ONE of the rarest copies of Lewis Carroll’s classic children's book, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, is expected to sell for between £1.5million and £2.5million at an auction in America next week. (June 16).

But the book might never have been written if Lewis Carroll had not met the real-life Alice who urged him to write it and who ended up marrying a former England cricketer from Accrington.

Alice Liddell was only three-years-old when she met Lewis Carroll, then aged 24, for the first time on April 25,1856.

Carroll later recorded: “We became excellent friends.”

Carroll photographed Alice and her sisters, Lorina and Edith while playing croquet with them, inventing and playing other games with them in the nursery, telling them stories and taking them on river picnics to Oxford.

On one of these picnics, on July 4,1862, Carroll invented the story of Alice In Wonderland and Alice Liddell pleaded with him to write Alice’s adventures down for her.

When she was 28, Alice Liddell married wealthy Accrington-born former England and Hampshire cricketer Reginald Hargreaves at Westminster Abbey in London on September 15,1880.

The Hargreaves family was one of the richest nineteenth century families in Accrington.

They owned Broad Oak Printworks, the largest firm of calico printers in Accrington.

Reginald Hargreaves and his family lived at Oak Hill in Accrington.

Reginald’s father, Jonathan Hargreaves was a merchant, a farmer and a magistrate, who in 1851 he employed 506 men, 21 women and 247 boys.

In 1851, Jonathan Hargreaves also employed seven live-in servants at his Accrington home, including a butler.

Jonathan Hargreaves’s daughter-in-law, Alice Hargreaves, who inspired Lewis Carroll to write Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, retained a tenancy over Oak Hill in Manchester Road, Accrington, until her death in 1934.

Now an 'excessively rare' copy of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, first published in 1865, is expected to sell for between £1.5million and £2 million at Christie’s in New York next Thursday.

It is one of only 22 known first edition copies and of these 16 are in institutional libraries.

Only six remain in private hands and only two of these six copies still have their original binding.

The copy coming up for sale at Christie’s next week is considered to be the finest of these two copies.

Auctioneers Christie’s said: “No other copy in the original binding in this condition exists in private hands.”