The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  In those early years, he kept busy photographing his family, making numerous pictures of his ever-patient brothers and sisters, father, aunts and uncles. They were portrayed with a variety of props: chess sets, dogs, or, in one case, a penny-farthing bicycle. Of these family pictures one of the most ambitious shows five of his seven sisters sitting on chairs. Edwin, the smallest and very outnumbered brother, is squashed in their midst, and a sixth sister lurks on the floor almost entirely swamped in the voluminous skirts of the other five.

  Photography was often used in its early days to record works of art which otherwise would not have been available as cheap reproductions, and Carroll’s albums also contain many photographs of sculptures and paintings. He bought some of the photographs and took some himself, and his diary records his excitement at an invitation from the sculptor Alexander Munro to roam at large in his studio with his camera.

  Just as important as photographing artworks, as far as Carroll was concerned, was the chance to create original works of art himself. Like many of his contemporaries, he loved genre painting, in which the picture tells a human story, points a moral, or both. He, too, wanted to create art that illustrated poems, expanded on ideas or suggested stories. Today, many art critics disparage what could be called ‘fictional photography’ of this kind. When the photographs display the twin Victorian penchants for fancy dress and heavy-handed moralizing, it is hardly surprising that some of them seem ridiculous; but they were not all bad. Many, including Carroll’s, are as worthy of consideration as any other contemporary art form.

  Carroll’s genre photographs are very well designed and grouped. Some resemble scenes from charades or amateur theatricals, of which he was very fond. In 1858 he exhibited Little Red Riding Hood at the London Photographic Society. This showed young Agnes Weld, daughter of Tennyson’s sister-in-law, with a basket of goodies and an apprehensive expression. It charmed the poet so much that he later accepted Carroll into his home on the strength of it. The Elopement, taken in 1862, shows Carroll’s future sister-in-law, 11-year-old Alice Jane Donkin, balanced precariously outside an upper window with a rope ladder. In St George and the Dragon, the young models – three boys and a girl – are posed wearing extraordinary headdresses with lances and a rocking horse, in a representation of St George slaying the dragon and rescuing a damsel in a long white dress.

  Sometimes Carroll added poetry to his pictures, creating a careful matrix on the page into which each handwritten letter fitted individually. In one of the albums now held in the Princeton Collection, he matched up an image of Agnes Weld with a neatly calligraphed seven-stanza poem, ‘O fair the blossom on the bough’, which had been specially written for little Agnes by the poet and critic FT Palgrave.

  Carroll also sometimes created photographs that exploited an interesting prop that came to hand. The outfits that Carroll’s models wore in these story-pictures were chosen for their artistic and emotional effect, and some had actually been purchased from theatres where they had been used for pantomimes. During a visit to his friend the artist Henry Holiday in 1870, Holiday supplied a suit of chain mail, and Carroll made several elegant pictures of young ladies clad from head to foot in it. Marion Terry struck a particularly noble pose with a caption taken from Sir Walter Scott: ‘Come one, come all! This rock shall fly/From its firm base as soon as I!’ Other images with poetic captions also show individuals wearing splendid costumes, such as that of Miss Rose Lawrie, cross-legged and boyish in elaborate Chinese men’s clothing above a verse by Bret Harte.

  Looking at these photographs, it is easy to imagine what fun it must have been to devise them, and how delightful it must have been for the sitters to see themselves transformed into exotic characters so very different from their ordinary selves. It is not hard to see, behind the work of the grown-up photographer, the boy who had conducted his own marionette shows decades before – or even the man who would love to play with toys for the rest of his life. In fact, playfulness, in every sense of the word, characterized most of Carroll’s artistic successes.

  There are sometimes gentle allusions contained in his photographs which a modern viewer might find difficult to spot. Certain images of Alice Liddell show her sitting next to a distinctly ordinary potted fern. The fern itself may not add much to the picture, but in the Victorian language of flowers, which was very widely used and understood at the time, ‘Fern’ meant Sincerity and also Fascination, both qualities which the clever, lively little girl possessed in abundance.

  The distinguished photographer and photo-historian Helmut Gernsheim was an admirer of much of Carroll’s work, even though he was scathing about its allegorical and storytelling aspects, commenting that ‘the sentiment of these pictures is a lamentable concession to Victorian taste …’. Otherwise, he thought Carroll a ‘genius’, and he was among the earliest critics to say so. ‘With [Carroll], the whole arrangement of the figures is expressive’ he went on to say, and the accessories he used – a folding ladder or even a toy gun – revealed an individual taste and lightness of touch that was unusually effective: ‘… the position of the figure, the placing of accessories, the disposition of the empty space around them, the trimming of the print: everything plays a part, everything is arranged in a decorative manner. He was a master of composition … In grouping, too, Lewis Carroll is infinitely superior to his contemporaries.’6

  Gernsheim felt that Carroll’s pictures of children were particularly accomplished, and noted the care with which he made his photographs of family groups seem fresh and interesting. Not for them the hackneyed photo sessions that Carroll himself so mercilessly parodied in his comic poem ‘Hiawatha’s Photographing’.

  … Last, the youngest son was taken:

  Very rough and thick his hair was,

  Very round and red his face was,

  Very dusty was his jacket,

  Very fidgety his manner.

  And his overbearing sisters

  Called him names he disapproved of:

  Called him Johnny, ‘Daddy’s Darling,’

  Called him Jacky, ‘Scrubby School-boy.’

  And, so awful was his picture,

  In comparison, the others

  Seemed, to one’s bewildered fancy,

  To have partially succeeded …

  Carroll was interested in others’ photographic work as well as his own. He kept a special album, now in the University of Texas, to hold his collection of pictures taken by other people. Of these, the most striking are those by the famous Swedish photographer Oscar Gustav Rejlander, whom Carroll knew personally.

  Rejlander was creative and highly original (as his use of his cat as an exposure meter suggests). Much of his work was narrative in style, sometimes combining many negatives to illustrate his concepts in a most technically skilful way. Carroll owned several Rejlander photographs, among which were Non Angeli, Sed Angli, a famous image showing the heads of two cherubs, and Poor Joe!, which shows a barefoot, ragged boy crouched on a step in despair.

  In 1863, Carroll chose Rejlander to photograph him, and the result is probably the most famous picture of Carroll in existence. In this portrait, Rejlander presents Carroll as a photographer, and the image conveys harmonious collaboration between artist and sitter. Carroll holds a large camera lens with a cloth draped partly over it, and he is gazing pensively away from the viewer. His pose is dynamic and must have been difficult to hold. His body is turned, one leg is raised, but every line – from the curves of his hands to the angle of his white bow tie – is elegant.

  Unfortunately, Carroll, in his usual laconic style, recorded the visit to Rejlander’s studio without saying anything about his own thoughts and impressions on how Rejlander worked. Still, when he set up his own studio in Badcock’s Yard, Oxford, Rejlander was the man to whom he turned for advice. A studio was an expensive outlay, and it has been suggested that Carroll might have considered becoming a professional photographer, or ‘Photographic Artist’ as they were then often known.

  Some support
for this theory comes with a list of photographs for sale which Carroll issued in 1860.7 He even signed some of his photographs ’From the Artist’. His bank account shows that he did receive payment for the pictures, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford owns some enthusiastic 1864 letters from Dante Gabriel Rossetti who was apparently prepared to spend when it came to Carroll’s pictures: ‘I come boring you about the [photographs]. Everyone concerned has reached such a pitch of excitement about them,’ he wrote, before ordering no less than 30 extra prints.

  At one point, Carroll also entertained the hope that he might be able to obtain some funding from Christ Church for his hobby. Christ Church had a fund to be ‘apportioned somehow to the encouragement of Physical sciences’ he wrote hopefully in his diary, and he went on to speculate that his cultivation of photography might entitle him, as a college tutor, to claim some of it.8 Any such hopes came to nothing, however.

  In reality, however attractive the idea of professional photography may have seemed, it would never have been feasible. The life may have offered a more artistic and relaxed existence than the monkish routines of Christ Church, but professional photographers did not have high social status, and, most importantly, Carroll had an excellent job at Christ Church which his father had taken great care to help him obtain. He could not lightly exchange this for the insecure life of an artist, especially since, as the eldest son, he would shoulder heavy financial responsibilities after his father died. He must have known, too, that photography was unlikely to provide him with a solid professional career. As the 1850s turned into the 1860s, even the great Roger Fenton had realized there was no serious money to be made in photography – and the gifted Rejlander died in poverty. So Carroll remained an amateur, albeit a devoted one.

  During the early years, Carroll created quite a portfolio of photographs taken outside Oxford. He would pack up his equipment – a fastidious process which could last for a morning or more – and would travel with all his bags and boxes to see friends, family or extended family. He would photograph his hosts and their children during his visits, and stay for meals or overnight, sometimes for several days. This social aspect of his photography was probably a major part of its appeal. The photography enhanced, or provided an excuse for, many a pleasant social occasion, and his diaries show that when he was at home he liked to show his photo albums to his guests, partly as a polite way of soliciting friendly commissions, partly to entertain, and partly to be sociable.

  One of the best known of his social photography visits during this early time was to the Isle of Wight, where he had come to know Tennyson and Tennyson’s neighbour, the celebrated photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. He arrived on the island in July 1864 with his equipment and some of his photographs. Perhaps he was hoping to repeat the earlier success when his Red Riding Hood photograph of Agnes Weld had enchanted the poet.

  On arrival in Freshwater, Carroll’s photography immediately gave him an entrée into local society, with a local photographer lending him some photographs to look at. There was also, as he told his sister Louisa, ‘a gentleman and a lady (real ones, as my peculiar skill in physiognomy told me)’ who wished to see his own photographs. That same evening, there was yet more photograph-viewing. This time he and Mrs Cameron showed each other their photographs. Hers were mainly taken out of focus, he told Louisa, and he thought some of them were very picturesque and ‘some were merely hideous’. However, Mrs Cameron talked about them as though they were artistic triumphs, he added, and ‘she wished she could have had some of my subjects to take out of focus – and I expressed an analogous wish with regard to some of her subjects.’9

  Neither Carroll nor Mrs Cameron were to know that soon photography would start to take second place in Carroll’s artistic efforts. The success of Alice in Wonderland would intervene to soak up his time and (initially, at least) a good deal of the money which he might otherwise have devoted to photography. The book was published in 1865 and by the end of the 1860s it was clear that it was a great success. After this, Carroll understandably directed his commercial aspirations, such as they were, towards the writing of books. He moved away from being a photographic jack-of-all-trades and became more selective about how he spent his photographing time. He began concentrating on the type of photography he enjoyed best – portraits. He liked taking pictures of people, particularly girls.

  Earlier chapters have described how, as Carroll moved through his thirties he began to seek out little girls as companions. They seem to have offered the combination that he needed of loving, uncritical warmth and essential apartness, and many of his most striking photographs of them hint at this contradictory mixture of feeling. The children stare frankly out of the pictures, happily aware of being observed by a beloved friend, yet ready to run away and play when the session is over.

  After he built a studio in his rooms at Christ Church, parents began to bring their children to him to be photographed, and he started to make a name for himself for his pictures of children. By the early 1870s he had published Looking-Glass, and Alice and her two closest sisters were grown up. He had made one final photograph of them in 1870, the nearly-adult Alice staring rather glumly out of a large chair, completely unrecognizable as the responsive child she had once been.

  In the second stage of his photographic career, roughly covering the 1870s, one of his favourite subjects was a girl called Xie Kitchin. Xie was the daughter of one of his colleagues, George Kitchin – the one who had brought in the Prince of Denmark for him to photograph. Carroll was very friendly with the whole family, and Xie was a natural model, graceful and unselfconscious. He portrayed her both in costume and in regular dress, the first picture when she was five, and the last when she was 16, shortly before he gave up photographing altogether. One of his favourite pictures of her shows her attired in a gorgeous coat trimmed with Santa Claus fur, a furry pillbox hat and gloves – she had links with Denmark and looked the part to brave a Danish winter. Later, it would be Xie’s mother, Alice Maud, to whom Carroll confided the problems which led him eventually to abandon photography.

  The 1870s, Carroll’s final photographing decade, were to see a change in the public attitude towards photography. Quick, convenient photography would not become a serious proposition until the 1880s, but by now the art had reached the mass market. Hundreds of photographic studios had opened in towns up and down Britain to cater for the public’s wish to have its photograph taken. These little studios churned out thousands of beautifully decorated and engraved cards upon which were pasted either cartes-de-visite or the larger ‘cabinet’ photos. Thousands of men and women, boys and girls put on their best clothes and posed stiffly for their pictures, and stationers’ shops stocked ever more elaborate photograph albums to hold this unstoppable flood of images. These commercial family albums boasted everything from gilt-edged silken pages painted with flowers or countryside scenes, to carved wooden covers, brass locks and keys, and even built-in musical boxes. New picture card formats were hastily introduced, with names like the Victoria, the Imperial and the Boudoir, and they just as speedily disappeared.

  Throughout this busy time, Carroll ignored new technical developments, continuing to use the wet collodion process which suited him. After he built his studio in Badcock’s Yard, near Christ Church, he used that for a while. When he moved into a much larger suite of rooms at college, he abandoned Badcock’s and constructed a studio and darkroom within his own home.

  He was highly methodical in his record-keeping, and kept a numbered register of all the photographs he ever took. This register contained a brief description of every image, and would have been a useful document for anyone seeking an overview of his work and an impression of its scope. The sheer hard work that went into it is suggested by some of Carroll’s diary entries during July and August 1875. In these, he describes spending the whole week in registering and arranging photographs, taking up about 10 hours a day. He arranged, and nearly completed, his alphabetical index of negatives, he wrote up the chro
nological register of his photographs nearly to date and numbered them all. He arranged in albums nearly all his unmounted prints and his mounted cartes and cabinets, and entered them into his photographic register. He then went on, he said, through all the 4¼ × 3¼ and 6 × 5 negatives by means of the register, erasing some, and finding places for others. The register survived his death perfectly safely. Sadly, at some time afterwards, the careful and comprehensive record disappeared. It is just one of many major documents which are known to have existed after his death but which have subsequently vanished.

  The disappearance of any document inevitably raises speculation about its contents. Just as the loss of the diaries and letter register has made it harder for researchers to understand Carroll, so the loss of the photographic register has made it hard for researchers to trace the development of his photographic art. Perhaps most unfortunately, the loss of the register clouds Carroll’s reason for giving up photography in 1880, and it adds mystery where perhaps there would have been none.

  His abandonment of his hobby was, apparently, very sudden. One day, after years of hard work and apparently continuing enthusiasm, he simply put his camera away and never took it out again. From 1880 onwards, if he wanted to obtain photographs of his friends, he had them professionally taken at studios.

  Various reasons have been suggested as to why he might have done this. Summer, with its bright light, was the best time for the increasingly old-fashioned style of photography which he favoured, and, as the photographic historian Douglas Nickel points out, by 1880 his summers were being spent at Eastbourne, away from his studio.10 Yet Carroll had been going away on his summer holidays for years, if not to Eastbourne then to somewhere else, and he had not abandoned photography before. Furthermore, he was not at all busy in 1880. He was shortly to resign his mathematical lectureship and would be aware that this would offer more time for photography. Indeed, after he quit his job, his diary tells that he became lonely and concerned at his ‘reclusiveness’.