The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  There is a persistent rumour that Carroll quit photography because of a scandal involving little girls. This rumour is probably partly based on remarks in an essay of 1969 by Helmut Gernsheim prefacing the revised Dover edition of his book Lewis Carroll, Photographer.

  In this, he described a conversation he had had with a lady called Ella Bickersteth. She had been one of Carroll’s child sitters, and she remembered him with great affection. When she talked to Gernsheim, she would have been extremely old – in her nineties. Gernsheim reports that, despite Carroll’s scrupulousness when taking nude photos of children, the aged Miss Bickersteth remembered that a scandal had developed about him in Oxford around 1880. As a result, Carroll decided to abandon his photography altogether.

  By the time Gernsheim wrote his essay, a piece by Margaret L Woods had appeared in the press. Ms Woods had met Carroll twice as a teenager but had not become a friend. In her piece, she stated confidently that Carroll had ‘invited a very little girl to be photographed and took her almost unclothed. Her mother shrieked at the impropriety of this.’11 Ms Woods’ piece was crammed with inaccuracies and conjectures, of which this (as will be seen) is one, but her readers could not be expected to know this.

  As previously mentioned, several learned commentators had also put forward psychoanalytical theories which supposedly showed that Carroll was unable to fall in love with women and was fixated on little girls. They had little scientific basis, but it would have been reasonable at that time for Gernsheim to assume that little girls were involved in any ‘scandal’ there might have been. Significantly, though, Ella Bickersteth did not report that the scandal involved little girls, but as so often happened with Carroll, this salient fact was widely overlooked.

  So what were the relevant facts?

  Carroll directed that after his death certain packets of private material should be destroyed unopened by his executors. He had told Mrs Henderson, the mother of two children that he photographed nude, that he would add the negatives of her nude children to these items. ‘I haven’t destroyed the other prints. Perhaps you may be wanting more some day,’ he said.12

  He felt that these and other nude photographs might embarrass their (by then much older) subjects and their families if strangers were to see them. The reference numbers of the missing nude photographs in question suggest that they depicted the Hatch girls and Gertrude Chataway. All three stayed close to Carroll until the end of his life and were very fond of him, so the photographs obviously did not cause any problems either for the children or their parents.

  Yet so much has been written about Carroll’s nude photographs, that it is worth looking at the subject more closely before continuing with what actually happened in 1880. Edward Wakeling, a world expert on Carroll’s photography, has estimated that of nearly 3,000 negatives made by Carroll, only around 1 per cent is thought to have shown children nude or partly-clothed.13 These represent 8 sessions over 13 years with the children of 6 families, and all were done only when the children wanted to do it, and with the parents’ full permission.

  But even one nude child picture may seem like one too many. Even if there is genuinely no deviant intention, the spectre of child pornography casts a constant shadow over modern life, and modern artists and photographers cannot tinker with our own very strong contemporary taboos without causing anger, suspicion and outrage.

  This was far from the case in Carroll’s day. Nearly all men yearned to touch and gaze at the heavily protected and well-draped womenfolk, who were usually carefully guarded by their husbands, brothers and fathers. Small girls were considered to be sexless (when they were even considered at all), and photographing children naked was considered compatible with a wish to portray human beauty in its purest and most inoffensive form.

  There are no assertions, no reports of gossip and no hints or suggestions that any parent of any young child portrayed nude by Carroll felt threatened by anything he did. Nor did any of the few children themselves, after they grew up, suggest that they had been upset by their encounters with him: the opposite seems to have been the case. Carroll wanted to portray what he saw as God’s handiwork. He considered his nude photographs of little girls as celebrations of this, and he spoke openly – and with all kinds of people, including their parents – about all aspects of child nudity, both aesthetic and moral.

  For example, he made no secret of his enthusiasm for portraying Annie Henderson nude to her mother, Mrs Henderson, when he wrote it was ‘a chance not to be lost, to get a few good attitudes of Annie’s lovely form and face, as by next year she may (though I much hope won’t) fancy herself too old to be a “daughter of Eve”.’14 Neither he, nor Mrs Henderson (nor Annie, after she had grown up) saw a problem in his nude pictures of her.

  But Carroll was equally frank about the moral problems sometimes inherent in nudity in another letter, which was written to his artist friend Gertrude Thomson, in which he said he no longer wished her to use two particular child models in her drawings for his book because he was concerned about the way in which they were being brought up.

  I don’t think I have yet told you that I wish no more drawings to be made, for me, of either Iris or Cynthia, naked. I find they are being brought up in a way which I consider injudicious and dangerous for their purity of mind, and I will do nothing which can add to the danger. It is a real sacrifice of inclination … but if we are to follow the voice of conscience, we cannot always do what we should like!15

  Morality was a vital issue. The use of nudity had a complicated moral and social significance in Victorian art. It not only celebrated the artistic beauty of the attractive human body, but it aimed to arouse moral ideas in its viewers, encouraging them to reflect on social or political issues. Just as the storytelling aspects of Victorian photography are still treated with puzzlement or contempt today, so are its moral aspects usually overlooked. Yet these moral aspects are important if one is to understand what many photographers and artists of the day were trying to do.

  One of the most famous nude statues of mid-Victorian times illustrates this point. Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave was well known to Carroll, who recorded in his diary that he had met a lady whose brother had bought it for £300 and sold it for £5,000.16 This American statue depicts a chained naked woman sold into slavery by the Turks. The fact that she is young, delightful and beautiful as well as naked aroused a storm of protest (and, of course, created wonderful publicity for the statue), but ultimately, the public accepted the statement of her maker, Hiram Powers, that ‘it is not her person but her spirit that stands exposed’.

  Just as Uncle Tom’s Cabin portrayed the evils of slavery in readable fictional form, so Powers’ sculpture invited the viewer to acknowledge the moral evil represented by slavery, and he did this by showing a beautiful woman abused and ruined by it. And this evil, to his American viewers, was part of everyday life, since some of these mid-19th-century Americans owned slaves themselves.

  Some of Carroll’s photographs, such as the famous image of Alice Liddell in her ragged, off-the-shoulder beggar girl dress, would also benefit from being seen in their full moral and narrative light. Often criticized today for its supposedly provocative air, this photograph of the beggar Alice was admired in its day by many people, including Tennyson, and a copy was carefully preserved by Alice’s family.

  To its contemporary observers – including Alice’s hugely respectable parents – it would have seemed ludicrous to perceive it as sexual in any way. The image would have reminded them of one of the beggar children that they saw daily. They would also have known the very relevant fact that the photograph was one of a pair. In the other picture, Alice is shown in exactly the same corner of the garden – this time wearing her best clothes. So Carroll’s child is the same child both rich and poor. The pair of images made the point that wealth and social position were only on the surface; and that, in a religious context, rich and poor are alike in the eyes of God.

  Alice Liddell was a gifted little model, as
she succeeded triumphantly in engaging with the viewer and compelling attention in her role. Those who see nothing in the picture but a provocative, scantily clad nymphet, are perhaps imposing their own modern anxieties and preoccupations on the image, and also upon other Victorian art nude images, including those by Carroll.

  As far as young children’s naked bodies were concerned, countless contemporary greetings cards showed naked children merrily frisking in cherub wings or splashing comically in tin baths. Photographs of naked women would not have been acceptable under any circumstances on family greeting cards, and even semi-draped mythological figures sometimes attracted adverse comment, but it was obvious that for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the public saw pictures of naked small children as appealing and endearing. This convention continued right into the Edwardian age, and within English families, as the writer is personally aware, pictures of young children happily playing without clothes were taken and shown around to friends without arousing adverse comment until well into the 1980s.

  Nonetheless, nudity of any kind at all was a problem in some social circles, and Carroll knew this. It may not literally have been true that some ladies draped the legs of their pianos, as popular legend would have it, but there were moralists around who were always alert for any sign of anything potentially sexual of which they could disapprove. They saw no beauty or grace in the naked body and perceived sin everywhere.

  Carroll himself was morally over-sensitive on certain subjects, and so it was certainly not that he disapproved of moralizing per se. But to him, and most other people of his period, it was an accepted fact that children’s purity and innocence were the opposite of sexuality and sensual temptation. Carroll worked always on the assumption that it was normal to wish to avoid sin, and he believed his dealings with children were far more godly than any of the potentially sensual situations that inevitably threatened even the most ‘artistic’ encounters between grown-ups of opposite sexes.

  In accordance with this view, he believed it to be a grave sin to persuade children to do anything they themselves had the slightest unwillingness to do. As his comment to Miss Thomson showed, he would flatly refuse to use child models if he thought they had any bodily self-consciousness, for fear of unwittingly leading them to evil ways. So, despite mutterings from those who disliked nudity at any price, no scandal was associated with his small child-friends, and there is no evidence that his photographs of young unclothed children were the cause of any problems either for him or his contemporaries.

  The same cannot be said, though, of contemporary reaction to his photographs of older girls and grown-up women. Therein lies a greater possibility that a scandal was threatening to blow in 1880.

  Carroll took pains to emphasize to his friends that his own ‘romantic’ (as he put it) feelings had dwindled with age. Numerous comments he made indicate that he no longer considered himself to be a moral threat to ladies or their reputations by the time he reached late middle age. He seemed to feel that he was now capable of offering a chaste kiss to grown women and admiring their bodies more artistically – and less sexually, one presumes – than before.

  Throughout the 1870s, the age of his sitters had been rising, and his last ones recorded, in summer 1880, were the sisters Gerida and Gertrude Drage, aged about 16 and 19. They were friends of Julia Arnold, the granddaughter of Dr Arnold of Rugby. Carroll told Julia that he wanted to portray Gerida, the younger, in ‘gymnasium dress’ and she could also be ‘Comte de Brissac’ if she liked, dressing in a feathered hat and doublet and hose. He also expressed the hope that her older sister might also be willing to pose in gymnasium dress.17 Carroll’s photographs of them have disappeared, but gymnasium, bathing and acrobatic outfits could hardly be morally condemned since they were worn in public places frequented by families. Indeed, his faithful model Xie Kitchin had around this time personally presented Carroll with a picture of young women in acrobatic attire.

  At the same time, Carroll complained to Xie’s mother, Mrs Kitchin, about some increasingly virulent gossip concerning a recent incident in his photographic studio. After photographing a 17-year-old girl, Atty Owen, he had kissed her in front of her father under the impression that she was just 14 – and hence a ‘child’. It would have been fine for him to kiss a child, but a young lady of marriageable age was another matter altogether. Atty’s parents, who were both of a legalistic turn of mind, were outraged. Carroll noted in his diary that he had written to Mrs Owen that ‘the incident had been as distressing to her daughter as it was to myself, but promising to kiss her no more.’18 This unfortunate little joke went down very badly indeed with the Owens. Soon afterwards, Carroll, who felt he had done nothing wrong, asked to photograph Atty again. The Owens were even more furious.

  By July 1880, Carroll was writing to Mrs Kitchin:

  I met Mr. S. Owen a few days ago and he looked like a thundercloud. I fear I am permanently in their black books now, not only by having given fresh offence – apparently – by asking to photo Atty (was that such a very offensive thing to do?) but also by the photos I have done of other peoples’ children. Ladies tell me ‘people’ condemn these photographs in strong language, and when I enquire more particularly, I find that ‘people’ means Mrs. Sidney Owen!19

  Carroll knew well it would have been disastrous for him to gain a name as ‘unsuitable company’ among respectable families, particularly those with children of marriageable age.

  The Oxford Art & Antique Agency issued a catalogue after his death which listed various items of fancy dress Carroll had used in his photography. They sound charming, but as well as the fairy prince suit, the red fez and so on, there is a ‘large bathing dress – elbows to knees’ and one large-sized nightdress, listed as ‘suitable for use rather than fancy dress – 7/6d’.

  Carroll had been skating close to the wind in photographing young lady friends in nighties or showing their calves, especially when he was known to be a man who was interested in ‘nudity’ – even if it was only children’s nudity and even if he was ‘past it’. Respectable though most bathers, gymnasts and sleepers undoubtedly were, there was no denying their outfits were scanty by comparison with the whalebone corsets, padded bustles and petticoats sported by regular Victorian ladies in daily life. However ladylike his friends’ children were, and however gentlemanly Carroll was, this gossip threatened to damage his reputation. He kept joking about it all, but there is a slightly frantic note to some of the joking, both to Mrs Kitchin and to Xie, whom Carroll had been photographing since her infancy.

  Apart from the brief written reference to meeting Atty’s father, it has been hard to find out more. As with other troublesome matters – like, for example, the Mathematical Lectures referred to in Chapter 2 – Carroll stopped or avoided referring to it in his diary. Had Mrs Kitchin not kept his letters, the event itself would likely have disappeared from public knowledge. But even though his letter and photographic registers are gone, there are comments still extant which suggest that his overfamiliarity with the 17-year-old Atty had provoked gossip. Laurence Irving described how an Oxford lady had been egregiously ‘parading her outraged sense of propriety’ around town about the incident,20 and the persistence of Mrs Owens’ anger suggests that she would have been only too glad to hound Carroll until he stopped taking photographs altogether.

  He, of course, was obliged to find a reason to explain to the world why he had abandoned photography. He told friends that he no longer had time for it, and in a letter to a Mrs Hunt in 1881 he complained that it was ’a very tiring amusement’.21 What he said would have been the truth, for telling outright lies seems to have been against his complicated inner code, yet it probably was not the entire truth. Still, if he was to be persecuted for doing the sort of photography that increasingly interested him, then perhaps it actually was better to fill his time with other things, and let the vicious gossip about young women die away.

  In any case, there is no sign that nude children were part of the problem. We know
this, because Carroll continued to sketch children in the nude, and talk openly about it, for many years afterwards, and nobody complained about that at all.

  Alice as ‘rich girl’ and ‘beggar girl’.

  10

  ‘He offered large discount, he offered a cheque’

  Money

  ‘My dear Fanny,

  As we are about midway in the half-year for which I regard my periodical remittance as due, and as it is pleasant to prepay one’s debts, I enclose cheque for £30.’

  Letter from Carroll to his cousin, Mrs. W.E. Wilcox1

  Most people think that Lewis Carroll must have been very rich. After all, he wrote one of the best-known books of the century, and his pseudonym, at least, has become a household name. Yet his bank account, discovered after a hundred years unseen in an archive in northern England, tells a different story.

  Tracing its spidery way across the thick ledger pages of Oxford Old Bank, Carroll’s account began in 1856, when he was 24 years old, and it finished in 1900, two years after his death, when his brother and executor Wilfred had finally wound up his affairs. Its value lies mainly in the fact that it is the only major document about him which is both factual and completely unaltered. His family did not discuss Carroll with outsiders, either before or after his death, and if his friends knew details of his private life, they chose not to share them with the world. But nobody ever went through Carroll’s bank account snipping out the names they did not like, or rubbing out transactions they thought ought not to be there. So these rows of figures and names are a treasure trove of private fact against which to measure other information.

  The account offers details of people and places that might otherwise have been lost, and it points up matters that have been skimmed over in the past. It hints at aspects of Carroll’s life that have never been guessed at before, and complements the sparse information otherwise known about his finances – a matter on which he kept rather quiet. And the image that has so often been presented of Carroll as a socially inadequate loner is belied on just about any page of it.