A MAGICAL invention is on display at Oxford’s Story Museum in Pembroke Street.

Children’s writer Ted Dewan is inviting people to see the Rochester storyloom.

Mr Dewan, pictured explaining the machine’s workings to Thomas Chappell, aged four-and-a-half, said: “It’s a machine for charging stories up with the imagination of a child.”

And he joked: “One hundred and fifty years ago, orphans would have had stories extracted from them using this machine. “The only problem was that these stories were rubbish because there was no heart to them. There is a whole fairytale that goes with the machine.”

The story goes that Rochester, a poor textile worker, was in love with the mill owner’s beautiful daughter, but she was in love with Oxford don Charles Dodgson – celebrated storyteller Lewis Carroll .

Rochester built her the fantastical storyloom to impress her, but the clouds of smoke from the machine billowed across the street through the window of Carroll’s study in Christ Church.

You can find out how the story ends until September 16. Picture: OX53583 Jon Lewis