The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  In his later years, he certainly spiced his life up with as many affectionate and respectable women as he could and looked after them tenderly. He had at last succeeded in casting himself in the public mind as a prim, harmless old fellow, and accordingly gathered around himself many intelligent young ladies who were happy to kiss him. As he wrote to his friend Mrs Poole, when boldly inviting her to dine alone with him one evening, ‘Child society is very delightful to me, but I confess that grown-up society is much more interesting!’39

  The mischievous iconoclast in him loved to tease ‘Mrs Grundy’ about his lady friends, but that was because Mrs Grundy was getting everything wrong, to his way of thinking. Some people might gossip about the kisses he was getting in return for his love and care. Others might think he was odd – and indeed he was odd. But, as he said to his sister Mary, he had settled it in his mind, and he knew he was all right.

  His unfailing kindness and protectiveness to children showed how he cared for the helpless, and since they themselves wanted his company, and since his religion was genuinely and manifestly his mainspring, he was welcome in many homes. By the end of his life, he felt at peace with himself, whatever some people think about him now, or thought of him then. As he said to Mary, ‘… the opinion of “people” in general is absolutely worthless as a test of right and wrong.”40

  And, as Karoline Leach perceptively remarks in In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, ‘Crudity sometimes repelled him, but … he was … deeply responsive to the physical world around him, fascinated by and curious about the female body. Physical contact with other human beings was essential to him. To hug and cuddle and kiss a beloved gave his life warmth and meaning. He found beauty and godliness in the naked human form [and] saw the validity and morality of human relationships as defined entirely by “love.”’41

  In 1928, Alice Hargreaves, (née Liddell), sold the original “Alice” book which Carroll had hand-written and illustrated for her. There was considerable public interest in the sale, and the “Illustrated London News” magazine reprinted some of Carroll’s endearingly amateurish illustrations, thereby allowing its readers to compare them with Tenniel’s more famous images.

  5

  ‘Children are three-fourths of my life’

  Children

  For I think it is Love,

  For I feel it is Love,

  For I’m sure it is nothing but Love!

  Sylvie and Bruno

  Lewis Carroll made no secret of how important children were to him. His family biographer Stuart Collingwood was sure that this was entirely to his credit. He devoted two whole chapters of his book to his uncle’s love of children and also dedicated the book to what were known as his ‘child-friends’. The devoted nephew summed up Carroll’s attitude in one word – ‘Love’. ‘As he read everything in its light’ he wrote, ‘so it is only in its light that we can properly understand him.’1

  The question is, what is meant by ‘love’? Carroll told very few people about his inner feelings, but he once explained to a younger colleague, Arthur Girdlestone, what children meant to him. Girdlestone had called in to Carroll’s rooms one evening, and perhaps he had caught him at a vulnerable time, because he recollected that he seemed tired. But when he commented on a newly taken picture of a baby which Carroll had propped onto a reading stand, the older man brightened, and said, ‘“That is the baby of a girl-friend of mine.”’

  ‘He said that in the company of very little children his brain enjoyed a rest which was startlingly recuperative,’ added Girdle-stone, ‘If he had been working too hard or had tired his brain in any way, to play with children was like an actual material tonic on his whole system.’ Carroll went on to say that he found it easiest to get in tune with children when he was tired with other work. Girdlestone responded that he did not understand children himself, and he asked Carroll if he did not sometimes find them boring. ‘He had been standing up for most of the time, and when I asked him that, he sat down suddenly. “They are three-fourths of my life,” he said. “I cannot understand how anyone could be bored by little children. I think when you are older, you will come to see this – I hope you’ll come to see it.”’2

  Reading Carroll’s diaries in his middle age, it is easy to believe that children were indeed ‘three-fourths’ of his life. Particularly when he was on holiday at Eastbourne, the diary entries sometimes seem like a roll call of his ‘child-friends’. They were friends whom he always took perfectly seriously; just as seriously as he took the adults in his life. Yet the extent to which he focused on them was really unusual, and few other public figures have made such efforts to obtain their company. So why were they so important to him, and what did the love of them represent in his complicated mind?

  The previous chapter suggests one important reason, which is that of innocent diversion from romantic love, but it is far from being the only one. Collingwood had plenty other suggestions in his book. Carroll was by nature a teacher, he said. Also, children appealed to him aesthetically. In a veiled reference to the nude photographs, he added that his uncle preferred ‘life as God made it’ to any imperfect representations of life created by a painter. Yet, he continued, although Carroll loved the human form, the soul attracted him more.

  It does not seem to have occurred to Collingwood that Carroll may also have simply liked children’s company for its own sake. Carroll made no secret of the fact that adult social prattle bored him. He loathed the people he met in ‘Fashionable drawing-rooms, who conceal all such feelings as they may chance to possess beneath the impenetrable mask of a conventional placidity.’3 Children’s spontaneous and sincere company offered the chance to express the playfulness which was so much part of his own nature, and this was undoubtedly a part of the truth that was hidden in his remark to Girdlestone.

  Both Carroll and his child friends adored toys and gadgets. He – and they – also loved jokes, humour and imaginary things: ghosts, witches, fairies, charades. The capacious cupboards in his rooms were full of treasures which his child-friends were to remember with delight. They included an early typewriter and some beautiful musical boxes, together with a mechanical ‘orguinette’ – a kind of home barrel organ (which worked much like a pianola) – on which he sometimes gave concerts in reverse by putting the rolls in the wrong way round.

  His niece, Irene Dodgson Jacques, looking back to her childhood, remembered him sitting beside her on the carpet happily playing with a marvellous bear that opened and closed its mouth as it spoke.4 A bat named Bob, which worked with the use of elastic bands, caused real chaos on one occasion when it ‘flew’ into the wrong place, something which Carroll probably enjoyed as much as the children did. He also invented novelties himself. Some were useful, like a contraption for writing in bed at night in the dark. Others were just for fun, like a gadget still in the possession of the Dodgson descendants which makes it appear as though a string is being pulled through the middle of one’s nose.

  Carroll also created endless riddles, puzzles and domestic games, and loved to tell stories about doll and animal characters. The gentleman in his toy-strewn college rooms was perfectly recognizable as the youth who had loved creating puppet stories for his little brothers and sisters, and the grown man who had taken considerable trouble to make a portrait of Tim, the well-used boy doll of his childhood.

  There have been many condescending remarks made about this characteristic of his, as though a love of childish things somehow prevented him from being a proper adult. Virginia Woolf thought that childhood had lodged within Carroll ‘whole and entire’,5 and in her view this was an ‘“impediment’ which starved him of maturity; she described him as slipping through the grown-up world like a shadow.6 But it is unfair to suggest that he could not handle adult life. It is probably true that, as a lifelong bachelor, he failed to acquire the kind of maturity that comes from sharing life with another person, but he undeniably saw himself as a family man. As the head of his family, he worked conscientiously not only for his brothers
and sisters but also for many cousins and friends in a way that showed full practical understanding of the ways of the grown-up world, even though it was a world into which he did not always choose to fit himself.

  Being with children allowed Carroll to inhabit a special in-between realm set well apart from care and sadness, and he felt at home in it. It is very noticeable that he offered his child-friends some of the things that he himself would have liked as a child, and still liked as an adult. He preferred children to visit individually, so that he could give them personal attention, something which had inevitably been very lacking in his own huge family. During their visits, they, too, had nobody to focus upon but him.

  He shared their joy as they accompanied him to the glittering world of the theatre, and on their walks and expeditions he saw the sights of the town through their fresh eyes. They went out to tea together, and had long conversations. Sometimes they discussed moral and religious matters, and read the Bible; the latter only in gentle and kindly ways, for Carroll hated moralistic church-going which he felt darkened a child’s bright faith. Sometimes his child-friends put up with him talking about mathematics. Occasionally, they even enjoyed talking to him about mathematics.

  Carroll was particularly fascinated by stage children; and perhaps his interest in them ties up with what has been described as his own extraordinary sense of the theatre. Perhaps he could have been an actor himself, if only it had been possible. But of course it never would have been possible, for so many reasons, including the central fact that neither his father nor mother would set foot in a theatre. Carroll was always delighted by stage childrens’ pleasure in performance, and overjoyed to see them loving their work as professional actors. The theatre was a kind of enchanted dream world of stories come to life, and his child actor friends were part of the enchantment.

  His photography was, in some ways, part of this dream world. Many people who were children in the 19th century recalled how they loathed their dull, scratchy restrictive clothes, their thick stockings and their badly-shaped shoes. If Carroll too had yearned for the freedom to discard his dreary woollies and re-enter the Garden of Eden, it would have been an impossible dream. But he could please his child-friends, and please himself, by offering them something a little like Eden: the chance to exchange the hateful clothes for fanciful and colourful costumes, or innocently discard them altogether.

  But if he was such a child-lover, why did he only like girls, and not boys? In fact, he did not, as is often claimed, hate all boys. He had many male friends, and he got on well with some individual boys and youths. He cared a good deal for his brothers, and he took much time and trouble to help undergraduates who needed it. Despite the large difference in their ages, as mentioned in Chapter 3, he and the undergraduate Walter Rees tackled their stammering problem together. In his twenties, he made almost a surrogate little brother of Harry Liddell. He brought Harry along on outings, thought about him, wrote about him and took a real interest in his welfare.

  Another boy with whom he had a good relationship was the writer George MacDonald’s young son, Greville, one of the first children to read Carroll’s original book about Alice. ‘He was very dear,’ recalled Greville later. ‘There was a toy shop in Regent Street where he let us choose gifts, one of which will remain my own as long as memory endures. It was an unpainted wooden horse. I loved it as much as any girl her doll …’7

  Essentially, Carroll got on with individual boys with whom he had something in common, like Bert Coote, whom he met when Coote was 10. ‘My sister and I were regular young imps,’ Coote recalled later, ‘and nothing delighted us more than to give imitations. … but we never gave imitations of Lewis Carroll, or shared any joke in which he could not join – he was one of us, and never a grown up pretending to be a child …’8

  However, the happy little world that Carroll created with children tended very strongly to the feminine rather than the masculine. Nobody has (yet) written a serious book accusing him of being homosexual or a closet transvestite, but he has been described variously as womanish, tender, gentle, nun-like, shy or like a ‘mother hen’. One friend described him weeping with emotion at the sight of the sea at sunset, and the preacher H P Liddon once found Carroll sobbing like a child in a cathedral, overcome by its beauty.9 The ostentatiously manly qualities that were so important in Victorian social life left Carroll cold, and he rejected them. He shunned whiskers, moustache and beard, and he did not crop his hair short or smoke a pipe like other men. He did not go out game-shooting, and he loathed the fishing which his younger brothers loved. He was an anti-vivisectionist, and he had no enthusiasm for war. Even his interest in sport was, at best, lukewarm.

  This failure to enjoy hearty, manly interests often stopped him relaxing with boys. So, perhaps, did his rough and gruelling experiences in the all-boy milieu of Rugby School which had given him such a horrible three years. ‘As a salmon should be on a gravel path, so should I be at a boys’ school,’ he once memorably remarked.10 On the other hand, tales of fairies, pictures of pretty children, dainty outfits, light music, soft girly colours and sentimental poetry all entranced him. He was very proud of a syrupy set of verses he wrote in Sylvie and Bruno which begins:

  Say, what is the spell, when her fledglings are cheeping,

  That lures the bird home to her nest?

  Or wakes the tired mother, whose infant is weeping,

  To cuddle and croon it to rest?

  What the magic that charms the glad babe in her arms,

  Till it coos with the voice of the dove?

  ’Tis a secret, and so let us whisper it low

  And the name of the secret is Love!

  His pastel-coloured emotional tastes were not for everyone, and it is not entirely surprising that one of the tougher little girls he knew, Ursula Mallam, according to an unpublished family anecdote, thought that Lewis Carroll was ‘soppy’.

  Carroll also had a strong need for loving attention. He needed his child-friends to respond kindly and affectionately towards him, and little girls were more at ease expressing affection than boys were. As already discussed in the last chapter, Carroll believed that little girls were pure and non-sexual. They were good moral company for him, and with them he could experience the tenderness he needed without descending into the nightmare of tangled love and sex.

  He had a great deal of love to offer, for beneath his stiff public exterior, he was a most affectionate man. Girl after girl testified to his kindness, understanding and sweetness, and recalled how much they appreciated it. ‘So gentle and kindly a nature, whose friendship enriched my childhood’, remembered Ella Bickersteth. ‘My parents’ loved friend, as well as my adored one’, said Winifred Holiday, ‘We cried when he went away’, recalled Dymphna Ellis. And Ethel Rowell wrote in 1943, ‘For me, now forty years on … I think my love for him is as fresh and confident as in the days when I first in my childishness signed myself to him as “your very loving friend”.’11

  Edith Maitland had a particularly touching memory of him sitting on a bench and reading her the story of the Ugly Duckling, a tale which ‘made a great impression on me, being very sensitive about my ugly little self’. Carroll, typically, did not discuss whether she was ugly or not. He made sure she knew that he loved her as she was, and impressed on her how it was much better to be good, truthful and concerned with others, than pretty, selfish and disagreeable. He reassured her about her looks by calling her ‘Ducky’ and cheered her up by reminding her that she, too, might turn out to be a beautiful swan. How happy she was, she recalls, ‘to see the well known figure in his cap and gown coming so swiftly, with his kind smile ready to welcome the “Ugly Duckling” sitting in the grass!’12

  In all his friendships with boys or girls, it was vitally important to Carroll that the children themselves wanted to be with him. If their love was shallow or fleeting, he could deal with that; but it must be sincerely felt at the time and, as he said to his friend Mrs Richards, he did find it very sweet.13 On the rare
occasions that a child did not want to see him or be with him, he would not press the issue. When he first met Edith ‘Dolly’ Blakemore, she caused an enormous fuss, so he told her mother, ‘I will gladly do without ever seeing her again, if only she will be happy again, poor little thing.’14 He then offered suggestions about how to handle the over-emotional Dolly which showed genuine sympathy towards her but an equal determination not to let her set the rules. She seems to have been a strong-minded little girl, and Carroll recommended a few minutes of ignoring her when she misbehaved: ‘I wonder if you noticed, as I did, that when she thought you were not petting her quite enough, she roared a little louder to recall your attention?’ he asked Dolly’s mother.15

  Eventually, the contrary-minded Dolly decided she did want to see him after all. She made him a pocket book and then began showering him with gifts. He replied to her personally, and showed how carefully he listened to her feelings by gently asking her mother to ‘Please give my love and my best thanks to Edith (I call her so rather than “Dolly,” believing that to be her own wish) …’.16 And after this rocky start, he and Edith remained friends till the end of his life, when she was quite grown up.

  Friendships with children also made it possible for him to bypass many of the confines of the class system which still ruled Victorian social life. Carroll did not rebel against the intensely snobbish social structure within which he lived, but he found many aspects of it stressful and tiresome. True, the class system was not as brutally rigid in his day as it had been in preceding centuries, but it was still a formidable and stuffy institution. The classes each had characteristics and customs which were distinguished from each other by countless nuances of accent, appearance, behaviour and dress, as well as by income. Anyone attempting to move between classes might find their efforts met with disapproval or even contempt from members of their own class.