The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  All your notes have delighted me, my precious child, and show me you have not quite forgotten me. I am always thinking of you, and longing to have you all around me again more than words can tell. God grant that we may find you all well and happy … give [your brothers and sisters] and all my other treasures including yourself, 1,000,000,000 kisses from me with my most affectionate love, I am sending you a shabby note but I can not help it …24

  The letter, although genuinely affectionate, is not that long, and does not say much that is specifically about him. Yet it was so important to the little boy that he wrote threateningly on the back, ‘No one is to touch this note, for it belongs to CLD. Covered in slimy pitch, so that they will wet their fingers.’25

  Carroll’s work as a whole suggests that he may have had some issues about mothers and sons, and these can perhaps be traced back to the difficulty he probably had in getting individual attention from his mother. It cannot have been easy for him to accept. Many people who knew Carroll remark on his gentleness. Fewer, though, comment on his jealousy. The early biographer Langford Reed spoke privately to some of Carroll’s surviving friends and reported that Carroll had had something of a problem with jealousy, although Reed did not go into details.26

  Carroll’s flashes of anger and rage were occasionally glimpsed by others but were usually well controlled. It is interesting that a portion of this rare jealous anger is associated with the subject of mothers and sons. One cannot look at his works of fiction and make glib assumptions about exactly what he meant, but nevertheless, nowhere in Carroll’s huge output is there a single realistic portrayal of a good and loving – or even a remotely convincing – relationship between a mother and a son.

  He depicts doted-upon mama’s boys with particularly withering scorn. In ‘The Blank Check’,27 a skit upon the financing of new building in Oxford, the various luminaries of Christ Church are presented as unappealing little boys fawned over by a stupid and ignorant mother. An elaborate piece of juvenilia, ‘Crundle Castle’ centres almost entirely on a spoiled boy who is the apple of his mama’s eye and the bane of everyone else’s life.28

  Even more unappealing – in fact downright unsettling – is the relationship of My Lady and her beloved little son Uggug in Carroll’s late books Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893). The grim portrait of a cloying mutual relationship ends with Uggug being confined forever in a cage, transformed into a monstrous porcupine-like beast. His glaring appearance (conveyed in artwork closely supervised by Carroll) is oddly reminiscent in its brutal madness, of Goya’s Saturn, who devoured his children. Worse than this, Uggug is loveless; nobody wants him. He is covered in prickles, shut up in a cage, and everyone is going to hate him forever. No jealous infant could be crueler than the elderly Carroll in savaging this beloved mama’s boy. In contrast, the young hero and heroine of the book do not have a mother at all, even though they have a father. Their mother is omitted, as though she never existed, and the boy’s older sister takes her place.

  This replacement of a mother by an older sister is also a not uncommon feature of Carroll’s work. It can be seen in Alice in Wonderland, where Alice recounts her adventures to an older sister, not a mother. In Carroll’s long juvenile story Sidney Hamilton, the family scene also lacks a mother figure, even though Carroll’s mother was alive and well at the time. An older sister again takes the mother’s place. After her naughty brother runs away, young Lucy Hamilton busies herself with the ‘domestic duties’ that would normally be the province of the mother. Just as Carroll’s surviving letters are to his sisters and not his mother, in his story it is Lucy, not her mother, who presides over the dinner table and worries about the missing boy.29

  Carroll never seems to have got over his jealous emotional confusion about mothers; it may be that he was not even consciously aware of it. The surviving letters and diaries for the whole of his life refer to his feelings for his mother just once – in a letter congratulating his sister Mary on the birth of a son. The letter shows he loved his mother, although, as so often with Carroll, the actual words he uses suggest a situation without actually saying a great deal about it:

  My dearest Mary,

  I must write one line to yourself, if only to say – God bless you and the little one now entrusted to you – and may you be to him what our own dear mother was to her eldest son! I can hardly utter for your boy a better wish than that!

  Your loving brother30

  While Carroll makes a few idealized references elsewhere to mothers and their children in general, apart from this instance, in his letters and diaries his mother hardly appears to exist.

  The lack of mothers in Carroll’s work is not often remarked upon, but the brutal, domineering female figures that also occur from time to time in his work have attracted speculation from commentators as to whom they might be based upon. These include the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland and My Lady, who holds a position of power in Sylvie and Bruno. They are sometimes, on no evidence, assumed to be maternal figures, but these bullying women run to a type that seems absolutely nothing like Carroll’s mother was said to be. Large, coarse and stupid, they love or hate with savage irrationality, and do not care how much damage they do. They could perhaps resemble some of the uneducated servants who would have had control of Carroll and his siblings when Mrs Dodgson was not available.

  Most children of Carroll’s class and period spent a great deal of time with nursemaids. It had to be that way, for if children of a large family were to be well cared for, plenty of people needed to be involved. Servants to a perpetual curate in a remote village in the 1830s were unlikely to be intellectually sophisticated and probably could not even read or write. Not much is known about the Dodgsons’ servants but, perhaps significantly, an unpublished family letter refers to one nursemaid, Louisa, who left when Carroll was four. She is described as horrible, cold hearted and selfish.31 This was very strong language by contrast with the almost uniformly gentle and positive tone of the other surviving letters.

  This ‘cold hearted’ woman had charge of the highly sensitive and affectionate little boy in his earliest years. Her replacement, Jane, was described as loud, arrogant and conceited, but at least to the children she was kind, mild and sensitive.32 Whatever his own experiences may have been, Carroll strongly objected to nursemaids in general, as he wrote to a Mrs Blakemore in 1877: ‘I should like the whole race of nurses to be abolished: children should be with their mother as much as possible, in my opinion.’33

  Whatever his ambivalence about mothers and female caring figures, Carroll had no such difficulties in his portrayal of fathers. The older-younger man relationships he created, from Father William to the father in ‘Jabberwocky’, were sometimes lively and ridiculous, and frequently rather edgy, but they were always emotionally alive. Even the bossy papa of Sidney Hamilton, at whom the youthful Carroll cocked a mischievous snook as he sends him ‘to bed in a state of mind bordering on insanity’, is only being so ridiculous because he cares so deeply about his naughty oldest son.

  In everyday life, Carroll probably clashed with his father. He was self-willed, as he admitted himself. To his friend Dora Abdy, he jokingly wrote:

  Among the host of virtues which, as you are no doubt aware, form the background of my character … a readiness to adopt suggestions (when they happen to coincide with my own inclinations) is one of the most marked – so prominent, in fact, that my biographer will fail to do justice to it, unless he devotes a whole chapter to the subject …34

  A self-willed boy coming up against a strong-willed father will result in conflict, and so it seems reasonable to assume that there was some. It must have been resolved well enough for Carroll to remain on decent terms with his father, who entrusted him with the supervision of his younger brothers and continued to welcome him home in the vacations.

  Surviving family letters suggest that Mr Dodgson, like his wife, adored his children. Unlike his wife, he left numerous letters which testify to his
deep personal interest in them as individuals. An entire collection of letters to his second son, Skeffington, survives,35 and the paternal personality which emerges is dependable, clever and lively – as well as being very much in control. Descriptions of him suggest that Carroll inherited his father’s storytelling ability and high intelligence.

  In fact, Revd Dodgson was, by Victorian paterfamilias standards, highly emotionally expressive. Young Skeffington had various mild social and intellectual problems, and was continuously struggling to keep up. His father’s letters were uniformly encouraging and compassionate. Perseverance was one of Skeffington’s virtues, and when, after interminable effort, he finally struggled through his exams, his father wrote him a long, joyful letter which included the comment, ‘The great Dr Arnold drew … a living picture of such a character as yours, and wound it up with the striking words, “I could stand hat in hand before such a man.”’36 It was wonderful praise for a youth who must often have faced failure, and it is no less joyful than the letter Revd Dodgson had written to Carroll about his brilliant examination results not long before.

  As the oldest son, of course, Carroll had a special relationship with his father. Revd Dodgson had strong views about what his offspring should do with their lives, and most professional jobs were gained through the ‘old-boy’ network of recommendation and introduction, into which it was hard for outsiders to break. To find good positions for his sons, their father was obliged to undertake a round of asking his friends and acquaintances if they could help. Carroll followed his example when he became head of the family, helping his younger brothers to sort out their careers, and shouldering financial responsibility for his sisters where necessary.

  As the bank account and the few examples of surviving correspondence between Carroll and his father show, Revd Dodgson expected his eldest son to take care of his brothers’ money while they were at university. The increasing sharing of financial responsibility for his brothers and sisters must have been an important aspect of Carroll’s relationship with his father as he grew older. Another letter that his father wrote to him gives an interesting insight into their early relationship. Written when Carroll was just eight years old, it shows that his father was prepared to take considerable trouble composing a long letter to amuse his child, and he had clearly also brought him a present. After describing an amusing scene of increasing chaos in obtaining the gift, it ends with a flourish: ‘… At last they bring the things which I ordered, and then I spare the Town, and send off in 50 wagons, and under the protection of 10,000 soldiers, a file and a screw driver and a ring as a present to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, from his affectionate Papa.’37

  When his father died at the age of 68, Carroll, according to Collingwood, fell into a kind of depression from which he thought he might never recover.38 Some commentators have conjectured that Carroll was thrown into despair because his father’s death removed his chance to rebel against all that the older man stood for. It has also been suggested that the death condemned Carroll to endless guilt because he had not become the person his father had wanted him to be.

  There is no evidence that either was the case. For sure, he did not always obey his father, but then, few grown-up men do exactly what their father says. He may well have been jealous of him at times, since a tendency to jealousy was, as already noted, one of his personal characteristics. However, there is no record that either man felt anything other than normal parental or filial love. Another and more practical aspect of his distress may have been the only too obvious facts that not only must he now bid farewell to his devoted, hardworking and protective father, but that a huge burden now lay upon his own shoulders.

  His father’s death would have obliged Carroll to shoulder responsibility for all his adult brothers and sisters, all of whom were jobless, unmarried and had become homeless. The family home of 25 years was being dismantled as the rectory was prepared for its new incumbent. It must have felt as though the ground had been snatched away from under the whole family’s feet, not just his own. Of course he did his duty, but the shock must have been immense, and the weight of responsibility enormous.

  At the time of his father’s death, Carroll was writing Through the Looking-Glass, the account of how Alice becomes a queen, which for the psychologically inclined may suggest something of the horror of how it feels to become a responsible adult. In the book, Alice is pleased at first to become a queen, as she has anticipated all along:

  … she turned to run down the hill: ‘and now for the last brook, and to be a Queen! How grand it sounds!’ A very few steps brought her to the edge of the brook. ‘The Eighth Square at last!’ she cried as she bounded across,

  and threw herself down to rest on a lawn as soft as moss, with little flower-beds dotted about it here and there. ‘Oh, how glad I am to get here!’

  Unfortunately, the badgering and pestering of the other queens gives her little freedom to enjoy her imposing new role, so when they fall asleep, Alice escapes into a dream-within-a-dream – or thinks she does. But it is all an illusion: she does not escape. As the focus of all eyes, she becomes increasingly frightened as she is expected to take charge, yet everything around her is disintegrating into a revolting and unpredictable mess. She is crushed and squashed (‘You would have thought they wanted to squeeze me flat!’) and finally, as the nightmare rises to its height, she screams, ‘I can’t stand this any longer!’ and starts shaking one of the queens almost to death.

  For Alice, it was a dream. For Carroll, writing about Alice’s experiences Through the Looking-Glass in whatever time he could spare, daily reality as the new head of his family was undoubtedly a quick-moving procession of unfamiliar tasks. He had to take the lead and cope alone, with all eyes upon him. There was no escape, and never would be again.

  Viewed in this context, there is also a certain resonance in Alice’s farewell to the kindly old White Knight, immediately before she becomes a queen. The old man takes his leave in a way that always seems poignant.

  ‘You’ve only a few yards to go,’ he said … ‘and then you’ll be 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 shan’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’ said the Knight, doubtfully. ‘But you didn’t cry as much as I thought you would.’

  So they shook hands, and then the Knight rode slowly away into the forest …

  The White Knight cannot be stated to be Carroll’s father (or anyone real – he is fiction), but, like any fictional character, he must reflect fragments of his maker’s inner feelings and preoccupations at the time. He is similar to the comical older men or father-figures in Carroll’s juvenilia, and is the only character in either book who ever cares about Alice or tries to look after her.

  This, then, is about the sum of what we know about Carroll’s childhood, youth and education, and about his relationships with his family. About his own feelings during this period, we know little; he wrote diaries as a teenager, but these have all disappeared. He apparently had some problems during his adolescence, which is hardly surprising or unusual. It would be interesting to have an idea of what those problems were, but he is not recorded as having said or written anything about them, just as he almost never mentioned his childhood. The letters which the family chose to preserve were cheerful, clever, companionable and upbeat.

  The only brief and fragmentary first-hand recollections of him as an adolescent appeared long after his death. They were contributed by aged residents of Croft-on-Tees who had obviously hardly known him. Racking their memories, they called to mind a polite young man who studied while lying full length beneath an acacia tree in the garden, and who visited old ladies and enthusiastically ate their girdle-scones (a type of pancak
e). Nobody could remember discussing anything with him.

  Collingwood is tellingly coy about the subject of Carroll’s adolescence. He informs his readers that it was ‘necessarily less interesting’, although he does not say what it was less interesting than. It would certainly have been interesting to us, and it is also interesting to see how Collingwood tries to explain his decision not to discuss it without actually revealing what it is he is refusing to talk about:

  We all have to pass through that painful era of self consciousness which prefaces manhood, that time when we feel so deeply and are so utterly unable to express to others, or even to define clearly to ourselves, what it is we do feel. The natural freedom of childhood is dead within us, the conventional freedom of riper years is struggling to birth, and its efforts are sometimes ludicrous to an unsympathetic observer. In Lewis Carroll’s mental attitude during this critical period there was always a calm dignity which saved him from these absurdities, an undercurrent of consciousness that what seemed so great to him was really very little.39

  What his words mean is anybody’s guess. And so our knowledge of Carroll’s youth ends in clouds of mystery deeper than those with which it started. Currently available records offer no other clues, and no indication of what happened between Carroll’s return home from Rugby and his departure for Christ Church, where he would spend the rest of his life.

  Six of Carroll’s seven sisters and his outnumbered youngest brother Edwin. They have been posed to show that they are examining a new book. The photograph was taken at the Rectory, Croft-on-Tees, ‘the old home we have known for five-and-twenty years’ as Carroll described it.