by Jenny Woolf
Not long before his death, his doctor pronounced him a thoroughly fit man. But just a few days before his 66th birthday, a feverish cold with ague developed into bronchitis, and then into pneumonia. He died at 2.30 pm on the afternoon of 14 January 1898. He was in the Guildford home of his sisters. They had been nursing him continually, devoted to the last.
One of the earliest, pre-clerical photographs shows a decidedly dandyish youth with a large cravat, a checked waistcoat and a jacket which contemporary fashion plates confirm was in the very latest style.
4
‘This strange wild man from other lands’
Love and Sex
‘… against the door of the room three strong men were leaning, vainly trying to shut it – for some great animal inside was constantly bursting it half open, and we had a glimpse, before the men could push it back again, of the head of a furious wild beast, with great fiery eyes and gnashing teeth …’
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
Lewis Carroll, living in a secretive age, was considered reticent even by his friends. He belonged to a private, self-contained family, and after his death many personal documents that had been in his family’s keeping mysteriously disappeared. His diary does not mention his romantic yearnings or needs. Yet even though most of the material about his personal life has been destroyed, this does not mean that he had none. Is it possible, so long after his death, to get a glimpse of it?
In the earlier part of the 20th century, Carroll was often presented as virginal, sexless or, at the least, highly repressed. In 1932, the biographer Langford Reed made a good deal of Carroll’s ‘split personality’ although he was genteel enough not to speculate about Carroll’s sexual life in print. After interviewing several of those who had been Carroll’s child-friends, he concluded that Carroll must have been one of those ‘super-sensitive and over-refined people to whom the very idea of physical familiarity was abhorrent’, and he compared Carroll with an old maid or a nun.1 Some years later, Carroll’s niece, Menella Dodgson, told an acquaintance that, from her memories of him, she could not imagine Carroll married because no woman could have dealt with his exact and fastidious ways.2
In later life, he was, indeed, a quaint old bachelor, and there are numerous tales of his gentle eccentricities. One of his grown-up child-friends recalled how delighted he was with a special kettle he had designed for making tea in the best possible way, which he boasted of to her ‘in the most ingenuous manner’ every single time she visited.3 Yet in truth, Carroll was far from being a maidenly nun-figure who was ignorant of sexual matters. He may have given that impression to the casual observer, but, on closer examination, one of the most nun-like aspects of his life was the number of women who surrounded him.
His views on physical life were better informed, even more outré, than those that many men of his background held in his own day. He strongly disapproved of pornography, and yet he owned books that covered sexual and physical matters as frankly as was then legally possible. These included Alexander Walker’s Woman Physiologically Considered as to Mind, Morals, Marriage, Matrimonial Slavery, Infidelity and Divorce, which includes discussion of polygamy, infidelity, concubinage, and prostitution, and William Acton’s famous treatise on prostitution, the standard 19th-century work on the subject. He also owned medical texts covering many aspects of sexuality, such as Dr Paget’s book (described in Chapter 3), and books that considered social aspects of sexuality, such as William Dixon’s startling observations on free-thinking religious sects, Spiritual Wives, which includes events that would seem noteworthy even by modern-day cult standards.4
Carroll also read about polygamy and unconventional types of marriage; he owned a copy of Plain Home Talk by Dr Foote, whose frank ideas on free love as well as birth control, dress reform and Utopianism, were way ahead of their time. In fact, some of the material Carroll sought, such as Michael Ryan’s The Philosophy of Marriage and its Social, Moral and Physical Relations, although certainly not pornographic, was extremely candid. He asked his American illustrator Arthur Burdett Frost if he could obtain this and a couple of Ryan’s other titles in America, obviously being under the impression that they were not available in England.5
Carroll would sometimes visit his artist friends in their studios and see them at work, but his diary is so laconic about them that his liberal-mindedness has often gone unremarked. In April 1865, for instance, he recorded a visit to Dante Gabriel Rossetti thus: ‘We went … to call on Rossetti. We found him at home, and his friend Swinburne also in the room, whom I had not met before. He showed us many beautiful pictures, two quite new, the bride going to meet the bride-groom (from Solomon’s Song), and Venus with a back-ground of roses.’ The critic Hugues Lebailly has pointed out that one of the pictures Carroll admired during the visit was Rossetti’s Venus Verticordia, the eroticism of which made it difficult for Rossetti to sell.6 Carroll does not tell us what he made of the scandalous Swinburne, but he did go out and buy a first edition of his notorious Poems and Ballads.7
As his bank account shows, Carroll could be almost reckless in private, even though he kept up an impenetrably prudent front in public. His friend Gertrude Thomson described how his donnish manner would utterly disappear when he was in informal surroundings; and his scornful comments about ‘Mrs Grundy’, the fictitious moralizer, show how little he cared what conventional people thought of the way he was obliged to live his life. ‘Oh, Edith, I wish you could come and stay here a bit!’ he wrote to Edith Rix in 1888, when she was in her twenties.
I believe the “Mrs. Grundy” risk might be altogether avoided by simply arranging 2 or 3 visits to be paid consecutively, Eastbourne to be one. Then, when Mrs. Grundy calls, and asks for you, she will simply be told, “She is away, paying a round of visits.” The miserable old gossip will hardly be inquisitive enough to say “and what particular house is she at just now?” or, at any rate, if she is, she will deserve to be snubbed!8
So, despite the apparent emptiness of his emotional life from this distance in time, closer examination suggests that he did manage to fill the spaces after all. What is more, during his moralistic later years, he demonstrated a well-honed and effective knowledge of how to win over girls in their teens and grown-up women, as well as children. Several descriptions exist of his technique, which was based on presenting the potential friend with interesting aspects of himself that he wished her to see, and allowing her to respond if she wanted to do so. It was a gentle, skilful extension of his storytelling or dramatic technique. If she did not wish to get involved, nothing was lost; if she did react, a friendship usually developed. The start of his lifelong friendship with a Mrs Bennie (described in full in Chapter 8) demonstrates how he used this technique, intriguing her sufficiently to make her put in the effort to pursue his company. The account of his first meeting with Gertrude Thomson shows the same mind at work.
Miss Thomson was a respectable and independent young lady artist of a type starting to emerge towards the end of the century. She produced charming pictures of children, fairies and cherubs. An early photograph of her depicts a bright, untidy young woman, ornamentally clad in fur, feathers, embroidery and jewellery. A later, more sedate photograph has her with an elaborately elegant hairstyle and dressed in dark ruffles. She was talented, unconventional and scatty.
Miss Thomson first met Carroll in June 1879 when she was in her late twenties and he was 47. He had seen her pictures, liked them, and wanted her to draw for him. He suggested they meet in the South Kensington Museum to discuss the matter. Miss Thomson forgot, however, to tell Carroll what she looked like, and, since it would have been unseemly for her to approach an unknown man, when she reached the museum she wondered what to do. However, punctually at the appointed time, she saw a ‘tall, slim figure’ with a ‘clean-shaven, delicate, refined face’ arriving with two little girls (the well-dressed child chaperones showing, to Victorian eyes, that he was a respectable man). The man glanced swiftly about, and then ‘bending down, [he] whispere
d something to one of the children; she, without a moment’s pause, pointed straight at me. Dropping their hands, he came forward with that winning smile of his … and said simply “I am Mr. Dodgson; I was to meet you I think?”’ Astonished, Miss Thomson asked him how he had recognized her. ‘“My little friend found you,” Carroll replied. “I told her I had come to meet a young lady who knew fairies, and she fixed on you at once.” Then he added: “But, I knew you, before she spoke.”’9
Miss Thomson, the fairy painter, was delighted by this charming story, which flatteringly emphasized her fairy-like credentials. Closer examination of her tale, though, suggests that there was more to it. No child could have instantly and unaided picked her out of the crowd. But Carroll knew that she had not asked how she should recognize him – though since she was waiting with a portfolio at the appointed time, he could easily spot who she was. Rather than approaching her directly, he had spun the unusual idea of asking the child to spot a ‘young lady who knew fairies’.
He had (as he said) already recognized Miss Thomson. So the child, having no idea what a ‘lady who liked fairies’ looked like, would have automatically pointed out the woman at whom Carroll was gazing. The path was then free for him to approach Miss Thomson with a ‘winning smile’ – that is, with full eye contact – bypassing the awkwardness that would usually have attended a meeting between strangers of opposite sexes. Furthermore, he could involve Miss Thomson in the charming, wholly improbable yet respectable suggestion that she had been instantly, attractively recognizable to him. No lies were told, for she filled in all the gaps herself. Within days, he was writing to her, ‘Are you sufficiently unconventional (I think you are) to defy Mrs Grundy and come down to spend the day with me in Oxford?’10 Of course, Miss Thomson was.
Carroll’s light-handed skill at controlling how others responded to him can also be seen in how he won over 17-year-old Charlotte Rix. She wrote a letter to her mother describing how, as a friend of her father’s, Carroll had turned up at her boarding school to take her out for the day. She had never met him but, once again, there was no stiff and awkward start to their conversation. To her amazement, his first action on meeting was to turn her round and look at her back.
‘I wondered what on earth he was doing, but he said that he had been made to expect a tremendous lot of hair,’ Charlotte reported to her mother. Lots of hair was a great sign of beauty in those days, so this remark, like his comment to Miss Thomson, was surprising, personal and flattering. Immediately it set them upon closer and less formal terms. He then told the gratified Charlotte that ‘he was surprised to see that she [the principal] would let the young ladies go out with any gentleman that called, without even coming to see that they looked respectable. …’ Although polite enough to report to her mother, this comment was guaranteed to raise the emotional temperature, which – as the rest of the letter makes clear – Charlotte herself was stoking up. The description she goes on to give of the outing shows how Carroll managed to set up a little mutual admiration society in which he gave her a good time and she played the part that he wanted her to play. ‘Mrs Grundy’, despite Charlotte’s relatively advanced age of 17, was kept at bay.11
Did Carroll’s ability to charm – which is mentioned by several people and which he was aware of himself – have sexual undertones? He must have obtained emotional satisfaction from it, since these and other descriptions indicate that he took the trouble to hone his skills. There was no reported impropriety, and his genuine horror of sin probably means there really was not any, at least later in his life, and certainly not with teenage girls like Charlotte.
What there was, was gossip. He attracted a large female retinue, and Mrs Grundy’s tongue never stopped wagging in relation to Carroll and women. From at least his twenties, when he was supposed to be chasing Alice’s governess, right until the end of his life, he was dodging tittle-tattle. The older he became, the more lady friends he acquired, and the more obtrusive the gossip became.
He countered it partly by presenting himself to his fellows as a man who was no threat to their sheltered womenfolk, and who could be welcomed without anxiety into their family circles. His unmarried status and his love of children’s company conveyed to Victorians the idea that he was a person who had chosen not to be sexual.
He was only in his forties when he began to tell people that he was too old to pose a moral threat to respectable women. A letter he wrote to a Mr Alderson in 1884 when he was 51 asking if he could take out his 22-year-old daughter Helen shows the line he adopted:
As yet I do not know if you would sanction any such expedition, without other chaperon, but … I am an entirely confirmed old bachelor who is now well over 50 … so why should Mrs. Grundy object to my having what is so pleasant to me, the friendship of my child friends? So many of my friends … have allowed me to chaperone my quondam child friends – at all ages from 15 to 25 and upwards. …”12
Carroll was extremely fit and looked young for his years, but by constantly telling people he was ‘old’ he was making the point that he could at last be trusted to take out un-chaperoned young women (whom he ostentatiously referred to as ‘child friends’ – children compared to him, that is). He could also enjoy the personal liberties, including loving kisses, which so many of them seemed pleased to grant him.
As he grew older, large numbers of his letters were to or about women. Some are charming, some positively flirtatious. To Marion Miller, aged 18, he wrote:
My dear May.
Here is the photo. Looking at it, however, it is not much of a substitute for the live May. I wish you would come back again: I need not point out how cruel it is of you to be away so many weeks while I am here, for no doubt you are already feeling a little ashamed of your heartless conduct … 13
While to 22-year-old Edith Lucy he wrote, ‘My dearest Edith, Why will you insist on my beginning so, [i.e. calling her ‘dearest’] when you know what a lot of Ediths I know … and how awfully hard it is to decide which of them is the dearest!’14 It is no wonder that the theatrical designer Laurence Irving noted that the ageing Carroll was seen by some in Oxford not as the nun or spinster figure of Langford Reed’s imagination, but as a ‘greying satyr in sheep’s clothing’.15
There was no shortage of young women willing to go out to the theatre, art galleries, on long walks, to tête-à-tête meals and on lengthy outings with him – outings they would never normally have gone on alone with other men. Even today, a middle-aged man who accompanied so many young women would probably cause comment, as would his very cordial tête-à-tête meetings with married women.
With his lady friends, however, Carroll set his own moral limits and stuck to them rigidly. Within these moral limits, he did what he liked. What other people made of him was up to them; but he deflected a good deal of criticism honestly enough by emphasizing certain ultra-moralistic views that became a feature of his later life. There seems to have been no irony in his loud protestations against ‘ungodly’ stories, and he manifestly meant the angry letters he wrote to theatre proprietors who allowed ‘indecency’ in their plays. Isa Bowman was echoing a general sentiment when she said, ‘He was the purest-minded and cleanest living of men, intolerant of anything in the slightest degree coarse.’16 His protestations conveyed the message in no uncertain terms that he was an intensely moral man.
So Lewis Carroll, the inveterate caricaturist, made himself into a caricature of Victorian primness, and thus deflected a great deal of attention away from what he did. Crucially, his genuine and longstanding love of little girls made him seem much more appropriate company for women than a man with an ‘eye for the ladies’; and however eccentric it made him seem, he was not going to allow anyone to forget it.
Unsurprisingly, sarcastic, fanciful and downright catty gossip began circulating around Oxford about him in this respect. Carroll’s young women, it was ironically said, would react with delight to gifts of little toys and packets of pear drops that he supposedly gave them. His entourage
became well known, and Laurence Irving no doubt spoke for many observers when he said that Carroll’s lady friends’ ‘affectation of whimsies long past, and now, to flatter their author, kept up with desperate naivete, [was] embarrassing, if not a bit macabre’.17
Yet Irving also remarked that Carroll, ever-puzzling, was patently innocent of any intent to harm anybody. So his mother, then a young aspiring actress, was allowed to meet him despite all the gossip which buzzed about the kindly and, apparently, unworldly don.
A letter that has only recently come to light casts a bright beam of illumination on this intriguing aspect of Carroll’s life. A year after his brother’s death, Wilfred Dodgson wrote to the periodical Literature, a precursor of The Times Literary Supplement. Arguably the most worldly of the Dodgson siblings, Wilfred complained that Isa Bowman, in her just-published memoir, was presenting herself uniquely as Carroll’s adopted niece.
Wilfred, on the contrary, felt that Isa was very far indeed from being unique. He wrote that his brother had ‘almost a mania’ for ‘adopting’ nieces. He followed this with the bombshell announcement that Carroll had often told him that he ‘adopted this avuncular position with a view to the time when his “nieces” began to grow out of their teens’. At this point they could ‘no longer be treated with anything like intimate affection except by “uncles” and such-like relations,’ wrote Wilfred. There were at least fifty women who fell into this category, he added, before continuing, ‘I know of [a] very charming married lady who says that one of the conditions she made when she accepted her husband was that she might continue to be kissed by ‘Uncle Charles [Carroll].’18