The slippage between real life and a fairy-tale realm was very tangible for Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1872). A lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University, Caroll was known as the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. It was under the pen name of Lewis Carroll, however, that he revealed his love of writing, theatre, puppetry, photography and magic. Carroll often photographed his friends’ children enjoying the theatrics of dress-ups and play-acting, capturing these moments in a series of hand-tinted albumen photographs. The photograph Xie Kitchin, Captive Princess, 26 June 1875 shows one of Carroll’s favourite subjects, Alexandra (‘Xie’, pronounced ‘Eck-sy’) Rhoda Kitchin, who was the daughter of his colleague, Reverend George William Kitchin. In the photograph, Xie is dressed as a sullen princess awaiting her prince. This image is one of four taken on the same morning with her three younger brothers, George, Hugh and Brook, in which the family acted out a variety of stories.