And now for the most significant part of the story. Ruskin thinks that Alice’s sisters, Edith and Rhoda, were also present, but he isn’t sure. “It is all so like a dream now,” he writes. Yes, Alice must have been quite an attractive little girl.
There has been much argumentation about whether Carroll was in love with Alice Liddell. If this is taken to mean that he wanted to marry her or make love to her, there is not the slightest evidence for it. On the other hand, his attitude toward her was the attitude of a man in love. We do know that Mrs. Liddell sensed something unusual, took steps to discourage Carroll’s attention, and later burned all of his early letters to Alice. There is a cryptic reference in Carroll’s diary on October 28, 1862, to his being out of Mrs. Liddell’s good graces “ever since Lord Newry’s business.” What business Lord Newry has in Carroll’s diary remains to this day a tantalizing mystery.
There is no indication that Carroll was conscious of anything but the purest innocence in his relations with little girls, nor is there a hint of impropriety in any of the fond recollections that dozens of them later wrote about him. There was a tendency in Victorian England, reflected in the literature of the time, to idealize the beauty and virginal purity of little girls. No doubt this made it easier for Carroll to suppose that his fondness for them was on a high spiritual level, though of course this hardly is a sufficient explanation for that fondness. Of late Carroll has been compared with Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. It is true that both had a passion for little girls, but their goals were exactly opposite. Humbert Humbert’s “nymphets” were creatures to be used carnally. Carroll’s little girls appealed to him precisely because he felt sexually safe with them. The thing that distinguishes Carroll from other writers who lived sexless lives (Thoreau, Henry James . . .) and from writers who were strongly drawn to little girls (Poe, Ernest Dowson . . .) was his curious combination, almost unique in literary history, of complete sexual innocence with a passion that can only be described as thoroughly heterosexual.
Carroll enjoyed kissing his child-friends and closing letters by sending them 10,000,000 kisses, or 4¾, or a two-millionth part of a kiss. He would have been horrified at the suggestion that a sexual element might be involved. There is one amusing record in his diary of his having kissed one little girl, only to discover later that she was seventeen. Carroll promptly wrote a mock apology to her mother, assuring her that it would never happen again, but the mother was not amused.
On one occasion a pretty fifteen-year-old actress named Irene Barnes (she later played the roles of White Queen and Knave of Hearts in the stage musical of Alice) spent a week with Charles Dodgson at a seaside resort. “As I remember him now,” Irene recalls in her autobiography, To Tell My Story (the passage is quoted by Roger Green in Vol. 2, page 454, of Carroll’s Diary), “he was very slight, a little under six foot, with a fresh, youngish face, white hair, and an impression of extreme cleanliness. . . . He had a deep love for children, though I am inclined to think not such a great understanding of them. . . . His great delight was to teach me his Game of Logic [this was a method of solving syllogisms by placing black and red counters on a diagram of Carroll’s own invention]. Dare I say this made the evening rather long, when the band was playing outside on the parade, and the moon shining on the sea?”
It is easy to say that Carroll found an outlet for his repressions in the unrestrained, whimsically violent visions of his Alice books. Victorian children no doubt enjoyed similar release. They were delighted to have at last some books without a pious moral, but Carroll grew more and more restive with the thought that he had not yet written a book for youngsters that would convey some sort of evangelistic Christian message. His effort in this direction was Sylvie and Bruno, a long, fantastic novel that appeared in two separately published parts. It contains some splendid comic scenes, and the Gardener’s song, which runs like a demented fugue through the tale, is Carroll at his best. Here is the final verse, sung by the Gardener with tears streaming down his cheeks.
He thought he saw an Argument
That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
“A fact so dread,” he faintly said,
“Extinguishes all hope!”
But the superb nonsense songs were not the features Carroll most admired about this story. He preferred a song sung by the two fairy children, Sylvie and her brother Bruno, the refrain of which went:
For I think it is Love,
For I feel it is Love,
For I’m sure it is nothing but Love!
Carroll considered this the finest poem he had ever written. Even those who may agree with the sentiment behind it, and behind other portions of the novel that are heavily sugared with piety, find it difficult to read these portions today without embarrassment for the author. They seem to have been written at the bottom of treacle wells. Sadly one must conclude that, on the whole, Sylvie and Bruno is both an artistic and rhetorical failure. Surely few Victorian children, for whom the story was intended, were ever moved, amused, or elevated by it.
Ironically, it is Carroll’s earlier and pagan nonsense that has, at least for a few modern readers, a more effective religious message than Sylvie and Bruno. For nonsense, as Chesterton liked to tell us, is a way of looking at existence that is akin to religious humility and wonder. The Unicorn thought Alice a fabulous monster. It is part of the philosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves. Occasionally the noses of these creatures are shaken by momentary paroxysms. Kierkegaard once imagined a philosopher sneezing while recording one of his profound sentences. How could such a man, Kierkegaard wondered, take his metaphysics seriously?
The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity. We all live slapstick lives, under an inexplicable sentence of death, and when we try to find out what the Castle authorities want us to do, we are shifted from one bumbling bureaucrat to another. We are not even sure that Count West-West, the owner of the Castle, really exists. More than one critic has commented on the similarities between Kafka’s Trial and the trial of the Jack of Hearts; between Kafka’s Castle and a chess game in which living pieces are ignorant of the game’s plan and cannot tell if they move of their own wills or are being pushed by invisible fingers.
This vision of the monstrous mindlessness of the cosmos (“Off with its head!”) can be grim and disturbing, as it is in Kafka and the Book of Job, or lighthearted comedy, as in Alice or Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. When Sunday, the symbol of God in Chesterton’s metaphysical nightmare, flings little messages to his pursuers, they turn out to be nonsense messages. One of them is even signed Snowdrop, the name of Alice’s White Kitten. It is a vision that can lead to despair and suicide, to the laughter that closes Jean Paul Sartre’s story “The Wall,” to the humanist’s resolve to carry on bravely in the face of ultimate darkness. Curiously, it can also suggest the wild hypothesis that there may be a light behind the darkness.
Laughter, declares Reinhold Niebuhr in one of his finest sermons, is a kind of no man’s land between faith and despair. We preserve our sanity by laughing at life’s surface absurdities, but the laughter turns to bitterness and derision if directed toward the deeper irrationalities of evil and death. “That is why,” he concludes, “there is laughter in the vestibule of the temple, the echo of laughter in the temple itself, but only faith and prayer, and no laughter, in
the holy of holies.”
Lord Dunsany said the same thing this way in The Gods of Pagana. The speaker is Limpang-Tung, the god of mirth and melodious minstrels.
“I will send jests into the world and a little mirth. And while Death seems to thee as far away as the purple rim of hills, or sorrow as far off as rain in the blue days of summer, then pray to Limpang-Tung. But when thou growest old, or ere thou diest, pray not to Limpang-Tung, for thou becomest part of a scheme that he doth not understand.
“Go out into the starry night, and Limpang-Tung will dance with thee. . . . Or offer up a jest to Limpang-Tung; only pray not in thy sorrow to Limpang-Tung, for he saith of sorrow: ‘It may be very clever of the gods, but he doth not understand.’ ”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are two incomparable jests that the Reverend C. L. Dodgson, on a mental holiday from Christ Church chores, once offered up to Limpang-Tung.
INTRODUCTION TO
More Annotated Alice
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was a shy, eccentric bachelor who taught mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. He had a great fondness for playing with mathematics, logic, and words, for writing nonsense, and for the company of attractive little girls. Somehow these passions magically fused to produce two immortal fantasies, written for his most-loved child-friend, Alice Liddell, daughter of the Christ Church dean. No one suspected at the time that those two books would become classics of English literature. And no one could have guessed that Carroll’s fame would eventually surpass that of Alice’s father and of all Carroll’s colleagues at Oxford.
No other books written for children are more in need of explication than the Alice books. Much of their wit is interwoven with Victorian events and customs unfamiliar to American readers today, and even to readers in England. Many jokes in the books could be appreciated only by Oxford residents, and others were private jokes intended solely for Alice. It was to throw as much light as I could on these obscurities that forty years ago I wrote The Annotated Alice.
There was little in that volume that could not be found scattered among the pages of books about Carroll. My task then was not to do original research but to take all I could find from the existing literature that would make the Alice books more enjoyable to contemporary readers.
During the forty years that followed, public and scholarly interest in Lewis Carroll has grown at a remarkable rate. The Lewis Carroll Society was formed in England, and its lively periodical, Jabberwocky (now retitled The Carrollian), has appeared quarterly since its first issue in 1969. The Lewis Carroll Society of North America, under the leadership of Stan Marx, came into existence in 1974. New biographies of Carroll—and one of Alice Liddell!—as well as books about special aspects of Carroll’s life and writings have been published. That indispensable guide for collectors, The Lewis Carroll Handbook, was revised and updated in 1962 by the late Roger Green, and updated again in 1979 by Denis Crutch. Papers about Carroll turned up with increasing frequency in academic journals. There were new collections of essays about Carroll, and new bibliographies. The two-volume Letters of Lewis Carroll, edited by Morton H. Cohen, was published in 1979. Michael Hancher’s The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books came out in 1985.
New editions of Alice, as well as reprintings of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (the original story hand-lettered and illustrated by Carroll as a gift to Alice Liddell), and The Nursery “Alice” (Carroll’s retelling of the story for very young readers) rolled off presses around the world. Several editions of Alice were newly annotated—one by the British philosopher Peter Heath. Other editions were given new illustrations by distinguished graphic artists. Some notion of the vastness of this literature can be gained by leafing through the 253 pages of Edward Guiliano’s Lewis Carroll: An Annotated International Bibliography, 1960–77, already more than two decades behind the times.
Since 1960 Alice has been the star of endless screen, television, and radio productions around the world. Poems and songs in the Alice books have been given new melodies by modern composers—one of them Steve Allen, for CBS’s 1985 musical. David Del Tredici has been writing his brilliant symphonic works based on Alice themes. Glen Tetley’s “Alice” ballet, featuring Del Tredici’s music, was produced in Manhattan in 1986. Morton Cohen, who knows more about Dodgson than any other living person, published in 1995 his biography Lewis Carroll, which contained many startling revelations.
While all this was going on, hundreds of readers of AA sent me letters that called attention to aspects of Carroll’s text I had failed to appreciate and that suggested where old notes could be improved and new ones added. When those letters reached the top of a large carton, I said to myself that the time had come to publish this new material. Should I try to revise and update the original book? Or should I write a sequel called More Annotated Alice? I finally decided that a sequel would be better. Readers who owned the original would not find it obsolete. There would be no need to compare its pages with those in a revised edition to see where fresh notes had been added. And it would have been a horrendous task to squeeze all the new notes into the marginal spaces of the original book.
A sequel also offered an opportunity to introduce readers to different illustrations. It is true that Tenniel’s drawings are eternally part of the Alice “canon,” but they are readily accessible in The Annotated Alice, as well as in scores of other editions currently in print. Peter Newell was not the first graphic artist after Tenniel to illustrate Alice, but he was the first to do so in a memorable way. An edition of the first Alice book with forty plates by Newell was published by Harper and Brothers in 1901, followed by the second Alice book, again with forty plates, in 1902. Both volumes are now costly collector’s items. Whatever readers may think of Newell’s art, I believe they will find it refreshing to see Alice and her friends through another artist’s imagination.
Newell’s fascinating article on his approach to Alice is reprinted here, followed by the latest and best of several essays about Newell and his work. I had planned to discuss Newell in this introduction until I discovered that my friend Michael Hearn, author of The Annotated Wizard of Oz and other books, had said everything in an essay that I could have said and much more.
The famous lost episode about a wasp in a wig—Carroll deleted it from the second Alice book after Tenniel complained that he couldn’t draw a wasp and thought the book would be better without the episode—is included here at the back of the book, rather than in the chapter about the White Knight where Carroll had intended it to go. The episode was first published in 1977 as a chapbook by the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, with my introduction and notes. This book is now out of print, and I am pleased to have obtained permission to include the entire volume here.
A few errors in the introduction to The Annotated Alice need correcting. I spoke of Shane Leslie’s essay, “Lewis Carroll and the Oxford Movement,” as though it were serious criticism. Readers were quick to inform me it is no such thing. It was intended to spoof the compulsion of some scholars to search for improbable symbolism in Alice. I said that none of Carroll’s photographs of naked little girls seemed to have survived. Four such pictures, hand colored, later turned up in the Carroll collection of the Rosenbach Foundation in Philadelphia. They are reproduced in Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of Nude Children, a handsome monograph published by the foundation in 1979, with an introduction by Professor Cohen.
There has been considerable speculation among Carrollians about whether Carroll was “in love” with the real Alice. We know that Mrs. Liddell sensed something unusual in his attitude toward her daughter, took steps to discourage his attentions, and eventually burned all his early letters to Alice. My introduction mentioned a cryptic reference in Carroll’s diary (October 28, 1862) to his being out of Mrs. Liddell’s good graces “ever since Lord Newry’s business.” When Viscount Newry, age eighteen, was an undergraduate at Christ Church, Mrs. Liddell hoped he might marry on
e of her daughters. In 1862 Lord Newry wanted to give a ball, which was against college rules. He petitioned the faculty for permission, with Mrs. Liddell’s support, but was turned down. Carroll had voted against him. Does this fully explain Mrs. Liddell’s antagonism? Or was her anger reinforced by a feeling that Carroll himself wished someday to marry Alice? For Mrs. Liddell this was out of the question, not only because of the large age difference, but also because she considered Carroll too low on the social scale.
The page in Carroll’s diary that covered the date of his break with Mrs. Liddell was cut from the volume by an unknown member of the Carroll family and was presumably destroyed. Alice’s son Caryl Hargreaves is on record as having said he thought Carroll was romantically in love with his mother, and there are other indications, not yet made public, that Carroll may have expressed marital intentions to Alice’s parents. Anne Clark, in her biographies of Carroll and of Alice, is convinced that some sort of proposal was made.
The question was thoroughly dealt with in Morton Cohen’s biography of Carroll. Professor Cohen originally thought Carroll never considered marrying anyone, but Cohen later altered his opinion. Here is how he explained it in an interview published in Soaring with the Dodo (Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 1982), a collection of essays edited by Edward Guiliano and James Kincaid:
Actually, I didn’t change my mind recently; I changed it in 1969 when I first got a photocopy of the diaries from the family. When I sat down and read through the diaries—the complete diaries not just the published excerpts—somewhere between 25 and 40% was never published, and naturally those unpublished bits and pieces are enormously significant. Those were the parts that the family decided should not be published. Roger Lancelyn Green, who edited the diaries, actually never even saw the full unpublished diaries because he worked from an edited typescript. When I first read through the unpublished portions of the diaries, however, I realized that another dimension to Lewis Carroll’s “romanticism” existed. Of course it is pretty hard to reconcile the stern Victorian clergyman with the man who favored little girls to a point where he would want to propose marriage to one or more of them. I believe now that he made some sort of proposal of marriage to the Liddells, not saying “may I marry your eleven-year-old daughter,” or anything like that, but perhaps advancing some meek suggestion that after six or eight years, if we feel the same way that we feel now, might some kind of alliance be possible? I believe also that he went on later on to think of the possibility of marrying other girls, and I think that he would have married. He was a marrying man. I very firmly believe that he would have been happier married than as a bachelor, and I think one of the tragedies of his life was that he never managed to marry.
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