In 1849, he returned home, where he would stay before heading off to Christ Church, Oxford, two years later, following in his father’s footsteps. His university education got off to a bittersweet start, as his mother died at forty-seven, just two days after he’d arrived at Oxford. He had been especially close to her, and this loss marked the definitive end of his childhood.
At twenty-one, he wrote a poem called “Solitude” that revealed, despite his love of jokes, puzzles, and riddles, a pensive side, glum and highly sensitive. It also revealed what would become a lifelong craving for a return to innocence, manifested in his preference for close friendships with children rather than adults. The final stanzas of the poem read:
For what to man the gift of breath,
If sorrow be his lot below;
If all the day that ends in death
Be dark with clouds of woe?
Shall the poor transport of an hour
Repay long years of sore distress—
The fragrance of a lonely flower
Make glad the wilderness?
Ye golden hours of Life’s young spring,
Of innocence, of love and truth!
Bright, beyond all imagining,
Thou fairy-dream of youth!
I’d give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life’s decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer-day.
Even as he earned a degree in mathematics at Christ Church, Dodgson wrote poems and stories on the side. In 1855, he submitted “Solitude” for publication in a literary journal called The Train. This is the earliest recorded appearance of “Lewis Carroll.” Two years earlier, he’d placed a poem and a short story in another literary journal, signing both with the alias “B. B.”
He was tall (six feet), slim, and handsome, yet he often showed considerable discomfort in social situations. Then there was the matter of his being ordained, which further isolated him from a wider community. However, as the bishop of Oxford recalled years after Dodgson’s death, he did not pursue his religious studies as far as he might have done. “He was ordained,” the bishop wrote, “but he never proceeded to priest’s orders. Why he stopped at the Diaconate I do not know, but I think his stammer in speech may have had something to do with it. He was rather sensitive about this and it made him shy of taking clerical duty in church.” Although Dodgson was not prepared to devote himself wholly to parochial life, as his father had, the bishop wrote, “No one who knew him could doubt that he took his position as an ordained man seriously, or that his religion was a great reality to him, controlling his thoughts and actions in a variety of ways.” It may have not only controlled but crippled him. Dodgson never married or had children; many scholars have asserted that the relationship with his young muse, Alice Liddell, was the single great romance of his life.
Dodgson found a home at Christ Church, partly by winning a distinguished “studentship” honor, given to only the best undergraduates. This appointment offered him lodgings and a small stipend for the rest of his life, along with permanent affiliation with Christ Church—and access to its astounding resources with no obligation to teach or publish academic papers. There was a catch, of course; he could keep the fellowship as long as he never violated its restrictions. As a fellow, he was required to remain celibate and unmarried, and to progress to holy orders as an ordained priest. It’s unclear why he never got further than deacon; instead, he appealed to the dean, Reverend Henry George Liddell, for permission not to advance. For reasons also unknown, Liddell allowed him to retain his position as Christ Church fellow, even though this was a violation of the rules and unprecedented. Despite deciding against entering the priesthood, Dodgson was by all accounts devout and pious, obsessed throughout his life by notions of sin and guilt. He was extremely conservative in his political and personal beliefs. This is yet another reason why he seems inscrutable, and so unlikely as the creator of Lewis Carroll.
The transition from stellar undergraduate to undergraduate tutor was not enough for him. As one writer commented of Dodgson’s living quarters at the college, “the very intensity of his tidiness indicates what forces were pent up within this environment.” To the extent that he could, he satisfied his creative yearnings by slyly infusing his mathematical lessons with puzzles and riddles. One former student recalled, “I always hated mathematics at school, but when I went up to Oxford I learnt from Mr. Dodgson to look upon my mathematics as the most delightful of all my studies.” But something larger and more urgent stirred in his blood, and could not stay pent up for long.
At the age of twenty-three, Dodgson now had a secure position as a scholar and lecturer, and a regular income. His life changed profoundly when he was introduced to Dean Liddell’s children.
Among his many skills and hobbies, Dodgson took an early interest in photography when it was still a wondrous new invention. Like Mark Twain, Dodgson was a gadget freak—whatever the nineteenth-century equivalents of iPhones and iPods, he couldn’t wait to try the next big thing. The camera was no exception, and with his eye for composition, his artistic sensibility, and his desire to tinker with new toys, Dodgson loved taking pictures. It was a cumbersome process, the very opposite of today’s point-and-shoot, but he enjoyed it all, including the preparation of the plates. He constantly sought out subjects for his photographs, especially children.
As Liddell, a photography enthusiast himself, became better acquainted with Dodgson, he invited the young man to take pictures of his family. Dodgson began spending time with Liddell’s little girls, Lorina (known as Ina), Alice, and Edith, and their brother, Harry, taking them on picnics and boating trips.
The “golden afternoon” of July 4, 1862, would prove transformative for them all. Years later, Alice Liddell recalled the day: “The sun was so hot we landed in meadows down the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a newly made hayrick. Here from all three of us, my sisters and myself, came the old petition, ‘Tell us a story,’ and Mr. Dodgson (that is Lewis Carroll) began it.” He made it up as he went along.
In the presence of children, particularly the Liddells, there was no awkwardness: Dodgson was at his most charming. That July afternoon, as he later remembered it, “in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards.” Ten-year-old Alice begged him to write down for her the story that he’d told. He sat up the entire night, working on a draft, and eventually made it into a green leather booklet called Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which he illustrated himself and gave to her as a Christmas gift.
Dodgson shared his story with a select few, including his friend Henry Kingsley, a novelist, who urged him to consider publishing it. He expanded and revised the manuscript, commissioned John Tenniel (already celebrated for his political cartoons for Punch) to do the illustrations, and submitted it to Macmillan, which agreed to publish Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The first chapter, “Down the Rabbit Hole,” began:
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do; once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’
So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid) whether the pleasure of making a daisy chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a white rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
The book was initially released in 1865, but only fifty copies of a planned edition of two thousand were issued. Publication ceased when an unhappy Tenniel insisted on suppressing it because of imperfections in the printi
ng process, which had affected his illustrations. Those who had purchased early copies were asked to return them to the publisher, and Macmillan donated the rejected books to children’s hospitals.
After the necessary corrections were made and a new printer was found, Alice was published, in 1866, in an edition of four thousand that Dodgson proudly declared to be a “perfect piece of artistic printing.” (Only twenty-three copies of the withdrawn 1865 version are known to survive, and in 1998 an anonymous buyer paid $1.54 million at auction for one of those precious books.)
Alice was an instant success and sold out right away. Dodgson was thrilled at the reviews proclaiming his book “a glorious artistic treasure.” Like Charlotte Brontë, Dodgson requested that his publisher send him clippings of every review that came out, and he kept records of them in his diary.
The sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, which made no reference to its predecessor, was published in time for Christmas 1871, with a first printing of nine thousand copies bound in gilt-stamped red cloth. Today, the original manuscript is in the British Museum.
A section called “The Wasp in a Wig” had been omitted from the second book at Tenniel’s suggestion, partly because he didn’t think it could be drawn. He dismissed it with no small amount of condescension, informing the author that “the ‘wasp’ chapter doesn’t interest me in the least . . . a wasp in a wig is altogether beyond the appliances of art.” Tenniel was apparently something of a diva—he’d initially refused to sign on as the illustrator for Looking-Glass, and only after more than two years of nudging was Dodgson able to persuade him to say yes. Tenniel agreed, but noted that he would draw the pictures only if he could find the time.
Although Looking-Glass was not as universally praised as Alice had been, it was a best seller. Immediately after the first printing sold out, Macmillan went back to press for six thousand more. It’s no wonder that the critical reaction to the book, while favorable, was not entirely rapturous. The sequel, though brilliant, was more of an acquired taste than its predecessor (those coded chess moves!), if no less enchanting.
As the novelist Zadie Smith commented in her introduction to the 2001 Bloomsbury edition, Looking-Glass is “a more tenebrous animal than its sister, both in style and quality of its fame. When I came to pick it up once more after an absence of years, I found I couldn’t quite remember it other than as the repository where missing stories you thought were in Wonderland turn out to be—like a second, darker, larder.”
Looking-Glass introduced what many consider to be the greatest piece of nonsense verse ever written, “Jabberwocky.” It ranked in the top ten in a poll of Britain’s favorite children’s poems, along with Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” and T. S. Eliot’s “Macavity the Mystery Cat.” “Jabberwocky” begins:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
Carroll went on to write other books, including, in 1876, the mock-heroic nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark (141 rhymed four-line stanzas) and important texts on mathematics and logic, but the Alice books remained his crowning achievements. His writing career had reached its apogee. As Robert McCrum wrote in the Guardian on the occasion of Tim Burton’s “charmless mash-up” of a movie adaptation, the Alice books “continue to exert an indestructible spell: teasing, phantasmagorical, narcotic, existential and profoundly English.”
That he knew fame (not to mention great wealth) in his lifetime was a decidedly mixed blessing for C. L. Dodgson, as he was often known. Managing it filled him with terrible anxiety. On the rare occasions when he admitted that Dodgson and Carroll were the same man, he was either speaking openly with friends or corresponding with children and encouraging their letters. Otherwise, he said once, “I use the name of ‘Lewis Carroll’ in order to avoid all personal publicity.” Over and over, he lamented the unrelenting pressure to become a “public figure,” since he’d chosen a pseudonym precisely to protect himself from the burdens of celebrity. Dodgson hated the idea of strangers knowing anything about his personal life or what he looked like. Even those close to him could not resist feeding the myth of his enigmatic nature. He was “not exactly an ordinary human being of flesh and blood,” one friend reported, but rather “some delicate, ethereal spirit, enveloped for the moment in a semblance of common humanity.”
To that end, when he received letters for “Lewis Carroll,” he marked most of them “Return to sender.” Requests for photographs, even from relatives, were routinely denied. (He gave out photographs of himself only to children, usually young girls.) He begged friends to keep his real name private. When a bookshop catalog cited him as the author of Through the Looking-Glass, he wrote a letter demanding that Charles Dodgson’s name no longer be printed “in connection with any books except what he has put his name to.”
Desperate to keep his pseudonym private, he implored the Bodleian Library at Oxford to delete all cross-references between his names. The request was refused. Even though his identity as Carroll was an open secret, he was distressed by his inability to control its distribution.
He achieved a minor triumph when an editor contacted him for the Dictionary of the Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain. “I use a name, not my own, for writing under, for the one sole object, of avoiding personal publicity,” he wrote, “that I may be able to come and go, unnoticed, to all public places.” He added that “it would be a real unhappiness to me to feel myself liable to be noticed, or pointed out, by strangers.” And he begged for respect in not “breaking through a disguise which it is my most earnest wish to maintain.”
The Dictionary editor, surprisingly, agreed to omit his name—and so the book was published in 1882 with a glaring omission: this very famous pseudonym was nowhere to be found.
Dodgson remained a vigilant sentry of his privacy. In 1890, exasperated by the barrage of mail he received, he printed a circular to be enclosed with all replies to letters addressed to “Lewis Carroll.” The statement declared that Mr. Dodgson “neither claims nor acknowledges any connection with any pseudonym, or with any book that is not published under his own name.” (He might as well have added, “So please bugger off.”)
There’s a passage from Alice in Wonderland that invites interpretation as a commentary on the double-edged sword of fame, with its demands, expectations, and vicissitudes—and as an expression of Dodgson’s ambivalence toward his legacy:
“It was much pleasanter at home,” thought poor Alice, “when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me! When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought!”
(The meaning is heightened, too, if you buy into the notion that the heroine is a stand-in for the author.) By all accounts, what Dodgson desired most was the power of invisibility. Though he was a fanatic about photography and loved taking pictures of people, he treasured his own privacy, and struggled to reconcile this requisite to his well-being with the fame he’d achieved. “I don’t want to be known by sight!” he once said in despair.
He may have been paranoid about fame, but he was pragmatic. In 1879, he wrote to his publisher: “I cannot of course help there being many people who know the connection between my real name and my ‘alias,’ but the fewer there are who are able to connect my face with the name ‘Lewis Carroll’ the happier for me.” After all, he’d
never intended to make Alice in Wonderland public; it had been created as a gift for Alice Liddell, and only at the urging of friends had he considered publishing it. He had hardly conceived it as a commercial product. Another reason for his strict separation of church (Dodgson) and state (Carroll) was purely professional: he wanted his mathematical books to be regarded seriously, and feared that if scholars connected him with Carroll, those works would be dismissed.
Although Dodgson could accept that at a certain point his real name was not exactly a secret, there was the matter of preserving his privacy. He bristled at what he considered even the slightest invasion of his personal life—such as being accosted in public to receive compliments about his work. It was exhausting. (“But it’s no use now,” says Alice after falling down the rabbit hole, “to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”)
His encounters with eager fans left him uncomfortable, and he confessed that among the things he hated most were “having a tooth drawn” and listening to a stranger talk about his books. The notion of being gracious to admiring fans was lost on him. In 1891, he reported to a friend an anecdote he’d read about a pompous author who greeted someone with the line, “Have you read my book?” It left him mortified. “If ever I ask such a question of a stranger,” he wrote, “it will be due to ‘temporary insanity!’”
Even though some biographical accounts of Dodgson portray him as a cloistered academic, he wasn’t that, exactly. Between the age of twenty-nine and his death at sixty-five, he wrote a staggering number of letters—nearly a hundred thousand in all—proving that although he was shy with his public, he was not a recluse. That most of his letters were addressed to children shows his frequent unease in the world of adults; for the children he adored, he kept records of their birthdays and sent them letters with jokes, puns, puzzles, acrostics, and drawings. He toyed with inventive forms for his correspondence, including looking-glass letters that the recipient had to hold up to a mirror to read; rebus letters to be decoded; pinwheel-shaped letters; and delightful letters composed in such tiny script, on paper the size of a postage stamp, that a magnifying glass was needed to read them.
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