The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  Carroll slipped through the class barriers to mix with higher-class children when he chose to play the role of ‘Lewis Carroll’, the famous author, for their parents. Characteristically, he would not always agree to be shunted off with the children even in the grandest circles, and though he never liked being lionized, he did enjoy the mild thrill of occasionally mixing with the upper crust. In his accounts of the glittering social occasions he attended, his dislike of social chit-chat was forgotten, and he established some continuing friendships – an achievement which probably gave his family a certain satisfaction too.

  Carroll’s yearnings towards the stage also allowed him to move downwards in the class system towards theatrical children and their families. If they were respectable people, and not too much ‘below’ him, matters usually went well. Actors respected his knowledge of the theatre and his wide range of theatrical contacts, and there was always plenty to talk about. Of course, his friendliness to these ‘lower’ families was sometimes sniffed at by his social equals. The architect Harry R Mileham said that his cousin May was forbidden to continue visiting Carroll because ‘her mother considered that the child’s ear for the King’s English was suffering through the rather mixed company’.17 In other words, she felt that spending time with Carroll’s stage friends was encouraging May to pick up accents and expressions ‘below’ those of a middle-class child.

  Children of a considerably lower class than Carroll posed more of a problem. They were usually badly educated, so that their general knowledge and ability to converse would typically be well below that of higher-class children. They were sometimes referred to as the ‘servant classes’, as though servitude was bred into them. It was not true, but their manners were often rough, and their accents coarse. Carroll was not good at dealing with rough behaviour or rudeness in children. He was on good terms with the poor children in his father’s parish, and often taught and entertained them, but, even with them, he had difficulties in keeping order when he needed to, and he did not seek very low-class children as friends.

  As well as his difficulties in dealing with loud or boisterous behaviour, an equally important reason for his reluctance to befriend girls of much lower class is suggested in a letter that he wrote to his friend Beatrice Hatch. ‘I should like to know, for curiosity, who that sweet-looking girl was, aged 12 … speaking to you when I came up to wish you goodnight. I fear I must be content with her name only: the social gulf between us is probably too wide for it to be wise to make friends. Some of my little actress-friends are of a rather lower status than myself. But, below a certain line, it is hardly wise to let a girl have a “gentleman” friend – even one of 62!’18 He was politely saying that people would assume that a gentleman would probably have indecent reasons for becoming friendly with a young girl so far outside his own social circle, and he wanted no part of that.

  Carroll’s diary descriptions of getting to know children are very interesting because they reveal something of how the middle-class social system operated at the time. What might be referred to as social networking in the mid-19th century depended almost entirely on personal introduction, or their presenting themselves in the appropriate social context.

  Middle- and upper-class people did not tend to become friendly with strangers in a casual way. They relied upon having some point of mutual social contact to enable them to ‘place’ a stranger to see if they were a suitable sort of person for the family to know. Being related, however distantly, or having a mutual friend would usually be sufficient; or a stranger’s title, or history of attending the right type of school or college would offer useful clues about the kind of person they were. There is a certain resonance to W S Gilbert’s poem about two Englishmen being stranded together on a desert island, but never speaking in 30 years because they had no mutual acquaintances!

  In this middle-class social structure, people did not always meet personally, but would sometimes call at each others’ houses and leave their cards if they wished to establish or maintain a cordial relationship. They also complied with elaborate unwritten rules as to the precise degree of familiarity to show to others: whether a bow or a smile – or both – would suit a meeting in the street, for example.

  Carroll detested conventional formality, and often said so, but his pattern of social behaviour conformed to the Victorian way of doing things. If he had kicked against the traces, it would have caused difficulties for him and may well have reflected badly on his family. His diaries often refer to spotting children that he thought seemed pleasant company, and then finding out who their parents were. As they were only children, he could usually smile at them or address them directly without an introduction, and he valued this human social contact. After this, he would present his credentials, or leave his card at the family home with a note to ask if it would be possible for him to get to know the children. The parents would consider his request, and sometimes they said yes, sometimes they said no. Sometimes they laid down conditions, such as that the children were only allowed to mix with people with certain religious views. Whatever their views, if they did not choose to know him, they said so, and that was the end of the matter.

  For Carroll, his popularity with children was a striking social asset when it came to making adult friends. Once he was accepted on behalf of the children, the whole family, including its womenfolk, would be allowed to mix with him on a friendly basis. By the time the children grew up, he had become a familiar figure in everyone’s lives. The children often lost interest in him as they got older, and, although he did not reject them, the feeling seems to have been mutual if they became conventional people to whom he was obliged to bow and raise his hat.

  Today, though there is, of course, an extra element in how Carroll’s friendships with little girls are perceived. The bottom line which any commentator must consider is whether there was anything untoward about them. Carroll’s strong interest in little girls and his liking for portraying them nude runs directly counter to our own society’s assumptions and unspoken rules. An enthusiasm for drawing or photographing children in the nude would be considered unacceptable today, and might possibly be considered a matter for the police.

  It is only too easy for modern commentators to declare that Carroll’s behaviour shows that he had paedophile instincts which he suppressed. But modern ‘“evidence’ is based on the incorrect assumption that he and his contemporaries lived similar lives and held similar views to the ones we hold now – and they did not.

  Yet, although it is only fair to judge Carroll by the standards of his time, not ours, he would also have been the first to agree that there is also a standard of right or wrong – ‘good versus evil’ – on which he must be held to account. Looking at the matter in these terms, there is not the slightest shred of evidence that he did anything out of line with pre-pubescent girls, and no indication that he had sexual feelings towards them. Taken as a whole, the documents suggest that he found late-teenage girls and grown women attractive, but that he struggled to suppress a sexual interest in them by concentrating on what he considered to be ‘pure’, that is, non-carnal aspects of femininity.

  His reasons for yearning to be pure, considered in Chapter 4, were compatible with his celibate lifestyle. Once again, by modern standards, seeking out pure people as companions seems an odd thing to do, but it was not so in his own context and in his own times. He was a personal protégé of Pusey, who believed that virginity was the highest state of life. Many of his colleagues and friends, such as H P Liddon, were known to prize chastity as a high ideal. He was also, of course, sworn to celibacy himself.

  Rather than being a closet paedophile, it seems that the intensity of Carroll’s pursuit of little girls reflects the extent to which he sought an antidote to his feelings for women. With his loving child-friends, he could obtain loving, beautiful, feminine company which was neither tempting nor ‘sinful’.

  Those who are still convinced that he must have been a closet paedophile, suggest that his kindness
and protectiveness was merely a public face, a kind of ‘grooming’ of children. In private, they presumably therefore think, he would have been different. Again, there is no evidence for this. Not one single recollection of any child indicates that he ever seemed like a threat to them or upset them: indeed, the exact opposite was true. Even more significantly, the discovery of his bank account, which he never imagined would be made public, has illuminated this aspect of his life in a way he never dreamed of.

  Payments that he made show that he detested the idea of children, or indeed other helpless creatures, being abused. Privately, and without fuss, he gave financial support to an organization which caught and punished men who abused children. He also, equally privately and unfussily, contributed to many other charities which helped the helpless in other ways.

  He was particularly concerned with the welfare of unprotected women and children of both sexes. Protectiveness was a personal characteristic which people remarked upon, and the way in which he lived his life also suggests that he had a horror of all forms of abuse.

  When the behaviour of the Dodgson family in destroying so much documentation is closely examined, it also shows that they were confident that Carroll did not possess any disturbing material about children. They got rid of a great deal of material. The papers which Stuart Collingwood saw, and which no longer exist today, include 11 missing years of Carroll’s diary – from the age of nine to the age of 23 (excluding the three Rugby years) – plus four-and-a-half years’ worth of other diaries from his twenties, which cover times of religious and emotional upheaval in Carroll’s life. The family also disposed of Carroll’s letter register, covering tens of thousands of letters and their contents, and his photographic register, which listed details of every photograph that he took. They mutilated, erased and censored parts of the remaining diary volumes, apparently not long afterwards.

  They were a very private family living in an era when privacy was greatly valued. They did not want later readers finding out anything about their family life, with its squabbles, dramas and crises, and they wished to present their famous brother to posterity in the most virtuous light possible. Yet, most significantly, in this entire gigantic welter of concealment there is no suggestion at all that the family found anything to make them feel concerned about Carroll’s relationships with little girls. On the contrary, the exact opposite is the case. Collingwood’s book, which spoke for the whole family, emphasized Carroll’s child-friendships for all they were worth, taking two full chapters to do so. This intensely religious family also took pains to preserve and publicise as many papers as possible that dealt with Carroll’s love for little girls.

  Furthermore, after Carroll’s unexpected death, his brother Wilfred spent several days going through Carroll’s possessions while clearing his rooms. If these had contained anything at all – letters, pictures, photographs – which gave rise to the slightest moral concern about Carroll’s relationships with children, Wilfred would undoubtedly have insisted that the child-friendships be downplayed immediately.

  So his family knew him intimately, they knew many of his secrets, they wanted to protect his reputation and their own – and they uniformly acted as if there was everything to be proud of about his close friendships with children.

  Still, the idea that Carroll was in some way predatory towards young children has become well established. The growth of his image is a subject which has been examined in a number of recent books, and it is therefore necessary, and fascinating, to take a brief look at how this ‘paedophile’ aspect of Carroll’s image has evolved.

  No suspicions were raised about him and his relationships with his little friends by anyone who knew him, either during his lifetime or after his death. On the contrary, most children remembered him with affection. Even those who did not take to him – and there were some – merely found his puzzles and riddles uninteresting. Nobody seems to have thought him creepy; nobody was made uneasy by him.

  The development of the negative image of him began about 30 years after his death, when Freud’s works had been translated and become fashionable in intellectual circles. This was a time of intense rebellion against the Victorian past, and Freud’s ideas were one of the ways in which the sunshine was let in on the numerous secrecies and repressions upon which the Victorians had determinedly drawn the blinds. In this atmosphere of exposure, Lewis Carroll was among many once-revered figures that were up for grabs.

  A M E Goldschmidt’s ‘Alice in Wonderland Psychoanalysed’19 appeared in 1933, and was probably the first shot to be fired at the ‘St Lewis Carroll’ image. This essay made the odd assumption that because the original Alice story was impromptu, the version written down months later, and then rewritten for publication, could be scientifically labelled as ‘free association’ and analysed accordingly in Freudian terms.

  It was known that Carroll was a highly religious lifelong bachelor who presumably had no sex life and who had been inspired by little Alice Liddell to write his famous story. Therefore, according to Goldschmidt’s posthumous psychoanalysis, falling down the rabbit hole was not a literary device to get the fictional Alice into another world, but was a symbol of the sexually-frustrated Carroll wishing to have sex with the real Alice. The door with the golden key was no longer a simple means of getting her into the garden, but a symbol of coitus. It was obvious to Goldschmidt (although not necessarily to anyone else) that Alice’s growing and shrinking meant that she represented a tumescent and detumescent penis.

  Goldschmidt either did not know, or else simply disregarded, the fact that Carroll’s impromptu stories usually wove in themes or incidents that were particularly relevant to his audience at the time. Perhaps Alice had joked that she might like to scramble down a rabbit hole that day. Perhaps she had tripped in a rabbit hole and fallen over. Nobody knows, and still nobody knows which of the ideas in his story arose from Carroll’s own mind, and which arose from casual remarks from those around him, or incidents which had befallen them that day.

  More analysis followed, and then more. The Cheshire Cat represented Carroll’s emotional detachment from sex, it seemed. Alice supposedly ignored the large doors in her dream hall because she represented Carroll and the doors represented women. And so on. Some of this work is now hard to read without laughing, but once the idea had been broached that Carroll had abnormally sinister tastes and emotions, then this soi-disant science was able to ‘prove’ anything that people felt like saying about him.

  The fact that these Freudian analyses look primitive now does not mean, of course, that they looked ridiculous then. Freud’s approach was revolutionary and did signify a genuinely new way of approaching human beings. Psychoanalysis was then crude and in its infancy, and this was the period during which the idea of Carroll as ‘abnormal’ took root.

  It might all have been forgotten in time, except for two things. One was the well-intentioned but unwisely secretive attitude of certain members of the Dodgson family towards Carroll’s papers, which fanned the flames of the idea that he had something to hide. The other is the ‘snowball’ effect, in which an idea – in this case, Carroll as pervert – gains a momentum of its own and begins to seem self-evidently true.

  The Dodgson family members in charge of Carroll’s papers had valiantly fought in the late Victorian era to disassociate Carroll from gossip about his friendships with women. Now, the family’s destruction (or, at the least, their gross lack of care) of many important documents relating to his private life had resulted in the fact that little was available to counterbalance the focus on little girls, which by the 20th century was starting to look increasingly odd.

  Early researchers, therefore, understandably searched out personal recollections from those who had been alive during Carroll’s lifetime. There had been a fair amount of gossip about him, and as with all gossip nobody quite knew what was true and what was not. Carroll was sufficiently eccentric, reclusive and famous to generate rumours and make people intrigued. From the mid-1920s onwa
rd, people who had known Carroll, or known of him, begun casting their minds back to what they remembered from all those years ago.

  The gossip had been about young (and older) women, but, since he was presented as a man who was exclusively interested in children, and whose muse was a little girl, some of those looking back 40 years or more would have endeavoured to make their memories fit what they now believed to be the reality. That Carroll and his friends had bent over backwards in his lifetime to emphasise his love of children and not women would have strongly reinforced that tendency, and so it is hardly surprising that the idea took hold in the way it did.

  Contemporary gossip had included rumours that he had wanted to marry one of the Liddells, probably Alice. This matter will be covered more thoroughly in Chapter 6, but even if he had wished to do this, the mid-Victorian mind would not have imagined that a grown man would have wanted actually to marry a child. He would have applied to her parents for leave to court her and, if they had agreed, there would have been a long courtship. Assuming that she remained agreeable, she would have grown to womanhood before she married. Sometimes, a suitor who found he was unable to marry one girl, would marry her sister. But 30 years or more into the 20th century, everything had changed. People now married each other for love, and those who remembered mid-Victorian courtship customs were nearly all dead.

  As the years passed so the ball rolled on, gathering increasingly inaccurate information about a supposedly dull, reclusive and thoroughly peculiar personality who was scared of women and could only get along with little girls – and had sinister designs on them, too. In 1938 a Professor Paul Schilder found ‘preponderant oral sadistic trends of cannibalistic character’ in Carroll’s works.20 In 1947, a Martin Grotjahn wrote a long, earnest screed about the subject of ‘Girl = Phallus’ in relation to Carroll.21 They were voices among many saying similar things. Carroll was being increasingly dismissed as a bore, a recluse, a pervert, a man who had no life and little personality, an unlovable man who had left no personal trace upon the world.