Something Old

                               IN DEFENSE OF LEWIS CARROLL

Now why am I writing about the man who wrote Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, not to mention Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark? Because he deserves to be defended, that is why. And in due course you will soon see why. But let me first say who he was..

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (born 1832 – died 1898) was the son of an Anglican parson of conservative views. Young Dodgson held the same views and was quite devout. He went to Oxford where he excelled in mathematics and he became such a great mathematician that for many years he lectured in Maths at Oxford. He wrote many books about mathematics, some of which broke new ground. Dodgson was known to be shy in the way he talked and his lectures were rather dry. He became a deacon, but he never took Holy Orders. But there was another side of him. He got on well with many writers of his day, took poetry and the arts seriously, and he attempted to become an artist. But he decided he was not up to it; so instead he learnt the new art of photography and became a very capable photographer. He had inherited his father’s habit of writing in a whimsical way when dealing with friends and family and also creating puzzles. And when Dodgson decided to write stories intended for children, he wrote under the name Lewis Carroll – a name put together by Latin and other obscure ideas related to his family. But when it came to his books about mathematics he still called himself Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. There is an often-told story – untrue and now long debunked – that Queen Victoria so liked the Alice stories that she asked “Lewis Carroll” to send him another book… and he sent her a mathematical treatise.

Children and young people have different ways of reading the Alice stories. When we were children, my sister hated the Alice books. She said they were just silly and they didn’t make any sense. I had a different view. I liked Alice in Wonderland, [first published in 1865] but some things frighted me. I was particularly worried by the sequence where the horrible Duchess thrusts a baby into Alice’s arms… and after Alice walks for a while the baby turns into a pig and runs away. This shocked me. Could such things happen? [Of course more recent clever-dick reviewers see this as proof that Lewis Carroll liked little girls but hated little boys, saw them as nasty pigs, and the angry Duchess sings “Speak roughly to your little boy, / And beat him when he sneezes, / He only does it to annoy, / Because he knows it teases.”] Later I was almost frightened by the angry queen who kept shouting “Off with her head!” or “Off with his head!”... but by that stage I was used to the rhythm of the story and knew it couldn’t hurt me. And I liked the crazy-ness of it all. Going down the rabbit hole chasing the rabbit. Drinking the potions that expands or diminish Alice. The pool of tears and the ridiculous caucas-race where we meet many birds and beasts including the [extinct] Dodo… who might be there because Lewis Carroll sometimes had a stutter when he addressed himself as Do… Do… Dodgson [although once again this theory has been disputed]. Alice reciting You Are Old, Father William [one of the many poems where Lewis Carroll made satire of “improving” poems for children]. The wonderful Mad Hatter’s Tea Party even if it has the nastiness of the poor Dormouse being stuffed into the teapot… and I particularly liked the appearance of the Cheshire Cat who came and mysteriously disappeared. I have always liked cats and I delighted  in him, setting up enigmas and being as careful as any good cat. [ By the way, the phrase “Cheshire Cat” was not invented by Lewis Carroll. It was a traditional phrase and is quoted in William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel The Newcomes, decades before  Lewis Carroll was using the phase.]

Now I hate to say this, but as a child  I moved on and found myself enjoying Through The Looking-Glass [first published in 1871] even more than Alice in Wonderland. Why? Because it had the best [nonsense] poems that Lewis Carroll ever produced: the magnificent Jabberwocky; The Walrus and the Carpenter as performed by Tweedledum and Tweedledee;  Humpty Dumpty’s attempt to recite a poem about the seasons; the White Knight’s long tale of The Aged, Aged Man… and as for events, well, the flowers and their thoughts, and the rivalry of the White Queen and the Red Queen… and their less aggressive spouses. Might I also note that while children don’t go running down rabbit holes, most children at some point will look at a mirror and wonder why we see things backward – which is the opening of Through The Looking-Glass. We note, too, that both books are built around thoughtful games. Alice in Wonderland has playing cards – and you might remember that that it ends with Alice saying “You’re nothing but a pack of cards”. And Through The Looking-Glass is built around chess, where Alice finally wins the game . Finally, if you read both books you will soon understand that Alice is the most intelligent character, asking questions even if her questions are those of a child. She is dealing with grown-ups who usually say foolish things or whimsical things or confusing things. Unlike most books written for children in the Victorian era, which were meant to be “approving”, Lewis Carroll was deliberately giving children a fantasy in which the adults were the silly and pompous ones. And please note that some of the wonder of the Alice books was gained by the illustrations drawn by Sir John Tenniel. Nobody has ever drawn the Alice books better. 

I could go on about Lewis Carroll’s other works, such as The Hunting of the Snark, which is good fun; and his last two long books for children Sylvie and Bruno, which were an awful flop and did exactly what he had avoided in his earlier books for children - he lectured children about how to be good. I also have on my shelves one of his very last books for children A Tangled Tale… which is really a set of mathematical exercises disguised as stories. No wonder it is now forgotten.

But at last I have to go into the problem of defending Lewis Carroll. For some people he is controversial.

First there is the lesser problem. In 1967, when hippies were around and smoking pot and other drugs, there was a song called White Rabbit sung by a now-forgotten singer calling herself Grace Slick. Alice goes down the rabbit hole and she drinks the potions and she becomes tall and she becomes small and she changes… so it’s obviously about drugs, right? Now it is true that in the 19^th century laudanum [derived from opium] was used commonly for everyday things such as head-aches and some people became addicted to it. Could Lewis Carroll have become an addict? Not likely. The expanding-and-diminishing of Alice in Alice in Wonderland has nothing to do with drugs. It was more likely that Lewis Carroll was playing with ideas about size as would be seen by a child – a very mathematical idea.

The greater problem is the belief that Lewis Carroll was somehow a paedophile. There is no evidence of this, but it has been built up by those who think there was something suspicious about his interest in little girls. As a photographer Carroll took many photos of  men and women, but he particularly enjoyed taking photos of girls, child or young adolescent. Indeed he made hundreds of such photos. The Liddell family were happy to have Carroll photograph their young daughters Lorina, Edith and Alice – who became his favourite. It was for these three that Carroll made up stories while taking them in an outing, rowing up the river. But as they grew older, the girls grew out of hearing stories, and the Liddells told Carroll that he could no longer visit them. Was there a scandal? Not at all. What has tarnished Carroll’s memory? Partly the work of psychologists seeing all manner of symbols in his works, and Freudians looking for his weaknesses. Not to mention the sensationalism of rumour. Item – some decades ago there was revealed a naked photo of a young girl purported to be taken by Lewis Carroll. Big sensation for a while … but it turned out to be a fraud.

            There are some scholars who are better than I when it comes to Lewis Carroll.

ITEM: I have on my shelves The Annotated Alice edited by Martin Gardner, published in 1960, which gives the whole texts of the two Alice books, and it scrupulously presents notes on all the jokes that were fully understood in the Victorian era, all the mathematical puzzles that are hidden, all the poems of other poets that Lewis Carroll parodied… and inevitably he does have to deal with Carroll’s relationship with young girls. He does say that Carroll “was a fussy, prim, fastidious, cranky, kind, gentle bachelor whose life was sexless, uneventful and happy”. He also says “books of nonsense fantasy for children are not such fruitful sources of psychoanalytic insight as one might suppose them to be. The symbols have too many explanations.” But his most important statement is this: “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. There is 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 the 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…”

 

                 Photo of Alice Liddell as taken by Lewis Carroll.

One must also add that Carroll’s younger sisters removed some pages of his journals after he died, not because he had written something about little girls, but because he had flirted with women in their 20’s. This, they thought, was indiscreet. 

ITEM: For the record, I also consulted a pamphlet written by Derek Hudson on Lewis Carroll in the Writers and Their Work series published 1958. He more quaintly said of  Lewis Carroll “From his early youth… he had sought the society of little girls, thus compensating himself, in part, for his inability to form friendships with women of his own age. Children were an escape from sex rather than any sort of conscious satisfaction of it, but they gave him the affection he needed and helped him to fulfil the Platonic and protective love which was characteristic of his nature.” This seems to be the truth.

Really I think that is where the case should end. When he was in his early twenties Lewis Carroll wrote a poem saying “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.”  In other words, he pined for his own childhood... but he did no harm.