The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  Carroll’s nephew-biographer Stuart Collingwood, writing his book for the general public, also went so far as to mention briefly Carroll’s many lady friends. Indeed, he admitted that most of his uncle’s friends were ‘ladies’, and remarked that Carroll had a ‘Bohemian’, that is, an unconventional, side.

  These comments show that the family believed in Carroll and were prepared to stand by him in public – even though in private there is evidence that there was some concern about the gossip that circulated about him and women. Most of this gossip entirely escapes modern readers, since in print it was heavily underplayed and veiled in euphemistic Victorian style. One very interesting example occurs in a conversation reported by Carroll’s friend Gertrude Thomson in her reminiscences marking Carroll’s death.

  Miss Thomson was unusual in that she was not one of Carroll’s ex-‘little girls’ but an openly grown-up woman friend. She wished to celebrate her close friendship with Carroll – and also to inform the world exactly what their relationship signified. In her memoir she describes how she and Carroll once went to sketch the children of an extremely conventional lady. This lady waited till Carroll had departed before initiating a woman-to-woman talk with Miss Thomson.

  ‘I hear that you spent the other day in Oxford with Mr. Dodgson?’ she said, ‘… It’s a very unconventional thing to do.’ Miss Thomson replied that she and Carroll were ‘both unconventional’. The lady then responded that Carroll was ‘not at all a ladies’ man – a confirmed bachelor’, to which Miss Thomson retorted that she herself was a ‘lady bachelor’. As the conversation progressed, she said she became so angry at the woman’s impertinence that she could hardly contain her temper.19

  This conversation seems somewhat mystifying to a modern reader, although Miss Thomson clearly did not feel she needed to spell anything out to her Victorian audience. The ‘unconventionality’ referred to an unmarried man and woman openly spending the day together (including alone in his rooms) without an accompanying chaperone, thereby advertising their liberated social views. This behaviour was not unknown in the 1880s among progressive-minded folk, but it could have harmed Miss Thomson’s own marriage prospects, had she wished to marry. So the lady was warning Miss Thomson that Carroll would never marry her. He would go around with her and give people the impression they were a couple, but in the end he would not tie the wedding knot.

  Miss Thomson was known in her own circle for not wishing to marry, and she found the woman’s remarks very offensive. Later in her memoir, to emphasize her point, Miss Thomson reports how, when she had been attending the theatre with Carroll, someone had sent her a note marked ‘Mrs. Dodgson’. Carroll jokingly remarked, ‘Well, we are certainly labelled now!’ Indeed. And, ‘How we laughed!’ Miss Thomson defiantly told her readers.20

  The gossip which circulated about Carroll also explains why so many of the young women who were close to him make the point in their recollections of how young and childlike they were. It also suggests why other women asserted that he was usually only interested in little girls and that they were the exception. It made everything in the whole scenario seem so much more innocent.

  Several references to her own unfeasible youthfulness are found in the 1899 book by Isa Bowman about which Wilfred complained. Isa was undeniably close to Carroll, and stayed with him, unchaperoned, for weeks at a time. Carroll confessed to a friend that she was the only young lady he had felt happy living with for longer than the traditional ‘honeymoon’ month: a risky remark if ever there was one. Gossip about Isa was rife. When she was nineteen, he was writing to her, ‘I’m still exactly “on the balance” … as to whether it would be wise to have my pet Isa down here! How am I to make it weigh, I wonder? Can you advise any way to do it?”21

  His ‘pet’’s photographs show her to have been slim, dainty and pretty: quite the ‘stunner’. However, in her book, she persistently implies she was younger than she really was, even to the point of lying about it and referring to herself as 10 years old when she was in fact around 13 when they first met.

  Although the acting profession had become more respectable as the 19th century went on, it still had a rather racy reputation even at the end of the century. Those of Carroll’s contemporaries and friends who were tolerant and easy going were willing to believe that Isa was not his mistress. But merely having a pretty young lower-class actress to stay, being on close and familiar terms with her (she was heard to address him as ‘Goosie’), and making the sort of fuss of her that Carroll did, was a truly startling thing for a man in his position to do. It is hardly surprising that Carroll’s friends often glossed nervously over the subject.

  Sometimes, too, people were genuinely confused. Ruth Waterhouse, who knew Carroll as a little girl, recalled how he was very much interested in the ‘little Bowman girls … especially in Isa’:

  … he was very anxious that I should meet her, but of course she was on the stage and he was afraid my parents might object. You must remember that this was sixty years ago when actresses occupied a very different position to what they do now … So, in order that my parents might see for themselves what a very nice little girl Isa was, he invited them to meet her at dinner … Later my mother said that as a dinner party it had not been a great success but she and my father had enjoyed it and been very much amused. … You can see it all – Mr. Dodgson, never very happy in the society of grown-ups, the poor shy little girl of twelve, and my parents (both of them very good company) doing their best to make themselves agreeable.22

  Carroll’s diaries reveal, however, that he only met Ruth, then aged 10, when Isa was a ‘nice little girl’ of 18. Ruth had been mystified by Isa’s reluctance to play games with her, and seems not to have realised she was not the child she was introduced as. Ruth’s parents, Mr and Mrs Gamlen, were no doubt amused at having dinner with the reverend and his ‘stunner’, whom they had to pretend was a child. They probably never told Ruth the real story.

  Others, primmer or less good-natured than the Gamlens, were more concerned at this dizzying display of walking on the edge of social acceptability. They felt Carroll risked overstepping the mark. Carroll’s sister Mary, married to a clergyman, wrote him a distressed letter about his many friendships with women in 1893. Mary’s letter has disappeared, but Carroll’s detailed response has often, bizarrely, been quoted to ‘prove’ that Mary fretted about his friendships with little girls. If only, as Mary might have said today. The women referred to were 27 and 23 years old, and Carroll wrote, ‘I don’t think it at all advisable to enter into any controversy about it. There is no reasonable probability that it would modify the views either of you or of me. …’

  He then went on to criticise gossips, adding:

  The only two tests I now apply to such a question as to the having some particular girl-friend as a guest are, first, my own conscience, to settle whether I feel it to be entirely innocent and right, in the sight of God; secondly the parents of my friend, to settle whether I have their full approval for what I do.

  You need not be shocked at my being spoken against. Anybody, who is spoken about at all, is sure to be spoken against by somebody, and any action, however innocent in itself, is liable, and not at all unlikely, to be blamed by somebody. If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much!23

  He had worked out to his own satisfaction that he was morally in the right, and so he was not prepared to curtail his activities. His frequent meetings and outings, including a weekend jaunt with the married 30-something Constance Burch, continued to raise eyebrows, not least those of Mr Burch, perhaps, since he called on Carroll not long afterwards.24 Carroll’s diary does not record what they talked about.

  He noted his outings with women down in the briefest and dullest of ways in his diary, and just a few descriptions survive to bring them to life. One, written to a beloved child-friend called Enid, describes an extraordinary day Carroll spent with 23 year-old May Miller. That he could write about it
to a 10-year-old, knowing her mother would almost certainly read the letter, shows how confident he was in his own moral rightness. It also gives a glimpse of the irresponsible fun he could offer his lady friends when he felt like it.

  He told Enid how he and May took a steamer from East-Bourne to Brighton to visit Carroll’s sister Henrietta. On the way, just for fun, they deliberately got themselves drenched by the rough waves that slopped over the side of the boat. It was, Carroll told Enid, like being slapped by a large warm blanket. Not surprisingly, on reaching Brighton, they were soaked to the skin, so, skipping the visit to Henrietta, they returned to East-Bourne. There, they went to Carroll’s rooms, and May changed into the maid’s outfit while her own clothes dried. Then the two of them had a tête-à-tête dinner together in the evening. ‘And she did look so pretty in the maid’s Sunday-gown!’ Carroll commented to Enid.

  ‘“What stupid little adventures!”’ I hear Enid muttering to herself. Well, I can’t help it, my pet. These are true. If I were to invent some, why they wouldn’t be ad-ventures, you know. They would be in-ventures, which is quite a different thing …’25

  It is well known that Carroll never married. Could it be possible that he remained a bachelor in order to leave the way clear for his adventures with numerous young ladies? Whatever the larger picture, it is unlikely to be straightforward.

  In practical terms, marriage had always been difficult for him. Sworn to celibacy while he stayed at Christ Church, his heavy family responsibilities and the lack of family money would have made it hard for him to abandon his job and its secure income. For various reasons, to be discussed in later chapters, it was difficult for him to become a vicar – the usual procedure for men in his position who wanted to marry. What is more, marriage would probably have brought even more dependants. Carroll had seen his father burdened with 11 children, including seven sisters, the responsibility for whose welfare had now been passed to him. Bachelor life at Christ Church, for all its faults, offered ample free time to pursue his own ideas without the distractions of a wife and family. As he had so very many close relatives, loneliness was the least of his problems.

  Yet this is where we come up against one of the startling contradictions that bedevil the study of Carroll. If he was so charming and so at ease with women, if he had so many loving lady friends, why did his diaries in earlier life never refer to women whom he thought interesting or attractive? The special days (ones that he said that he ‘marked with a white stone’ usually represented happy times with children, interesting excursions, or meetings with important people – not meetings with women. Where are the love affairs, the infatuations? Where are the private musings which one might expect from a man who was so adept at dealing with women and who enjoyed their company so much?

  The missing diaries from his teens and into his early twenties may have been franker than his later ones, but they have gone. He is also known to have kept separate notebooks for some matters omitted from his main adult diary, such as the matter of the mathematical lecture referred to in Chapter 2. Few such notebooks survive and, for obvious reasons, nobody knows what was in the missing ones; we can only guess.

  The adult diaries are circumspect. Delicate matters, when mentioned at all, are referred to obliquely, as though he feared his words might be read. He barely mentions his feelings on the death of his beloved father, for instance, even though he later described this event as the greatest sadness of his life. In 1866, he dined twice with his Uncle Skeffington and, ‘on each occasion we had a good deal of conversation about Wilfred, and about A.L. – it is a very anxious subject.’26 He never said any more about this, and despite much conjecture, nobody has ever discovered who ‘A.L.’ was.

  So it is more than possible that any notes on his private feelings or intimate personal life were kept in a form which has not come down to us, while the diary, cross-referenced and written up from notes, was maintained to record more mundane matters. However, there are enough hints and suggestions over the spread of Carroll’s writings to make the case that he had at least one love affair, and that, far from being a joy for him, it was a disaster, and affected the way he lived the rest of his life.

  According to Collingwood, Carroll started writing his diary when he was nine years old,27 but the earliest surviving volume dates from 1855, when he was 23. The early adult diaries indicate that at this time, like many young men, he wanted to have an interesting life, and broaden his horizons. He was establishing his career, and he hoped to meet celebrities, create art, and write something worth publishing.

  His letters to family and friends are full of lively humour and quaint details, illustrated with comical pen-and-ink cartoons. They contain little of the moralism and none of the eccentricity of his later life, and show him to have been cheerful, smart, energetic and receptive. He saw the funny side of life, and eagerly collected curious trifles and new ideas.

  A marked change occurred during his late twenties. His diaries are missing between 1858 and 1862, and almost no letters remain from that time. When the diary resumed in 1862, Carroll was 30, and the diary’s emotional tone is markedly different from before. It is more sombre, and anguished prayers for forgiveness from sin appear from time to time. He gives no details of what this sin was, but he pleaded with God to, ‘help me to live to Thee. Help me to overcome temptation: help me to live as in Thy sight: help me to remember the coming hour of death. For of myself I am utterly weak, and vile, and selfish. Lord, I believe that Thou canst do all things: oh deliver me from the chains of sin. For Christ’s sake. Amen.’28 A few weeks later he added, ‘Mar. 13. Amen, amen.’

  These and other similar prayers were not primarily impassioned outpourings of inner feelings. He did not treat his diary as a confidante. The prayers probably mark his spiritual progress in rejecting whatever his sin was. He would have renewed them on the dates when he added ‘Amen’.

  He never expressed despair of this type in any other surviving diaries, even though as a rector’s son he had been raised to consider his sins. He was naturally inclined to be positive, not negative, but this time he apparently could not resolve his difficulty. Since other documents show that his problem was not financial or familial, it could have been religious, sexual, emotional or a mixture of all three.

  If sexual, it did not torment him before the break in his diary record; so what was then delicately termed ‘self-abuse’ was probably not to blame. Few men who had been through public school at that time could have remained innocent of that particular ‘sin’. Religion had bothered him for a while, and religious concerns had been expressed vaguely before, yet nothing he had previously written displays the sense of corrosive guilt and shame of these particular entries.

  It has also been suggested by some commentators that the prayers were to do with little girls. Yet although he liked children’s company, he never expressed the slightest concern or anxiety about his feelings for them at any stage of his life. He was always glad to have children’s company, and had at the time been just as concerned with ‘handsome’ little Harry Liddell as with Alice Liddell or her sisters.

  So what clues exist to suggest what chastened him so much? Stuart Collingwood did not want to dwell on unhappy matters in his admiring chronicle. Yet, in throwaway remarks, Collingwood did touch gently on difficulties which readers (including Carroll’s friends) may themselves have remembered. The gentlemanly Collingwood might have expected that any decent chaps who knew of past problems would take the hint and keep quiet.

  His most intriguing remark refers to a collection of Carroll’s serious poems, Three Sunsets, which was published in the 1890s. Its most emotional and heartfelt poems were written during the diary ‘black-out’ period of 1858–62. Collingwood wrote: ‘One cannot read this little volume without feeling that the shadow of some disappointment lay over Lewis Carroll’s life. Such I believe to have been the case, and it was this that gave him his wonderful sympathy with all who suffered.’ A ‘disappointment’ would usually mean a sadness
in emotional life, and Collingwood urged his readers to hold back and not ‘lift the veil’ on this. He expressed the hope that Carroll had forgotten his pain in Paradise.29

  All this aroused some interest at the time, and some of the poems in the book do suggest sadness and disappointment. It is tempting to see them as straight autobiography, but they are not. Poetry uses imagery, allegory and fancy to convey its meaning, and autobiography is what it says. They are not the same. Yet Carroll’s works at this time do offer a repetition of certain ideas and themes, showing that particular issues were indubitably on his mind during this difficult period. These themes are both unusual and consistent, and for this reason it is worth considering how they could have related to his life.

  The title work of Three Sunsets was first published in 1861 and revised almost immediately. It originally had the curious title ‘Dream of Fame’, ironically picking up a reference in Idylls of the King by Carroll’s favourite poet, Tennyson: ‘Man dreams of fame, while woman wakes to love.’ In Tennyson’s poem, Merlin stupidly loves the treacherous Vivien. He reveals to her his secret charm, and is viciously betrayed:

  And shrieking out ‘O fool!’ the harlot leapt

  Adown the forest, and the thicket closed

  Behind her, and the forest echoed ‘fool.’

  Carroll’s long poem describes a man falling passionately in love with a woman, being deprived of her, and becoming so obsessed that he loses all dignity and emotional connection with normal society. Above all, he loses the mental independence which characterises his ‘manhood, strength and pride’, and behaves instead like a lovestruck loser. He ultimately dies a stupid and pointless death.

  The poem is not at all sympathetic to the man. He is weak, because he has allowed his feelings to overwhelm and destroy him. Yet Carroll’s description of how it feels to be instantly love-smitten by the woman in the poem is precise and oddly poignant, and suggests that he knew what it felt like.