by David Day
The year 1876 marked the beginning of a new romance for Alice Liddell. Her beau this time was another Christ Church undergraduate, Reginald Gervis Hargreaves, the only son of a wealthy mill owner and Lancashire property magnate. He was exactly Alice’s age and was everything Dodgson was not: a youthful, athletic cricketer and a member of the hunting and shooting set with a country estate in the New Forest. He was also academically unremarkable and absolutely hated Latin and Greek.
This was the year of the publication of The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carroll’s last true literary masterpiece. Significantly, this book is dedicated not to Alice Liddell but to a different child-friend and muse, Gertrude Chataway.
Midsummer that year was initially a time of celebration for the Liddells. Alice’s younger sister Edith (the Eaglet) was engaged in June to Aubrey Harcourt, the grandson of the Earl of Sheffield and nephew of Liberal home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer Edward William Harcourt. Coincidentally, Aubrey was heir to the Nuneham estate where a decade before the sisters frequently picnicked with Carroll on their boating expeditions. Plans for the wedding ended thirteen days later, when Edith died suddenly from a combination of measles and peritonitis. This was a terrible blow to all the Liddell family, but especially to Mrs. Liddell and to Alice, who had always been a close confidante of her younger sister. Dodgson mentions the event in his diaries by referring to the passing of “my old friend Edith Liddell.” He also mentions—seemingly sympathetically—that the grieving Mrs. Liddell came to his rooms to gather a few photographs of Edith from his collection.
Extraordinarily, though, less than one month after Edith’s death, Dodgson seems to have had no mercy for her grieving father. In July of 1876, he published the poem “Fame’s Penny Trumpet,” which was an almost hysterical attack on Dean Liddell’s program for financing original research at the university. Dodgson held the dilettante’s view that it was despicable and ungentlemanly to accept endowments and funds to conduct and reward research. Once again employing the Liddell/little pun, he attacks the “little men” by describing them as “Ye little men of little souls!…Gold-sucking leeches…[with] swinish appetite!” and “the vermin that beset [Wisdom’s] path!”
In Morton Cohen’s opinion: “So intemperate was the verse that the Pall Mall Gazette, Punch, and World would not print it.” Nonetheless, the undaunted Carroll had the diatribe printed and distributed himself.
Over the next four years, Dodgson attacked in print a wide variety of university programs and policies, such as the statistical analysis of examination marks. He also publicly opposed the financing of Max Müller’s professorship of comparative literature and argued against awarding M.A. degrees in natural science.
Much to the embarrassment of the dean and the university, he often voiced his many objections through letters to national newspapers. Although his letters covered a wide range of subjects and complaints, one issue became his most frequently ridden hobby horse. Dodgson believed it to be his duty “to rouse an interest, beyond the limits of Oxford, in preserving classics as an essential feature of a University education.” Sadly for him, the interest of the nation was not roused, and nor did the nation share his horror at the notion that “the destinies of Oxford may some day be in the hands of those who have had no education other than ‘scientific.’ ”
Alice Liddell, circa 1880: Leaving Wonderland behind.
The venue for the wedding: Dodgson was not invited.
IV. LAST YEARS On September 15, 1880, Alice Pleasance Liddell married Reginald Gervis Hargreaves with much pomp and ceremony in Westminster Abbey where she had been baptised twenty-eight years earlier. The presiding minister at the wedding was the Liddells’ old family friend the dean of Westminster, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, the leading liberal Churchman of the time. In attendance were many prominent members of church and state, as well as royalty in the person of Prince Leopold the Duke of Albany who carried congratulatory messages from the Queen and the Prince of Wales. Charles Dodgson was not among those invited.
Alice and Reginald Hargreaves moved into Cuffnells, the Hargreaves family estate in the New Forest. Alice became a celebrated society hostess, while her husband played cricket for Hampshire and served as a magistrate. Like her mother before her, Alice sought out the cream of society for their soirees, balls and shooting parties on their estate. It was a life that could hardly be further removed from that lived by the Reverend Charles Dodgson.
Some fifteen months after her grand wedding, Alice produced the first of three sons, Alan Knyveton. Fifteen months later, she gave birth to Leopold Reginald “Rex,” and later still to Caryl Liddell. The second son was named after his godfather, Prince Leopold, who through the Queen’s arrangements in 1882 had married Princess Helena Frederica Augusta of Waldeck-Pyrmont. Sadly, just two years later, the Prince—who suffered from hemophilia and epilepsy—died as a result of a fall, leaving behind two very young children: a prince and a princess—who was named Alice.
The months following Alice Liddell’s wedding proved to be a turning point in Charles Dodgson’s life as well. Although continuing with his tea parties and visits with scores of child-friends, he suddenly and completely gave up his practice of photography. Now aged forty-nine, he also decided to dispense with his teaching duties at Christ Church and submitted his letter of resignation to the dean.
Dodgson never had any undergraduate following, and indeed appears to have rather despised popular tutors like Benjamin Jowett. Although he enjoyed teaching children (especially pre-adolescent girls), he seems to have avoided forming or maintaining friendships with adult pupils. And despite his notoriety among undergraduates as a pamphleteer and satirist, his students did not find his classes to be in the least entertaining. One student, H.F. Howard, described his lectures as humourless and “unspeakably dull”; while A.S. Russell (who became a Christ Church tutor) claimed one group of students actually petitioned to be transferred to another instructor.
Nonetheless, Dodgson appears to have taken his duties as a lecturer seriously, and in his diary for 1881 he reflects sadly that while his first lecture in 1856 was attended by a class of twelve undergraduates, his last attracted only two out of nine.
The Chestnuts, Guildford: Dodgson family residence.
Unfortunately for Dean Liddell, Dodgson’s resignation from his teaching duties did not end his activities at the university. Indeed, as among the last given tenure under the old system of privilege and favour, Dodgson was entitled to retain, for the rest of his life, his residency, including free board and common-room membership, in one of the most desirable suites of rooms in Christ Church’s great quadrangle.
Dodgson expressed his desire to dedicate the rest of his life to his writing, and Dean Liddell would no doubt have been delighted if Dodgson had indeed limited himself to his writing, hobbies and picnics. But Dodgson’s resignation from his teaching duties gave him much more free time to sit on committees, where he must have driven the dean to despair. Dodgson fought with Liddell over every issue, from college appointments to the dean’s wish to provide college servants with Christmas presents.
In the 1880s, his popularity as the author of the Alice books grew exponentially, and internationally, so much so that he busied himself with marketing Wonderland stamp cases, puzzles, games and biscuit tins. There was also an 1886 Christmas stage production of Alice in Wonderland at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London; an Alice’s Adventures Under Ground facsimile edition of the handwritten manuscript (1886) and a simplified, colour illustrated The Nursery “Alice” for children “nought to five” (1889).
Spinoff: An Alice for those “from nought to five.”
A new audience: Alice on stage.
He worked equally hard on a considerable number of publications stemming from his study of mathematics and logic. Among them, in 1887 he published his Curiosa Mathematica and Game of Logic. He also made a special study of the mathematical probabilities of voting systems.
Furthermore, he was constantly writing l
etters to the national and local press, the prime minister and various committees and dignitaries on a multitude of issues: university education, public schools, national politics, economics, organization of charities, vivisection and public morals.
His chief creative work of this period was a novel in two parts: Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893). These two volumes are interesting primarily because they give Carrollian scholars insights into the author and the ideas and issues that most concerned him. As novels, however, they are failures of disastrous proportions and did a great deal to diminish his literary reputation among critics and even his most enthusiastic fans.
No good as novels: Carroll’s chief creative work of this period.
Somewhat disappointed by the reception of the Sylvie and Bruno books, Dodgson was nonetheless buoyed up by the continued popularity and ever-expanding sales of the Alice books. He also became more and more focused on what he considered his most important contribution to education, his book on logic. After more than a decade of labour, he published Symbolic Logic: Part I, Elementary in 1896. He fully intended to finish Part II, Advanced over the next year or so. However, despite the long working hours he put into the project, it never saw publication during his lifetime.
Now in his mid-sixties, the Reverend Charles Dodgson appeared to be in vigorous good health. He was famous for working at a standing desk during marathon sessions that frequently extended into the early hours of the morning, and he was often sighted—black coattails flapping—on rapid-paced twenty-mile walks through the Oxford countryside.
In the summer of 1897, Carroll proudly commented on “the splendid health I have had, unbroken, for the last year and a half, and the working powers that are fully as great as, if not greater, than I have ever had.” And in September that year, he wrote to a sister saying that he enjoyed (without tiring in the least) his brisk biweekly eighteen-mile walks between his holiday residence in Eastbourne and Hastings.
And yet suddenly, on January 14, 1898—thirteen days short of his sixty-sixth birthday—Charles Dodgson was dead. He had suffered cold and flu symptoms after spending Christmas with his sisters in Guildford, and shortly thereafter contracted a fatal bronchial infection.
Morton Cohen has pointed out that while appearing generally fit, Dodgson had had some bronchial trouble over the last decade of his life, and this may have been due to the “miasmal river climate of Oxford.” However, he also offers a very convincing suggestion that Carroll’s condition may have resulted from his enthusiasm for acquiring the latest gadgets and appliances.
Always an early adopter, Dodgson was one of the first to acquire asbestos gas fires. He had them installed in his bedrooms in Christ Church, Guildford and Eastbourne. As he boasted, not only were these fires cleaner and more efficient than coal fires, but he could keep them burning all night without attending them. As the dangers of asbestos were not understood until the second half of the twentieth century, Dodgson could not have known the damage he was undoubtedly inflicting on his lungs for more than a decade by breathing in asbestos particles in a closed room throughout the night.
Dodgson and the dean: Rivals died within days of each other.
Four days after Dodgson’s death, his old adversary, Henry George Liddell, also passed away. On January 23, 1898, Liddell’s successor as dean, Francis Paget, preached a sermon in Christ Church Cathedral honouring the memory of both men. The irony would not have been lost on the congregation. Within the limits of formally polite but often poisonous Oxford academic society, the pair’s animosity had been obvious and mutual. Dodgson was excluded from many social occasions at the Deanery. And in later years, Mrs. Liddell confiscated all the letters, stories, puzzles and games that Dodgson had sent to her children and destroyed them.
Most telling of all, years later, when Lewis Carroll was famous throughout the empire, Mrs. Liddell commissioned and oversaw her husband’s posthumous biography, in which not one reference to Charles Dodgson or Lewis Carroll is made. This despite the fact that the two men had a fifty-year working relationship, and the dean’s daughter was famously acknowledged throughout the English-speaking world as the original Alice in Wonderland.
One final irony may be gleaned by anyone visiting Christ Church’s great dining hall, around which are hung the portraits of the great and the good of the college over the centuries. There upon the walls may be found the portraits of both Dean Henry George Liddell and his old nemesis the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
So ends the tale of Charles Dodgson. But what do we know of the fate of the real Alice, now Mrs. Alice Hargreaves, through the last years of the Victorian age?
Alice continued to live the life of a wealthy socialite at Cuffnells, but by the 1890s revenues were diminishing for many of the country’s landed gentry owing to falling agricultural prices. And during the Edwardian period, increases in income and inheritance taxes began the decline in the fortunes of the nation’s grand estates. The Hargreaveses suffered no real hardships, but like many of their class, they began to slowly sell off their land holdings. First to go was the family’s northern Lancashire estate, its grand house, its park and finally its outlying farms.
None of this seemed to impinge on the high-society life of Alice and her family. However, then came the holocaust of the Great War that brought desolation to the lives and fortunes of so many families of all classes. From this cataclysm, the Hargreaves were not exempt. By the end of the conflict, their two eldest sons lay among the dead, and Alice and her husband’s lives were forever after darkened by that terrible loss.
In 1926, a rather broken and nearly financially ruined Reginald died, aged seventy-three. His only surviving son, Caryl, inherited Cuffnells, but there was not sufficient money to maintain the estate as well as his London apartments. Despite this financial crisis, Caryl was unwilling to give up his fashionable society lifestyle in London, and he largely left it up to his elderly mother to deal with matters as best she could, alone at Cuffnells.
The original Alice: Its inspiration was forced to sell her hand-drawn, handwritten copy.
No longer a wealthy society hostess, Alice Hargreaves believed she had only one viable asset remaining: her collection of gifts from Lewis Carroll, including first editions inscribed by him. These included the beautiful hand-drawn, handwritten green-leather-bound booklet that was Carroll’s original Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.
Its offering at a Sotheby’s auction on April 3, 1928 caused a sensation as pre-emptive offers of four to ten thousand pounds were refused, and even the British Museum’s limit of twelve thousand pounds was exceeded. The final bid was £15,400, an enormous sum. At the same time, Virginia Woolf was about to publish A Room of One’s Own, in which she cites an annual income of five hundred pounds as sufficient to make a woman of some social standing financially independent. The sale price was four times Sotheby’s estimate and broke all records as the highest price ever paid for a book in Britain; in today’s currency it would be equivalent to well over a million U.S. dollars.
However, sensation in the press soon turned to outrage when it was discovered that the purchaser was an American book dealer and that this literary treasure would be forever lost to the nation when taken away to the United States.
Had Lewis Carroll posthumously come to the rescue of his little heroine Alice and saved her family home? Unfortunately not. The money should have been sufficient to provide mother and son with a good living income. Also, Alice had hoped that it would cover the inheritance tax on the estate, so Caryl might retain Cuffnells after her death. But Caryl—as was so often said of the careless young men of his class—was “not good with money.” Within two years, through ill-advised investments, he had lost the entire fortune acquired through the Sotheby’s auction. The aging Alice Hargreaves was back in the ever more financially precarious Cuffnells, alone, and more isolated than ever.
And yet, absurdly, all was not entirely lost. After the 1928 Sotheby’s sale, Alice’s Adventures Under G
round (along with two first editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) had been resold for $150,000 (equivalent to roughly two million dollars in today’s currency) to Eldridge Johnson, president of the Victor Talking Machine Company (later RCA Victor).
In 1932, a massive exhibition was mounted in New York to mark Lewis Carroll’s centenary. The exhibition’s prize display was Eldridge Johnson’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, while the president of Columbia University decided to top off the celebrations by inviting the real Alice to Manhattan. She travelled to New York at the university’s expense in the company of her sister Rhoda and her son Caryl.
Honoured in New York: Alice with Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler.
Alice Hargreaves was greeted in New York as a great celebrity. The eighty-year-old was met at the port by newspapermen, film crews and a police escort that paraded her though the streets of Manhattan and into a grand suite in the Waldorf-Astoria. She appeared in the press throughout North America and in a Paramount newsreel in the nation’s movie houses, and addressed the American people on the radio and by means of a well-paid exclusive interview in The New York Times.
It is difficult to know whether Charles Dodgson would have been delighted or outraged when Alice Liddell was presented with an honorary doctorate of letters from Columbia University.
A somewhat less flamboyant centenary exhibition of Carrollian paraphernalia was held in Britain on June 26, 1932. The Bumpus Bookshop (“Booksellers to His Majesty the King”) of Oxford Street, London, was filled to overflowing with those wishing to catch sight of “the real Alice.” The event was attended by a considerable number of literary luminaries, including J. B. Priestley and Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Also in attendance was J. M. Barrie’s adopted son, Peter Llewelyn Davies, the inspiration for Peter Pan. He and Alice were introduced, but sadly, we have no record of what conversation passed between these muses for the creation of two of the most celebrated characters in children’s literature.
