How did Long John Silver Lose his Leg?

by Dennis Butts

  Ballantyne was always a restless figure. Although married and apparently settled comfortably in Edinburgh, he could not resist travelling. After his early years in Canada, he also holidayed in Norway, lived in Switzerland for a time, and visited Algiers and South Africa. Even when he was at home he spent many winters on extensive lecture tours, striding across the stage dressed as a backwoodsman with his long-barrelled gun, to give talks on Hudson’s Bay and the Frozen North. Between April and May in 1864 he even fulfilled his life-long ambition of walking the full 426 miles from London to Edinburgh.

  It is, therefore, more than likely that although Ballantyne claimed that his adventurous forays were in search of authentic material for his stories, he was seeking to act out the same role as the heroes of his books. He liked playing the part of a bold adventurer. ‘It is difficult to avoid the conclusion’, Professor J.S. Bratton says, ‘that what he was actually doing when he visited lighthouses, rode on fire-engines, or tried out diving suits on the bottom of the Thames was living out his fantasies, which he then packaged and delivered for the less fortunate boys who could only read his books’. Research was his excuse for his numerous and sometimes dangerous expeditions.

  ‘Toil and trouble underground’

  We must be grateful for the colour these expeditions leant his works. Here in Deep Down is Ballantyne’s account of his young hero Oliver Trembath visiting a Cornish miner’s cottage:

  Oliver’s last visit that day was to the man John Batten, who had exploded a blast-hole in his face the day before. This man dwelt in a cottage in the small hamlet of Botallack, close to the mine of the same name. The room in which the miner lay was very small, and its furniture scanty, nevertheless it was clean and neatly arranged. Everything in and about the place bore evidence of the presence of a thrifty hand. The cotton curtain on the window was thin and worn, but it was well darned, and pure as the driven snow. The two chairs were old, as was the table, but they were not rickety; it was obvious that they owed their stability to a hand skilled in mending and in patching pieces of things together. Even the squat little stool in the side of the chimney-corner displayed a leg, the whiteness of which, compared with the other two, told of attention to small things. There was a peg for everything, and everything seemed to be on its peg. Nothing littered the well-scrubbed floor or defiled the well-brushed hearth-stone, and it did not require a second thought on the part of the beholder to ascribe all this to the tidy little middle-aged woman, who, with an expression of deep anxiety on her good-looking countenance, attended to the wants of her injured husband . . .

  ‘Your husband is not quite so well today, I hear,’ said the doctor, going to the side of the bed on which the stalwart form of the miner lay.

  ‘No, sur,’ replied the poor woman; ‘he has much pain in his eyes today, but his heart is brave, sur; I never do hear a complaint from he.’

  This was true. The man lay perfectly still, the compressed lip and the perspiration that moistened his face alone giving evidence of the agony he endured.

  ‘Do you suffer much?’ inquired the doctor, as he undid the bandages which covered the upper part of the man’s face.

  ‘Iss sur, I do,’ was the reply.

  No more was said, but a low groan escaped the miner when the bandage was removed, and the frightful effects of the accident were exposed to view. With intense anxiety Mrs Batten watched the doctor’s countenance, but found no comfort there. A very brief examination was sufficient to convince Oliver that the eyes were utterly destroyed, for the miner had been so close to the hole when it exploded that the orbs were singed by the flame, and portions of unburnt powder had been blown right into them.

  ‘Will he see – a little, sur?’ whispered Mrs Batten.

  Oliver shook his head. ‘I fear not,’ he said in a low tone.

  ‘Speak out, doctor,’ said the miner in firm tones. ‘I ain’t afeard to knaw it.’

  ‘It would be unkind to deceive you,’ replied Oliver sadly; ‘your eyes are destroyed.’

  No word was spoken for a few minutes, but the poor woman knelt by her husband’s side, and nestled close to him. Batten raised his large brown hand, which bore the marks and scars of many a year of manly toil, and laid it gently on his wife’s hand.

  Perhaps, whatever his reasons for carefully researching the context of his books, we owe some of our most affecting accounts of working-class life in the nineteenth century to Ballantyne.

  4. How Often Does Charles Dodgson Appear in the ‘Alice’ Books?

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1873)

  One of the minor mysteries of Children’s Literature is how the ‘Alice’ books ever came to be regarded as nonsense. Perhaps it was, and is, a triumph for the eccentric Oxford academic Charles Ludwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), whose complex and subtle mind crammed the pages of his most famous children’s books with philosophy, mathematics, politics, and in-jokes about Christ Church and the University – layers of meaning disguised but visible to those with, as it were, eyes to read. Perhaps most of all he used the books to explore his own feelings about childhood, and especially his feelings towards one of the daughters of the Dean of Christ Church, Alice Liddell. Part of his genius lay in covering his intellectual and emotional tracks – and to judge from the library of books that has been devoted to unravelling the hidden meanings of his works, he was highly successful.

  In terms of the history of children’s books, the ‘Alice’ books are significant in two main ways. Firstly, they were almost entirely ‘on the side of the child’: that is, not only did they not moralise and patronise, as many, if not most children’s books before them did, but they positively subverted the authority of the adult world. Children’s books had been increasingly sympathetic to their child readers, but rarely, if ever had a narrator viewed the adult world in such an unfavourable light. Almost all the characters and creatures that Alice meets are adult and mad, unpleasant, stupid, irrational, and downright dangerous. The texts are littered with parodies of pious verses that children had been forced to learn – a dangerously subversive mockery. But, most strikingly, the narrative voice is friendly – even affectionate – and not for one second is there any doubt as to who is the superior being in this deranged world; it is Alice herself.

  The portrait of Alice, polite, sceptical, rational, and yet very much the prisoner of her class and gender (think of her watching, from her luxurious captivity, the boys collecting wood for the bonfire in Through the Looking Glass) is the key to these books. They are the most powerful and influential (although probably not the first) children’s books that were used by their author as therapy – perhaps primarily as therapy, as we will see in this chapter. Children’s books very commonly explore the relationship that their authors have with their childhoods, or their idea of childhood, or with specific children – and it is a very delicate area, the more so in these days of paedophilic paranoia. The books of writers from Barrie to Blyton reflect their authors’ childhood traumas, and it is not too much to suggest that the driving force behind ‘Lewis Carroll’s’ books may have been a sublimation of Dodgson’s frustrated desire and love for a small girl.

  A good deal of ink has been spilt over the question of Charles Dodgson’s sexuality and sexual behaviour. His photographs of near-naked pre-pubescent girls and his predilection for the company of children mark him out, in these uncharitable days, as a potential, if not actual, paedophile. It seems to be increasingly futile to suggest that, after all, attitudes to children were different then: that the child’s body was seen as a thing of innocent beauty, and a chaperone would have been thought necessary only after puberty (which, in girls, occurred rather later than it does now). Even attitudes of seventy years ago seem questionable now. What, for example, are we to make of the description of Dodgson by the children’s book editor Eleanor Graham, in the 1946 Puffin edition of the ‘Alice’ books? He was, she wrote,


  very fond of children and had many child friends, though often he did not keep them long. He took great pains for their entertainment and invited them, sometimes to tea or lunch in his rooms, sometimes to go to London with him for the day, to a theatre or to the zoo. Even when he set out alone on a journey by train, he took with him a supply of puzzles, games, and small toys in case he found a child in his compartment. Moreover, when he went to the seaside he kept a bunch of large safety pins in his pocket for the convenience of little girls who might want their frocks pinned up so that they could paddle more comfortably.

  Times have changed, but I do not think that that should be allowed to mask the very real and platonic affection for Alice that shines through the books, and which is carried by a succession of eccentric characters. Dodgson-Carroll’s strategy was to enter his books in disguise – for personal, and rather mysterious reasons. Between the famous river trip on 4 July 1862 when Dodgson first told Alice and her sisters part of the story, and Christmas 1864, when he gave Alice the holograph Alice’s Adventures Underground, he became persona non grata at the Deanery. In June 1863, Mrs Liddell destroyed Dodgson’s letters to her daughter; and the relevant pages of Dodgson’s voluminous diary just happen to have been cut out – something that has never been explained. By 1872, when Through the Looking Glass was published, Alice was twenty, and Dodgson saw the family very rarely (he took his last photograph of her in 1870). And so in one sense, he had lost her before the books came out, and he could only communicate his feelings by proxy.

  Charles Dodgson

  It begins harmlessly enough, with Dodgson inserting himself, along with Alice, her sisters, their governess, and his colleague Canon Duckworth, as the Dodo (he had a mild stutter) in the parody of a wet Oxford picnic. ‘The pool was getting quite crowded with the birds and animals that had fallen into it: there was a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory [Alice’s sister Lorinda?] and an Eaglet [Alice’s sister Edith?].’ The rude, and academically-sleeved Caterpillar seems to be a rather sharp satire on Dodgson’s colleagues, but the enigmatic Cheshire Cat (Dodgson was born in Daresbury, Cheshire) makes some attempt to be nice to Alice. When Alice complains: ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy!’ the Cat ‘vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.’

  It is when we get to the trial scene, and the hapless Knave of Hearts, that Dodgson’s mask of anonymity slips. The Knave is embroiled in a nonsense of gossip:

  They told me you had been to her,

  And mentioned me to him:

  She gave me a good character,

  But said I could not swim.

  Some critics have suggested that this parodies (rather humourlessly) the power of gossip to destroy a happy relationship. As the King says to the Knave: ‘you ca’n’t swim, can you?’, and the Knave replies, sadly: ‘ “Do I look like it?” . . . (which he certainly did not, being made entirely of cardboard.)’ It has been suggested that it was gossip that necessitated the removal of Dodgson from Alice Liddell’s society.

  Alice disrupts the trial

  Alice Through the Looking-Glass is much more, perhaps significantly, elegiac than Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The mad adults are there in the form of the kings and queens of the chess set, and the mad academic is there in the form of Humpty Dumpty, but this time Alice has some friendly, if ineffectual mentors. The first of these is the gnat:

  The little voice sighed deeply. It was very unhappy, evidently, and Alice would have said something pitying to comfort it, ‘if it would only sigh like other people!’ she thought. But this was such a wonderfully small sigh, that she wouldn’t have heard it at all, if it hadn’t come quite so close to her ear. The consequence of this was that it tickled her ear very much, and quite took off her thoughts from the unhappiness of the poor little creature.

  ‘I know you are a friend,’ the little voice went on: ‘a dear friend, and an old friend. And I know you wo’n’t hurt me, though I am an insect.’

  Then there is the White Knight, who rescues Alice and takes her to the edge of the final square on the board, where she will become a queen and grow up. This is possibly one of the most protracted and poignant farewells in literature. The Knight is an ironic self-portrait of Dodgson, with his array of inventions that don’t work, and his (emotional) instability. Alice walks beside his horse, and he keeps falling off in front of her, sometimes catching her by the hair.

  Otherwise he kept on pretty well, except that he had a habit now and then of falling off sideways; and as he generally did this on the side on which Alice was walking, she soon found that it was the best plan not to walk quite so close to the horse.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve not had much practice in riding’, she ventured to say, as she was helping him up from his fifth tumble . . .

  ‘I’ve had plenty of practice’, the Knight said very gravely, ‘plenty of practice.’

  He sings her a nonsense song – the tune of which Alice identifies as the tune of ‘My Heart and Lute’, a sentimental ballad. ‘Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through the Looking-Glass, this was the one that she remembered most clearly.’ Alice listens, ‘but no tears came into her eyes.’ He points the way over the last brook, to where she will become a queen:

  ‘But you’ll stay and see me off first?’ he added as Alice turned with an eager look in the direction to which he pointed. ‘I sha’n’t be long. You’ll wait and wave your handkerchief when I get to that turn in the road! I think it’ll encourage me, you see.’

  ‘Of course I’ll wait,’ said Alice: ‘and thank you very much for coming so far – and for the song – I liked it very much.’

  ‘I hope so,’ the Knight said doubtfully: ‘but you didn’t cry so much as I thought you would.’

  This is fairly revealing stuff, but immediately after this, in the original text, there was another episode. Alice reaches the last brook

  . . . and she was just going to spring over, when she heard a deep sigh, which seemed to come from the wood behind her.

  ‘There’s somebody very unhappy there,’ she thought, looking anxiously back to see what was the matter. Something very like an old man (only his face was more like a wasp) was sitting on the ground, leaning against a tree, all huddled up together and shivering as if he were very cold.

  The encounter consists largely of the wasp being sorry for himself and insulting Alice, but at the end of it, ‘Alice tripped down the hill again, quite pleased that she had gone back and given a few minutes to making the poor old creature comfortable’. The Wasp is the miserimus of the ‘Alice’ books – or would have been had he appeared in them, but one suspects that the redoubtable Tenniel, Dodgson’s illustrator, who could scarcely have not noticed what was going on, put his foot down. He may have had enough of Dodgson’s self-indulgence, because he wrote to the author in June 1870, ‘Don’t think me brutal, but I am bound to say that the “wasp” chapter doesn’t interest me in the least, & . . . . I can’t see my way to a picture . . . ’ (Neither did he make the White Knight look like in the least like Dodgson). And so the hapless wasp was left out.

  It is clear that Alice Liddell was something special to Dodgson, and that the ‘Alice’ books are in some ways a love-song to her. In 1885, when Dodgson was thinking of preparing a facsimile of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, he wrote to Alice, now Mrs Hargreaves, and perhaps unguardedly let his feelings show:

  . . . my mental picture is as vivid as ever, of one who was, through so many years, my ideal child-friend. I have had scores of child-friends since your time: but they have been quite a different thing.

  Through his disguises, Dodgson-Carroll allowed himself to come closer to his dream child than he could in reality – and in doing so he pioneered the use of the children’s book as a therapeutic tool for wrestling with
the tensions between childhood and adulthood.

  5. What Did Mr March Do in the War Between the States?

  Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)

  The autobiographical elements of Louisa May Alcott’s great American family novel Little Women (1868) have long been recognised. Although Louisa was at first reluctant to follow her publisher’s advice ‘to write a story for girls’, the idea grew on her, and she wrote it very rapidly – 402 pages between May and July. ‘It reads better than I expected’, she said when she examined the proofs. ‘Not a bit sensational, but simple and true, for we really lived most of it; and if it succeeds that will be the reason of it.’

  Similarities between the book and Louisa’s own life are many and various. The March family are remarkably similar to hers, as they grew up in Concord just before the American Civil War. Tomboy Jo, the embryonic writer, is based upon Louisa herself, and Jo’s sisters, Meg, the frail Beth and artistic Amy, all have considerable resemblances to Louisa’s real sisters: Anna, Lizzie (who died young), and Abby, who studied Art and actually did illustrations for the first printing of Little Women. Marmee, the girls’ mother, is based upon Mrs Alcott (1800-1877), Laurie on Louisa’s Polish friend Ladislas Wisniewski, and John Brooke, Meg’s husband, owes something to Anna’s husband, John Pratt.

  But who then is Mr March, the girls’ father, based upon? He is a rather shadowy figure in Little Women. We are told that he is a scholar and a minister, who had once been wealthy but lost his property trying to help am unfortunate friend. He seems to be a loving father who likes telling stories to his daughters, and is praised by his wife for his patience. But he is absent for most of Little Women, having already gone when the book opens to serve in the Union army in the Civil War. We later learn that he falls ill in hospital in Washington for a time, and his wife visits him there. He returns home at the end of the story just before Christmas to be happily reunited with his loving family.