« Not Alice »

Everything about this tiny, early Carte de Visite places it around 1860, so she would have been a contemporary of Alice Liddell, the assumed inspiration for Lewis Carroll's (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) Alice in Wonderland. Dodgson was an accomplished amateur photographer whose photos of his acquaintances' daughters were very different in mood and setting from this sweet studio image. 

The photographer was T. H. Larmouth of High Street, Tunbridge Wells, England, who established his studio in 1851 and advertised that duplicates "may always be had 1 shilling each." Note that early photos used plain backgrounds with hangings and furniture instead of the fanciful painted backdrops and faux props that became popular later in Victorian studio work. I have cropped this one at top and bottom; photographers used standard negatives and cards so that accommodating the subject width often led to considerable areas above and below the person being photographed (today we would get closer to the person and include partial views of anything else).