Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded

by David Day

  Rather astonished at the tone of the letter, the dean wrote in reply that Dodgson’s objections were both “hypercritical and unnecessary,” but wishing to be somewhat conciliatory, Liddell offered to modify future notices. This simply was not good enough for the irate Dodgson, who refused to assess these candidates—and who in any case was of the opinion that places at the college should not be entirely based on intellectual merit.

  Just a few weeks later, in February, it was proposed that the classics should no longer be compulsory after the first-year examinations for those planning to graduate in the sciences. The idea was anathema to Dodgson. Adding insult to injury, Oxford degrees were to be further degraded, he said, by instituting third class and even fourth class grades that didn’t require Latin and Greek beyond the initial undergraduate entrance.

  When the liberal element eventually prevailed, Dodgson went public with his protest. On March 4, a letter by him appeared in the Morning Post: “I much regret the necessity I feel under which the new examination statute has placed me, of resigning my present office of Public Examiner in Mathematics…[owing to] a partial surrender, and so is a step towards a total surrender of the principle, hitherto inviolate, that the Classics are an essential part of an Oxford education.”

  This example of washing the university’s dirty laundry in public undoubtedly caused (as it was meant to) the dean some embarrassment. Nor would it be the last time. Although Dodgson’s preferred method seems to have been anonymous squibs distributed privately in college common rooms and publicly through booksellers in Oxford, Cambridge and London, he also wrote many more letters to the press.

  In February 1865, Dodgson distributed his satire “American Telegrams,” which dealt with the continuing efforts of the Christ Church students (lecturers and tutors) to wrest from the dean and canons some of their decision-making power over college business. In part, the satire concerned itself with what would eventually reach the London press and the House of Commons as the “Bread and Butter Row” over the college butler’s overcharging for food and drink.

  In “American Telegrams,” the dean and canons are known as the Federals, and the students (tutors) as the Confederates. (Always on the wrong side of history, Dodgson was a champion of the Confederates.) The villainous “President L.” was clearly Dean Liddell, and “General Grant” was Henry Grant, the Christ Church butler. The Federal Secretary of the Treasury is described as “a blot in any conceivable system of government,” a direct reference to Under Treasurer Blott of Christ Church. The main complaint of the squib is that President L. has foolishly given virtual “dictatorial powers” to General Grant, and that the only solution to the conflict must be “that the Treasury shall be placed under the control of Confederates and Federals alike.”

  “American Telegrams” was quickly followed in March 1865 by Dodgson’s “Dynamics of a Parti-cle,” which included his “New Method of Evaluation, as Applied to π” and its decade-old persecution of Benjamin Jowett; this was combined with an attack on William Ewart Gladstone, who had just lost his seat in Oxford. Gladstone’s defeat was especially painful to his friend and ally Dean Liddell, who had campaigned vigorously on his behalf. Dodgson cleverly disguises these individuals, along with other prominent figures at Oxford, as coordinates in geometry. And so, for instance, proclaims by employing pseudo-mathematical means: “it will be found most convenient to project WEG [William Ewart Gladstone] to infinity.”

  The year 1865 was also when the conservative revolt of the lecturers and tutors of Christ Church satirized in the “Caucus-Race” regained momentum. Once again Dodgson was one of the prime movers in this revolt, which was ultimately resolved in the House of Commons, and required the dean to make concessions.

  When the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (with its dedication to Alice Liddell) that year was also met with silence from the Deanery, Dodgson seems to have thrown caution to the wind, and published what might be considered an anti-reform manifesto in a sarcastic long poem entitled “The Elections to the Hebdomadal Council.”

  In this poem, Carroll argued that the awarding of fellowships based on intellectual achievement alone would lead to a disastrous influx of social misfits, clever criminals, foreign infidels and ingenious villains of all stripes.

  And then our Fellowships shall open be

  To Intellect, no meaner quality!

  No moral excellence, no social fitness

  Shall ever be admissible as witness.

  “Avaunt, dull Virtue!” is Oxonia’s cry:

  “Come to arms, ingenious Villainy!”

  For Classics Fellowships, an honour high,

  Simonides and Co. will then apply—

  Our Mathematics will to Oxford bring

  The ’cutest members of the betting-ring

  Law Fellowships will start upon their journeys

  A myriad of unscrupulous attorneys—

  While prisoners, doomed till now to toil unknown,

  Shall mount the Physical Professor’s throne!

  .… I might go on, and trace the destiny

  Of Oxford in an age which, though it be

  Thus breaking with tradition, owns a new

  Allegiance to the intellectual few—

  (I mean, of course, the—pshaw! No matter who!*)

  But, were I to pursue the boundless theme,

  I fear that I should seem to you to dream.

  Somehow Carroll’s epidemic of criminal and moral corruption resulting from awarding fellowships nominally based on intellectual merit did not materialize. Or, stated more accurately: criminal and moral corruption at Oxford remained at much the same level as before. Infidels, however, were another matter. It took another six years—and the passage of the University Tests Act of 1871 to force the issue—but finally *Jews and other non-Christians were allowed entry into the Oxford colleges.

  It is almost impossible for anyone born in the twentieth or twenty-first century to support Dodgson’s view that entry into universities should be based on “moral excellence” and “social fitness” rather than intellectual achievement. However, his argument must be seen in the context of a time when universities were moving slowly from a system designed to uphold the status quo of the ruling class to one that industry and empire required be more open, with highly educated graduates and fields of study expanded to include the practical sciences and engineering.

  In the years following the publication of Wonderland, Carroll became more and more publicly allied to conservative forces at Christ Church. Certainly he seems to have convinced himself that his opposition to the dean was a matter of conservative principle and moral rectitude. However, as time passes, it becomes increasingly clear there was a deeper and irrational reason for his actions against the dean and his wife. Certainly, over the years, Dodgson became increasingly bitter about his loss of the original Alice. Near the end of 1867, he wrote a letter to a child-friend named Agnes “Dolly” Argles that began, “I have a message for you from a friend of mine, Mr. Lewis Carroll, who is a queer sort of creature, rather too fond of talking nonsense. He told me you had once asked him to write another book like one you had read—I forget the name—I think it was about ‘malice.’ ”

  III. THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS AND BEYOND Six years after the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll’s second masterpiece, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, was again dedicated to Alice Liddell. This is remarkable, given that Carroll had barely seen or spoken to his “dream child”—by then nineteen—for the better part of a decade.

  Over the intervening years, the little Liddell sisters grew up in the great social swirl that was the Deanery society managed by their mother. They progressed from pretty children to society darlings. Admirers and suitors came to the Deanery and were carefully evaluated by Mrs. Liddell as potential husbands.

  During these years, while Carroll attempted to find some consolation in tea parties and photographic sessions with scores of other little girls
, Alice and her sisters proved to be an inspiration to others. Even before the publication of Wonderland, the three sisters sat for a painting by one of Britain’s most sought after portrait artists, William Blake Richmond.

  As they matured into young ladies, the sisters became models and muses for a number of other photographers and artists. Among them was the already mentioned photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who besides portraying Alice in the various forms of the Great Goddess, also photographed her as the teenage Saint Agnes and the virtuous Lady Enid from Tennyson’s Idylls of a King. On another occasion, Cameron created a tableau with all three Liddell sisters appearing as the three daughters of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

  All three sisters also sat for the most prestigious photographer of the Victorian age, Alexander Bassano, the official portrait photographer of Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales. Always well placed at the centre of high society, the sisters continued throughout their lives to attract the attention of artists. And in the case of Edith the Wonderland Eaglet, this continued even after her early death at the age of twenty-two, when her likeness was used by the Pre-Raphaelite artists Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris for their stained glass portrait of St. Catherine in the Chapel of Remembrance in Christ Church Cathedral.

  The Liddell sisters in an engraving after a painting by William Blake Richmond…

  …and as photographed by Alexander Bassano…

  …and posing as Lear’s daughters for Julia Margaret Cameron.

  Edith Liddell as St. Catherine.

  Just after the publication of Through the Looking-Glass, released in December 1871 (but dated 1872), Carroll’s attitude toward Dean Liddell and his wife deteriorated from unpleasant to abusive. There is little doubt that his emotional motives were largely hidden from himself, but his attacks on the dean and his wife after 1871 progress from the covert (as in their portrayal as the King and Queen of Hearts) to the public and vicious in frequent anonymous pamphlets, many of them amounting to character assassinations.

  The timing is significant. By the summer of 1872, Alice was twenty, and she and her sisters Lorina and Edith had just returned from their Grand Tour of Europe. It would not have helped that Carroll’s younger brother Wilfred had just wed his own teenaged sweetheart, Alice Donkin, who was now twenty-one. The most provocative circumstance for Carroll, though, was undoubtedly the fact that Queen Victoria’s youngest son, Prince Leopold, had become romantically linked with Alice Liddell.

  As his brother, the Prince of Wales, had done before him, Prince Leopold attended Christ Church. He had become an undergraduate student of Robinson Duckworth (the Wonderland Duck), and his mentor was Dean Liddell. As such he went often to the Deanery, where he and Alice were frequently seen in each other’s company.

  As Carroll’s biographer Martin Cohen remarks, “When the Prince and Alice appeared to be more than friends, Charles launched his most virulent attacks upon the Dean and, indeed, upon Mrs. Liddell’s ‘king-fisher’ activities.”

  Cohen’s reference to Carroll’s “unbridled vitriol” levelled at Mrs. Liddell relates to his 1873 publication of The Vision of the Three T’s, a very public assault on the entire family, but most especially on Mrs. Liddell. The Vision was—in part—cast as a parody of Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler in which Carroll characterized Mrs. Liddell’s social-climbing ambition to marry her daughters off to ever-higher levels of society as that of a “King-fisher” who single-mindedly hunted for “Gold-fish”—that is, aristocrats or royalty—to feed to her young.

  Though Carroll was not alone in this sort of observation of Mrs. Liddell, in such a class-conscious society it was presumed to be every mother’s duty to attempt to marry her daughters off to gentlemen of a higher social standing. It was common knowledge that this was how Mrs. Liddell herself had found her place in society. The novelist and old school friend of the dean William Makepeace Thackeray was much surprised to hear of the match and wrote: “Dear brave old Liddell!…has taken a 3rd rate provincial lady (rather first rate in the beauty line, though, I think) for a wife.” Still, gossip was one thing; publication was quite another.

  The real problem for Carroll was that Mrs. Liddell and he were too much alike. As we have seen, Carroll was a relentless “lion hunter” of the rich and famous. He too was a third-rate provincial who was equally ambitious as a social climber and stalker of celebrities, aristocrats and royalty. And he was as dismissive as her of those he considered socially inferior.

  In 1874, Carroll published “The Blank Cheque,” another virulent attack on Mrs. Liddell. Again the timing was significant: it was three days before Alice’s older sister, Lorina, wed William Baillie Skene, whose family was descended from thirteenth-century barons of Skene Castle. In “The Blank Cheque,” Mrs. Liddell appears as an overbearing, vain and stupid wife of a vague, absent-minded and dim dean. She is called Mrs. Nivers—that is, someone who believes herself to be the centre of the “u-NIVERS-ity.”

  In the incompetent hands of Mrs. Nivers, the university rapidly descends into hopeless debt and falls apart. Carroll himself appears as Mr. De Ciel—or D. C. L., a scrambling of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s initials—the only reasonable and sensible person in a cast that includes three silly schoolboys: Benjy (Benjamin Jowett), Arthur (Arthur Penrhyn Stanley) and Harry-Parry (Henry Parry Liddon). There is also Pussy, “the much-enduring parlour-cat” (Edward Bouverie Pusey) and Susan the maid (Mary Prickett, Alice’s governess).

  Carroll self-published “The Blank Cheque” and a dozen other satiric pamphlets of this sort over the years. Many of the more notorious ones were quoted in undergraduate publications and not infrequently in popular magazines and the national press.

  If the attacks seem today obscure, they certainly were not at the time in Oxford. The tolerance of the dean and his wife is rather remarkable. The almost hysterical vitriol Dodgson aimed at the Liddells in these squibs undoubtedly caused tongues to wag and exaggerate the nature of his relationship with Alice even further.

  Certainly, no one saw Dodgson’s pamphlets as harmless lampooning. Oxford’s great philologist, the German Max Müller, wrote about the attacks with some embarrassment: “Nasty things were said and written, but everybody knew from what forge those arrows came.” Even Dodgson’s friend the chancellor of the university, Lord Robert Cecil the Marquess of Salisbury, commented on the unsavoury nature of the pamphlets: “Some say that Dodgson has lost his mind because of rejection of Alice’s hand in marriage. It certainly seems like it.”

  In Oxford academic circles—even among undergraduates—Lewis Carroll’s feud with the dean and Mrs. Liddell had taken on such legendary status that in 1874, it resulted in an outright scandal. That year, the dean decided he could no longer tolerate the situation when an undergraduate published an anonymous lampoon entitled “Cakeless.” This was the last straw for the normally tolerant man. Attacks on the dean’s policies and politics were one thing, but this nasty attack on the morals and character of his wife and daughters could not be ignored—all the more so since all the material had obviously been lifted from Dodgson’s many pamphlets.

  “Cakeless” is comic verse drama in which the Liddell family appear in Greek costume: Dean and Mrs. Liddell as Apollo and Diana, and Alice, Lorina and Edith as their three betrothed daughters. The occasion is a joyous triple wedding of the three beauties, but in the midst of the ceremony a “cursed fiend” appears and screams out, “I do protest against this match, so let me speak.”

  Apollo (the dean) immediately recognizes the “cursed fiend” as his all too familiar gadfly adversary: “My foeman Kraftsohn.” The dodgy Kraftsohn is, in fact, Charles Dodgson, the mathematics don who is “biting his nails” in wrath and swears geometric oaths: “By circles, segments, and by radii, / Than yield to these I’d liefer far to die.”

  The enraged Apollo points out Kraftsohn to an army of scouts and demands they drive him from the scene: “Strip, strip him, scouts! This is the knave we seek.” Later, to make sure no one can mistake Kraftsohn�
��s true identity, Apollo suggests his scouts “Leave him in Wonderland with some hard-hitting foe, / And through the looking-glass let him survey the blow.”

  Though “Cakeless” is written in the same style as a couple of Lewis Carroll’s pamphlets, his unflattering portrayal makes it unlikely that he was directly involved in producing it. What is certain is that most of the ammunition used against the Liddells was gleaned from a decade’s worth of Carroll’s lampoons. “Cakeless” is practically an index to all of Dodgson’s abusive pamphlets.

  It certainly mirrors Carroll’s characterization of Mrs. Liddell as a “King-fisher” who hunts “Gold-fish” aristocrats to marry off her daughters to. In “Cakeless,” the three wealthy bridegrooms are clearly identifiable as Prince Leopold, Lord Brooke and Aubrey Harcourt, who were all romantically linked to the three Liddell sisters.

  Finally imprisoned in a belfry, the still vengeful Kraftsohn fumes like Milton’s Satan in his chains:

  My fate is sealed; my race is run,

  My pilgrimage is well nigh done

  Farewell to pamphlets and to angles round!

  I seek a shore where Euclid is not found.

  Dean Liddell ordered all copies of the pamphlet seized and suppressed. Then he had the undergraduate author unmasked and brought to his chambers. The luckless student, John Howe Jenkins, was informed that he was to be sent down.

  Remarkably, the “Cakeless” scandal did nothing to silence Dodgson. In fact, he seemed to thrive on his notoriety as the Oxford gadfly. Far from being the shy, retiring don that he is commonly believed to have been, he was in fact one of Oxford’s most contentious figures throughout his tenure at Christ Church—and a constant thorn in the side of the dean.

  Indeed, in the wake of the “Cakeless” scandal, he decided the moment was right to publish College Rhymes and Notes by an Oxford Chiel. This was a collection of most of his most notorious squibs and satires lampooning the Liddells. This was followed later that year by the publication of letters in the Pall Mall Gazette attacking the dean’s programs.