The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  Tall and gaunt, Henrietta generated several family stories about her eccentricities. There was the portable stove she brought along when visiting relatives, to enable her to fry sausages in her bedroom. There was the time she once became so involved with singing hymns on the train with fellow passengers that she missed her stop, and on another occasion she accidentally took an alarm clock to church one day instead of her prayer book. Carroll often visited Henrietta in Brighton, and he sometimes took his young friends along, too. One such was Katie Lucy, aged 17, who noted in her diary, ‘I like her. I think she is like him.’9

  Of the four brothers, Edwin, the youngest of all the children, felt called to become a missionary and spent time in Africa and Tristan da Cunha. His work was at times very hard and discouraging, and his descriptions of his extremely difficult life in Tristan make it clear that, for Edwin, human love and pleasure were not part of his self-denying life plan. He never married and his last years were spent as an invalid.

  The third son and seventh child, Wilfred, was lively minded, humorous and clever. He loved the outdoors and rejected academia, breaking from the family clerical tradition to become an estate manager. He was a successful businessman, married his childhood sweetheart in 1871, and had nine children.

  The second son and sixth child, Skeffington, had difficulty with academic work, and was forgetful and emotional. He married late in life after a rather turbulent clerical career, and settled in Vowchurch, Herefordshire. There, he lived as an impoverished vicar, pursuing his passionate hobby of fishing. He was often teased for his eccentricity by his rustic parishioners, but his wife was charming and clever and the family was very happy. He was a strict but beloved father to his three surviving children.

  The fact that only three of the Dodgsons’ eleven children married has sometimes attracted comment, but this is not necessarily a sign that the family had issues with the idea of marriage. Carroll and Edwin both had jobs that made marriage difficult, and the girls probably did not meet enough people or socialize enough for all of them to find husbands. Like the vast majority of young women of their class, they had a very restricted existence. They could not attend university, nor have careers. If of marriageable age, they could not go out alone to make friends outside the extended family circle, nor speak to men they did not know. Carroll never danced, and always avoided dancing, so it is also possible that there were family restrictions on this form of social entertainment.

  An aged neighbour, speaking at the time of Carroll’s centenary celebrations in the 1930s, knew the daughters before 1868, when they would have been in their twenties and thirties, and remarked on how plain their clothes were and how self-sacrificing their lives. As one family descendant wryly observed after considering their photographs, they seem to have been dressed in ‘last year’s curtains, with room allowed for growth!’10

  Apart from Carroll, who earned his own living, the Revd Dodgson supported all his children during his lifetime, and scraped enough money to leave a trust fund to allow the sisters to live together after his death with modest financial independence. For them, as for any women with minds and means of their own, marriage was not necessarily much of an attraction. A wife had to surrender everything she owned or earned to her husband and put herself under his control. So apart from the prospect of motherhood – a mixed blessing – their father’s consideration of them meant that there was no practical need for the sisters to marry.

  Despite, or perhaps because of the lack of outside contacts, the siblings’ closeness and interdependence meant that none of them ever needed to feel lonely, unwanted or out of place, so there would be little reason to marry for companionship. There was always someone to remember their birthdays, always someone to share a joke with or drop in and see, and always someone with whom to spend Christmas. Even Edwin wrote long, long letters to his family as he battled the windy deprivations of Tristan, and the sisters faithfully copied these long letters out and circulated them for other family members to read.

  After his father’s death, Carroll was to work extremely hard trying to aid Edwin in his plan to resettle the islanders. He helped Wilfred settle into a career, and Skeffington’s problems were a recurring theme in his life. He spent a good deal of time dealing with his sisters’ financial and legal matters, and helped all his relatives – particularly the female ones – with countless other practical details. But although he was always the leader of this little band of siblings, the first surviving glimpse of him as an individual comes in a letter that he wrote to Fanny and Elizabeth in 1844, when he was 12 years old.

  Carroll had just gone to boarding school in Richmond, Yorkshire, his first attendance at school. Education was not compulsory in those days, and his financially-pressed father had tutored him at home throughout his early childhood. So, though he was not in the least socially deprived, Carroll had been denied the experience that most people soon acquire, of making a group of school friends at a young age, and standing on his own feet among them.

  Richmond School was small and reasonably humanely run, but it would not have been surprising if Carroll, on the very edge of adolescence, suffered during his first time away from home. Yet he did not. He seemed to accept that he was part of a group here, too, and settled down quickly and well. In his letter, he sent his sisters a long list of the children that he liked (there were, apparently, none that he did not like) and he described the chief games they played, ‘foot-ball, wrestling, leap frog, and fighting’. He had suffered the trials to which new boys were usually subjected, and described them in some detail. They were not savage, and he was sanguine about them: ‘the boys play me no tricks now’, he concluded cheerfully.11

  Many early and mid-Victorian schools offered their pupils a huge degree of freedom; or, as we would now see it, gross lack of supervision. Richmond School, as Stuart Collingwood noted approvingly, was run on the old ‘free’ system. It was so different from more modern schools, he added, where ‘the unfortunate masters hardly get a minute to themselves from sunrise till long after sunset’.12

  Carroll seems to have enjoyed the freedom. His sisters told Collingwood that he had been a typical boy in his love of climbing trees and messing about in ponds, and in the relaxed atmosphere of the school he would have been allowed to roam. He lived in the family home of the headmaster, Mr Tate, and got on well with his children, keeping in touch with them for years afterwards.

  Tate (‘my kindly old headmaster’, as Carroll was later to remember him) sent a closely observed and highly positive assessment of the boy to his parents. ‘He possesses, along with other and excellent natural endowments, a very uncommon share of genius.’ he wrote, going on to describe Carroll as ‘gentle and cheerful in his intercourse with others’ and ‘playful and ready in conversation’. 13 The letter obviously pleased Carroll’s father, for he kept it all his life.

  Sadly, Carroll was much less happy at his next school, where he was sent at 14. It was the famous public school Rugby, in Warwickshire, and he remained there for three years. It was not a minute too short for him.

  Rugby School had been greatly improved by the remarkable Dr Arnold only a few years before Carroll arrived. Arnold had removed many of the worst excesses of violence and brutality for which the school had previously been notorious, and Rugby was at that time probably the best and most progressive public school in the country. That does not mean, however, that it provided an environment that anyone today would consider to be remotely good, or even acceptable for their children.

  In mid-19th century England, young gentlemen’s schools trained them for the tough and hard life they might well have to endure, either at home or overseas. Hardship and abuse, far from stunting their tender personalities, was considered to be positively good for them. A typical example of what one could expect at a contemporary public school is given by the Devonshire doctor J W Ley, who was born the year after Carroll, in 1833. Dr Ley described how the boys in his school were left unsupervised at night, when the inhabitants of two of
the dormitories would converge with twisted bolsters upon a third dormitory of younger children who would ‘anxiously and timorously be awaiting their approach.’ They would, he recalled, be carried off, tossed in blankets up to the ceilings, stripped and spanked, drenched with cold water, and various other indignities would be inflicted on them. Once, the bullied little boys took their revenge. Using ropes, bolsters, and knotted soaked towels, they reduced the chief bully to pulp, his shirt in ribbons, his face almost unrecognizable. Everyone ended up with black eyes, bloody noses and torn mouths. Finally, the teacher intervened, and added to the carnage by beating all the boys thoroughly with his cane.14

  Dr Ley, as an old man, wrote a newspaper column of humorous reminiscences, and he delightedly recounted this horrific event as a splendid example of boyish fun. He was entirely in tune with his times in that it did not occur either to him or his editors that his readers might have the slightest reservations about sharing his pleasure.

  The status or cost of a school often bore little relation to how well the pupils were nurtured. Sexual abuse, often of the most disgusting kind, was taken for granted, and violence was endemic. At Eton, in 1825, just 19 years before Carroll went to Rugby, the 13-year-old brother of the humanitarian Lord Shaftesbury was beaten to death in a fist fight. The boy’s father did not prosecute because the fight had been conducted according to standard fist fighting rules.

  Set against this tough background, Rugby School in Carroll’s time was not bad but, according to Rouse’s History of Rugby School (1898), boys often vandalized each others’ rooms, and drunkenness was a perennial problem. Beating with a cane, both by masters and older boys, was commonplace, and Collingwood confirms that the general system of victimizing and tormenting younger boys would have been endemic in Carroll’s day.

  Looking back on his schooldays at the age of 23, Carroll mused in his diary that, ‘I cannot say that I look back upon my life at a Public school with any sensation of pleasure, or that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again.’15 Nevertheless, he was no sissy. His boyish words to his sisters show he considered fighting a ‘game’, and, in fact, wrote Collingwood, ‘even though it is hard for those who have only known him as the gentle and retiring don to believe it, it is nevertheless true that long after he left school, his name was remembered as that of a boy who knew well how to use his fists in defense of a righteous cause’ – that is, the protection of smaller boys.16

  One of Carroll’s major objections to Rugby was the unkindness of the bullying, and his continuous protectiveness towards the helpless would be a marked characteristic for the rest of his life. On visiting Radley School, around a decade after he had left school himself, he approvingly noted that each boy had his own wooden cubicle to sleep in at night:

  … a snug little bed-room secured to himself, where he is free from interruption and annoyance … This to little boys must be a very great addition to their happiness, as being a kind of counterbalance to any bullying they may suffer during the day. From my own experience of school life at Rugby I can say that if I could have been thus secure from annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would have been comparative trifles to bear.17

  Carroll singled out little boys as the main sufferers from ‘annoyance’. As Dr Ley’s account makes clear, younger boys were the main target of older bullies. It was, as Collingwood points out, the bad discipline maintained in the dormitories at Rugby that made even the nights seem intolerable, ‘especially for the small boys, whose beds in winter were denuded of blankets that the bigger ones might not feel cold’.18

  Carroll’s remarks, above, about ‘annoyance at night’ have been interpreted to suggest that he was a lonely, bullied misfit who was sexually abused. There is nothing to support the idea that he was lonely or more bullied than anyone else, and no evidence one way or the other about sexual abuse. If he had been abused, he certainly would not have been alone, as a blind eye was turned to abuse by both boys and masters, who believed that boys would generally grow out of their homosexuality and get over any abuse inflicted upon them.

  Carroll’s love of learning (which he would retain throughout his life), had been developed at home by his father but, even so, his studies at Rugby were a trial to him. He made some progress in his school work, he wrote, but none of it was done con amore, and he spent a good deal of time in writing out ‘lines’ as punishment.19 He did not enjoy organized sport, which must also have made life difficult, and it seems highly possible that Rugby was the place where he was first exposed to the stammerer’s worst nightmare of having to read aloud in front of a group, and likely sustain their mockery. That was something which his home tuition never inflicted on him, and his affectionately remembered Mr Tate no doubt spared him.

  Carroll kept no diary during his three years at Rugby, and he was not a person to dwell on negative experiences. Yet he must have had a robust character. He won prizes and plaudits, and inspired his headmaster to write to his father, ‘I must not allow your son to leave school without expressing to you the very high opinion I entertain of him … of his abilities and upright conduct … During the whole time … his conduct has been excellent.’20

  The picture which thus emerges of Carroll is of a boy with considerable reserves of toughness and concentration beneath a sensitive exterior. He was a boy, too, who developed ways of dealing with aggressive members of his own sex without breaking down, and kept his eye firmly on what he wanted to achieve.

  When he became an adult, he seems to have retained these qualities. There is no record of his having been pushed around in adult life. He was never afraid of speaking out, and there is no suggestion anywhere that he showed or felt physical fear. The journal of his one and only trip abroad, written when he was 35, goes into much more detail than his other diaries, since he seems to have written it for family members to read on his return. He travelled across Europe to Russia, and, his account of the trip shows him to have been strongly assertive and not prepared to be bullied, even when in a strange land in which he did not speak the language.

  In one incident, he argued with an abusive cab driver who was refusing to accept a previously negotiated price of 30 kopeks, and demanding 40 instead. Having given him 30 kopeks, Carroll reported that he then asked for the money back. On receiving it, he returned it to his purse and counted the man out 25 kopeks. ‘In doing this,’ he noted, ‘I felt something like a man pulling the string of a shower bath – and the effect was like it – his fury boiled over directly and quite eclipsed all the former row. I told him in very bad Russian that I had offered 30 once, but wouldn’t again. …’21

  His correspondence with the illustrator Harry Furniss, who attempted to dominate him, is more amiable, but it is worth reading for Carroll’s extraordinarily clever, gentle but steely success in forcing Furniss to back down completely.22

  So it seems that Carroll dealt effectively with his male contemporaries and was protective towards younger children. He was close to his group of siblings, and they loved and admired him. He also had good relationships with his aunts and uncles. His sweet-natured aunt Lucy Lutwidge had long been concerned with her sister’s children, and came to look after the family on their mother’s death. Carroll’s letters to her show that he got on well with her and felt relaxed in her company.

  His favorite uncle, Robert W Skeffington Lutwidge, played an important part in his life. ‘Uncle Skeffington’ provided a positive bachelor role model, showing Carroll how to play the kindly uncle and how to relish an unmarried existence. He and Carroll had a one-to-one closeness that the busy Dodgson household may not have provided, and there were striking similarities between the two men. Both were deeply religious, and both were extremely fond of mathematics. Both adored gadgets; it was Lutwidge who introduced Carroll to photography. As a government Commissioner for Lunacy, he inspected asylums, and mental disorder was one of Carroll’s own lifelong interests. The two men had long talks about family issues, and, despite the 30-year a
ge difference, they socialized together, going out to concerts and plays.

  So, did Carroll also get on well with his parents? It is surprisingly hard to find information about this. Not many details of his relationship with his mother have survived. She took a conscientious interest in his religious education. She kept a log of his progress in a book that was divided into sections that included ‘Religious Reading: Private’, and ‘Religious Reading with Mama’. It was said that her religious faith was at the centre of her life – something often said, too, about Carroll. One of the few references he made to her in his childhood letters was to ask his sisters to tell their mother that his only fault had been ‘coming in one day to dinner just after grace’.23

  Mrs Dodgson had a gentle, sweet and contented nature, and her children said that she never shouted. She was not, perhaps, very imaginative, being apparently happy to live a life of quiet dullness – her life, she once confided to a relative, was exactly as she had always wanted it to be. She was preoccupied with the details of daily life; as well she might have been, with a family of 13, not to mention servants, pupils and visitors, to look after on a limited income.

  It may have been that because she had such a large family, and worked so hard to do the best for them, she was unable to take as much of a personal interest in each well-loved child as that child might have wanted. Carroll treasured all his life a letter she wrote to him when he was small and she was away from home visiting relatives. Although it is a sweet and loving message, there is something a little sad about it too. It suggests an affectionate child with a deep need to communicate, writing many letters to his beloved mother and perhaps not receiving enough personal attention in return. ‘I have used you rather ill in not having written to you sooner …’, runs part of the letter, continuing: