Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was conceived on 4 July 1862, when Lewis Carroll and Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed up the river Isis with the three young daughters of Carroll's friend Henry Liddell: Lorina Charlotte (aged 13; "Prima" in the book's prefatory verse); Alice Pleasance (aged 10; "Secunda" in the verse); and Edith Mary (aged 8; "Tertia" in the verse)
The journey began at Folly Bridge, Oxford, and ended 5 miles (8 km) upstream at Godstow, Oxfordshire. During the trip, Carroll told the girls a story that he described in his diary as "Alice's Adventures Under Ground", which his journal says he "undertook to write out for Alice". Alice Liddell recalled that she asked Carroll to write it down: unlike other stories he had told her, this one she wanted to preserve. She finally received the manuscript more than two years later.
4 July was known as the "golden afternoon", prefaced in the novel as a poem. In fact, the weather around Oxford on 4 July was "cool and rather wet", although at least one scholar has disputed this claim. Scholars debate whether Carroll in fact came up with Alice during the "golden afternoon" or whether the story was developed over a longer period.
Carroll had known the Liddell children since around March 1856, when he befriended Harry Liddell. He had met Lorina by early March as well. In June 1856, he took the children out on the river. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, who wrote a literary biography of Carroll, suggests that Carroll favoured Alice Pleasance Liddell in particular because her name was ripe for allusion. "Pleasance" means pleasure and the name "Alice" appeared in contemporary works, including the poem "Alice Gray" by William Mee, of which Carroll wrote a parody; Alice is a character in "Dream-Children: A Reverie", a prose piece by Charles Lamb. Carroll, an amateur photographer by the late 1850s, produced many photographic portraits of the Liddell children – and especially of Alice, of which 20 survive.