The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

  Also by Jenny Woolf

  Lewis Carroll In His Own Account

  The Mystery of

  Lewis Carroll

  Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful,

  and Sometimes Lonely Man Who Created

  Alice in Wonderland

  JENNY WOOLF

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS NEW YORK

  To Tony, with all my love

  THE MYSTERY OF LEWIS CARROLL. Copyright © 2010 by Jenny Woolf. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  ISBN 978-0-312-61298-6

  First published in Great Britain by Haus Publishing Ltd

  First U.S. Edition: February 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword by Edward Wakeling

  A Personal Introduction

  1 ‘My Father and Mother were honest though poor …’: Family

  2 ‘You can do arithmetic, I trust?’: Oxford Life

  3 ‘Nose in the Middle, Mouth Under’: The Human Body

  4 ‘This Strange Wild Man from Other Lands’: Love and Sex

  5 ‘Children Are Three-Fourths of my Life’: Children

  6 ‘Child of the Pure Unclouded Brow’: Alice

  7 ‘That Awful Mystery’: Religion and the Supernatural

  8 ‘And Would You Be a Poet?’: Literature and Storytelling

  9 ‘…took the Camera of Rosewood’: Photography

  10 ‘He Offered Large Discount, he Offered a Cheque’: Money

  A Personal Conclusion

  Appendix: Report of Dr Yvonne Hart on Carroll’s neurological symptoms

  Select Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to all the people who have been involved in the making of this book. I appreciate the work of those at the publishers who have worked so hard to get it right, and my agent Andrew Lownie. I would like to give particular thanks to Jaqueline Mitchell for her wise and conscientious text editing and her tireless willingness to explain the finer points of the publishing process to me.

  I am grateful to Mark Richards, Chairman of the Lewis Carroll Society, London, who has offered help and advice and allowed me to borrow all sorts of books from his collection over the years, even though it may sometimes have seemed to him that I would never return them! I am also very grateful to Karoline Leach, for so many useful and interesting discussions over the years. And many special thanks to Beth Mead, descendant of Wilfred L. Dodgson, who has been kind and supportive throughout.

  I am grateful also to Yoshiyuki Momma, Clare Imholz and many other scholars, collectors and members – too many to mention individually – from the various Lewis Carroll Societies in the UK, the USA, Japan and worldwide.

  The combined expertise and energy of all these enthusiasts has brought so much hitherto obscure information about Lewis Carroll into the public domain.

  It was important to me that the book was readable as well as accurate, and I am hugely grateful to my family, particularly Tony, Kath and Vanessa, who have spent hours of their time in discussing the book, and reading and commenting upon the manuscript from a reader’s point of view.

  Last but certainly not least, I am very grateful indeed to Edward Wakeling, who has generously shared his time, expertise and extensive databases with me, and has offered staunch moral support and encouragement over the years.

  In addition, I have consulted many biographical works on Lewis Carroll, including those by Carroll’s nephew, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, Michael Bakewell, Anne Clark, Professor Morton Cohen, Derek Hudson, Karoline Leach and Donald Thomas, together with the Diaries edited by Edward Wakeling, and the Collected Letters and many other works, large and small, edited by Professor Morton Cohen.

  I am grateful to the owners of the material who have kindly allowed me to quote. They include the Alfred C. Berol Collection; Fales Library, New York University; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin; the Special Collections Department, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries; Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia; Guildford High School, England; The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Morris L. Parrish Collection. Manuscripts Division. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library. Extract from ‘In the Shadow of the Dreamchild’ by Karoline Leach, Peter Owen, Ltd., London; Extract from ‘Lewis Carroll’ by Derek Hudson by kind permission of Constable & Robinson Ltd, London. thanks to A.P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of the Executors of the C.L. Dodgson Estate for permission to quote from copyright material by Lewis Carroll, from the Letters and other books edited by Professor Morton Cohen and others. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders of text and photographs to clear permission. I regret any inadvertent omissions, which can be rectified in future editions.

  Photographic illustrations courtesy of: the National Portrait Gallery p 10; Getty Images pp 66, 180, 237, 264; Corbis p 264; Topham Picturepoint pp 38, 126, 211; National Media Museum Science and Society Picture Library p 238; Private Collection p 94.

  Foreword

  If you read all the published biographies of Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), you would end up with confusion rather than clarity. There have been scores of books written about the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland over the last hundred years. The earlier biographies give you more fact (albeit limited in scope), and the later ones give you more fiction.

  Over the last 20 years I have read some very strange biographies of Lewis Carroll, that to my mind are about a person I do not recognize at all. Having studied him for well over 30 years, researched all the available primary source material, edited his private diaries for publication, reconstructed his photographic register, and written extensively about him and his activities, I thought I knew him fairly well. But I gasp when I discover that some biographers think he was a repressed man, a philanderer, a child sexual-abuser, a shy introvert, a man with a guilty conscience, a murderer, a psychopath, a fraud, or an oddity – suggestions made by a variety of writers. These suggestions probably tell us more about the biographers rather than Lewis Carroll himself.

  So it is refreshing and delightful to introduce a new biography that speaks sense about the man. All biographers have to interpret the information they have available to them, but desperation should not lead to pure invention, and the search for a ‘new angle’ should not lead to myth-laden nonsense.

  Jenny Woolf’s biography of Lewis Carroll takes notice of the evidence that is now available to help us understand and appreciate this famous Victorian poet, mathematician, writer, photographer and children’s author. This book gives a good account of what we know about Dodgson’s life, and I like the way it is written. I don’t agree with every sentiment expressed, but that doesn’t matter. She has painted a picture of the man based on her thorough research, with accurate descriptions, and her evidence is clear and well presented.

  Her analysis of Dodgson’s financial activities, taken mainly from the bank accounts that she discovered and published, provides a most interesting chapter covering much new ground. Her chapter on ‘children’is excellent, strongly emphasizing, rightly in my view, the need to understand Dodgson in his own context – the Victorian standards, attitudes, and mind-set of his time.

  This book beautifully demolishes the nonsense written about him from the 1920s onwards. There are aspects of his personality that surprise and confuse us, mainly because there are apparent contradictions. Was he shy and withdrawn from society or
gregarious and comfortable with others? Was he always witty in his conversations and correspondence or did he have a serious side? Was he conventional by Victorian standards or did he sometimes act in an unconventional manner? Did he follow the moral and ethical codes of his day or did he rebel against the norms of Victorian society? Was his personality gentle and easy-going, or was he strong-willed and pedantic? This biography answers these questions and reveals many different aspects of Dodgson’s character – some for the first time. Lewis Carroll’s personality is many-faceted and complex.

  Maybe this is what attracts us to him – he is a very interesting person.

  Edward Wakeling

  Editor of Lewis Carroll’s Diaries: the Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

  A Personal Introduction

  ‘“Things flow about so here!” she said at last in a plaintive tone, after she had spent a minute or so in vainly pursuing a large bright thing that looked sometimes like a doll and sometimes like a work-box, and was always in the shelf next above the one she was looking at.’

  Through the Looking Glass

  The more closely Lewis Carroll is studied, the more he seems to slide quietly away. The elusive author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been portrayed in innumerable ways over the last hundred years. He has been posthumously psychoanalyzed, condemned and criticized for his supposed sexual perversions and drug use. He has been pitied for his apparent repressions, his hidden tragedies and his emotional frustrations. He is said to have suffered from various disorders that range from Asperger syndrome to epilepsy. He has even been suspected of committing terrible crimes – in the intervals between his religious devotions, of course.

  His personal contemporaries, those who would have recognized the stiff-backed, pale-skinned Oxford don as he strode down the street, have also left differing, though generally less dramatic, impressions of him. Many of these people lived and worked alongside him for decades. Their recollections make perfect sense individually yet, taken together, they do not present a coherent picture. When compared with each other, or with aspects of Carroll’s work, the real man that they try to describe starts to twist, dwindle and disappear, like a sheet of paper devoured by fire.

  So was Lewis Carroll a quiet and boring scholar whose life was utterly devoid of incident, or was he as sharp and imaginative as his ‘Alice’ books suggest? Was he mild-mannered or passionate? Prim or bohemian? Reserved or sociable? Creepy or cuddly?

  I have had an itch to know more about Carroll since, at the age of seven, I was given a copy of the combined volumes of Alice in Wonderland (as the first book is more commonly known) and Through the Looking Glass. I found it impossible to figure out what the stories were about, but something about Alice and her adventures greatly appealed to me. I read the books laboriously by myself all the way through, and asked for more. When I discovered there were no more, I requested Lewis Carroll’s address, so that I could contact him and ask him to write some. I still remember how disappointed I was when I learned that he was already dead. My dreams of having a friendly correspondence, and perhaps a meeting with him, fell in ruins about my seven-year-old ears. I think I have been trying to track him down ever since.

  The bare facts of Lewis Carroll’s life are clear enough, and can be summed up in a couple of paragraphs. His real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and he was the oldest son of an Anglican clergyman. He was a devout Christian, and grew up in a large family in the north of England. He attended boarding school at Rugby, then came to study and live at Christ Church, Oxford, when he was 19. Christ Church then was a dusty, closed-in old place, which became less dusty, but not much less closed-in as the years went on. Carroll lived quietly there for the rest of his life. He never married. A mathematician by profession, he was a photographer in his spare time. He was fond of children, and told a special story for one little girl – a story which became famous. He shunned fame, and made just one trip abroad, then never left Britain again. He taught, he wrote, he prayed, and then he took early retirement. He died, aged nearly 66, while at the home of his spinster sisters near London.

  That, then, was his life: yet there was so much more to it than that.

  The Oxford college of Christ Church, Aedes Christi, provided the constant physical background to Lewis Carroll’s life. Originally a monastery, then a theological college, Christ Church (often abbreviated in Carroll’s correspondence to ‘Ch.Ch.’) is still one of the wealthiest and most important institutions in Oxford. Re-founded by Henry VIII in 1546, it has traditionally educated the offspring of the rich and powerful, and its foundation includes Oxford’s cathedral church. The college is certain of its own importance, and it treasures its own history and sense of continuity. Standing on the edge of riverside meadows, its noble buildings are dominated by Tom Tower, designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Superficially, it seems that little has changed in hundreds of years. History seems to permeate the golden-yellow stones. Great Tom, the tower bell, still strikes hourly throughout the day, and chimes 101 times each night at 9.05 pm. The main gate is guarded by bowler-hatted custodians, and the main archway leads into a spacious, grassy quad, overlooked by many windows, with a fountain in its centre. Scholars still climb the fan-vaulted, worn stone staircase to dine daily in the paneled Great Hall.

  Yet, despite its sense of inward-looking continuity and apparent changelessness, the college – like Oxford itself – is now entirely different from the place that Lewis Carroll knew. These days, Harry Potter fans flock to see Christ Church’s splendid hall, which they know as the original of Hogwarts’ school refectory. Visitors are more likely to see groups of tourists than a couple of dons ambling past in academic robes and caps. Buses and coaches and taxis roar past the ancient main gate, and crowds of trippers trudge along the pavements from famous ‘sight’ to souvenir shop to teashop. The city of Oxford itself has become large, sprawling and, beyond the sublime historical areas, frankly drab.

  Wherever Carroll’s shade may be glimpsed, it is not here. His Oxford existed in an age that was pre-motor car and pre-mass tourism. It was a city that was quiet, small, old, provincial, apart. Its refined flavour can now only be experienced briefly in the occasional sight of a sunlit empty alleyway, or in the stillness inside the cathedral when the tour groups are elsewhere. For Carroll lived not only in a different time, but truly, in a different world.

  His Oxford may have vanished beyond recall, but his books are still alive. What is more, they have remained relevant in a changing world. To me, reading them first as a child, then as a teenager, and finally as an adult, this continuing dynamism has seemed one of the strangest things about them. How could a book keep changing? Of course, I knew that really I was the one changing, as I grew up. Yet the feeling of shifting uncertainty, the sense that none of what I read had been quite what it seemed, was the element that kept drawing me back. This unusual, if not unique, quality of the books set me wondering what Lewis Carroll himself had been like. So I opened the best-known biographies and started reading.

  I found more than enough detailed information about Christ Church, Victorian religion and mathematics, and also plenty of speculation about Alice and all those engaging little girls. Yet although there were plenty of facts, and more than enough theories, it was hard to get an idea of Carroll the man. He was sometimes portrayed as a drearily unpopular social retard with a creepy interest in pre-pubescent girls, or, alternatively, as a shy saint, too innocent and religious to realize what women were for. Or he was presented as a pathetic loner who was woefully unlucky in love with anyone over the age of seven. Sometimes he sounded mad, sometimes dull, sinister, or just boring. In fact, rather than seeming like a real person, Carroll the human being came across almost as a sort of space into which commentators poured their own heartaches, yearnings or fears.

  I read all the books that I could find about Carroll, but quickly discovered that there are few truly intimate memories of him. From his birth to long past his death, no members of his close family c
ircle discussed his adult existence with outsiders. Except for a handful of letters to newspapers, mainly correcting errors of fact, they said nothing to the wider world about him. His scout, or servant, at college did not discuss what he knew, and his oldest friend, Thomas Vere Bayne, left only the briefest, dullest recollections of him.

  Carroll himself shunned publicity, and had little to do with his colleagues in later life. He was gregarious when he wanted to be, but only on his own terms. Privacy was an important element of his existence.

  I bought each volume of the complete edited version of his diary as it came out, but, despite the diary’s extensive notes and annotations, Carroll’s own words were not revealing either. His jotted comments became increasingly clipped and guarded as the years went by. Essentially, it seemed as though he was writing the diary with one eye on posterity. His letters, though usually charming, lively and interesting, nearly all reflect a public face.

  What I read just did not fit together to create a believable picture of the man who had been ‘Lewis Carroll’. His inaccessibility was maddening. Of course, it did not help that in the years after his death Carroll’s family descendants, for what must have seemed to them good reasons, kept such a tight hold on much of the information that could later have cast light upon his unusual personality. Major documents about his personal life, originally carefully preserved, had apparently been destroyed some years after his death; if not destroyed, they must have been extraordinarily carelessly handled – at any rate, they were now nowhere to be found.

  Because of these large gaps in information, various peculiar theories have come to fill the gaps. Some were mad, some were sad, others positively baroque. Carroll and his stodgy clergyman friend, Thomas Vere Bayne, were supposedly jointly Jack the Ripper, taking time off from their clerical duties at Oxford to travel up to London and murder prostitutes. Carroll was said to be autistic or epileptic; and there were fanciful Jungian assessments of his psyche, and detailed analyses of the many secret messages that were all-too-imperceptibly supposed to be hidden in his work.