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CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON:
DON, MATHEMATICIAN, PHOTOGRAPHER,
WRITER AND MUCH MORE…
On 27th January 1832, in the parsonage of Daresbury in Cheshire, England, Mrs Frances Jane Lutwidge gave birth to the man who would have revolutionized the concept of Victorian writing for children. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a meticulous, reserved and deeply religious mathematics don, under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll, will be in fact the author of many popular stories for children which have marked not only several generations of young British readers, but also many kids from all-over the world. But we have to reckon this is a paradox in some way, because Charles never got married and never had children. He just lived his life pursuing child friendships.
Half deaf and with a stammer, he lived a busy and very productive life since the very beginning. He was a very precocious boy, interested in mathematics, drawing, writing and reading. “One day, when he was a very small boy, he showed his father a book of logarithms, with the request, ‘Please explain’ ”.1
The third of eleven children, he and his family lived through the memorable events of the age of Utilitarianism and reform and his life was always influenced by the strict rules and habits of Victorian society. Religious rituals dominated the Daresbury parsonage: Bible reading was a staple and both work and play were forbidden on Sunday. Like many other Victorian families, the Dodgsons wrote a series of domestic magazines but only four of them survive nowadays. The earliest one is a booklet called Useful and Instructive
Poetry, which consists of sixteen poems written on the right-hand pages and crude
illustrations on the left. But other magazines have survived, such as the Rectory
Magazine, an accumulation of verses, stories, essays, drawings, mock book reviews and
faked letters; the Rectory Umbrella, written during Charles’s eighteens, which is a more complex work consisting of allegorical drawings, showing a smiling, bearded poet sitting beneath an umbrella on which Charles’s categorization of the various branches of
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literature are inscribed: jokes, riddles, fun poetry, tales etc. From the sky above, some evil creatures throw rocks down upon the umbrella and each rock is labelled with a negative feeling, while seven angelic females bring positive feelings.
Frontispiece to the Rectory Umbrella. www.blog-imgs-54.fc2.com
Another important magazine is the periodical Mishmash, written and illustrated by Charles from 1855 to 1862, notable because it contains the first version of the poem
Jabberwocky, which would later appear in Through the Looking-Glass.
As we said before, Charles was a very precocious boy with lots of interests and, as the Richmond school headmaster reported, he possessed “a very uncommon share of genius”. 2 Some of his favorite subjects were: Latin, Greek, Religion, Mathematics, English literature and French. He was also keen on reading and always showed, through quotations or allusions the influence of Coleridge, Cowper, Crabbe, Dickens, Goldsmith, Gray, Ossian, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Thomson and Wordsworth.
In his early years Charles was educated at home by his father. He later joined the Rugby School, perhaps England’s best public school. Despite the huge amount of class hours, the frequent episodes of bullying and the brutal initiating ceremonies, Charles did very well in his studies, winning even some prizes. Charles was at Rugby almost four years, until 1849 when he moved to Croft (his family’s new residence) to spend a year preparing for Oxford University where he matriculated in 1850. In the same year he became a member of Christ Church under the recommendations of his father to his old
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friend Canon E.B. Pusey. Here, Charles dedicated all his time standing apart from the clubs and following his own program of studies. From a letter to his sister Mary we infer that he used to work very hard, striving for punctuality in all he did. In another letter to his sister Elizabeth he writes: ”You shall have the announcement of the last piece of good fortune this wonderful term has had in store for me, that is, a 1st class in Mathematics”.3 Impressed by Charles’s performance, Dr. Pusey recommended him for a Studentship, but this came with restrictions: he was to proceed to holy orders and could not marry, otherwise he would have automatically lost it.
In Autumn 1854 Charles made first-class honors in the Final Mathematical School and two months later he received his Bachelor of Arts. It is probably in his third year at Oxford when he started to keep his diary, whose larger part still survives (nine of thirteen volumes). After the Christmas holidays spent at home, he returned to Oxford and on January 19th he read his first lesson at the college. But becoming a tutor was only the beginning of Charles’s professional life. He really loved teaching and in 1855 he officially bore the new title. As he writes in his diary: “I began it a poor bachelor student, with no definite plans or expectations; I end it a master and tutor in Christ Church”. 4 Charles could now look forward to being an Oxford don and a dignified lecturer, scholar and member of a high social order. In 1855 he finally became Mathematical Lecturer.
When we tell the life of Charles we cannot help mentioning one of the most remarkable figures who influenced his life and his work. This is Henry George Liddell, Dean of Christ Church Cathedral and one of the most important ecclesiastical men in Oxford. He and his wife, Lorina Hannah, had three children, Lorina, Alice and Edith. Charles started keeping in touch with the Dean, but his very first encounter with the Liddell family took place on February 25, 1855, when Charles went to the river to watch the boat race and there he met Mrs Liddell and Lorina. Not until the following term, when he returned from the Easter vacation, did he encounter Alice, Lorina’s younger sister, the girl who would inspire one of his most successful books. His relationship with the Liddells and in particular with Alice was very intimate and deeply rooted, as many letters show. He seemed to have a great innate talent in entertaining children. He used to give his
3 Ibidem, p. 42. 4 Ibidem, p. 55.
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young friends presents made by him, such as toys, poems, short stories, puzzles, jokes, drawings and puns.
Charles used to take the three sisters on pleasant walks or little boat trips telling them stories, mimicking the characters, raising his voice for the female parts and gesticulating:
We used to go to his rooms, escorted by our nurse. When we got there we used to sit on the big sofa on each side of him, while he told us stories, illustrating them by pencil or ink drawings as he went along. He seemed to have an endless store of these fantastical tales, which he made up as he told them, drawing busily on a larger sheet of paper all the time.5
The Liddell sisters, from the left Edith, Lorina and Alice. www.talesofcuriosity.com
Charles loved his young friends’ company and used to enjoy it a lot, as he tells us in his diary: “We went down to the island, and made a kind of picnic there, taking biscuits with us, and buying gingerbeer and lemonade… Mark this day, annalist, not only with a white stone, but as altogether dies mirabilis”.6
Among these trips, there is one which we can undoubtedly consider noteworthy; Alice herself mentions it in her diary: the rowing trip to Godstow, on July 4, 1862: “Most of Mr. Dodgson stories were told to us on river expeditions to Nuneham or Godstow… I believe the beginning of Alice was told one summer afternoon when the sun was so burning that we have landed in the meadows down the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a new-made hayrick…”7. And again, thirty-four years later she casts her mind back to that day:
5
Ibidem, p. 86.
6 Ibidem, p. 62. 7 Ibidem, p. 90.
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Nearly all of “Alice’s Adventures Under The Ground” was told on that blazing summer afternoon…I have such a distinct recollection of the expedition, and also, on the next day I started to pester him to write down the story for me, which I had never done before. It was due to my importunity that, after saying he would think about it, he eventually gave the hesitating promise which started him writing it down at all.8
As Alice notes in her diary, that afternoon generated the most famous book written by Charles, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. That summer afternoon another man enjoyed the trip, Robinson Duckworth, Fellow of Trinity College, who was an early friend of Charles and who later became Chaplain to the Queen and Canon of Westminster. He was a man of great charm with a good singing voice which he used for entertaining Charles and the children.
One more year passed by, with Charles keeping on going round with the Liddels, until suddenly, for June 27th, 28th and 29th no record appears in the diary. Even more strange is the fact that a page is missing, later cut out by Charles’s niece Menella Dodgson, who admitted she cut it out because it contained some information that offended her sensibility. Something must have clearly occurred in that period between Charles and the Liddell family. No more visits, no outgoings, no photography, no games nor walks together. But what could have happened? It might have happened that one day, to the question “whom would you like to marry?”, Alice might have impetuously piped up:” Mr. Dodgson!”. And if Charles were present he might have picked up the thread and replied: ”Well said, and why not!”. 9 And this might have been taken as a real desire and not as a joke. Charles must have been misunderstood without any doubt. Some speculate that Charles, aged thirty-one, proposed marriage to Alice, aged eleven, causing the indignation of her mother, Mrs. Liddell.
Another hypothesis could be the one put forward by Jenny Woolf, who assumes that “the break between the Liddell family was not due to Alice but rather to Lorina. It was Ina who had ‘been too fond of him’ and that Ina had a schoolgirl crush on Carroll. Once Lorina’s affections toward Carroll were discovered by her parents, this led to Carroll never
8 Ibidem, p. 91. 9 Ibidem, p. 102.
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being allowed to take Ina out again, even with a chaperone, and destruction of Carroll’s letters to all the Liddell children”.10
“Karoline Leach has even argued that Carroll might have been having an adulterous affair with Mrs Liddell and was using his involvement with the children as a smokescreen, a suggestion that has been widely discredited”.11 We do not have conclusive evidences about this rupture. Actually, nobody knows.
But, talking about Charles’s relationship with the Liddels, there is something more we have to take into account: his passion for photography. An ardent researcher for beauty, Charles saw photography as ”a door opening onto an aesthetic world where he might succeed better than he had with drawing and sketching”.12 It was not, by any means, as easy as it is nowadays, for the photographer had to prepare many things before taking a photo (preparation of the dark room and the plates) and after (preparation of silver nitrate solution, exposition etc.). Not to mention the amount of tools he had to use if he wanted to take photographs in an open space! Beginning with a darkroom tent, a large box camera, lenses, a tripod, bottles containing chemicals, plates, trays, dishes, scales, weights, ending with even water for rinsing when no fresh source was available.
In addition to passion, Charles possessed an innate talent for photography. He used to photograph landscapes and objects of all types, but his favourite subjects were people, and in particular young female children. He used to keep a list of all the names of the children he had photographed and the ones he still had to take pictures of. He developed special techniques for photographing the young “models” as he liked them to be as natural as possible. Photographing the children was all about playing a game with them. He wanted them to have fun and enjoy the sitting, which they used to do, as we find out in Alice’s diary:
Being photographed was a joy to us and not a penance as it is to most children. We looked forward to the happy hours in the mathematical tutor’s rooms… Much more exciting than being photographed was being allowed to go into the dark room, and
10
J. WOOLF, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful, and Sometimes Lonely
Man Who Created Alice in Wonderland, New York, Haus Publishing Ltd First U.S Edition, 2010, p. 167.
11 J. SUSINA, “The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful, and Sometimes Lonely
Man who Created Alice in Wonderland (review)”, in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 35, N. 4, 2010, p. 473.
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watch him develop the large glass plates. Besides, the dark room was so mysterious, and we felt that any adventure might happen there!.13
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Alice as “Beggar Child”. Lorina and Alice: “the Chinese group”. Beatrice Henley(child friend of Charles).
Charles used all manners of dress for his sitters indeed, but he also took them with no dress at all. It was not just a matter of a Victorian society trend. In children nudity Charles saw that innocence and pureness he wished to see the world full of.
Of course, taking pictures of a naked child was something to be extremely careful of, so Charles first used to ask parents for permission and then to photograph the children unclothed. He also used to let parents stay, supervising his work during the sitting, but many parents used to admire his art so much that they allowed their children to stay by themselves. Although he took many nude photographs, only four have come to light, since, before he died, he destroyed all the negatives and prints of his nude studies.
Obviously, there was no shortage of bad criticisms and gossip. As we will see later, he was accused of paedophilia and of taking pleasure in photographing unclothed children. But these are unfounded accusations and we have just explained why. As Jenny Woolf argues, those relationships with his young girls have to be seen as “an antidote to his feelings for women. With his loving child-friends, he could obtain loving, beautiful, feminine company which was neither tempting or ‘sinful.’ ”14 Both children and parents loved and trusted him. “Let them talk”, he used to answer to people who reported him
13 Ibidem, pp. 86-164. 14 J. WOOLF, op. cit., p. 139.
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some gossip about his life and the relationship he had with children. His conscience was his only judge.
www.upload.wikimedia.org www.upload.wikimedia.org www.upload.wikimedia.org
Beatrice Hatch seated before white cliffs. Evelyn Hatch lying on the ground. Annie and Frances Henderson as
castaways.
Despite his passion for photography, it is curious that he never photographed himself and all his photographs portray him in serious poses, never looking at the camera.
Altrettanto curioso che egli si sia fatto fotografare quasi sempre da solo, e in una posa specifica della sua prismatica personalità: quella inappuntabile, pubblica, seria, ufficiale, mai discinto, mai scanzonato, mai scherzoso, com’era in parte se non soprattutto; sempre inappuntabile cioè, in marsina scura, camicia candida con cravattino immacolato; solo vezzo una chioma abbondante, ricciuta, un po’ spettinata. In tutti questi ritratti, Carroll non fissa mai l’obbiettivo…E quanti di questi ritratti sono di lui reclino su una poltrona o su una sedia, un po’ spossato, svagato, stanco. La bocca non sorride, è ferma in una posa enigmatica, scontenta e spoetizzata. Si potrebbe proseguire e noteremmo sempre questo volto malinconico, quasi assente, perduto in sogni ed elucubrazioni: una metafora di Amleto, o di Kierkegaard.15
In 1880, he stopped taking photographs. His diaries and letters echo his fears that he might not have enough time left to finish his books, since photography had taken him too much time. Furthermore, that year coincides with the advent of the dry plate process, which Charles tested and rejected considering the results obtained through it artistically inferior. “To stay with the old method would have been too time-consuming, to change to the new one would have compromised his art. Instead he gave it up entirely”.16 What is sure is that Charles succeeded in developing his two strong interests simultaneously: photography and his friendship with children. Through the first one, he found a concrete and visual way of celebrating the child and, at the same time, breaking down social
15
F. MARUCCI, Storia della Letteratura Inglese: dal 1870 al 1920, Firenze, Edizione Le Lettere, vol. IV, 2006, p. 374.
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barriers, giving him access to many celebrities and producing some of the most remarkable photographs of the nineteenth century.
But Charles is more than anything else famous for his literary work. Many are the books, stories and treaties he left us. Starting with his huge production of mathematical kind. As we well know, he was very keen on mathematics and among his treaties we remember: The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry, Printed with Symbols (Instead of Words)
to Express the Goniometrical Ratios (1866), a nineteen-page pamphlet in which he
invented new symbols to represent trigonometrical functions. Indeed, his efforts to clarify mathematical concepts and terms knew no bounds. In the same year, Charles brought forth one of his most important mathematical works, Condensation of Determinants,
Being a New and Brief Method for Computing Their Arithmetical Values.
In 1868, Charles submitted to the University Press the Algebrical Formulae for
Responsions and in 1879 he published Euclid and his Modern Rivals, a play written in
defense of Euclid's approach to the teaching of geometry. In 1886, he published Game of
Logic, an elementary text on logic presented in an entertaining way using Carroll's "game"
to solve problems, but his masterpiece, as for logic, sees the light in 1896 with the book
Symbolic Logic Part I Elementary, presented as a serious test book for schools, but made
entertaining by the use of interesting examples of puzzles to be solved. All these mathematical works appear very remarkable especially because Charles worked on them while creating his masterpiece, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, conceived on July 4, 1862.
As we have already said, the idea came to his mind on a warm summer afternoon, during a boat trip on the river, with the Liddell sisters and his friend Duckworth. He started telling them that story and, under the suggestion of Alice herself, he decided to write it down. On 19th October 1863, Charles met the publisher, Alexander Macmillan, who agreed to publish the story. The next step for Charles was to find an illustrator. Duckworth suggested him John Tenniel, a famous artist and political cartoonist. His style suited Charles perfectly and in the end Tenniel decided to illustrate the first published edition of the book. Another problem appeared as for the title.
The first idea was Alice’s Adventures Underground, then, after rejecting Alice Among
the Fairies and Alice’s Golden Hour, the work was finally published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in 1865. The commercial success of the book was overwhelming. The Reader
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termed it “a glorious artistic treasure”, The Publisher’s Circular selected it as “the most original and most charming” of the two hundred books for children sent them that year and many other newspapers reviewed it very positively. The tale pleased the reading public too, and the sales started steady. Late in 1872, Carroll published the sequel, which was an immediate success as well: Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found
There. “On November 30, before Charles saw his first copy, he was amazed that
Macmillan already had orders for seventy-five hundred Looking-Glasses”.17 The two books continued to sell. Next to the Bible and Shakespeare, they still are the most widely translated and quoted books. Over seventy-five editions and versions of the Alice books including play texts, parodies, read-along cassettes, colouring books etc., are available today. They have been translated into over seventy languages, including Swahili, Yiddish and even Braille alphabet. As for the plot, it is the story of a young girl, Alice, who, while sitting with her sister on a river bank (reading a boring book with no pictures in it), falls asleep. She is immediately thrown into an imaginary world full of weird creatures. Of course, both the Alice books are full of symbolisms, parodies of real characters and metaphors and reminiscences of Charles’s childhood. Before going into the details (which I will do in the following chapters), we cannot but mention the importance that these two books have as far as the literature for children is concerned. Writing them, Charles did not invent the genre, but he broke with tradition. In fact many of the earlier children books were written to entertain the upper classes and had lots of lofty purposes. The Alice books instead, “Fly in the face of that tradition, destroy it, and give the Victorian child something lighter and brighter. Above all, these books have no moral”.18
www.ecx.images-amazon.com
Cover book of the first edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
17 Ibidem, p. 132. 18 Ibidem, p. 142.
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Perhaps, the most important difference between the Alice books and the more conventional stories of mid-Victorian Britain is in the author’s attitude towards his audience. But we will analyse this point in the following chapters.
In 1876, Charles produced his next great work, The Hunting of the Snark, a fantastical nonsense poem about the adventures of a bizarre crew of tradesmen and a beaver to find, lure and capture the snark. We have no idea what the “Snark” looks like, nor do the crew. When a young man asked him, “Mr. Dodgson, what is a snark?”, he laughed and said: “When you find out tell me.”19 What is sure is that the story has nothing to do with reality and logic. In the preface to the Snark, Charles playfully calls the work “a brief but instructive poem with strong moral purpose.”20 “The poem’s real meaning is anti-meaning. It is more about being than meaning, listening than seeing, feeling than thinking”.21
Notwithstanding the negative reviews and critics of this book, it produced the effect Charles wanted: it amused young and old audiences alike. They held their breath, blanched with fear but mostly they laughed. And this mixture of feelings gave the book its present fame. Snark clubs have grown up at Oxford and Cambridge and the Universal Snark Club meets annually in London on Charles’s birthday.
Last but not least, we cannot but mention the two Sylvie and Bruno books, which constitute Charles's most ambitious literary enterprise. They appeared for Christmas 1889 and consisted of four hundred pages, a thirteen-page preface, a table of contents, forty-six illustrations by Harry Furniss and a five-page index. But to identify what brought Charles to this unexampled work, we have to go back to 24th June, 1867, when Charles was struck with the idea for a story, “Bruno's Revenge”, for Aunt Judy's Magazine. He told the tale again and again to friends and strangers, having a great success. So he decided to create a book with two plots. He also created three separated worlds: a real one; an imaginary world called Outland; and the last one, Elfdom, the most rarified of the three and accessible only to few. The narrator acts both as commentator and as a character
19
E. KARNEY, Letter to the John O’ London’s Weekly, April , 1932, cit. M. N. COHEN, op. cit., p. 408.
20 L. CARROLL, The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits, New York, MacMillan, 1891, p. 41. 21 M. N. COHEN, op. cit. p. 409.
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within the story. The structure is complex and it is difficult to keep the three different spheres in mind.
As for the story, there are two strands: the conspiracy against the Warden of Outland (instigated by the Sub-Warden and the Chancellor), and the love of a young doctor, Arthur, for Lady Muriel. Many are the autobiographical elements in the books, Charles’s view of life, death and the universe, for instance, are put in the mouth of the hero of the novel, Arthur. Both Lady Muriel and Sylvie are probably fictional reincarnations of Alice and maybe, the love triangle (Charles-Muriel-Arthur) reproduces Charles’s private fantasy of what he wanted to have happened between him and Alice: Arthur wins Muriel and, in his fantasy, Charles wins Alice. It is clear that Charles, writing this book,
Has lost his sense of appropriateness, proportion and aesthetic balance that he possessed earlier. He retreated inward where he should have traveled outward, and
Sylvie and Bruno books are overburdened by seriousness, calculated messages,
ponderous cogitations and fulminations that reflect the map of Charles’s aging mind and his broken heart.22
What is sure is that this novel offers us a mirror of nineteenth-century life and thought, if seen as a work on art, science, technology, religion and society.
During the 1870s Charles also published briefs on subjects in the public domain. One of these was vivisection. His concern for animals was truly deep and in early February 1875 he wrote a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette entitled “Vivisection as a Sign of the Time”, where he depicted vivisection as a metaphor for the malaise of the age, describing it a social depravity and totally useless. In a second paper called “Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection”, he classifies thirteen fallacies, which include: the idea that men are superior to animals so they have the right to inflict pain upon them just in the name of science; the fact that experimenting with the animals is the same thing as experimenting with human beings; and the notion that if one may legally kill animals in sport, one may surely do the same in the less selfish practice of vivisection. Charles’s voice was not ignored in some way, because on June 22, 1875, the Royal Commission of Vivisection was finally established and, the following year, it brought into being the Cruelty to Animals Act
of 1876, which established licensing regulations for experiments on living animals.
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Charles had also another ambitious idea: getting Alice onto the stage. His dream came true on Christmas 1886, when Alice in Wonderland: A Musical Dream Play, in Two Acts,
for Children and Others, opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre. It was both a theatrical
and a critical success. It was on this occasion that he met Isa Bowman, a young actress who played a secondary part in this first representation. Charles immediately noticed her cleverness on the stage and, two years later on 28th December, Isa got the role of Alice at the Globe Theatre in London. They soon became friends as Carroll liked her from the very beginning. She “fell in love with him”, seeing him as some sort of “uncle” who was always present for her and made her laugh a lot with his riddles, puns, letters, toys, stories and weird puzzles. She enjoyed spending her time with him, as she writes in her book:
And those rooms of his! I do not think there was ever such a fairy-land for children. I am sure they must have contained one of the finest collections of musical-boxes to be found anywhere in the world. There were big black ebony boxes with glass tops through which you could see all the works. There was a big box with a handle, which it was quite hard exercise for a little girl to turn, and there must have been twenty or thirty little ones which could only play one tune. Sometimes one of the musical-boxes would not play properly, and then I always got tremendously excited. Uncle used to go to a drawer in the table and produce a box of little screw-drivers and punches, and while I sat on his knee he would unscrew the lid and take out the wheels to see what was the matter. He must have been a clever mechanist, for the result was always the same-after a longer or shorter period the music began again. Sometimes when the musical-boxes had playedall their tunes he used to put them in the box backwards, and was as pleased as I at the comic effect of the music “standing on its head,” as he phrased it.23
Isa used to visit him in Oxford every winter between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, as she recalls in a passage of her book:
They were happy days, those days in Oxford, spent with the most fascinating companion that a child could have. In our walks about the old town, in our visits to cathedral or chapel or hall, in our visits to his friends he was an ideal companion, but I think I was almost happiest when we came back to his rooms and had tea alone; when the fire-glow (it was always winter when I stayed in Oxford) threw fantastic shadows about the quaint room, and the thoughts of the prosiest of people must have wandered a little into fancy-land. The shifting firelight seemed to almost etherealize that kindly face, and as the wonderful stories fell from his lips, and his eyes lighted on me with the sweetest smile that ever a man wore, I was conscious of a love and reverence for Charles Dodgson that became nearly an adoration.24
23
I. BOWMAN, The Story of Lewis Carroll: Told for Young People by the Real Alice in Wonderland Miss Isa
Bowman, New York, Edition E.P. Dutton & Company, 1899, p. 21.
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And in some letters Charles made an accurate account of Isa’s visit to Oxford. Here are some extracts:
On Wednesday, the Eleventh of July, Isa happened to meet a friend at Paddington Station at half-past-ten. She can’t remember his name, but she says he was an old old old gentleman, and he had invited her, she thinks, to go with him somewhere or other, she can’t remember where… The first thing they did, after calling at a shop, was to go to the Panorama of the “Falls of Niagara”. Isa thought it very wonderful… The next morning Isa set off, almost before she was awake, with the A.A.M., to pay a visit to a little College, called “Christ Church”… On Saturday Isa had a Music Lesson, and learned to play on an American Orguinette… Then they went through the Botanical Gardens… Then they rode in a tram-car to another part of Oxford, and called on a lady called Mrs Jeane, and her little grand-daughter, called “Noël”, because she was born on Christmas-Day… On Sunday morning they went to St. Mary’s church, in High Street. In coming home, down the street next to the one where they had found a fixed dog, they found a fixed cat—a poor little kitten, that had put out its head through the bars of the cellar-window, and get back again. They rang the bell at the next door, but the maid said the cellar wasn’t in that house, and, before they could get to the right door the cat had unfixed its head… The same day, Isa saw a curious book of pictures of ghosts… They took a little walk in the afternoon, and in the middle of Broad Street… They saw “Mansfield College”, a new College just begun to be built, with such tremendously narrow windows that Isa was afraid the young gentlemen who come there will not be able to see to learn their lessons, and will go away from Oxford just as wise as they came… After dinner, Isa got somebody or other (she is not sure who it was) to finish this story for her. Then she went to bed…25
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Extracts from the Diary of Charles about Isa’s visit to Oxford.
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Isa Bowman performing Alice. www.carrollpedia.com Portrait of Isa Bowman.www.carrollpedia.com
Besides plays and fiction, Charles Dodgson authored a vast amount of letters. Writing letters was in fact a ritual for him. We get a hint of his epistolary activity from a Register
of Letters Received and Sent, kept for the last thirty-seven years of his life. Although
letter-writing gave him great pleasure and satisfaction, it was also a burden, because he was afraid of spending too much time on it, while he could have dedicated himself to more important things: “One third of my life seems to go in receiving letters” he writes to a friend (May 8, 1879), “and the other two-thirds in answering them… Life seems to go in letter-writing, and I’m beginning to think that the proper definition of ‘Man’ is ‘an animal that writes letters’ ”.26
At the beginning of the 1890s, Charles started feeling more solitary and introvert, due to some health problems and his struggling against depression. But despite this, he continued to have a quite active social life, going to the theatre and enjoying concerts. “He was a fairly constant patron of all the London theatres, save the Gaiety and the Adelphi, which he did not like…Comic opera, when it was wholesome, he liked, and was a frequent visitor to the Savoy theatre. The good old style of Pantomime, too, was a great delight to him, and he would often speak affectionately of the pantomimes at Brighton.”27 He was now thinner and the signs of time started to appear on him. Isa Bowman remembered him as:
A man of medium height… His hair was a silver-grey, rather longer than it was the fashion to wear, and his eyes were a deep blue… As he walked seemed a little
26Morton N. Cohen, op. cit., p. 262. 27 I. Bowman, op. cit., pp. 81-82.
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unsteady in his gait...But for the whiteness of his hair it was difficult to tell his age from his face, for there were no wrinkles on it. He had a curiously womanish face, and, in direct contradiction to his real character, there seemed to be little strength in it... When he shook hand with you, his grip was strong and steadfast… The pressure of his hand on yours was full of strength, and you felt here indeed was a man to admire and to love. The expression in his eyes was also very kind and charming.28
In the nineties, having left photography far behind, Charles continued sketching for pleasure. He also dedicated himself to the creation of games, puzzles, anagrams, riddles, rebuses, alphabet games etc. Here is an example of a new kind of riddle (June 30, 1892): “A Russian had three sons. The first, named Rab, became a lawyer; the second, named Ymra, became a soldier. The third became a sailor: what was his name?”.29 The solution is as follows: the name of the third one is Yvan, because the names read backwards spell out their professions and, since the third one is a sailor, he was in the “navy”, word which written backward is indeed Yvan.
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Charles’s rebus letter to Georgina Watson. Charles’s tremulous letter to B. Earle. Charles’s looking-glass letter to W. Schutser.
As we well know, Charles’s relationship with the Liddells was by now sporadic. They were formal, distinct, cold but at least civil with each other. On June 25, 1870, Mrs. Liddell brought Lorina and Alice (adult ladies now) to be photographed in Charles’s studio. That was the last time Charles took a picture of them. He then kept in touch with Alice, sending her letters warm with reminiscences like this one he sent her on Christmas day, 1883, with a copy of Rhyme? And Reason?: “Perhaps the shortest day in the year is not quite the most appropriate time for recalling the long dreamy summer afternoon of
28 Ibidem, p. 8.
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ancient times: but anyhow if this book gives you half as much pleasure to receive as it does me to send it, it will be a success indeed”.30
Charles’s last photograph of Alice Liddell. www.asketchofthepast.com Charles’s last photograph of Lorina Liddell.
Alice got married to a young man, Reginald Gervis Hargreaves, son of a wealthy mill owner and property magnate from Lancashire on 19th December, 1881. They had three children: Alan, Leopold and Caryl. They happily lived in Cuffnells until two of their sons, Alan and Leopold, died in the war. Then, on February 14, 1926, Reginald died too, at the age of seventy-three. Alice remained alone with her son Caryl trying to go through their financial problems. She decided to sell the manuscript of Alice’s story and all the first editions and gifts Charles gave her so long before. No scruple held her back. Fortunately, it all came into the hands of a bibliophile, Lessing Rosenwald, who then gave that precious heritage to the British Nation. In fact, that manuscript can still be found at the British Museum in London. In 1932, the hundredth anniversary of Charles’s birth, Alice’s life suddenly changed. Columbia University invited her to participate in an elaborate sequence of celebratory events. Alice, now eighty-year-old, arrived in New York, escorted by police, celebrated by society and paid homage by the American reading public. “All this because of her friendship, so long ago, with the rejected Mr. Dodgson”.31
On her return to England, she participated in the London celebrations of Charles’s hundredth birthday. She died peacefully on November 16, 1934 at the age of eighty-two.
30
K. FENS, Finding the Place: Selected Essays on English Literature, Amsterdam-Atlanta, Rodopi B.V., GA 1994, p. 84.
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Alice Hargreaves on a visit to New York to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of
Charles’s birth. www.2.bp.blogspot.com
But let us return to Charles. His death was, unlike his life, unremarkable. He wanted his funeral to be as simple and inexpensive as possible. After his death, his family was forced to clear out his room and many of his papers, letters and manuscripts went up in flames. Furthermore, his collection of games, gadgets, his huge library, photographs, sketches and much more, were sold to the best bidder and lost forever.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson died of pneumonia at his sisters' home in Guildford, on January 14, 1898, at the age of sixty-six. He was buried at Mount Cemetery in Guildford. The local clergyman Dean Paget, summarized Carroll's gifts in his sermon: “The brilliant, venturesome imagination, defying forecast with ever fresh surprise; the sense of humor in its finest and most naive form; the power to touch with lightest hand the undercurrent of pathos in the midst of fun; the audacity of creative fancy, and the delicacy of insight--these are rare gifts; and surely they were his”.32
Isa Bowman as well, shows a great admiration, talking about the man he was, in these lines:
To have even known such a man as he was is an inestimable boon. To have been with him for so long as a child, to have known so intimately the man who above all others has understood childhood, is indeed a memory on which to look back with thanksgiving and with tears. Now that I am no longer “his little girl,” now that he is
32 F. PAGET, “The Virtue of Simplicity”, sermon preached in the Cathedral Church of Christ in Oxford, on
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dead and my life is so different from the quiet life he led, I can yet feel the old charm, I can still be glad that he has kissed me and that we were friends. Little girl and grave professor! it is a strange combination. Grave professor and little girl! how curious it sounds! yet strange and curious as it may seem, it was so, and the little girl, now a little girl no longer, offers this last loving tribute to the friend and teacher she loved so well.33
In the end, we can reckon Charles was an eternal child, an extremely sensitive and deep person, with a mysterious side in his personality. He was a strong man, used to deal with his not-so-easy-to-get-on-with disposition. He learnt how to cohabit with it and to deal with his twisting feelings. Always balancing between the sense of incompleteness and the fear of not making his father proud of him, he lived his life struggling against his limits and his nature, to free himself of his guilt, his sins, and his lonely isolation. Maybe he was too sensitive, too delicate for the society he belonged to. One thing is sure. “He was, in the end, a man with a broken heart, one who loved but was never really loved in return.”34
www.todayinbritishhistory.com
Self-portrait of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
33 I. BOWMAN, op. cit., pp. 3-4. 34 M. N. COHEN, op. cit., p. 531.
