The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  Asiatic Cholera was the scourge of the mid-nineteenth century, and Carroll and his contemporaries would always have had the fear of cholera at the back of their minds. Anxiety about the spread of the disease can be seen in Dodgson family letters written during Carroll’s childhood, for it had arrived in nearby Sunderland from India in 1831, and, during the following years it spread inexorably outwards from there. Cholera was fostered by filthy living conditions, but doctors were not aware of exactly what caused it or what to do about it. The Dodgson family lived in an isolated house, which had its own water supply and sewage arrangements, so they rarely encountered the foul air and disgustingly polluted living conditions of cities. The children were mostly educated at home, so they probably did not mix much with others who may have been less clean.

  Carroll did, of course, suffer the usual childhood ailments during his infancy and youth. His worst childhood illness seems to have been an attack of something called ‘infantile fever’, which has not been identified by modern doctors, but which left him with permanent deafness in one ear. Dr Selwyn Goodacre, a Carroll expert who is also a GP, has hypothesized that as a result of the fever, Carroll probably got otitis media, a common middle ear infection which, if untreated by modern medication, can result in hearing loss.

  At the age of 17, Carroll contracted whooping cough. This is usually a disease of childhood, but because he was nearly an adult, it hit him hard. Not only did it increase his deafness in the right ear but the cough lingered for five months. For some of that time he was boarding at Rugby school, where conditions were far from comfortable, and this cannot have helped his convalescence. Indeed, Dr Goodacre conjectures that the lingering whooping cough led to the complication of bronchiectasis, a localized infection of the lungs which may have predisposed Carroll to lung trouble later in life. He certainly suffered throughout his life from bronchial attacks, and ultimately died of pneumonia as a complication of bronchitis.

  Dr Goodacre also suggested that Carroll might have had mild chronic pyelonephritis, as he had repeated attacks of ague, sometimes with cystitis and backache.25 If so, then it never developed into anything serious.

  Carroll also remarked occasionally of his sufferings from neuralgia of the face. There is a droll account of his efforts to obtain relief from this in the journal of his travels in Russia, made when he was 35, in which he describes how, in Paris, he went to a convent to buy some salve made by the nuns for what he called the ‘tic-doloreux’. The nuns refused to sell him any, since according to their pious principles, the ointment was only to be given free to the poor. Carroll, ingenious as ever, hit upon the idea of asking the nuns to give him some ointment in exchange for a donation from him for the poor, ‘and so the delicately-veiled bargain was at last concluded’, he wrote.26

  Not only did Carroll tend his own body (and sometimes other’s ailments) with care, but he also found bodies fascinating in all kinds of ways – scientific, physical and artistic. Landscapes interested him hardly at all, and Irene Dodgson Jacques, his niece, recalled the disappointment of her father, Skeffington, when he took Carroll to a local beauty spot and found his brother impervious to its charms. On the other hand, Carroll’s comments after visits to picture galleries show what an ardent interest he took in beautiful depictions of human face and form. Nearly always, this was female beauty. Carroll particularly loved pictures of children and young women (clothed or not) that combined beauty with soulfulness or gentle spirituality. He commissioned Arthur Hughes to paint Lady of the Lilacs for him, a head-and-shoulders portrait of a gentle young woman holding up one hand as if in benediction. Collingwood remembered him lovingly pointing out the contrasts of colour in it, and how exquisitely the girl’s hair stood out against the purple lilac blossom.

  Although Carroll took care not to sketch or photograph nude women himself, he did admire many such pictures very much, so long as the images were not crude or overtly sexual. There is nothing salacious in his many diary references to how much he appreciated such works as Collier’s Pharaoh’s Handmaidens, which shows three bare-breasted young women, Weguelin’s The Maidens’ Race, showing a line of graceful semi-nude women, and others of the same type. There was, it must be confessed, a certain sentimentality in his approach. In his feeling for art, as in so much else, Carroll’s taste ran towards the feminine – the girly, even. He loved gentleness and harmlessness, and was repelled by coarseness and prurience.

  Yet, being human, he had a certain interest in the latter, too, and his diaries attest to his efforts to draw some kind of a boundary. In 1884, he wrote that he had been to see Nana by Marceli Suchorowsky, a picture he had been recommended to view by a friend. Inspired by Zola’s fictional prostitute, it was, according to the French critic Hugues Lebailly, most controversially displayed in a dark room, with a mirror flanking either side of the brilliantly lit easel on which it stood. The Art-Journal, wrote Lebailly, considered the picture to be revoltingly sensual, and trumpeted for the authorities who looked after England’s morals to rouse themselves to action about it.27

  When Carroll saw the picture, he disliked the fact that it had drapery. He always felt that using drapery suggested that there was something unseemly about God’s work. In fact, he did not like the picture at all. ‘It is a very life-like picture of a reclining woman, nude, except for a little drapery covering one leg from knee to foot; it would have been better entirely nude, but even so rather “French” in feeling,’ he noted.28 Although this was before the Naughty nineties began, describing anything as ‘French’ was tantamount to saying it was racy. Nevertheless, Carroll had satisfied himself that Nana was not actually indecent, so he did not join the Art-Journal’s public protests. For him, Nana had stayed on the right side of the line.

  It was not only the human body which intrigued Carroll, for he was as interested in minds as he was in bodies. He was very curious about madness and mental abnormalities, and what we might now call altered states or altered consciousness. His library included books on nervous exhaustion, the diseases of memory, the influence of the mind upon the body, sleepwalking, hypnotism and the delusions of the insane. Even though the details of so many of his other medical books went unrecorded, he is known to have owned titles that covered the rudimentary psychology of the period, for the links between body and mind were of particular interest to him. One of these titles was Sir James Paget’s Clinical Lectures, which impressed Carroll so much that he recommended it to a doctor acquaintance.

  The enormously gifted Paget was one of the foremost doctors of his day, and Carroll knew him personally, as Paget had attended his uncle, Skeffington Lutwidge, after a serious accident. The book was intended for medical students, and provides a panorama of Victorian medicine as an ever-expanding new world of scientific knowledge. It was, too, a world that was still accessible to the average intelligent person. Dr Paget’s approach to medicine could broadly be described as holistic, and he affected no clinical detachment in anything pertaining to morality, with his personal voice resounding through the pages and indeed over the centuries:

  I have not heard anything to make me believe that occasional masturbation has any other effects on one who practises it than has occasional sexual intercourse, nor anything justifying the dread with which sexual hypochondriacs regard having occasionally practised it. I wish that I could say something worse of so nasty a practice; an uncleanliness, a filthiness forbidden by GOD, an unmanliness despised by men.29

  Carroll’s interest in the book probably lay mainly in the chapters relating to what we would now consider to be psychosomatic subjects. Dr Paget had no background of modern psychology, of course, but several chapters of ‘Clinical Lectures’ deal with what might be broadly termed psychological conditions. His chapter on ‘Stammering With Other Organs Than That of Speech’ mostly deals with mental difficulties associated with carrying out normal bodily functions, such as urination. Other topics range from ‘Nervous Mimicry’ to sexual hypochondria in males, and they draw extensively upon observations o
f diseases then prevalent.

  It can be seen how Carroll’s interest in mental functioning, normal or abnormal, spilled over into his creative work. Not only is everyone mad in Wonderland, as the Cheshire Cat so memorably said, but his lengthy two-part novel Sylvie and Bruno, written many years later, is full of descriptions of altered mental states. However, the way that he treated the subject of mind and consciousness over the years echoes an increasing strangeness in Carroll himself as he grew older.

  The 30-year-old man who told the story of Alice in Wonderland appears from his letters and diaries to have been lively and normal in every way. The man who finally published Sylvie and Bruno Concluded when he was around 60 years old, had become someone who seemed in some respects to live in a world of his own, and who had become notably eccentric.

  Those who disliked him – and even some of those who did not – found him increasingly difficult to deal with as time went on. There is no recorded suggestion that his behaviour was mad: at least, not by comparison with other Oxford dons, some of whom were almost a byword for eccentricity. Carroll’s little peculiarities were in some respects less odd than, for instance, those of the Christ Church canon Dr Buckland, who frequently chose to dine on unpalatable creatures like mice and earwigs (he considered mole one of the nastiest dishes he had ever eaten, he said, but bluebottle was nastier still).

  Roughly from 1880 onwards, unmistakable signs of eccentricity began to appear in Carroll’s behaviour. It is well attested that he continued to function competently within his own social setting, and his capacity for logical thought was as good as ever even at the end of his life. He was working on his system of symbolic logic almost till the day of his death, and logicians have no quarrel with its competence, nor mathematicians with the mental puzzles he took such pleasure in devising. Nor does anyone seem to have shrunk from him or found him personally disturbing. He had many, many friends and he had no difficulty in making more. Children adored him, and his social behaviour, time and again, was described as courteous, gentlemanly, considerate, gentle and kindly. Yet it is hard to read some of his writings of later life, in particular his peculiar preface to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded without a feeling of puzzlement, even concern.

  In this rambling discourse, Carroll goes into detail about the peculiar mind-states of the characters in the story. He asks the reader to hypothesize that his story could take place if fairies existed, and if they were sometimes visible to human beings, and if they were sometimes able to assume human form, and also if human beings ‘might sometimes become conscious of what goes on in the Fairy-world’. He assumes that this awareness would involve actual transference of the non-material ‘essence’ of self, and compares it with the state of mind found in Esoteric Buddhism – presumably the 8th-century Japanese variety, and not Madame Blavatsky’s controversial theories which had then been circulating for some years. He then describes human beings as being capable of various psychical states:

  (a) the ordinary state, with no consciousness of the presence of Fairies;

  (b) the ‘eerie’ state, in which, while conscious of actual surroundings, he is also conscious of the presence of Fairies;

  (c) a form of trance, in which, while unconscious of actual surroundings, and apparently asleep, the subject (that is, his immaterial essence) migrates to other scenes, in the actual world, or Fairyland, and is conscious of the presence of Fairies.

  Fairies, Carroll blithely continues, were also capable of having corresponding mental states in relation to being in contact with humans! He went on laboriously to tabulate all the passages in each volume of the story where each mental state occurred, stating which character was involved, noting the relevant page numbers and whether the mental state was (a), (b) or (c), as well as further details, almost impossible for the average reader to understand. .

  This bizarre approach to what is, after all, a made-up story, as well as the chaotic nature of the whole work, almost suggests that, by then, something had happened to change Carroll himself. He may have been suffering some kind of mild and indefinable mental damage; a lesion of the brain, perhaps, which set him onto a path of slight difference, and perhaps made him less aware of the impression he was making on others.

  Dorothy Furniss, daughter of the illustrator Harry Furniss, wrote amusingly about her late father’s tribulations with Carroll’s eccentricities in later life. Furniss is often criticized for poking fun at Carroll, but correspondence such as this suggests that sometimes Furniss may have found it easier to laugh than to cry. At one stage, Dorothy recalls, Carroll wished Furniss to draw a creature which looked like a spider but sat cross-legged like a tailor. He wanted the creature to be,

  ‘… portrayed front view and full faced because some writer says that the full face of a spider, as seen under a magnifying glass, is very striking. Could you find one in some book of entomology, or look at a live one?’

  After a day spent sketching spiders and endeavouring to give them ‘just that human touch’ required by the author, the artist wrote in despair that it was an impossibility to depict a spider sitting cross legged like a tailor …30

  After Furniss protested, Carroll offered a sketch of his own, offering the opinion that ‘a creature, mostly human, but suggestive of a spidery nature, would be quite accurate enough’. In increasingly surreal vein, he added that the spider was deeply love-stricken, and was ‘in the midst of a “declaration”, quite unaware that the young lady is out of hearing! Would not that be a subject for pity? … I meant him to be laying his hand on his heart: but his chin got in the way …’.31

  In fact, Carroll is known to have had some kind of physical brain problem. It was mentioned explicitly for the first time on the last day of 1885 when he had a mild attack, diagnosed as ‘epileptiform’, which left him with a headache for 10 days or so. His interest in mental strangeness, particularly epilepsy, had developed long before this first recorded incident, and several entries in his diary describe occasions when he witnessed or helped with people who had epileptic fits, starting with the colleague whose fit had inspired him to improve his medical knowledge. As his fascination for medical matters grew, he witnessed a number of fits diagnosed as ‘epileptic’. In 1875, he reported in his diary that he was able to help a stranger who had collapsed in a fit, since he himself was by now ‘quite experienced in dealing with that kind of fit’.32

  It is conceivable that Carroll unwittingly experienced epileptic ‘auras’ himself earlier in his life, and that it was this which helped to inspire his interest in madness and with fitting. However, if any such attacks did occur, they must have been slight, for he only became ill enough to cause real concern in 1888. At that point, he fainted, and after that he felt ill for some considerable time.

  Carroll originally believed epilepsy was a form of insanity, as he wrote in his diary of 6 April 1876. This was a widely held view at the time. Many people believed it was caused by masturbation, but Carroll had read so widely on medical subjects that he probably did not. At any rate, he was relaxed about that some years later, in 1891, when referring to the matter to his friend Edith Blakemore. Nonetheless, his family have tried to censor material in his diary relating to his ‘epileptiform’ attacks, even though it is not clear precisely what these attacks were. Victorian treatments and diagnoses were necessarily more primitive than today’s, and there was, of course, no access to modern diagnostic technology or tests, so a good deal of what went on inside body and brain was a mystery. For that reason, contemporary diagnoses of Carroll as ‘epileptic’ cannot be relied upon.

  It is also difficult for any modern doctor to make comments on a long-dead patient, but all references and descriptions of the brain symptoms in Carroll’s letters and diaries were collected together and presented in 2008 to Dr Yvonne Hart, a consultant neurologist at the Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford with a special interest in epilepsy. Dr Hart also considered the famous incidents of macropsia and micropsia (growing larger and smaller) which occur in Alice in Wonderland, and which ha
ve also been compared to symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy. Her report appears in full in the Appendix to this book.

  Although she warned that any definite diagnosis was impossible, Dr Hart concluded that Carroll probably had migraine. She was more doubtful about the epilepsy because of the lack of independent observation of his attacks. She also pointed out that some doctors believe that epilepsy and migraine are linked.33

  As far as migraine is concerned, Carroll is known to have read (and probably owned) Nervous or Sick Headache by Dr P W Latham. This book detailed some of the migrainous symptoms from which he suffered, and suggested treatments for them, which included the building up of the system with iron, cod-liver oil and, rather alarmingly, strychnine! No other information about the physical state of Carroll’s brain has been forthcoming. He himself does not seem to have been overly worried about his visual migraine symptoms, and, apart from his eccentric behaviour at times, he coped well with his life.

  As he grew older, Carroll began to take an active interest in preserving his physical health. He increased the amount of exercise he took, adding to his normal habit of walking everywhere by going for long, solitary walks in the countryside (which he timed), and also using Whiteley Exercisers, a kind of strengthening device for the muscles. He continued to eat sparingly, and although 5 feet 10 inches in height, did not rise appreciably over ten-and-a-quarter stone – 144 lb (65.3 kg). His ascetism did not, apparently, extend to alcohol, for he was knowledgeable about wine, and his lunch, in 18th-century style, consisted of sherry – or, if the mischievous Harry Furniss is to be believed, several sherries – and a biscuit. He is even reported to have carried his own flask of sherry with him on social calls, but this was probably just another manifestation of his increasing eccentricity rather than a desperate need to have sherry with him at all times.