by David Day
The Liddells were aristocracy and Dodgson was definitely not. As a college lecturer, he was on the lowest rung of Christ Church’s social scale. Also, Dodgson knew full well that if he married he would automatically lose his position at the college, as lecturers and tutors were required to remain single and celibate. And as he had already decided not to be ordained as a priest, without his position at Christ Church, he would have had no immediate prospect of making a living.
Furthermore, from a young age Charles Dodgson had been made firmly aware of the drawbacks of marriage for anyone with academic ambitions. His father had sacrificed a brilliant future at Christ Church—after winning a double first in mathematics—because he chose to marry. Instead, the elder Dodgson was given a relatively meagre living for himself and his family in a remote rural parish.
Lorina (standing): The reason for the family’s break with Dodgson?
What, then, was the reason for this sudden break in Dodgson’s relations with the Liddells and their children? The most likely scenario is that the Liddells were actually focused on the reputation of Alice’s oldest sister, Lorina, who was then fourteen. Given that in Britain girls were legally marriageable at the age of twelve, the Liddells would not have been accused of being oversensitive in removing Lorina from the constant companionship of a thirty-one-year-old unmarried man.
In May of 1996, an article by Karoline Leach in the Times Literary Supplement revealed the contents of the pages missing from Dodgson’s diaries for June 27 through June 29, 1863. A note on a scrap of paper had been discovered in the Dodgson family archives. Headed “Cut Pages in Diary,” it read: “L. C. learns from Mrs. Liddell that he is supposed to be using the children as a means of paying court to the governess—he is also supposed by some to be courting Ina [Lorina].”
The handwriting on the note is recognizable as that of Dodgson’s niece Violet Dodgson, who was co-guardian of the diaries with her sister, Menella, from the early 1940s to the 1960s. Violet appears to have read through the diaries noting the pages deemed inappropriate and summarized their most important contents. It is presumed that either she or Menella then made the decision to cut the pages from the diary.
Whether or not anything occurred on the night of June 27 after the boat trip from Nuneham, it is obvious that Mrs. Liddell decided it was time to end Dodgson’s relationship with her children. She told him rumours were circulating both about him and the governess and about him and Lorina.
Either would have been considered inappropriate—although Mrs. Liddell’s concern would naturally have been primarily for her eldest daughter’s good name and how this would affect her prospects of marriage. As a result, Dodgson was either told or firmly requested to stay away. There is no mention whatsoever in Violet Dodgson’s note of anything to do with Alice.
The Liddell children’s governess was Miss Mary Prickett, or Pricks as they affectionately called her. She was the daughter of a college butler and was twenty-five when first employed by the Liddells in 1856. She was the family’s governess for fifteen years. In Wonderland, she is recognizable as the Mouse whom Alice encounters in the Pool of Tears.
Dodgson had been aware of the gossip for a number of years, and initially was shocked at the suggestion of his having any interest in the unattractive Miss Prickett. Recording these rumours in his diary as early as May of 1857, Dodgson initially resolved to distance himself from the governess and the children. However, he found himself incapable of staying away, especially as the children’s parents were soon to be absent for several months in Madeira, leaving his access to the Deanery unhindered.
Striking: Lorina by Dodgson.
Dodgson ostensibly satisfied himself that the gossip was “so groundless a rumour” and chose to simply continue as before—despite the objections of the children’s grandmother and his concerns for the reputation of Miss Prickett. He consciously exploited this period of parental absence to successfully cement his relationship with the children.
At the time of the confrontation with the dean and his wife in June 1863, Lorina Charlotte was tall, striking and physically mature for her age. Even Dodgson appears to have become aware of the problem her age would soon present. On August 6, 1862, he observed in his diary this was Lorina’s “fourteenth time” on the river with him, and he thinks it likely she will probably not be allowed to go with him and her sisters for much longer. On April 17, 1863—just two months before their last river trip—he wrote in his diary how Lorina had grown “so tall,” and that for the first time Mrs. Liddell had insisted on a chaperone to accompany them.
Dodgson was no more likely to have behaved inappropriately toward Lorina than he was toward Alice. However, in either case, he would very likely have taken offence at the suggestion that he had behaved inappropriately toward any child in his charge. We need only look to his advice to his brother Wilfred, in a letter written a month before the publication of Wonderland in 1865. It seems that the twenty-seven-year-old Wilfred had fallen in love with a young girl whose name was also Alice, an Alice Donkin who was fourteen. Charles advised his brother to keep away from Barmby Moor—the Donkin home—for a couple of years. His brother appears to have taken the advice. In fact, he waited another six years and married Alice Donkin when she’d reached the age of twenty.
“The rose gives bees honey”: Fludd’s Rosy Cross.
THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE We are not yet done with 42. In the Kabbalah, 42 is the number with which God creates the universe, and in the Talmud there are forty-two letters in the true name of God. Ancient Egypt divided into forty-two districts or provinces (called nomes). This is comparable to the emblematic Rosicrucian rose.
Robert Fludd’s illustration of the Rosy Cross is a seven-petal rose arranged in six consecutive rings. The resulting forty-two petals are emblematic of the pilgrim’s journey and a mapping of the levels of its temple of wisdom. Fludd’s Latin inscription translates as “The rose gives bees honey.” In the engraving we see honeybees at work, like alchemical adepts, gathering from the rose the “honey of theosophical knowledge.”
Numerology was an obsession for both the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians, as it had been for the ancient Egyptians and Alexandrian theosophists. Massive building projects both religious and secular were informed by the mystical significance of numbers and the sacred geography and architecture of these mystical realms.
Much of Oxford University was created by men such as Elias Ashmole, Thomas Bodley and John Radcliffe, who commissioned like-minded architects—Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor among them—to build colleges and institutions based on Rosicrucian and Masonic specifications. Victor Hugo saw the great cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris as one of the most spectacular monuments to hermetic science ever built. Hugo observed that the sacred geometry and hermetic symbolism that the medieval masons built into the architecture and sculpture of this great cathedral resulted in a massive “mute book” in stone.
On an even greater scale, the collective architecture of the ancient colleges of Oxford is a collection of similar “mute books.” The inspiration for what is perhaps Oxford’s most distinctive building, the Radcliffe Camera*—which once housed a science library and is now one of the Bodleian Library’s reading rooms—is found in Fama fraternitatis (1614), the first pamphlet of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, with its illustration of an imaginary “Invisible College.”
Rosicrucian and Freemason influence is especially apparent in Christ Church’s Tom Quad, Oxford’s largest and grandest quadrangle. The central feature of the quadrangle is a circular fountain with an antique bronze statue of Mercury.** The fountain was built in imitation of the emblematic fountain of Mercury in the garden of the Rosy Cross as portrayed in the Cabala.
Lewis Carroll knew of the fountain’s significance and wrote about it on many occasions. For nearly half a century, he lived in his rooms in Tom Quad, and each day passed by the fountain. In his Vision of the Three T’s, Carroll’s narrator speaks in tones of reverence—“Methought that, in some
bygone Age, I stood beside the waters of Mercury, and saw, reflected on its placid face, the grand old buildings of the Great Quadrangle”—while conjuring up the ghost of the college’s founder, Cardinal Wolsey.
The Rosicrucian “Invisible College” inspired Oxford’s Radcliffe Camera.
In the fairy tale of Wonderland, Alice returns from her fictional dreaming to the waking world on the riverbank. On the theosophical level, it is significant that the eventual end to that real-life boating expedition with Alice Liddell was Christ Church College at the final destination of the Rosicrucian pilgrim: the fountain of Mercury whose pool at the centre of Tom Quad just happens to have a diameter of exactly 42 feet.
Fountain of Mercury: Vandalized by Lord Stanley.
Dodgson would likely have accepted that Lorina Charlotte had become too grown up to be permitted to go on boating picnics with an unmarried man. But he would have been shocked and disappointed to be banned from the company of Alice and Edith. Dodgson would undoubtedly have felt aggrieved at the sudden decision to remove all three sisters (not to mention their son and other daughter) from his company.
Mrs. Liddell, for whatever reason, wished to protect all of her children from the taint of further gossip and decided that Dodgson must keep his distance. To Dodgson’s burning ears, this would have seemed a declaration that he could no longer be trusted with the safe care of the children. He would have been angry and deeply insulted.
To be fair to the dean and Mrs. Liddell, they would probably not have seen the episode as hugely significant. For his part, the dean seems to have never been much concerned with domestic matters. He was, after all, the dean of Christ Church Cathedral and head of the college, and so had much more on his mind. Mrs. Liddell, it is true, had always seemed somewhat wary of Dodgson’s attentions; however, her decision to end contact wouldn’t have struck her as any more noteworthy than disposing of a nanny or a tutor when their services were no longer required. Other tutors and nannies had quietly drifted in and out of the Deanery over the years. It is likely that both the dean and Mrs. Liddell viewed Dodgson’s time as a companion to their children in much the same light. They could have no idea how great a matter of the heart this event was to become for Charles Dodgson.
In later years, once Dodgson had become the famous author of the Alice books, his response to this indignity over what he saw as an issue of trust would become ever more extreme. If, for instance, the mother of one of his child-friends requested that a chaperone be present during a nude or semi-nude photographic session, Dodgson would invariably take this as an egregious insult.
In 1879, for example, one in a particularly unpleasant and bullying exchange of letters with a Mrs. A. L. Mayhew ends with a petulant Dodgson writing: “The fact that I have so unfortunately learnt, that you consider your presence essential, which is the same as saying ‘I cannot trust you,’ has taken away all the pleasure I could have in doing any such pictures.” He ends another letter to her irascibly, “If you can’t trust my word, then please never bring or send any of the children again! I should certainly prefer, in any case, to drop the acquaintance.”
Dodgson would not have dared to be so brusque with the socially superior dean and Mrs. Liddell. After his forced agreement to stay away from the children, he soon began to look for some means of venting his repressed anger and need to wreak revenge in a manner that he could morally justify to himself.
This may explain, to some degree, what happened to Alice Liddell’s fairy tale in the time between the composition of its first draft as Alice’s Adventures Under Ground and its much darker and more detailed final form as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Dodgson began to behave like a jilted lover but seems to have successfully masked his real motive from himself. He did this by convincing himself that he would, from that time on, as a matter of moral conscience, stand up forcefully for his conservative principles and oppose all of the liberal Dean Liddell’s reforms and programs at Christ Church.
To understand Dodgson’s gadfly behaviour over his many years at Christ Church, we need to look at the highly charged politics of Oxford and the great debate over higher education in the whole of Britain. For several decades, this was one of the most divisive social and political issues in the land. Nowhere was this more true than in Oxford.
Let us, as the King of Hearts stated, “Begin at the beginning.”
II. FROM ALICE TO MALICE Charles Dodgson first took up residence at Christ Church in 1851—the same year he so enthusiastically attended the Great Exhibition at the spectacular Crystal Palace in London. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain gave birth to the Industrial Revolution and a manufacturing system that would dominate world trade. Victorian Britain was the wealthiest and most advanced industrial nation on earth. It was a time of conquest and colonization, and Britain employed an all-powerful army and navy that embarked on adventures in India, Russia, Afghanistan, China and Africa. The result was a vast expansion of influence and power that would soon result in the consolidation of the greatest empire in the history of the world. A year after the launch of the Great Exhibition, there was another momentous grand opening—that of the House of Commons, in the spectacular new Palace of Westminster, a stunning eleven-hundred-room Gothic Revival palace on the banks of the Thames. This was the new home for the “mother of parliaments” that was to serve as a model to the world of the power and glory of a democratic system of government married to a constitutional monarchy.
This period also witnessed the expansion of male suffrage, and the influence of the aristocracy and the clergy in Britain was beginning to fade before that of the rising middle class and the new barons of industry. It was becoming increasingly evident that the higher educational requirements of these rising social classes in trade and industry throughout the empire were not being met by the traditional disciplines of institutions of higher education, especially in the fields of science, technology and engineering.
Grand openings: The Houses of Parliament (above) and the Crystal Palace (below).
In 1851, Oxford was essentially governed by medieval clerical regulations and a system of privilege that had little to do with academic achievement. The curriculum for nearly all aspects of what was called a classical education had virtually no practical application. Entry into colleges was based on influence, social position and knowledge of two dead languages, Latin and Greek.
In the college dining hall, social distinctions were clearly delineated. High table with the dean and canons of the college—along with the aristocratic undergraduates (distinguished by gold-tasselled caps and gowns)—was set upon a dais. Senior masters sat above the fireplace on the north side and junior ones were above the fireplace on the south side. Below on the north side were the bachelors of arts, and below them the gentlemen commoners—Dodgson was one of these. The only college members lower were the servants of the high table, who received an education in return for their servitude.
What we now would consider institutional corruption and nepotism could not be validly applied to Britain’s system of higher education at that time. The entire point of awarding fellowships at university colleges (in Christ Church, these were known as studentships) was to maintain the status quo of the aristocracy and the clergy. William Tuckwell, in his Reminiscences of Oxford, quotes the senior canon of Christ Church, Dr. Frederick Barnes: “I’ve given student-ships to my sons, and to my nephews, and to my nephews’ children, and there are no more of my family left. I shall have to give them by merit one of these days!”
Barnes remained in the splendour of his canon’s residence at Christ Church for fifty years, until his death at the age of eighty-eight in 1859. This was by no means a record for Christ Church residents. Dodgson himself remained in residence for forty-eight years, while Thomas James Prout occupied his rooms until carried out in a box after sixty-seven years.
To many in government, Christ Church came to signify everything that was wrong with higher learning in Britain. How could a modern indu
strial nation tolerate such outdated institutions? Reformers wanted all college fellowships opened to competitive examinations and wished to oversee a transfer of powers from the clergy to the academicians. They sought an end to the lifelong appointment of resident dons and the requirements of celibacy, dawn prayers and the taking of holy orders. Most radically, they wished to open Oxford colleges to other Christian denominations, as they were forced to confront the fact that half the population of Britain was not Anglican.
The administration and most of the old guard at Christ Church resisted all attempts to bring it in tune with the demands of the modern world. Thomas Gaisford, Regius Professor of Greek and dean of Christ Church since 1831, was determined to fight the “serious evils” (as he and the chapter wrote in a petition to Parliament) of university reform. Dean Gaisford never gave lectures, and was opposed to entry to Oxford based on “mere intellectual merit.” In a famous sermon, Gaisford stated his profound belief that the study of Greek was the most desirable acquisition of higher education, as it “not only elevates above the vulgar herd, but leads not infrequently to positions of considerable emolument.”
Under Gaisford, lectures and all business at Christ Church were still conducted in Latin. The statutes required celibacy in students and lecturers, compulsory attendance at dawn prayers and contained such medieval rulings as forbidding the discharging of crossbows within the college grounds. Not until parliament forced the issue with the University Reform Act of 1854 could anyone attend an Oxford college who was not a member of the Anglican Church and who did not swear to uphold the church’s Thirty-Nine Articles.