of the Liddell sisters. He also entertained them with weird and wonderful stories, and it was during a summer rowing trip on the Isis in 1862 that he regaled 10-year-old Alice and two of her sisters with a story about the adventures of a girl called Alice. The real Alice persuaded him to write it down, and he presented her with the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground in November 1864 with the inscription “A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer Day”.
Christ Church College, originally founded by Cardinal Wolsey as Cardinal’s College in 1524 and refounded by Henry VIII in 1546, was a rich source of inspiration for Dodgson. The little gate between the Deanery and the Cathedral Gardens through which Alice Liddell often went is similar to the little door leading to a beautiful garden that the book’s Alice discovers after falling down the rabbit hole. The Great Hall has long-necked brass “firedogs” are reminiscent of Alice’s stretching neck; a door concealing a narrow spiral staircase is thought to have inspired the rabbit hole; and a portrait of Henry VIII, who was known for chopping people’s heads off, brings to mind the famous line from the Queen of Hearts, “Off with her head!”
A Christmas trip to Christ Church in search of the spirit of Dodgson and his alter ego wouldn’t be complete without a carol or two of the musical variety, however, and the Christ Church Cathedral choir is world famous. But tickets for the cathedral’s services of Nine Lessons and Carols must be requested by letter well in advance, unless you want to take your chances on the day.
The well-known travel writer Jan Morris suggested Carroll’s stories, “like most of Oxford’s fantasies, represent an escape into some wider, freer world, where the traditions
are not so solemn, the conventions are not so subtle, where the horizons are as wide as imagination can make them”.
Shades, then, of Godley, whose idealistic approach to the new Canterbury settlement was shaped both by his experiences of Oxford and of the wider world. He was an Irishman who witnessed the terrible effects of the Great Famine, and his travels around North America introduced him to the possibilities of the New World.
As she fell down the rabbit hole, Alice wondered whether she might go right through the Earth (“… I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know.
‘Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand or Australia?’”). What if she had fallen through the Earth and ended up in Christchurch?
She would have found herself in a city that bore the same name as the place she had left but where summer had turned to winter and it was already tomorrow. She would have discovered a city where the ground sometimes shook violently and soil turned to liquid, but also a city known for its beautiful gardens. And none of that would have seemed out of place in Wonderland.