Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded

by David Day

  On his throne: The reforming Dean Liddell.

  The following year, in May of 1855, everything changed. Dean Gaisford unexpectedly dropped dead. As the faculty at Christ Church rightly observed, Gaisford was the last bastion of defence for the traditionalists. The government of Lord Palmerston had had enough of entrenched reactionary forces at Oxford and their obstruction of much-needed reform in all institutions of higher learning.

  The government created the Hebdomadal Council to be the governing body of the university in an attempt to end the most blatant policies of patronage, and instituted a system of academic competition for university posts. The government’s liberal reformers would now have their way through the appointment of a new dean.

  “Now nothing but what is evil is threatened by his [Gaisford’s] successor,” predicted Canon Pusey, Dodgson’s mentor (and his model for the Cheshire Cat). And that “evil” was seen to be embodied in the new dean of Christ Church: Henry George Liddell, the reforming headmaster of Westminster School, former student at Christ Church and liberal member of the 1850 Royal Commission on Oxford University.

  Liddell was guilty of three great sins. The first was that as a Church of England minister he brought about the beginning of the end of that church’s control over academic life. His second great betrayal was to have used his authority as an aristocrat in an attempt to end the system of privilege in universities. His third was that, despite being one of the greatest classical Greek scholars of his time, he wished to put an end to Greek being a prerequisite for a university education in the sciences.

  The dean’s reception upon his arrival at Christ Church was not just a matter of putting up with a resentful faculty who had gained their places at Christ Church through the very system Liddell was seeking to dismantle. Nor did he simply have to endure relentless plotting against his authority. There were many more extreme measures of resistance in the form of riots, acts of vandalism, arson attacks and death threats.

  The dean himself gives a harrowing account of events during the first weeks of his family’s arrival at Christ Church. Liddell’s description of the manner of his greeting at Christ Church and Oxford is a masterpiece of understatement:

  When I first came, I confess my heart often sank; it is hardly too much to say that hardly a week passed without some disturbance. Gunpowder was freely used in such a way as to terrify not only the inmates of the House, but all the neighbourhood. One night, not very long after I took possession, a kettle charged with gunpowder was found fastened to the handle of my front door with a match inserted by the spout; and had the match taken effect, probably the door would have been blown in and immense injury done. About the same time, Mrs. Liddell received an anonymous letter, in which she was advised to quit the house with her young family, because in the course of a few nights it was to be blown up.

  Resistance: Rioting in Christ Church.

  Nonetheless, the battle was lost. Reform was on its way. The demands of empire and industry required it. Both the Liberal Party under Palmerston and Gladstone and the Conservative Party under Derby and Disraeli wanted reform of the Education Act. But the old guard at Oxford stubbornly fought on. Liddell had to constantly battle against an entrenched faculty that had secured their positions through the old system of privilege and patronage.

  The parliamentary acts of 1854 and 1856 did away with medieval regulations—and in theory at least—required fellowships to be awarded on academic merit and opened the universities to non-Anglicans and to the middle class generally. Later parliamentary acts provided a more liberal curriculum that accommodated the needs of candidates who were not seeking honours degrees but simply wanted a good general education. And yet, it was not until 1877 that the University Reform Act ended the celibacy requirement for Oxford dons.

  Dodgson was among the last to gain a lifetime fellowship at Christ Church based on the old system. He was also among those who believed “nothing good” would come of the appointment of the new dean. He appears to have been quite wrong, at least as far as his position was concerned. By the end of his first year, Dean Liddell made a number of generous gestures in an attempt to pacify the entrenched conservative faculty; among them was the appointment of Dodgson as mathematical lecturer. It would have been exceptional to appoint a B.A. to this position, so Liddell did something even more exceptional, and made Dodgson an honorary Master of the House well in advance of his acquisition of a master’s degree. But, if the dean expected anything in the way of gratitude or loyalty from Dodgson—or any of the other conservative dons at Christ Church—he was to be sadly disappointed.

  Anyone other than Charles Dodgson might have been content with this new position. As his biographer Morton Cohen has noted, “he was not required to teach if he chose not to, nor was he expected necessarily to publish or to achieve any other distinction. If he wished, he might recline in his easy chair, his feet up by the fire, drink his claret, and smoke a pipe for the rest of his life.”

  Yet Charles Dodgson was not that sort of man. Nor was his political position in any way flexible. Even though his position as an active member of Christ Church was considerably improved through the generous acts of this new liberal dean, it appears that Dodgson could never forgive anyone who attempted to bring an end to Oxford’s ancient old boys’ system.

  However illogically, Dodgson spent the rest of his life conspiring against any and all modernizers of the academy. His political sympathies at both university and government levels had always been with the conservatives, and he was steadfastly against any liberal reform of the system that had given him his privileged position at Christ Church.

  It was in 1856—shortly after his appointment as honorary Master of the House—that Dodgson first encountered the Liddell children while taking photographs in the Deanery garden. Over the next six years he became very much a part of the Liddell children’s lives: boating trips, tea parties, private lessons, photographic sessions and long afternoons taken up with games, magic shows, dramatic performances and the telling of fairy tales.

  Although a great part of Dodgson’s leisure time for several years was spent with the dean’s children, he seems to have thought that this did not require any form of personal loyalty. It is difficult to see how Dodgson could expect the dean to look benignly on this young mathematics don who one week took the Liddell girls boating and the next became a co-conspirator plotting against their father’s academic programs and reforms.

  From Carroll’s own diaries, it does seem that he must have believed—naively perhaps—that these contradictory actions in private and public life would somehow present no difficulty in his relationships with the Liddell family.

  During this time—1856 and 1857—Dodgson became deeply involved in a revolt among the conservative junior dons led by his friend Thomas Prout (Wonderland’s Mouse) against the dean and canons of Christ Church. This was the source of one version of the Mouse’s tale in Wonderland. Dodgson played a vigorous part in the deliberations, proposing and amending clauses and writing directly to arbiters with his own proposals for change.

  Just how entrenched Dodgson’s anti-liberal bias was, was made fairly clear when it came to the matter of electing the new Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1857. His diary records the meeting in the common room in which the dons agreed to put up John Ernest Bode as candidate for the professorship. Bode was a minor and undistinguished poet of ballads and hymns, but a conservative in all matters aesthetic and political.

  Matthew Arnold: English-speaking Professor of Poetry.

  This support of a poet as mundane as Bode was all the more remarkable given that he was chosen by Carroll and his colleagues over the other candidate, Matthew Arnold: who was already widely celebrated as a major poet of some importance. However, because his father, Thomas Arnold—the famous headmaster of Rugby School—was a powerful exponent of the progressive trends in British education, the conservative faction of Christ Church voted against him. Nonetheless, other colleges had their say as well, and Matthew
Arnold was appointed Oxford Professor of Poetry and, much to Dodgson’s chagrin, became the first professor to deliver his lectures in English rather than Latin.

  Charles Dodgson attached himself to any number of attempts to block any election to office of those perceived to be liberal allies of the dean. Certainly, he gave his support to the long struggle by conservative forces in the university to block the appointment of the liberal Benjamin Jowett (Wonderland’s Father William) as master of Balliol College, and then, with that achieved, to a decade-long struggle to withhold a reasonable stipend for his services as the Regius Professor of Greek.

  Just why Dodgson felt compelled to oppose publicly the dean’s appointments and then attack his policies without apparently expecting some negative personal response from his superior is rather a mystery. And indeed, it is unlikely that most administrators would have tolerated this behaviour for as long as Liddell did.

  Perhaps initially, Dodgson’s actions as an opponent to the dean’s reforms were at a somewhat low level and did not result in great notoriety in the mind of Liddell in his role as the head of the college. The dean, after all, had greater immediate obstacles in his path and had many more obvious and formidable foes.

  Still, considering what followed, it is remarkable that the dean did not rid himself of this troublesome lecturer when the opportunity arose—as it did just four short months after the famous 1862 river trip on which Dodgson told the tale that became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For that year, Charles Dodgson’s career and position at Christ Church were very much in jeopardy.

  Dodgson, it seems, was a traditional conservative only so long as those traditions suited him. As he himself noted in a letter to his cousin William Wilcox, his mentor Canon Pusey “sent for me, and told me he would like to nominate me [for a studentship], but he made a rule to nominate only those who were going to take Holy Orders. I told him that was my intention, and he nominated me. That was a sort of condition, no doubt.” However, when Dodgson changed his mind about becoming ordained, he dismissed this “sort of condition” and somewhat conveniently claimed he didn’t see this “as in any way a breach of contract.”

  Others did not see this as a “sort of condition.” The ancient rules at Christ Church were quite clear, and Dodgson’s position came with two major conditions: he must not marry and he must take holy orders and enter the priesthood.

  Dodgson, however, found he quite cherished his place in academia and did not wish to be burdened by parochial work. He seems to have had little interest in or talent for dealing with common parishioners or carrying out tiresome clerical duties. Nor did he wish to give up his bachelor don’s lifestyle with its guaranteed income for life, its free palatial apartment and its dining and common-room privileges. Nor would he wish to give up his photography, his literary ambitions, his mathematical studies or his enthusiasm for the theatre. Dodgson’s dedication to the theatre was as firm as his dedication to his religion, but the ban on clergymen attending the theatre was at that time absolute.

  Holding back on the decision to take a priest’s orders, Dodgson decided instead to take deacon’s orders “as a sort of experiment, which would enable me to try how the occupation of a clergyman suited me, & then decide whether I would take full Orders.”

  On December 22, 1861, Dodgson received from Bishop Wilberforce his certificate of ordination as a deacon. As he saw it, this gave him the prestige of being a clergyman without being encumbered by any of the attendant duties of a priest. Dodgson took the view that “a deacon might lawfully, if he found himself unfit for the work, abstain from direct ministerial duties.”

  In this rather convoluted manner, Dodgson seems to have wished to have it both ways: arguing that—depending on the circumstances—as a deacon, he was allowed to be both a kind of clergyman and a kind of layman. In matters such as theatre attendance or committing to parochial duties, his position was that a deacon’s ordination was quite different from a priest’s, and as such he was “free to regard himself as practically a layman.” In matters where he found it convenient to assume the authority of a man of the cloth, Dodgson would invariably refer to himself as entirely a clergyman.

  The precarious reasoning behind this legalistic balancing act was that by failing to take holy orders, Dodgson put his position at Christ Church in question. Realizing that this dilemma must be resolved, on October 21, 1862, he finally presented himself to Dean Liddell, as he wrote in his diary, “to ask him if I was in any way obliged to take Priests’ Orders,” immediately adding, “(I consider mine as a Lay Studentship).”

  Dodgson records that the dean’s opinion—not surprisingly—“was that by being ordained Deacon I became a Clerical Student, and so subject to the same conditions as if I had taken a Clerical Studentship, viz. that I must take Priests’ Orders within four years from my time for being M.A. and that as this was clearly impossible in my case”—five years having already passed—“I have probably lost the Studentship, and am at least bound to take Priests’ Orders as soon as possible.”

  Dodgson’s only defence was an unconvincing repetition of his mantra: “I consider mine as a Lay Studentship.” On his own authority, the dean could have decided on termination, but suggested the question should be properly settled by “laying the matter before the electors”—although, as Dodgson feared, it is not likely they would have decided in his favour.

  The next day brought an unexpected reversal. Dodgson’s diary reads: “The Dean has decided on not consulting the electors, and says he shall do nothing more about it, so I consider myself free as to being ordained Priest.”

  The dean had once again bent the rules to accommodate Dodgson. Why he should take such an extraordinary step is to this day a mystery. Perhaps Dean Liddell’s character somewhat mirrored that of the essentially compassionate King of Hearts, who frequently pardoned all those whom his wife would certainly have executed. It is likely that the dean’s wife would have cause to remind him of the countless obstructions placed before him that were a result of this single act of unreciprocated kindness toward Dodgson.

  Although busy writing and illustrating a handmade version of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground and in constant contact with the Liddell children, Dodgson never seems to have given the slightest sign of gratitude to the dean for this decision. Rather, he felt quite entitled to continue to attack the dean’s liberal initiatives.

  Indeed, only a few months after Dodgson had secured his post at Christ Church, he published anonymously a squib entitled “The Majesty of Justice.” This was an attack on Dean Liddell and other liberal supporters of Benjamin Jowett, who—at the instigation of Canon Pusey and other conservative Churchmen—was quite absurdly to be tried for heresy.

  Jowett had been named one of the “Seven Against Christ” for his essay “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” published in 1860 in a best-selling theological anthology entitled Essays and Reviews. He was charged with publishing teachings contrary to the doctrines of the Church of England. Because of confusion over jurisdiction, he was tried not at the ecclesiastical Court of Arches at Canterbury—where there was a fair chance of conviction—but in Oxford’s lower Court of the Vice-Chancellor, where the charges were summarily dismissed on a technicality. The dismissal outraged Jowett’s opponents.

  “The Majesty of Justice” was aimed at Dean Liddell’s Liberal (Whig) faction at Oxford, whom Dodgson accuses of influencing the court to dismiss the case against Jowett: “That makes the silliest men / Seem wise; the meanest men look big: / The Majesty of Justice, then, / Is seated in the WIG.”

  The Majesty of Justice judge is undoubtedly comparable to Wonderland’s court of justice judge, recognized as such by Alice “because of his great wig.” The judge was the King of Hearts, “and as he wore his crown over the wig … he did not look at all comfortable, and it was certainly not becoming.”

  Benjamin Jowett: One of the “Seven Against Christ.”

  Dodgson’s actions and publications consisted mostly of minor pot sho
ts at the Liberal appointments and initiatives, and he did not yet stand out substantially as a significant figure in the conservative faction. He did not make himself known as a major opponent who was willing to attack not only the Liberal cause but the dean himself.

  But that changed after the mysterious showdown in June 1863, after which Dodgson found himself permanently exiled from the Deanery. He could find no way back into the good graces of the Liddell family, and especially those of the formidable Mrs. Liddell.

  Dodgson made an attempt at reconciliation by having his handwritten and personally illustrated Alice’s Adventures Under Ground bound in green leather and sent as a gift for Alice. It was delivered to the Deanery for Christmas 1863, but no notification of its receipt or message of thanks came in return.

  Over the next two years, Dodgson obsessed over the manuscript, intensely revising and adding, creating the much larger and more detailed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The new version very much expanded the roles of the King and Queen of Hearts and the story of the trial, as well as introduced many new characters and episodes. Notably, it also painted a much darker picture of the realm and actions of the King and Queen of Hearts.

  During these two years—between the November 1863 delivery of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground and the December 1865 publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—Dodgson penned a flurry of squibs, satires and letters to newspapers that directly and publicly attacked Dean Liddell’s policies and agendas. He was no longer content with low-key political agitation and anonymous publications.

  Dean Liddell: Attacked in squibs, satires and letters to newspapers.

  In January 1864, the dean announced that one of the junior studentships would be “adjudged to the candidate who shows the greatest proficiency in Mathematics.” On the face of it, this was a fair and reasonable means of selection. Liddell, though, had not consulted Dodgson beforehand. Dodgson, as an examiner in mathematics at Christ Church, immediately wrote an indignant letter of protest.