The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  He saw her once, and in the glance

  A moment’s glance of meeting eyes

  His heart stood still in sudden trance

  He trembled with a sweet surprise. …

  Later in the poem, when the man realizes he cannot have his beloved, Carroll observes that only children will accept this deluded and bereft creature as he roams around like some grieving animal, daydreaming obsessively about his love, ‘half in Fancy’s sunny trance/and half in Misery’s aching void.’

  Another poem, ‘Stolen Waters’, was written just a few months later, and this tells of a man being degradingly seduced by a tempting and immoral woman. Although Carroll does not refer to Tennyson’s Idylls in this poem, the first half of the poem exactly echoes the theme of Merlin’s downfall. The main character, like Merlin, is entranced by the woman’s apparent beauty and sweet words, and, like Merlin, stupidly reveals his secret heart to her. Like Vivien, she betrays him. He flees, and becomes so disconnected from God that he ceases, night-marishly, to feel like his real self. (Carroll wrote this within weeks of telling the original story of Alice in Wonderland which is also famously concerned with problems of identity.) eventually, the disoriented sexual sinner comes across a beautiful, innocent little girl with long, golden hair who offers him a revelation of redemption.

  First, she is seen full of life. In the next verse, she is dying, with patient resignation. In the third verse she is viewing the lifeless body which has taken ‘her’ place in the world. She herself has reached the Kingdom of Heaven sinless and undefiled: she is an angel. The poem’s narrator feels his human heart returning at this revelatory vision. He decides he will shun evil and spend his time with children in the future, no matter how mad people think he is.

  By contrast, the ‘Stolen Waters’ of the poem’s title refers to a prostitute, and comes from Proverbs, Chapter IX:

  16. Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither; and as for him that wanteth understanding, she said to him,

  17. Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.

  18. But he knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths of hell.

  Originally printed in the magazine College Rhymes in 1862, ‘Stolen Waters’ stands out from the surrounding work because of its unusual subject matter. Obscure though it is, it was as explicit as it was then possible to be about forbidden love with a woman.

  A third poem of 1868, written in retrospect, continues the theme of being unwillingly chained to sinful pleasure. Like the lover in ‘Stolen Waters’, the narrator cannot live either with or without his problem. Like the character in ‘Dream of Fame’, he yearns desperately, but cannot have. His poisoned love wrecks his life, and ruins his view of himself:

  The spells that bound me with a chain,

  Sin’s stern behest to do,

  Till Pleasure’s self, invoked in vain,

  a heavy burden grew. …

  He does not identify ‘Pleasure’s self’.

  Just as in the earlier two poems, this poem also has suicidal elements. Once again the solution includes the sight of pure and innocent girls, close to God. Additionally, in this case, a mother-figure also appears in a dream. And again, Carroll sees the female child and pure-minded femininity as an antidote to Sin.

  Crucially, too, the problem in all these poems is with love, not just sex. It was the irreconcilable conflict between good and evil which tormented this deeply religious man: the conflict between purity and impurity, and whether one made the personal choice to live in a moral or an immoral way. The vast underworld of sex outside marriage in Victorian England was of a commodity which had everything to do with money, much to do with class and little to do with love. Yet ‘Stolen Waters’ and ‘Dream of Fame’ suggest a genuine love, a painful, one-sided and degrading love.

  Oh, blind mine eye that would not trace

  Oh, deaf mine ear that would not heed-

  The mocking smile upon her face,

  The mocking voice of greed! …

  True love gives true love of the best.

  ‘Then take’ I cried, ‘my heart to thee!’

  The very heart from out my breast

  I plucked, I gave it willingly. …

  The poems consistently express a confusion about how one may dare to love sexually outside marriage, since impure and forbidden love may condemn one to both a worldly and an eternal hell. In a more practical sense, a man in Carroll’s position with a secret girlfriend – particularly one that he paid – would risk exposure or blackmail. Any scandal would taint innocent family members, or friends who continued to be in touch with him.30 Marriage to such a woman would be out of the question even if legally possible.

  Yet there is more. People usually get over bad love affairs, however difficult those love affairs may have been at the time. But Carroll was tormented by the horror of his ‘sin’ for many years, and references he made in later years suggest that he was affected by it for the rest of his life. Falling in love with, or even fornication with, immoral women was sinful, but it was not a major sin – not like, for instance, flouting the Ten Commandments. Much as it may upset some Carroll fans to consider it, the possibility exists that Carroll was tormented by the idea of a more serious sin than fornication.

  Then as now, there would have been married women around who wanted the excitement of a lover – the flattery, the fun and perhaps the gifts that went along with it. An inexperienced, celibate and romantic young man would not have been so very difficult to ensnare. A case has been made by Karoline Leach that Carroll could have been having an adulterous affair,31 but her notion of Mrs Liddell as the other party makes little sense. Leach suggests that the idea of adultery is backed up by Carroll’s two separate diary quotations of Psalm 51 in connection with his sin – the psalm is David’s broken-hearted plea for forgiveness for his adultery with someone else’s wife. Carroll himself also referred in his diary to his ‘corrupt affection’, which suggests that something about his love, either for God or for someone else, was essentially wrong.

  Years later, too, in August 1885, Carroll wrote mysteriously to his friend Mrs Feilding (who had suggested he write a religious book for children), that ‘I may perhaps some day try to write such a book for children as you want. But I feel much about it as David did about building the Temple.’32

  To someone as profoundly religious as Carroll, committing adultery would be to flout a holy commandment and deliberately defy God. To encourage another person to embrace evil would be a major and tormenting sin. To yearn passionately to become evil would be utterly disorientating, going against everything in which he believed. Well might one agree with Alice as she asked, ‘Who am I?’ in her amoral Wonderland.

  As well as writing these poems, Carroll pasted two poems by Christina Rossetti in his personal scrapbook during the mid-1860s. The first, ‘Who Shall Deliver Me?’, is preoccupied with agonizing feelings of sin and lonely self-hatred. The second, ‘Amor Mundi’, again uses the theme of a man stupidly seduced, and bitterly regretting it. The refined Miss Rossetti was presumably not writing from personal experience in this latter poem, and this is another reason why it is important to remember that Carroll’s poems, too, are unlikely to be a straightforward account of something which happened in his life. What Carroll’s behaviour does show is that his concerns with the intertwined issues of secret neediness, love, sex and pain, and a particular symbolism relating to these, were pushing him to express himself repeatedly at the time.

  Carroll’s parallel theme of little girls offering the prospect of moral redemption is not often found in poetry of the period, yet the idea is something upon which Carroll also dwelt, not only in these poems but also in other works, such as his poem ‘Beatrice’, of 1862. This work will be examined more closely in Chapter 6 in connection with Alice, but there is no reason to imagine that Carroll would have repeatedly used this concept in his small number of serious poems if he had not believed it had some relevance to himself.

 
; During the 1860s, Carroll’s diaries recorded an increasing concentration on the company of children, and this apparently led to a larger decision to embrace a lifestyle that concentrated on ‘pure’ little girls, as though it would somehow benefit him. By 1862, when the surviving diary begins, he was already photographing fewer celebrities, still lifes or art works. He was spending more time with children, particularly, but certainly not exclusively, his nearest neighbours, the Liddells.

  In the depressions which Collingwood mentions,33 little girls’ company usually cheered Carroll up. With them, he could be loved, admired and soothed as sinlessly as was humanly possible. He could lay aside his adult male miseries by teaching them gentle games, talking to them about their dolls and toys, singing songs with them – almost as if he were a child himself.

  Perhaps, with modern psychological knowledge, one may conjecture that it was in his need for the company of children over the next 20 years that he channelled intense yearnings for romantic love that were denied other outlets; that their feminine company helped him to suppress an insistent, despised sexuality of his own.

  His pretty little girls innocently kissed him, held his hand and sat on his knees. He never ‘romped’ with them, and upsetting them was the last thing he wanted to do. So he need not feel guilty about his need for chaste physical affection from them – nor risk it escalating into anything else. If he was afraid of being seduced, he was safe, for his small child-friends could never deliberately seduce him, nor anyone. They were beautiful, but their purity was the antithesis of predatory female sexuality.

  After the death of his father, when he was in his late thirties, there was a further subtle change of emphasis. As he shouldered his father’s burden as head of the family, he donned ever more of the old man’s upright moralism too. At this time, he seemed to decide that younger girls could sinlessly offer the sight of beautiful human bodies which he so badly wanted. As observed in earlier chapters, his intense interest in all aspects of the human body was lifelong, and even his childhood drawings demonstrated a startlingly mature and acute observation of the human form. As he grew older, his increasing preoccupation with the finer details of ‘morality’ began to make it difficult for him to satisfy this interest in what he felt was an unequivocally moral way.

  In his unpublished essay ‘Theatre Dress’,34 written when he was 56, Carroll said that men had a duty to turn away if they felt themselves being stimulated by the bodies of flimsily clad women. He did not like the look of the bony and muscular bodies of men and boys, so that left little girls’ bodies as the only ones that he could view with joy and without evil.

  Unfortunately, this idea has done his reputation no good in our own very different times, and his anxiety that others may fail to acknowledge his purity of intention has sometimes been taken as sign of a guilty conscience towards little girls. Seen in context, it is more likely that his anxiety was about the safety of his soul: others must acknowledge and validate his ‘purity’ to confirm that his evil and undisciplined past was behind him.

  His worries occurred mainly when the ‘little girls’ were at or approaching the age of consent. The letters he wrote then are most often quoted today to suggest that Carroll had an unwholesome interest in children. Some make uncomfortable reading to the modern eye, but not, as we shall see, to the eyes of his contemporaries.

  In the 1860s and 1870s, he photographed many children in family settings, including some nude photographs of under-sevens which he (and their families) considered perfectly virtuous. By the late 1870s, he had become considerably more moralistic than in his younger days, and had not relaxed his efforts to live a godly life. As he grew older and less susceptible, he started seeking sinless ways of admiring older female flesh. At last he himself was no longer young, and the importance of ‘romance’, as he put it, was fading from his life. He was now capable, with care, of taking a genuinely aesthetic view of the female body which so fascinated him.

  He still never sought adult nude models, although he did possess modest drawings of adult female nudes. As a man who had mixed a good deal with artists, he would have been well aware that women who posed nude for artists were not unaware of their own charms, and there would always be the possibility of temptation or seduction so long as any spark of life lingered in the male spectator.

  But unawakened young girls were incapable of deliberately tempting anyone. So if he played his own part in keeping his thoughts pure, then drawing or photographing slightly older girls would be, to his way of thinking, a celebration of God’s handiwork in the most harmless and pleasant way, for ‘no imperfect representations of life … could take the place of life itself’, as Collingwood put it.35 By middle age, Carroll felt very earnestly that he had finally achieved trustworthiness. He had worked hard at it, and desperately wanted others to acknowledge it.

  A correspondence has survived from 1879 between Carroll and a Mr and Mrs Mayhew about photographing their three daughters, aged 7 (Janet), 11 (Ethel) and 13 (Ruth), which shows how his mind was working – and, even more interestingly, what people thought at the time.

  The Mayhews did not mind Janet being photographed without clothes, but were more concerned about Ethel, who was approaching the then legal age of consent – 12 years old. Photographing the oldest, Ruth, in any state of undress would normally be out of the question. In his first letter, Carroll asked to take nude pictures of all the children, saying, ‘If I did not believe I could take such pictures without any lower motive than a pure love of Art, I would not ask it.’ He continued in similar vein, but the Mayhews refused his request.

  Carroll wrote again to emphasize the moral nature of his request. At the end of this letter he added, ‘If Ruth and Ethel bring Janet, there is really no need for her [Mrs Mayhew] to come as well – that is if you can trust me to keep my promise of abiding strictly by the limits laid down. If you can’t trust my word, then please never bring or send any of the children again. …’36

  The Mayhews’ response is lost, but his next letter said:

  After my last had gone, I wished to recall it and take out the sentence in which I had quite gratuitously suggested the possibility that you might be unwilling to trust me to photograph the children by themselves in undress. And now I am more than ever sorry I wrote it … For I hope you won’t think me very fanciful in saying I should have no pleasure in doing any such pictures, now that I know I am not thought fit for [sic] only permitted such a privilege except [sic] on condition of being under chaperonage. I had rather do no more pictures of your children except in full dress: please forgive all the trouble I have given you about it.37

  That was the end of the correspondence. He was bitterly upset at not being trusted.

  Any modern reader might imagine that the Mayhews would steer decidedly clear in future of any middle-aged man who got so heated about photographing their young daughters nude. But actually, a few years later, they all made it up, and Carroll became friends with the youngest Mayhew daughter, Margaret, aged about 10. What is more, in the early 1950s, Margaret wrote a brief memoir about the incident for the biographer Derek Hudson. This is what she wrote:

  My mother raised no objection to my youngest sister, aged about six or seven, being photographed in the nude or in very scanty clothing … but when permission was asked to photograph her elder sister, who was probably then about eleven, in a similar state, my mother’s strict sense of Victorian propriety was shocked and she refused the request. Mr. Dodgson was offended and the friendship ceased. …

  She goes on to describe how Carroll’s friendship with her family revived via a mutual friend. To her joy her parents let her spend some ‘unforgettably wonderful’ times in Carroll’s company. The quarrel was never mentioned, but after she grew up, she read the letters of which parts are quoted above. She felt they showed ‘how essentially kind and courteous and punctilious [Carroll] was, and that he felt he must be careful in dealing with a lady of such strict Victorian principles’, adding that, ‘The perusal of them
touched me very much.’38

  None of this will stop many today psychoanalysing what Carroll supposedly ‘really’ meant from the perspective of our own entirely different culture. Nobody now can be blamed for failing to understand the ways in which other times were different from our own. But Carroll lived in pre-Freudian times when the suppression and denial of sexuality was seen as a Christian virtue, not only by himself but by many other people. To appreciate God’s beautiful work in the human body was entirely acceptable, but to contaminate sinless purity with sex would be to embrace and invite the Devil into one’s soul. That was something he would not do.

  It makes no sense today to eliminate sex from one’s life, but that was not so in Carroll’s culture. Every scrap of evidence points to the idea that his little girls offered Carroll elements of the idealized romantic relationships he craved, but without the actual sex – and that was how he wanted it. The little girls who did not take to him – and some did find him boring, soppy or exasperating – never felt threatened. If any of them wanted to continue with him after they grew up – in the right pure spirit of course – then he felt blessed to receive sinless kisses and cuddles from real women. They had always to understand where the boundaries lay, and, to him, they must always present themselves as sinless ‘children’.As indicated earlier, Carroll is often presented as a lifelong virgin. There is a significant possibility that he was not; but sexual relationships seem to have represented pain, shame and misery for him, and he was probably celibate for many years. There is a great deal of evidence that it was imperative for him to see himself as a good person who could master his body and live in a pure and Godly way.