Best known by his pen-name Lewis Carroll, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was also a mathematics don at Christ Church, Oxford, and an accomplished amateur photographer. The affection of the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for children is well-known, and indeed, many of Dodgson’s best photographs are sensitive portraits of his ‘child friends’. These range from straightforward portraits of children dressed in their own clothes (see the portrait of Xie Kitchin, Ph.408-1981) to photographs of children in fancy-dress, sometimes acting out narratives.

St George and the Dragon is one of Dodgson’s most ambitious narrative photographs, in which all four Kitchin siblings (the children of George William Kitchin (1827-1912), dean of Winchester and Durham) use the accoutrements of the nursery to act out this allegory of the triumph of good over evil. In a belted nightgown and a cardboard crown, Alexandra ‘Xie’ Rhoda (1864-1925) plays the princess while her brother Brook Taylor (1869-1940), as St George, rides a rocking horse to her rescue. George Herbert (b.1865) is the dead soldier and Hugh Bridges (1867-1945), draped in a leopard-skin rug, the vanquished dragon. The photograph was made in Dodgson’s attic studio at Christ Church on 26 June 1875.