The discovery of a lost work by Edward Burne-Jones, prompts CHRIS KOENIG to think about Alice Liddell

The discovery last week of some Burne-Jones paintings in an unassuming house reminded me once again of the whimsical Victorian Oxford inhabited by Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland. The St Catherine window in Oxford Cathedral is by the same artist and is dedicated to one of Alice's sisters, Edith. She was the third daughter, and youngest child, of the Dean of Christ Church, Henry George Liddell.

On the so-called Golden Afternoon of July 4, 1862, when the ten-year-old Alice first heard of her adventures from the lips of mathematics don Charles Dodgson - during a boat trip down the Thames to Godstow - the eight-year-old Edith interrupted the tale "not more than once a minute".

Also on board the rowing boat was Alice's eldest sister, Lorina, two years older than Alice and known as the Lory, and the Rev Robinson Duckworth, of Trinity College.

Edith, the red-haired child nicknamed the "dear little Eaglet" by Dodgson (otherwise known as Lewis Carroll) died, aged 22, in 1876. She was engaged to Aubrey Harcourt of Nuneham Park.

The Pre-Raphaelite window shows an imposing figure standing on ground littered with fritillaries, those flowers which grew so profusely in Christ Church meadow in Alice's day that flower girls sold them by the armful.

Apt, somehow, that Edith had been engaged to Aubrey Harcourt, for the story of Alice's adventures as told on the Golden Afternoon was the continuation of one begun on an earlier boat trip to Nuneham Park that had been brought to an abrupt end by rain. On that occasion the whole party had got soaked and Mr Dodgson had had to bang on a friend's door in Sandford for shelter. Alice remembered: "If the Dodo hadn't known the way to that nice little cottage, I don't know when we should have got dry again."

It seems everyone on board had nicknames. Duckworth (obviously) was the Duck. Dodgson was the Dodo because of his stutter. Whenever he introduced himself he would say "Do-Do-Dodgson".

And of course the Liddell children had often seen the last mortal remains of that vanished bird in the recently-built University Museum (where they remain to this day).

Another work of stained glass by Burne-Jones in Oxford Cathedral is the St Frideswide window of 1859. It shows Medieval pilgrims visiting the holy well of Oxford's patron saint at Binsey, the Treacle Well. As Mavis Batey pointed out in her lovely booklet Alices Adventures in Oxford (published 1984 by Pitkin Pictorials): "The installation of the St Frideswide window in the Latin chapel of the cathedral, one of Burne-Jones's first essays in glass painting, was a great event in the world of Pre-Raphaelite art.

"It was much admired by Dean Liddelll, and all Christ Church watched the assembling of the stained glass on the grass behind the cathedral."

Passing Binsey on the Golden Afternoon the girls heard of the Dormouse's tale of the three sisters who lived at the bottom of a treacle well. Alice herself, under the tutelage of John Ruskin, became a competent artist. She created a woodcarving of St Frideswide travelling by boat along the Thames on her way to found a nunnery where Christ Church now stands. The carving now hangs in St Frideswide's Church, Osney.

It seems fitting, somehow, that more Burne-Jones paintings should come to light in Oxford.