The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  Just a couple of days beforehand, for example, Carroll and Ina had made their way home alone and unchaperoned with the two younger children. They had both known that this was unusual. Carroll’s 25 June diary entry makes it clear that it was a notable treat for him when ‘Ina, Alice, Edith, and I (mirabile dictu!) walked down to Abingdon-road station, and so home by railway. A pleasant expedition with a very pleasant conclusion.’

  Carroll looked young for his age, and Ina looked old for hers, and on that trip they were doing something that usually only married or engaged couples did. Carroll obviously found it fun. What effect would it have on a hormonal teenager?

  Even 65 years on, Ina clearly did not want to be questioned too closely about what Mr Dodgson had meant to her, or she to him. She wanted people to think she had been a little girl, not a young woman who had been old enough to have feelings for men. She was prepared to lie to Mrs Becker in order to deflect her attention from the truth, and her letter catches her out in that lie.

  So, carefully untangling the threads of memory, secrets and lies, it seems that Ina, not Alice, was the reason for the break. And Carroll would not have proposed – not to her, nor to Alice – because at the time, he could not sensibly have proposed to anyone.

  Strangely enough, a suggestion that Ina’s feelings were involved would have been exactly the kind of thing Menella would have edited out of the manuscript in the early 1930s. She was very anxious not to upset or embarrass people who were then still alive, or their families. Ina may well have shared Menella’s sensibilities, but her deliberately misleading comments were largely – though probably accidentally – responsible for Mrs Becker acquiring the idea of Carroll being fixated on little girls. It was an idea which led to a mountain of misunderstanding, and eventually caused great distress to Menella.

  Carroll’s friendship with the children was never resumed, although he saw the younger Liddell children briefly from time to time. Highly significantly, he was never allowed to take Ina out again, even with a chaperone, and the river trips came to a firm stop. In fact, he noted on 12 May the following year that Mrs Liddell would not let any of her daughters come out with him (even though he had not asked for Ina). ‘Rather superfluous caution’ he added bitterly. When he eventually presented ‘Alice’s Adventures under Ground’ to Alice, she was 12 years old. It was November 1864, two-and-a-half years after the original trip and nearly 18 months after the fateful interview at the Deanery.

  His offering was a very attractive little book, with a title page bordered by an exquisite design of blue and mauve cornflowers and pink convolvulus. Flowers like these must have dotted the golden cornfields and river banks as the party rowed along in early July. Inside the border, Carroll carefully combined ivy and foxgloves to make a design twining around the red and blue letters of the title. Interestingly, in the then widely-known language of flowers, these two intertwined plants represent the two opposing qualities of fidelity and insincerity.

  No doubt the family was pleased with the little book, for they kept it out for guests to read, but it was a postscript to the friendship rather than a celebration of it. The following 6 April, Carroll saw a painting of the three girls on show at the British Institution, and commented wistfully that it was ‘a very pretty picture on the whole. Ina looking a little too severe and melancholy, much as I am sure she would have looked, sitting to a stranger. …’14 Then there was a chance meeting with Alice and Miss Prickett on 11 May 1865, in which Alice was ‘changed a good deal, and hardly for the better’. And that was about the end of the close Liddell friendship.

  His little book, though, continued to occupy him. He already had the idea of making an edition for general public sale, and he began changing and expanding the text of ‘Under Ground’. He removed some references to the Liddells, and also made some clever improvements, such as rewriting the original ‘Mouse’s Tale’ in caudate rhyme – otherwise known as ‘tail rhyme’. After much deliberation as to titles (he mercifully rejected ‘Alice’s Hour in Elfland’ and several others equally bad), he entitled his book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It is notable that when considering ideas for the title, he explicitly rejected the idea of anything associated with ‘morality’.15

  In April 1864, Carroll hired John Tenniel to illustrate the book. Tenniel and Alice are now inextricably linked in the public mind, but at the time Tenniel seemed an unconventional choice of illustrator. Already 44 years old, he was established as a major political cartoonist, and he charged an extremely high fee: Carroll was a total unknown, and was paying Tenniel out of his own modestly-lined pocket. Yet Carroll’s visual instincts did not fail, for, of course, Tenniel was just the right man for the job. His drawings, with pantomime-like ‘Big Heads’ for the more outlandish characters, gave the book its ideal blend of gravitas and buffoonery.

  The firm of Macmillan & Co agreed to publish the book for Carroll. Since its foundation in 1843, Macmillan had become a highly reputable imprint with a respected stable of authors, and it had good relationships with writers, booksellers and distributors. Contrary to conventional modern practice, Macmillan expected Carroll to cover the cost of publishing, and marketed the book in exchange for a commission on sales. Although not the kind of publishing deal with which we are most familiar today, it was a common type of arrangement then, falling somewhere between modern ideas of conventional publishing and self-publishing.

  Carroll supervised the illustrations and printing of all his books very closely, to the irritation of both illustrators and publishers. By the end of June 1865, 2,000 copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland had been printed by the Clarendon Press, at Carroll’s expense. He was presumably pleased, although, as ever, his diary conveys little about his feelings. Unfortunately, Tenniel was not pleased at all, and complained that he was entirely dissatisfied with the printing of the pictures.

  If Tenniel was not happy, then Carroll would not be happy either. On 2August, he decided to withdraw the whole printing and get the book redone at a different printer’s, Clay’s. He recalled all the presentation copies he had had made, Clarendon wrote off £27 11s 0d and Carroll sold the disbound first edition copies to an American publisher, D Appleton & Co. The very few copies of this true first edition that were not sent back to Carroll are now like the Holy Grail for book collectors. Even copies of the ‘second’ first edition (Clay’s version) go for astronomical prices.

  So Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland greeted the world, and Carroll’s life would now change forever. So, perhaps, would Alice’s. She would never again be free of the feeling that people might see her only as the ‘girl from Wonderland’ rather than her own self.

  Yet there is a further mystery about Alice Liddell. Carroll made efforts to get Tenniel to draw a girl with long fair hair, in contrast to Alice’s short, dark hair. His own illustrations for ‘Alice’s Adventures under Ground’ show a long-haired girl – a girl who could therefore not be Alice Liddell.

  He did intend his little book as a gift to Alice Liddell, of course. It can be viewed at the British Library and there are various facsimiles on sale. At the very end of the manuscript, it can be seen that Carroll drew a small picture frame. In it, he first sketched a picture of Alice Liddell – with short, (very) dark hair. Then, presumably unsatisfied with his efforts, he pasted one of his photographs of her over his drawing. So there is no doubt that the book was for Alice Liddell – but it was clearly about some other girl who had long, fair hair. Perhaps nobody realized the significance of this at the time. As so often was the case, Carroll left others to make their own assumptions about what he meant.

  Furthermore, the 1886 facsimile edition that Carroll presented to the grown-up Alice Hargreaves (née Liddell) is most pointedly inscribed ‘To Her whose namesake [my italics] one happy summer day, inspired his story: from the Author.’ Did Alice realize, when she read the inscription, that it was not her, but her namesake, who had inspired the story? If she had, this might help explain why she was never particularly keen to
tell the world that she was ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

  And who might her namesake have been?

  There is no doubt that the young Alice Liddell meant a lot to Carroll, even if not as much as many seem to think. In March 1863 Carroll noted in his diary that he had begun a poem in which he meant to embody something about Alice. This was not an unusual sort of thing for a poetic Victorian gentleman to do. He also remembered her later in his life as ‘an entirely fascinating seven year old maiden’,16 but perhaps by the time she had grown up, Mrs Hargreaves was not as appealing as she had been in her childhood. In December 1885, Carroll told a Mary Manners that his heroine had been ‘named after a real Alice, but [was] none the less a dream-child’. And in a letter to Alice’s mother on the retirement of her husband on 12 November 1891, he was again careful to say that ‘many of the pleasantest memories of those early years … are bound up with the names [my italics] of yourself and your children.’17

  Even for the paradoxical Lewis Carroll, this seems a bit odd. Nonetheless, Carroll tended to speak the truth, even if he spoke it in ways which were not clear to other people. Here, as on several other matters, his ‘serious’ poetry has something to tell us. As always, no author’s poems and stories should be assumed to be autobiographical, however tempting it may be to assume that they are. The only things that poetry and fiction can reliably reveal are the themes and ideas that were on the author’s mind when they were written.

  In Chapter 4, some of Carroll’s poems, including ‘Stolen Waters’, are shown to reveal that certain themes were on his mind at around the time he wrote Alice in Wonderland. He was struggling with great personal distress at the time, and the themes he repeatedly used included poisoned love, obsession, and the idea of female children offering relief from the sense of sin. There is also a correspondence of several themes between the Wonderland story and ‘Stolen Waters’. ‘Stolen Waters’, with its message that a sinless little girl offers salvation to the male sexual sinner, was written in early 1862, shortly before Carroll told ‘Alice’s Adventure’s under Ground’.

  In late 1862, Carroll wrote another poem ‘Beatrice’, which also includes this unusual theme of redemption from despair through a child’s purity. It is not, perhaps, his best poem, but in it he describes a five-year-old child, Beatrice, who is full of the joys of life. She reminds him of another child he knew, and he says to her:

  Beatrice! Still, as I gaze on thee,

  Visions of two sweet maids arise,

  Whose life was of yesterday.

  In this poem, the two past-time Beatrices share a life, so they are in fact the same person. The first version of Beatrice, like the child in ‘Stolen Waters’, is dying:

  … pale and stern, with the lips of a dumb despair,

  with the innocent eyes that yearn –

  Yearn for the young sweet hours of life …

  The second Beatrice is an angelic vision. She is glorious and bright, ‘… a sainted, ethereal maid, whose blue eyes are deep fountains of light …’. And this angel of the dead Beatrice cheers ‘the poet that broodeth apart,/filling with gladness his desolate heart …’. Just as in ‘Stolen Waters’ only a few months before, a dying little girl offers hope to the desperate young man. Here, in ‘Stolen Waters’ the child with long, fair hair becomes a joyous angel, free from her lifetime’s suffering, and she shows the narrator that his path to happiness is to:

  Be as a child –

  So shalt thou sing for very joy of breath.

  So shalt thou wait thy dying

  In holy transport lying –

  So pass rejoicing through the gate of Death

  In garment undefiled.

  The correspondence of these themes suggests that the idea of a pure child with long, fair hair redeeming sin was emotionally important in Carroll’s mind at the time he was writing Alice in Wonderland. As mentioned in Chapter 4, Carroll at this time was tormented by particular feelings of sin, and a lovely fair-haired child is what he especially wanted Tenniel to show. The fair-haired ‘Alice’ of his story was to be his companion through his world-away-from-the-world. She remained with him. He referred years later in another poem to the ‘childish sprite/earthborn and yet an angel bright’ who stayed with him always.18 This pure and sinless child would be – and has, indeed, proved to be – forever young, forever companionable, and forever free of the bonds of conventionally moral society.

  Was this dead, golden-haired child a real person? An Alice Beatrice, or a Beatrice Alice, perhaps; or merely ‘Beatrice’, the famous epitome of pure love, leading Dante from purgatory to Paradise? For sure she was not the real, dark-haired Alice Liddell. Carroll knew that Alice Liddell would, God willing, grow up. She could not remain his muse forever.

  Alice Liddell did indeed grow up, and she joined conventional society. She never made the aristocratic marriage of which her mother had dreamed, but married a man called Reginald Hargreaves, inheritor of a large fortune. She became a noted society hostess, and what her granddaughter referred to as a ‘formidable woman who dominated the family’.19 Late in life, in the memoir which her son wrote with her, Alice commented unkindly on Carroll’s stiff-backed posture, and described his sisters as ‘stout’, although they do not seem to have been stout at all.20 She certainly was, to put it politely, tough-minded. Among other things, she forbade her three sons to marry, and she disliked the daughter-in-law she acquired when one of her sons eventually defied her and married in middle age. In adult life, Carroll and Alice Hargreaves were not good friends. His dream child, on the other hand, did not change.

  Carroll made a comfortable, though not a particularly affluent living from his Alice books. He did not choose to discuss the books face-to-face with anyone. However, in 1887, when he was 55, he contributed an article to The Theatre magazine. A stage presentation of Alice had opened in London, and Carroll decided to say what he thought about the books and their characters.

  His piece is affectedly sentimental, and written in the flowery language he always used for high-flown thoughts. It is intended for an adult audience, and it reflects the man he had become in his later years, increasingly eccentric and increasingly concerned with his new imaginary dream-child, the sugar-sweet Sylvie. Nevertheless, it shows what Alice meant to him by then, around quarter of a century after he wrote the first book. It shows the mark that it had left on his mind. Once again, he emphasized that ‘Alice’ was not Alice Liddell:

  Stand forth, then, from the shadowy past, ‘Alice’ the child of my dreams. … what wert thou, dream Alice, in thy foster father’s eyes? How shall I picture thee? Loving, first, loving and gentle: loving as a dog (forgive the prosaic simile, but I know no earthly love so pure and perfect) and gentle as a fawn; then courteous – courteous to all, high or low, grand or grotesque, King or Caterpillar. … then trustful, ready to accept the wildest impossibilities with that utter trust that only dreamers know, and lastly, curious – wildly curious, and with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names – empty words signifying nothing.21

  Once again, Carroll went out of his way to say he was describing an unreal child, the ‘child of my dreams’. He also made the specific point that Sin and Sorrow had nothing to do with her. A man struggling with his own sin could love his dream-‘Alice’ with nothing to fear.

  Interestingly, Carroll did not think much of his Alice books in later life. He told his friend Gertrude Thomson that he could not really imagine what people saw in them, and he said that he had devoted far more thought to Sylvie and Bruno than he ever did to the Alice books.22 He was a constructive man, not one to dwell on negatives, and it is not impossible that he associated the writing of the books with sinful times and sad feelings of his own.

  But of course, his Alice – his dream Alice – was to make another famous appearance in his life after he had written Alice in Wonderland. After his father’s death, grief-stricken from what he later described as the worst
blow of his life, he returned to his imaginary Alice and created and recollected more adventures for her through a looking-glass, adventures which he could ‘tell’ the vanished little Liddells in his head.

  Once more, in his imagination, his cheerful child friends might gather and enjoy his company as the river swept and sparkled by. Once more in his Wonderland, in his role of beloved storyteller, he was popular and happy. True, the children for whom he mentally told the stories that comprise Through the Looking-Glass no longer existed in real life. They were not dead – but the sunny days of their youth had gone forever and they lived now only in the dim eyes of a dreamer. He himself was that dreamer, and his ‘Alice’ was part of his consoling dream. The slightly chilling poem he appended to Through the Looking-Glass says most of this openly, and it is, of course, an acrostic on the name of Alice Pleasance Liddell.

  A boat beneath a sunny sky,

  Lingering onward dreamily

  In an evening of July –

  Children three that nestle near,

  Eager eye and willing ear,

  Pleased a simple tale to hear –

  Long has paled that sunny sky:

  Echoes fade and memories die:

  Autumn frosts have slain July.

  Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

  Alice moving under skies

  Never seen by waking eyes.

  Children yet, the tale to hear,

  Eager eye and willing ear,