The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  The now-elderly survivors who had known and loved him were ignored when they raised their voices in protest. ‘They have such wrong ideas about him, that he was a recluse, and that he made friends with little girls but was too shy to talk to grown ups,’ recalled Ethel Hatch in a radio talk. Gertrude Anderson added, ‘Many people have said that he liked children only as long as they were really children and did not care about them when they grew up. This was not my experience …’. ‘I have such vivid memories of happy times spent in his company that I am unable to stand aside without protest while he is dismissed as “dull,”’ wrote Enid Shawyer to the Observer. ‘He was always completely at ease with women,’ added Ethel Rowell. But their remarks were to no avail.

  Children who had been photographed nude by him also retained loyal and loving memories, but even the views of these people who knew first-hand about the reality of his nude photographic sessions were brushed aside. Beatrice Hatch, whom Carroll had photographed nude as a little girl, mourned how badly he would be missed, and, ‘above all, the true affection that grows scarcer in these latter days’. Diana Bannister, the daughter of Annie Henderson, who had also been photographed nude as a little girl by Carroll, protested that her mother had been really angry at suggestions that there had been anything unhealthy in his interest in small girls.22

  But nobody cared what they had to say.

  Before long, Carroll seemed to be permanently on the verge of checking in at Bates’ Motel, with no motive too sinister to ascribe to him and nothing too outrageous to pin upon him. Some extremely strange essays, such as that by the American psychoanalyst John Skinner, became quite influential. Skinner’s assessment of Carroll, published in 1947, is worth examining in a little more detail here, partly because it is still seriously quoted today.

  Here is the un-edited beginning of a long nonsense letter that Carroll wrote to a little boy. In his paper, Skinner assured his readers it was ’Full of rejection, with little friendliness in its tone’:

  My dear Bertie,

  I would have been very glad to write to you as you wish, only there are several objections. I think, when you have heard them, you will see that I am right in saying “No”.

  The first objection is, I’ve got no ink. You don’t believe it? Ah, you should have seen the ink there was in my days! (About the time of the battle of Waterloo: I was a soldier in that battle.) Why, you had only to pour a little of it on the paper, and it went on by itself! This ink is so stupid, if you begin a word for it, it can’t even finish it by itself!

  The next objection is, I’ve no time. You don’t believe that, you say? Well, who cares? You should have seen the time there was in my days! (At the time of the battle of Waterloo, where I led a regiment.) There were always 25 hours in the day – sometimes 30 or 40.

  The third and greatest objection is, my great dislike for children. I don’t know why, I’m sure: but I hate them – just as one hates arm-chairs and plum-pudding! You don’t believe that, don’t you? Did I ever say you would? Ah, you should have seen the children there were in my days! (Battle of Waterloo …)23

  This letter is not unlike a stage ‘comic monologue’ of a type with which both Carroll and Bertie, a child actor, would have been familiar. It uses a rhythmic, repetitious device of saying apparently insulting things, which are then revealed as affectionately ridiculous, a style Carroll often used when writing to girls. It is clear from Carroll’s references to hating plum pudding, to having ’25 hours in the day – sometimes 30 or 40’, and using ink that writes by itself, and so on, that he is joking throughout the letter.

  However, Skinner ignored all the humour and stated that the letter was a ‘clear expression of hostility towards boys’, and used misleading, highly selective extracts from it to make his deadly serious point that Carroll was gravely abnormal in his attitude to boys. Skinner’s ludicrous piece appeared in a respected journal and was being reprinted in serious books until quite recently.24

  One of the greatest boosts to the image of Carroll as ‘abnormal’ was, unfortunately, the careful biography written by Florence Becker Lennon and published in 1947.25 Mrs Lennon did her best to create a balanced picture of Carroll, even interviewing Lorina Liddell, Alice’s sister (Alice herself was unable to be interviewed). She also conducted a long correspondence over many years with Miss F Menella Dodgson, Carroll’s niece and one of the family members most closely involved with his papers.

  Mrs Lennon believed that Carroll would have been ‘normal’ if only he had not been constrained by the unusual circumstances of his Christ Church life. Since he did not have that chance of normality, Mrs Lennon believed, he ‘loved’ little girls instead, even though he never actually did anything sexual about it. She portrayed him as a damaged person who had been raised with sexual repressions that deprived him of happiness and obliged him to live inside an abnormal emotional ‘box’.

  There is a certain amount of truth in this picture, although it is far more complex than Mrs Lennon supposed. Unfortunately, she had incomplete sources, and although she was a careful and conscientious biographer, some of the sources she did use have since been shown to be unreliable. She was also American, and did not fully understand British social attitudes of Carroll’s day.

  Crucially, she failed to appreciate that Carroll was the person he was largely because of his environment and upbringing, with all its faults and virtues. Had he been raised elsewhere – in 1960s San Francisco or 21st-century Beijing, for instance – he would have been unrecognizably different. Not only his sexual life but almost every other aspect of his life would have developed in completely different ways.

  So it was entirely anachronistic for Mrs Lennon to compare him with her 1940s idea of a ‘normal’ man, just as there is no point in anyone now making a heavily culturally biased comparison of him with a ‘normal’ person of our own period and environment. He must be seen in the context of his own society. In that society he was not seen as damaged, nor sinister, nor unhappy. He was also not seen as in any way perverted.

  The last letter in Mrs Lennon’s long correspondence with Menella Dodgson was a reply from Menella, written in wavering handwriting by the then very old lady. Menella could not conceal the hurt and distress which she felt, and believed other Dodgson family members would feel, at the image of her uncle which Mrs Lennon had suggested.

  Why do you look for such things, because I presume it came from you or the psychologist in the first place … And although we have not read the 4 missing diaries so can not be certain of anything, there is absolutely nothing in all the others supporting even the idea you mention … So there we are, a suggestion based on nothing but possibilities only. And the most unlikely person too. We cannot do anything about it. The 4 lost diaries could, if they turned up, but my cousin never hinted at it when he talked to me about them, and he had read them all. So we are quite as much in the dark as you are though knowing Uncle Charles quite well we cannot believe it to be true. Now, there will be lots written about it based on what you say, of course. You will not encourage such gossip naturally but other people will. I am sorry indeed that it has come up like this.26

  As the 20th century wore on, more and more theories, increasingly grotesque and disgusting, grew and flourished upon this framework of Carroll as neurotic sexual deviant. Only in recent years has there been something of a revision in this view. Yet, as any public relations expert will confirm, the weirder the subject seems, the better the publicity; so, unfortunately, Carroll is unlikely to lose this image in a hurry.

  Leaving the psychoanalytic studies and returning to the man himself, there is no sign that any of his relationships were abnormal, although there are hints that he did not wish to become too intimate with those outside his family. His family were very important to him; even the man most often said to be his best friend, Thomas Vere Bayne, was actually his oldest friend. Bayne’s father had known Carroll’s father and Baynes’ family had known Carroll’s family since childhood. Bayne himself was a congenial p
lodder with whom Carroll seems to have had little in common. They got on well, but Bayne and his life and opinions certainly do not figure much in Carroll’s diaries. The two of them never, for example, holidayed together and rarely accompanied each other to social events. Carroll had many other friends of both sexes, but he did not appear to confide in them. In a way, he did not seem to need them.

  Children, of course, were a different matter. He had a gift for entertaining them, he liked the things they liked, he approved of them and he was effortlessly popular with them. They did not get possessive and they did not ask him difficult questions, but they were truthful, sincere and human. They honestly loved him, and then they grew up and left him, with no hard feelings on either side, and with the door always open for them to return if they wished.

  That he could enjoy their affection without feeling evil and threatened, can be seen from a letter he wrote to a young friend, Hilda Moberly Bell: ‘It is sweet of you children, to sign your letters to me, after only once seeing me, as you do! When I get letters signed “your loving,” I always kiss the signature. You see I’m a sentimental old fogey!”27

  Since children were, as far as the Victorian mind was concerned, sexless and therefore sinless, he could have as many beautiful little child-friends as he liked. Like lovable little animals, they surrounded him with friendly warmth. As he said to Girdlestone, it was like a tonic to him. If the girls sensed any emotional neediness in his wish to be accepted and appreciated by them, they did not mind. He made their lives happy and was good to them, and most of them were sincerely kind to him in return.

  A facsimile of the final page of the handwritten ‘Alice’s Adventures Under Ground’. Carroll originally sketched Alice Liddell, with short, dark hair, at the end of the text. Later, presumably unsatisfied with his efforts, he pasted one of his photographs over his drawing.

  6

  ‘Child of the pure unclouded brow’

  Alice

  ‘Is she like me?’ Alice asked eagerly, for the thought crossed her mind, ‘there’s another little girl in the garden, somewhere!’

  Through the Looking Glass

  One day (so the story goes), a shy Oxford don called Lewis Carroll took the three small daughters of his Dean out rowing on the river. They were called Edith, Lorina and Alice. The golden-haired Alice, his favourite, asked him to tell them a story. As they glided over the water, he did, and then he carefully wrote it out for her. The story became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, an international bestseller. To Alice’s delight, a follow-up story about her was also a great success.

  It would be charming if it had been like that – but it was not. Alice had short, dark hair, cut in an unusual, almost boyish style, and by the time Alice in Wonderland was published, she was well into her teens, and had had little to do with Carroll for years. Far from being delighted, Alice Liddell did not own up to being Carroll’s muse until she was an old woman, and that was only when she wanted the proceeds from selling the original manuscript which Carroll had given her.

  The legend also continues that Carroll, supposedly shy and awkward with women, was unusual because he could only relate properly to children. He fell hopelessly in love with the beautiful Alice as she grew older, and may even have proposed to her. (Given the perversions of which Carroll has sometimes been accused, an alternate version, these days, has Carroll as a Victorian version of Humbert Humbert with Alice as his Lolita.) Sometimes in this tale there is a story of a quarrel with Alice’s family about some vague and undefined matter to do with love. And that is where the story peters out.

  The fairy tale has some truth in it, of course. Alice sounds as if she was a captivating child, and Carroll was very fond of her. Although he was sociable enough with adults, he loved playing with the Liddell children when he was a young man living a bachelor existence at Christ Church.

  But there is one character who never fitted into the fairy tale from the start. Alice’s older brother, Harry, was Carroll’s reason for becoming involved with the Liddells in the first place. He commented more about Harry in his diary than he ever did about Alice. His photographs of him show a long-faced, good-looking boy. In 1856, Harry stares pensively to one side, clad in a splendidly trimmed jacket with his tam-o’shanter resting on his knee. In 1860, aged 13, he is dressed in cricket whites with his bat propped up against him: still a boy, but only just. He gazes haughtily out of the picture with the dark and extraordinarily compelling eyes which he and his sister Lorina inherited from their mother. It is not surprising that Carroll thought Harry the ‘handsomest boy I ever saw’.1

  Before arriving at Christ Church, Carroll had revelled in his role as the well-loved entertainer of his 10 brothers and sisters. In the monastic, child-free atmosphere of the college, there was none of the lively chatter and bustle of his home, but the Dean’s energetic and clever children would have offered him echoes of the family fun which he had left behind. Seeking out their company was, in the context of Christ Church, an unconventional solution to any feelings of loneliness – but Carroll always was unconventional.

  It was early March 1856 when he first made friends ‘down at the boats’ with nine-year-old Harry. Shortly afterwards, he met Lorina, (‘Ina’), aged seven, and Alice, who was nearly four. He liked them all, but it was Harry in particular who came to his rooms, accompanied him on photographing sessions and went out on excursions with him.

  Of course, as Ina, Alice and their younger sister Edith started to grow up, Carroll included them too, although Harry was still the main one. The first time he took Harry and Ina out on the boat, he surprised onlookers who were not used to seeing a man taking children out without accompanying ladies. He recorded in his diary that it was fortunate that ‘considering the wild spirits of the children, we got home without accident, having attracted by our remarkable crew a good deal of attention from almost every one we met.’2

  Dean Liddell and his wife were tolerant of Carroll’s unconventional visits to their family, and may even have enjoyed them. Carroll’s new hobby of photography was an exciting development. Even the Dean’s aged father wanted his portrait to be ‘taken’, and the little Liddells were among Carroll’s earliest photographic subjects. Soon Carroll was on close enough terms with the family to be giving Harry a mechanical tortoise for Christmas.

  When the Dean and his wife went to Madeira for several months in 1856–7, Carroll and the governess, Miss Prickett, agreed that he would help Harry with his sums. The Dean’s mother immediately protested, because she feared the effects of overwork on Harry’s brain. But ‘as far as I can judge, there is nothing to fear at present on that score’, Carroll observed dryly.3 He continued teaching Harry, and took the boy to picture galleries, on outings and to chapel. He jotted down Harry’s funny remarks, and Harry wrote to him when he was away from Oxford. Gradually, Carroll became part of the scenery as far as the Liddell children were concerned. ‘I don’t know how we first knew Mr. Dodgson,’ Ina recalled, many years later.4

  Of course, in the stuffy and socially restricted world of Christ Church, nothing that was remotely unusual went unnoticed. Eventually, the unconventionality of Carroll’s visits to the children attracted enough gossip to be a problem, although the problem was nothing to do with Alice. By May 1857, Carroll was remarking in his diary that, ‘I find to my great surprise that my notice of [the children] is construed by some men into attentions to the governess, Miss Prickett …’.5 Fortunately, Miss Prickett did not seem to mind this threat to her reputation; she may already have had her eye on the landlord of the Mitre Inn, whom she later married. So Carroll continued to call on the Liddells, sometimes taking photographs, and sometimes just playing with the children and telling them stories.

  His diaries between 1858 and 1862 are missing, but he continued to see the Liddells and took some good photographs of them during those years. He composed his poem ‘A Sea Dirge’ possibly to entertain relatives at the seaside, and said in a family letter that he had recited it to the children:
r />   … Pour some salt water over the floor –

  Ugly I’m sure you’ll allow it to be:

  Suppose it extended a mile or more.

  That’s very like the Sea….

  And he found it amusing that they indignantly told him it was ‘Not true.’6

  When Caroll’s diaries resume in 1862, he was 30 years old and he was still seeing the children. This was the year in which he was to tell them Alice in Wonderland. Harry had gone away to boarding school, by then, so Carroll’s time with the family was spent with the three next-oldest children, Ina, born 1849, Alice, born 1852, and Edith, born 1854. Occasionally he would take them out on boat trips, either with one of his brothers, with a friend, or with visiting sisters. The expedition would include good food – a large basket of cakes, a picnic of cold chicken and salad or something similar. They would progress at a slow and leisurely pace, lulled by the splashing of their oars and the clear, piping calls of plovers that wheeled over that particular stretch of the river.

  One of their favourite picnic spots was on the river bank near Nuneham House the seat of the Harcourt family. ‘Here, ‘rustic cottages set in masses of sylvan shade’ (as an 1873 river guide romantically enthused) were clustered about the picturesque Nuneham Bridge. At other times they would make for Godstow, with its huge trees and its old riverside inn, The Trout. Sometimes they would tie the boat up, go into a field and light a fire in order to make tea.

  On these sociable river trips, the grown-ups would allow the children to row, and they would all sing songs, or ask riddles. Sometimes Carroll would tell the children stories. On 4 July 1862, he first began the story of ‘Alice’s Adventures under Ground’. He would later rewrite this as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.