The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  There were no moral conflicts, though, where amateur theatricals were concerned. Large Victorian families often made their own entertainment by staging amateur dramatics, charades and recitations, and Carroll joined enthusiastically in these. One of his favourite party turns was a short play which he had originally seen on a visit to the theatre It was J M Morton’s farce Away with Melancholy, a tale of cynical betrothal and love between two disreputable men and two greedy women.

  The play contains some comical ‘business’ with idiotic servants, plus several popular songs of the time. Carroll used different voices and characteristics for each part during his solo performances, and sang the songs as well, and the whole thing probably lasted about half an hour. He also noted in his diary that he used the voice of one of Away with Melancholy’s main characters, Mr Trimmer, when giving a magic lantern show to around a hundred children in Croft-on-Tees for the children’s Christmas treat of 1856. This was an ambitious marathon which lasted nearly three hours. As well as the food, bran-pie and sweets, he presented 47 lantern slides and 13 songs (of which he performed six and the children sang the rest) and he employed seven different voices altogether.

  It was not only when performing his parlour pieces that he used multitudes of voices. Some of his child-friends remembered being entranced at how his use of different voices brought the characters of his own stories to life. He also drew lightning sketches to illustrate what was going on visually in the stories as he spoke. It is tempting to wonder what he might have made of film animation, for he would have been well suited to its combination of finicky production techniques and lively, expressive caricatures.

  Like so much else about him, his storytelling sessions were difficult to describe accurately. His friend, the artist Gertrude Thomson, another of the few grown-ups that Carroll allowed to listen to him, was frustrated at how impossible it was to convey the magic of his tales. ‘It was like pages out of the Alices … I used to try and recall and record it. It was impossible – as impossible as to catch the gleam of color on sunlit water …’ she wrote.10

  Ruth Waterhouse, who met Carroll when he was elderly at a children’s party, recalls that the party soon became his party. He talked and told them stories ‘delightfully, and I remember how exasperating it was to be asked whether I would like another piece of cake when I was trying so hard to hear what he was saying at the other end of the table’.11

  The crucial point, throughout his listeners’ accounts, is that Carroll was telling, not writing these tales. These fascinating stories disappeared forever because they were never recorded. His letters to children who wanted them were charming and full of fun, and if another of his favourites had asked him to write a whole book for her, perhaps he might have created something else as good as Alice in Wonderland. But there is no record that a single one of his child-friends after Alice Liddell ever thought to ask.

  Of course, Carroll wished to be taken seriously as a professional man, and success as a children’s writer was certainly not an unmixed social asset in the rarefied academic environment of 19th-century Christ Church. Today, Christ Church has joined the modern age. It runs Alice tours for its thousands of annual visitors, and earns a good deal of money from tourism. As well as the Harry Potter’s ‘Hogwarts’ Refectory’, its porters boast about something called a ‘Jabberwocky Tree’ – although it is a little hard for the sceptical eye to discern what is quite so specially magical about this gnarled and leafy relic.

  It was all very different in the 19th century. Carroll had a public position to keep up and, as a clergyman, he was expected to have serious ideas. Christ Church had produced many great and important men, and it is safe to say that few of them would have concerned themselves with mere children’s stories. Carroll’s whimsies could, quite literally, have been seen as little things for little minds. At worst, the stories were also the reason why embarrassing groups of gawping trippers kept on turning up at the college specially to catch a glimpse of him, and why the porters had to deal with so many stupid enquiries addressed to ‘Mr Lewis Carroll’.

  In fact, most of Carroll’s large written output was not for children, and it was extremely patchy in quality. Much of it deals with mathematics or logic, or with topical issues that interested him and his colleagues at the time. Apart from Alice, his main claims to literary fame lie in some excellent comic poems and his long story-poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’. It seems that he made no serious effort to develop his talent for children’s writing or comic poetry, being apparently uninterested in analysing it and quite content to say it that it ‘came of itself’ for no reason that he knew.

  On the other hand, he very much liked to create and communicate, and he took a huge interest in every detail of the way his books were presented to the world. Also, in later life at least, he had no hesitation in speaking out in print as ‘Lewis Carroll’ about public issues that concerned him.

  In short, as usual, he wanted things both ways. The solemn don who wasn’t ‘Lewis Carroll’ was only too happy to be a hugely famous author when it suited him, but the performer and storyteller with his comical songs, cartoons and poems was forever being bundled into a cupboard by the dry and silent Reverend Mr Dodgson, who did not choose to entertain his serious-minded contemporaries.

  In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the quality of his literary output was so patchy. In particular, the Sylvie and Bruno books, written late in his life, were a real disappointment to many who had expected another book in the style of Alice in Wonderland. Really two halves of the same story, these books were published separately, in 1889 and 1893 respectively, under the titles Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. Almost entirely lacking in structure, they nevertheless have their own peculiar charm, and contain many gems of strangeness, wit and wonder. They have been hailed as the first deconstructed novels ever written, and have their fans, notably in France, where their peculiar ideas have been said to provide topics for câfé philosophers.

  Their main attraction for the student of Carroll is the unparalleled insight that they offer into his mind as it was in later life, as in them he set out his carefully nurtured thoughts for the benefit of his readership. Alas, shut up inside his head all alone, the thoughts seem to have gradually grown into strange shapes, like sprouting onions kept in a dark cupboard for too long. Both books are written from the point of view of an elderly male narrator, who is never given a name. He is generally assumed to speak for Carroll, as he expresses views which Carroll is known to have held at the time. He moves between a dream world and a real world, meeting strange creatures and characters en route.

  The fragmentary plot hinges on a novelette-type romance between two young adult characters, Arthur and Lady Muriel. These, though, are not the real main characters. Those are two child fairies who can be perceived by the narrator while he is in a dream-state. The male fairy is called Bruno, and the female, and the heroine is called Sylvie. Much of the tale is stream-of-consciousness, as Carroll’s work often was when he had no particular audience in mind, and nowhere does his literary instinct fail more profoundly than in connection with Sylvie.

  As has been described elsewhere, Carroll was deeply attached to idealized sister-mother figures, and little Sylvie was exactly this. She was protective, loving, gentle, good-looking and radiantly, sinlessly pure. Sadly for the reader who does not share Carroll’s taste, Sylvie is also mystifyingly unappealing. She moralizes incessantly, and the very sexlessness of her beauty and her unrelenting virtue make her seem cloyingly sentimental. Further, she is a prig, always preventing her argumentative little brother Bruno (who resembles a young Carroll, with curly hair, unclear speech and a playful nature) from doing anything even mildly sinful.

  This means, though, that Bruno does not have to cope with evil all alone. In Carroll’s personal paradise, it is the adoring sister-mother who vigilantly prevents the horror of sin creeping upon the boy unawares. She unconditionally loves him, kisses and embraces him, and shows him by ex
ample what he must do to be a good person. Sylvie will never be cruel or insincere, nor will she reject or hurt her little Bruno, the beloved centre of her life. There is something very poignant about it all.

  Strangely – and thought-provokingly – the interesting, beautiful and intelligent Lady Muriel changes into little fairy Sylvie and back throughout the story, and the male narrator has a great interest in her. He feels distress and even bitterness that he is not supposed to have love affairs, but is seen by her only as a harmless old man. However, she is amusing and kind to him, and she is one of the most likeable and realistic characters in the book. Perhaps those who wish to untangle how Carroll saw the opposite sex should study this two-sided Sylvie-Muriel creature. Or perhaps she is three-sided, for she also occasionally surfaces as My Lady, a gross, obese bully with more power than she deserves.

  In any event, Carroll’s powerful emotional needs and fantasies had a very bad effect on his writing style in this book, and it is hardly surprising that so many people deduced from it that he had lost his storytelling gift as he grew older. Here, for instance, is Sylvie at her most saccharine:

  [Sylvie] sang timidly, and very low indeed, scarcely audibly, but the sweetness of her voice was simply indescribable. I have never heard any earthly music like it. On me the first effect of her voice was a sudden sharp pang that seemed to pierce through one’s very heart. I had felt such a pang only once before in my life, and it had been from seeing what at the moment realized one’s idea of perfect beauty … then came a sudden rush of burning tears to the eyes, as though one could weep one’s soul away for pure delight. And lastly there fell on me a sense of awe that was almost terror – some such feeling as Moses must have had when he heard the words ‘Put off thy shoes from off thy feet for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.’

  Some might feel that this extract provokes entirely the wrong kind of tears. It hardly seems possible that the same writer could also create the following simple and elegant passage from Through the Looking-Glass, which is also about singing and tears:

  ‘You are sad,’ the Knight said in an anxious tone ‘Let me sing you a song to comfort you.’

  ‘Is it very long?’ Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.

  ‘It’s long’ said the Knight. ‘But it’s very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it – either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else – ’

  ‘Or else what?’ said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.

  ‘Or else it doesn’t, you know. The name of the song is called “Haddock’s Eyes”.’

  ‘Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?’ Alice said, trying to feel interested.

  ‘No – you don’t understand’ the Knight said, looking a little vexed, ‘that’s what the name is called. The name really is, “The Aged, Aged Man.”’

  ‘Then I ought to have said “That’s what the song is called”?’ Alice corrected herself.

  ‘No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called “Ways and Means”: but that’s only what it is called, you know!’

  ‘Well, what is the song then?’ said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

  ‘I was coming to that,’ the Knight said.

  Never good at setting priorities, and increasingly interested in pinning life down logically, by the 1880s Carroll was entirely unable to give Sylvie and Bruno a decent plot. He filled it with a hotch-potch of ideas on all kinds of topics, forcing his readers to wade through pages of moral and theological discussions intermixed with sentiment and whimsy. Worse, the clergyman in him increasingly felt that he had a duty to insert virtuous opinions, for the older he became, the more he regretted that he had not used Alice as a means of morally improving children’s minds. He seems to have had so little empathy or sympathy with his younger self that it either did not occur to him, or else he did not want to know, that Alice’s very lack of moralizing – the deliberate opposition to moralizing, indeed – had been part of her great appeal.

  It is a relief to turn back to his earlier work, particularly to Alice which is a showcase for some of his best comic poetry. For instance, the Knight’s song, when he finally gets around to singing it, is a masterpiece of nonsense and a wickedly irreverent satire upon Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence’, in which the narrator meets a poor but inspiring old man who scrapes a humble living. As Wordsworth wrote:

  … He told, that to these waters he had come

  To gather leeches, being old and poor;

  Employment hazardous and wearisome!

  And he had many hardships to endure:

  From pond to pond he roamed, from moor to moor;

  Housing, with God’s good help, by choice or chance;

  And in this way he gained an honest maintenance.

  The old Man still stood talking by my side;

  But now his voice to me was like a stream …

  Carroll’s old man also earns his living on the moor in difficult and eccentric ways, but his voice ‘trickled through’ the narrator’s head ‘like water through a sieve’, and he was certainly not above soliciting for a tip:

  ‘I sometimes dig for buttered rolls,

  Or set limed twigs for crabs:

  I sometimes search the grassy knolls

  For wheels of Hansom-cabs.

  And that’s the way’ (he gave a wink)

  ‘By which I get my wealth –

  And very gladly will I drink

  Your Honour’s noble health.’

  Generations of people have enjoyed Carroll’s comic poems, and they are still so fresh and funny that it does not matter that they are mostly pure nonsense, for in their ideas and images they are also pure poetry. Their rhythms, their choice of words, their flashes of luminous strangeness still connect with us despite the huge cultural differences that separate Carroll’s time from ours.

  Most of Carroll’s good comic poetry was written when he was young, but even in Sylvie and Bruno the edgy, witty, offthe-wall Carroll sometimes pushes past the worthy Dodgson to give us unsettling moments, such as the oddly disturbing ‘Little Birds’ poem with its cast of crocodiles and tigresses, and its crimes hidden in carpet-bags.

  … Little Birds are tasting

  Gratitude and gold,

  Pale with sudden cold:

  Pale, I say, and wrinkled –

  When the bells have tinkled,

  And the Tale is told.

  Even more extraordinary is the surrealistic ‘Mad Gardener’s Song’, in which an unnamed narrator believes he sees one thing, only to find that it is something entirely different; something perhaps that could never be seen at all.

  He thought he saw a Rattlesnake

  That questioned him in Greek:

  He looked again, and found it was

  The Middle of Next Week.

  ‘The one thing I regret,’ he said,

  ‘Is that it cannot speak.’

  The ‘Mad Gardener’s Song’ is the only poem from Sylvie and Bruno which is widely quoted in anthologies today, and it is perhaps significant that the verses were first told to Enid Stevens, one of Carroll’s favourite child-friends. She was a very bright, perceptive child, and she described how they would go for walks and he would make up the verses to amuse her, then rush home and note down any that he particularly liked.12 Once again, Carroll was producing good work for an intelligent, appreciative audience, and happily using his creative gifts to produce laughter in a friend.

  Although Carroll’s particular talent was for comic poetry, he was technically very skilful and he loved experimenting with form, with sometimes extraordinary results. A poem he wrote for the birthday of his friend Robert Bosanquet has half a hyphenated word at the end of each first line; surely never seen in any poem before. When read aloud, the hyphenated line introduces a pronounced pause, like a sneeze, in each verse, to rhyme with ‘Bosanquet’ and this is highly relevant to the subject of the poem, which is about catching a cold. It begi
ns:

  The year when boilers froze, and kettles

  crystallized the fender

  The natal day of Bosanquet

  Dawned on us in its splendour

  For those who wear wool hosen, catching

  cold’s a thing unheard of,

  But this great maxim Bosanquet

  Would not believe a word of. …13

  The undescribed horrors which sometimes appear in his comic poetry – the Jabberwock, the Boojum, the Snark and the Bandersnatch – are also memorable, for one of the things that makes Carroll’s poetry most compelling is the unexpected touch of darkness within it. Like that other great storyteller Walt Disney, Carroll instinctively understood how people are moved and thrilled by a flicker of fear. A touch of fear came naturally to him, for his own acute self-contradictions, his terror of sin and his questions about his own identity helped to give an eerie tinge to the cute little girls and the talking flowers, the argumentative animals and the clever wordplay. In Carroll’s best work there are always elements of strangeness and craziness, of frustration, anguish and loss.

  As discussed in Chapter 6, both Alice books were written at times of great mental stress, which suggests that as well as having sympathetic listeners in mind, he needed an emotional impetus to help him to create his best work. Making nonsense seems to have helped him to deal with his own feelings, so that in entertaining and amusing those he loved, he was also able to please, calm and control himself. ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ was the last major work which showed this particular genius all the way through.

  It is a long poem which was begun in 1874 and published in 1876. It is not specifically intended for children, and Carroll wrote it in his sisters’ house in Guildford while he was helping to nurse his adult godson Charlie, of whom he was very fond. Charlie’s lungs were being destroyed by tuberculosis, then more usually known as consumption. Carroll made up some of the poem during long, solitary walks which he took on the downland outside Guildford. He maintained that he had no idea what it all meant, but his unfortunate godson died by fits and starts and the poem is sub-titled ‘An Agony in Eight Fits’.