At this point, Cohen gives way to ungainly speculations. Perhaps, he thinks, in 1863, when the newly married Prince and Princess of Wales visited the Deanery, Alice might have impetuously piped up: ‘I’m going to marry Mr Dodgson.’ And if Charles were present, perhaps taking it as a teasing remark, or not, he might have picked up the thread and replied: ‘Well said, and why not!’ Ah, teasing. That might have much to do with the case. Young females can bat their eyes, shake their heads, toss their locks about, feign innocence, and make outrageous suggestions all with intent to shock and call attention to themselves. And the three clever Liddell sisters were probably expert in these arts.
The biographer’s task, however, isn’t to picture wild scenes at the Deanery, but, as Cohen tells us, ‘to look beyond the writings and into the artist.’ He has set himself to account for Dodgson’s shyness, reserve, and melancholy and the springs of his magical creative power. His conclusion is that Dodgson, as a rector’s eldest son, bore ‘scars of guilt’ because he was a childless bachelor and a mathematician who would never be a priest. The father must, it seems, have been oppressive, although there is very little evidence for this and Cohen has to end the section rather lamely: ‘Had Charles managed to forge a union with Alice or some other object of his desire he would have been a far happier man than he was.’ Alice in Wonderland, he claims, is, in fact, about Dodgson himself, and his adolescent trials and stresses (although Alice could in no circumstances be anything but a little girl, absolutely certain of the rules she has learned and able to put down any amount of nonsense). Through the Looking-Glass is about Alice Liddell, but the game is more advanced. She climbs the social ladder and ‘becomes a woman.’ This doesn’t account for the irresistibility of the stories, which Cohen, in orthodox style, puts down to emotional and sexual repression. He has made a checklist of the prayers entered in the diaries for purity and a new life. There are many more of these, he calculates, when Dodgson was meeting the Liddell children regularly. His diverted sexual energy ‘caused him unspeakable torments,’ but we can consider ourselves fortunate, since it was in all probability the source of his genius. Meanwhile, without ever compromising his conscience or his religious faith, he had to endure his existence as ‘the odd man out, an eccentric, the subject of whispers and wagging tongues.’
Although Cohen accepts Mavis Batey’s identification (published in 1991) of the stories with their Christ Church background, he seems never quite to realize how well Dodgson was suited to mid-Victorian Oxford. Oxford hostesses were good judges of eccentricity, and the college halls were used to nervous, stammering, opinionated, riddling and joking guests. My grandfather, a tutor at Corpus in 1870, notes, ‘Heard this evening the last new joke of the author of Alice in Wonderland: he (Dodgson) knows a man whose feet are so large that he has to put his trousers on over his head.’ There is a kind of friendly resignation about this, certainly not hostility.
As to Alice herself, she was a creature of the golden age of indulged small girls, when Ruskin piled up valuable books for them to jump over, when Oscar Wilde rowed little Katie Lewis on the Thames, delighted with her selfishness, when Flaubert wrote a letter to his niece from her doll and Gladstone buttered his granddaughter’s bread on both sides. And Alice becomes a queen, but her reign will be short. As the century turned, the little girls of fiction were replaced by boys (Peter Pan, Le Grand Meaulnes) who were either unwilling or unable to grow up, but that is not the world of Alice. ‘I had known dear Mr Dodgson for years,’ Ellen Terry said. ‘He was as fond of me as he could be of anybody over the age of ten.’ Dodgson believed that ‘anyone that ever loved one true child will have known the awe that falls on one in the presence of a spirit fresh from God’s hands on whom no shadow of sin has yet fallen,’ but between ten and fourteen the shadow did fall. On 11 May 1865, he met Alice (by now thirteen) with Miss Prickett, ‘the quintessence of governesses,’ in Tom Quad. ‘Alice seemed changed a good deal, and hardly for the better probably going through the usual awkward stage of transition.’ Like every other child friend (though none of them were so dear), she had withdrawn her true self into time past. In Chapter 23 of Sylvie and Bruno, he expresses his nostalgia as a melancholy joke when with the help of the Professor’s Reversal Watch he turns time backward, only to find himself cruelly cheated.
It is distressing that Morton Cohen seems to care so little for Sylvie and Bruno, Dodgson’s parable of love and forgiveness. It is here that he is closest to his friend George MacDonald, whose Phantastes was written as a ‘fairy-tale for adults.’ When (in the introduction to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded) he says that he has imagined a possible psychical state in which a human being ‘might sometimes become conscious of what goes on in the fairy world, by actual transference of their immaterial essence,’ he is talking about something of the greatest importance to him. It is not enough to say, as Cohen does, that ‘Charles retreated inward when he should have travelled outward.’
Cohen, however, may well think that after thirty years’ patient study of the material he has earned the right to his own interpretations. Certainly he has avoided ‘the eccentric readings [that], while they may amuse, do not really bring us any closer to understanding the work,’ although, judging from his true grit as a biographer, he has probably read them all. The Red King’s Dream is yet another one. Here the authors, Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone, set out with the apparent advantage of living at Hawarden Castle, a few hundred yards from the Gladstone Library at St Deiniol’s. Their quest seems to have started there, with a strange conviction that, in Tenniel’s Wonderland illustration, the Lion is Disraeli and the Unicorn (in spite of his unmistakable goatee beard) is Gladstone. Tenniel was a political cartoonist, therefore the whole book must be a contemporary satire. (Dodgson, in fact, chose Tenniel not because of his work for Punch, but because the animals were so good in his Aesop’s Fables.) The White Knight must be Tennyson, and Tennyson’s two sons (not twins) must be Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In default of other evidence, an anagram will do. For instance, it is decided that the Mad Hatter is Charles Kingsley, so that the Hare must be his brother Henry: the Hare’s reply, ‘It was the best butter,’ is an anagram (though unfortunately it isn’t quite) of The Water Babies. But ‘we still did not know who the Dormouse could be…we could not fit him into the Kingsley coterie.’ It is anybody’s guess, but fit in he must, and he turns out to be F. D. Maurice, while Dean Stanley is the Cheshire cat, and Millais, because of his commercial success, is the Lobster who is baked too brown. And so on, faster and faster.
The only compensation is that the authors seem to be enjoying themselves so much. In this way at least their research is part of what Dodgson called ‘those stores of healthy and innocent amusement that are laid up in books for the children that I love so well.’
Times Literary Supplement, 1995
Old Foss and Friend
Edward Lear: A Biography, by Peter Levi
Edward Lear (1812—1888) made his reputation as a water-colourist after almost no training, and invented himself as an Old Man with a Beard. He is a very attractive example of Victorian self-help. It was not an easy life, of course. English humorists are all depressive, and Lear suffered to the very end from ‘fits of the morbids.’
Vivien Noakes’s Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (1968), her book on his painting, and her catalogue for the 1985 Exhibition are classics. Peter Levi acknowledges her work without reserve. It has left him free to write an eccentric, affectionate biography, and to indulge himself as well as his subject. Lear was born in Holloway in 1812, the youngest of twenty-one children. When he was four, his father, a stockbroker, was declared bankrupt. Edward had perhaps five years at school and scarcely knew some of his family. He was lucky that his much older sister Anne looked after him tenderly, and he never had to go out to work as a clerk. He was unlucky in having poor sight until he was given spectacles, everything he saw was ‘formed into a horror’, in being epileptic and asthmatic, and in having (at the age of ten) been put thr
ough an experience by a brother and a cousin that he remembered as ‘the greatest evil done to me in life excepting that done by C.’ Who was ‘C’? Lear kept diaries, but later destroyed all of them up to the year 1858.
By the time he was sixteen, he was ‘drawing for bread and cheese,’ then made a serious start as a bird painter, and was summoned to Knowsley by the old twelfth Earl of Derby to draw the menagerie. Another benefactor, Lord Egremont, asked him: ‘But where is all this going to lead to, Mr Lear?’ It led to the life of a wanderer, or rather of a voluntary exile. In 1837, Lord Derby (and others) paid his passage to Rome. Lear got himself an attic in the via del Babuino, and began to learn Italian. What was to be drawn was beyond anything he could have imagined, not the antiquities, but the views. At that time, as Levi points out, you could still see the tip of Mount Soracte from the middle of Rome, glittering white in winter, and then there was the Campagna.
Levi believes that Lear ‘became happy from the time he decided to become a landscape painter.’ After nine years in Rome, and the publication of two volumes of Excursions in Italy, there was an unexpected interlude when the Queen, pleased with the Excursions, sent for him to improve her drawing. This was a new opening, perhaps, but it came to nothing. From Rome he went on, travelling in discomfort inconceivable, to Calabria, Sicily, Corfu, Greece, Turkey, Albania, Egypt, Palestine, Athens, Crete. It was his ambition to paint the whole Mediterranean coast, with one last expedition to India. In the 1870s he eventually settled down in a villa at San Remo. As a young man, he had walked almost the whole distance from Milan to Florence. As an old one, he had to be lifted in and out of railway carriages ‘like a bundle of hay.’ But he continued to work. In recording the lands of summer, he made something like ten thousand watercolours.
Levi writes finely about images he loves of countries which he himself knows well. Temperamentally, I think he is drawn to sketches more than to finished pictures, to ‘dew-freshness and variety,’ ‘the heavenly-fresh sketch of the bridge at Scutari,’ yet, on consideration, he believes that the chromolithographs of the Ionian islands are Lear’s masterpiece, and out of these he selects for his one permitted colour illustration the view of Zante, which had worried Lear because he didn’t see how it could be made picturesque. ‘In fact it was that failure which lay at the root of his success…He drew a picture of perfect provincial peace and quiet, enlivened, if at all, only by a few normal-looking goats, but in doing so he expresses the true genius of place…The image has stood still in his eye.’
Lear was deeply interested in technical processes that might create a larger market for him, photography in particular; he didn’t seem to see how threatening it might become to a painter of views. Meanwhile, he continued to make a living in the only way he knew, and as his hero, Turner, had done he either got commissions, or showed his finished works to people who might be likely to buy them. Apart from these, there were his travel albums and the Nonsense books, both of which sold moderately.
Apparently he thought seriously of marriage and proposed twice to the same girl, but since she was forty-six years younger, he must have been certain of a ‘No.’ Friends, the visits of friends, their unaccountable behaviour, their many-paged and always-answered letters, were the defence against ‘cruel loneliness’ and the support of his life, partly because he lived a good deal through theirs. Frank Lushington, the dearest of all, he followed to Corfu. When he heard that another close friend, Chichester Fortescue, had been made Secretary for Ireland, he threw a fried whiting, in his joy, across the hotel dining room. There were tears, also, and ‘angries.’ Not a hint of homosexuality here, Levi insists, but this ignores the many lights and shades of that golden age of male friendship. Undoubtedly, however, the real married couple of the household were Lear and his grumbling old Suliot servant, Giorgis, an unsatisfactory cook (‘Fried oranges again!’) but faithful to the death. Giorgis did not think a poor man should want to live more than sixty years, and in fact died before Old Foss, Lear’s favourite cat, the other presiding genius of the villa at San Remo.
Lear had escaped the fate of a mid-Victorian jester to the gentry, established his own life and planted his own garden. Now, accepting his stoutness, his beard, his strange nose, he mythologized himself, delightfully, though more wistfully, perhaps, than the circumstances warranted, as the desolate Yonghy Bonghy Bo and finally as Uncle Arly, who wandered the world in shoes too tight for him. There was a mythical version, too, of Old Foss.
Levi wanders amiably and sometimes confusingly in and out of the diaries and letters, and up and down the years. But the book arose, he tells us, ‘from an attempt to put together a lecture on Lear as a poet,’ and it seems a pity that in the end he has left himself so little room for this. Lear was a skilled metrist, partial to dactyls (‘Calico,’ ‘Pelican,’ ‘runcible’), and a magic songwriter, with something like a reverence for the absurd. Levi says something about this, and, as a poet, he defends the limericks from anyone who may have found them disappointing because of the repeated last rhymes. But he goes over the edge, surely (as he does several times in this book), when he says that in the 1880s Lear was writing poetry which ‘no one but Tennyson (until Hardy) could rival for its lively and startling originality.’ What’s become of Browning?
Times Literary Supplement, 1995
The Sound of Tennyson
I think of Tennyson as one of the greatest of the English-rectory-bred wild creatures. In matters of theology, love, doubt, grief, and loss he is usually felt to have said what most people wanted to hear, but when he was in the grip of his daemon, as he surely was in ‘Break, Break, Break,’ or ‘Tears, Idle Tears,’ with its strange series of comparisons, or ‘In the Valley of Cauterez,’ or the last five verses of ‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava,’ he is not definable and not resistible. He was a superb metrist, who scarcely needed to care for the opinions of Indolent Reviewers, but did care, and he was someone who could hear the authentic voice of the English language. By this I don’t mean onomatopoeia (in any case many of his subjects for this—immemorial elms, church bells, steam trains—have unfortunately almost disappeared), but the sound of the language talking to itself. Take his round ‘o’s, which can be heard as he pronounced them himself in his recorded reading of ‘The Ballad of Oriana’: ‘When the long dun wolds are ribbed with snow…’ When my grandfather, as Bishop of Lincoln, preached the centenary sermon at Somersby, he quoted ‘Who loves not knowledge?’ and was told afterwards ‘You should have said know-ledge. Lord Tennyson always pronounced it so.’ Every round ‘o’ had its weight and its considered position. ‘Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row!’—‘Naay, noä mander o’ use to be callin’ him Roä, Roä, Roä [Rover]/For the dog’s stoän deaf, and ’e’s blind, ’e can neither stan’ nor goä.’ That is the Spilsby variation, of course. At times Tennyson seems to me to be listening, rather as Pavarotti does, in apparent amazement simply to the beauty of the sound s that he is inexplicably able, as a great professional, to produce.
Times Literary Supplement, 1992
The June-blue Heaven
Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife, by Ann Thwaite
In 1984, Ann Thwaite wrote, most successfully, the biography of Edmund Gosse, the Man of Letters. Now she has made a close study of another almost extinct profession, the Great Man’s Wife. It was a role that could end tragically, as it did for the second Mrs Watts, who had to live on in the painter’s house and studio for more than thirty years after his death, while his reputation faded to almost nothing. Emily Tennyson only survived her husband by four years, giving her time to work, with her son Hallam, on the two volumes of Memoirs.
They first met each other as Lincolnshire children. She was the daughter of Henry Sellwood, a Horncastle solicitor; he came from the disastrous Rectory family at Somerton. She did not marry her Ally until she was thirty-six years old. By this time the worst of his financial troubles were over (although he had formed a chronic habit of grumbling about money), and a few months later he wa
s appointed Poet Laureate. But for the past seven years the two of them had been eating their hearts out, while her well-meaning father forbade them to correspond. Sellwood was thinking of the drinking and smoking, the restlessness, the black moods and indeed the ‘black blood’ of the Tennyson family, the father an epileptic drunkard, one brother in an asylum, another one violent, a third addicted to opium from Lincolnshire’s homegrown poppies. Beyond this, Emily was a steadfast believer, while Tennyson was tormented and unresolved, particularly over God’s reason for creating sin and suffering. Another gulf to cross was the ‘deeper anguish’ of Arthur Hallam’s death, which had left Tennyson, as he said, ‘widowed,’ so that he ‘desired to die rather than to live’. But this, at least, was not a drawback to Emily. As a strengthening influence, she thought of herself as Hallam’s appointed successor. It seems a difficult concept, but it illustrates the depth, the purity, and the strange nature of Victorian emotional relationships.
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