The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  Alice, looking back as an old woman, recalled how, although Carroll told them many stories, the one about her under the ground particularly caught her fancy. Perhaps that was because it was ‘about’ her, or perhaps there really was something special about it. In any case, Alice then begged him to write his story down for her.

  Actually, Carroll’s original diary entry for the day did not mention telling the story at all. He said he took the children back to his rooms after the outing to show them some ‘micro-photographs’ and dropped them home at 9 pm. It was only in February 1863 that he went back and added a note that he had begun the story of Alice, and mentioned that he had started to write the headings out on 5 July, on his way to London on the train.

  At this point the ‘Wonderland’ fairy tale starts to diverge even more from what really happened. In the book, the characters at the Pool of Tears famously include several who were named after members of the boating party. Carroll’s real name, Dodgson, translated into ‘the Dodo’; and there was Lorina the Lory, Edith the Eaglet, Alice (who of course played herself), and also Carroll’s friend Robinson Duckworth, the Duck. Carroll and Alice both separately remembered how hot that 4 July had been, with a sky of ‘cloudless blue’. Alice recalled that nearly the whole story had been told on a blazing summer afternoon ‘with the heat haze shimmering over the meadows where the party landed to shelter for awhile in the shadow cast by the haycocks. …’7

  Yet the weather report indicates that the day was cloudy and cool. What is more, in one of her letters, Ina Liddell remembered that they did not have Duckworth with them when the story was first told.8 She was so convinced she was right that she discussed it with Alice, who was adamant that Duckworth had been there. Lorina concluded, with some surprise, that her own memory must have been at fault.9

  In fact, they were remembering different days. There may well have been clear, sunny breaks in the clouds on 4 July but at a maximum of only 68°F, the heat haze would hardly have shimmered. Alice remembered Carroll telling them many stories at various times, and so the ‘golden afternoon’, although undoubtedly real enough on one day or another, had become just another element in the fairy tale.

  On 6 August, a few weeks later, the party made another river trip. Once again, the English summer delivered a day of glum weather – overcast skies, with rain in the early afternoon. On this second occasion, they were accompanied by Carroll’s friend Augustus Vernon Harcourt, and Duckworth was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps that was the trip that Lorina remembered.

  They went to Godstow and had tea, just like before, and ‘I had to go on with my interminable fairy-tale of Alice’s Adventures’, Carroll recorded. That is when he probably concluded the tale of Alice in Wonderland; but he would probably never have done so if a game they were playing on the boat had been more interesting.

  The game was called The Ural Mountains. It was a parlour game about imaginary crimes that had recently been devised by the logician Henry Sidgwick10 In the game, one person was elected as the Judge and the other participants were divided into two teams. One team captain accused the other of some outrageous and stupid crime – the more ridiculous the better. Then, the other players argued the case.

  Carroll wove information about his hearers and his surroundings into his stories, so the children’s unsuccessful efforts at the boring Ural Mountains, as they floated down the river, very likely gave him ideas for the famous trial scene in Alice in Wonderland. If so, it is as well that it was not a better game. Otherwise they might have gone on playing it, and then the story might never have been finished; for after 6 August, there were no more river outings for quite a while. Indeed, there never was another that included a picnic at Godstow.

  After this, Carroll seems to have forgotten his promise to write out Alice’s adventures. During the autumn, in fact, he stopped seeing the Liddells so often, because he had fallen out with Mrs Liddell. The disagreement was nothing to do with Alice; it revolved around an incident with an aristocratic protégé of Mrs Liddell’s, involving whether or not a ball should be held at the college. So on 13 November, when Carroll met Ina, Edith and Alice by chance in the quad, he noted that the little chat they enjoyed was ‘a rare event of late’. And it was only on that November evening – months after the river trip – that he started to write out Alice’s Adventures.

  He may have been feeling a little low spirited. November is a dark and gloomy month in England. Fogs and mists obscure the light, and cold winds rattle the window frames and whirl dead leaves from the trees. Other entries in Carroll’s diary show that he was not happy at this time. His emotional outlet of playing with the children and telling them stories had been unavailable for a while. Recalling the pleasant summer outings and happy storytelling sessions would have seemed like a good thing to do.

  The meeting in the quad had pleasing results, at any rate. The children were so glad to have his company again that they persuaded their mother not to be so cross with him, and to let them start seeing him once more. She relented, and soon they were all back on their old easy terms. By the following 10 March, Carroll was borrowing a natural history text from the Deanery to help him with his illustrations for Alice’s Adventures. He was also back in the middle of their family life. Also in March, he showed Alice around the illuminations for the Prince of Wales’s wedding, and rejoiced in the ‘thorough abandonment’ with which she enjoyed it. In the next few days there were more walks, and he also recorded that he ran a race with Ina, who was now a tall girl of nearly 14.

  As 1863 went on, the Liddell family was having problems, and the Dean and his wife cannot have been feeling happy. At the end of May, they lost their new baby, which had been ailing, and to add to their misery, the Deanery gardens were unpleasantly vandalized. During this time, Carroll was around the edges of their lives a great deal. He was seeing the children almost continually, helping them with their school tasks, taking them to the circus and generally entertaining them.

  In the middle of June, the bereaved parents had to set aside their feelings in order to entertain the Prince of Wales at an enormous event at the Deanery. Alice, Edith and Ina ran a stall at a grand bazaar which the royal couple attended. The bazaar was closed to the public when Carroll arrived there on 16 June, so he crept under the counter and joined the children on their stall, just in time for the royal arrival. He exchanged pleasantries with the prince and boldly tried to get the princess to buy one of the kittens Alice was selling. If the royal pair wondered why he was there, they did not say.

  On 25 June, Carroll accompanied the Dean’s family and friends on an outing with the children. Afterwards, to his amazement and delight, he was allowed to take all three girls home on the railway unescorted. Two days later, something mysterious happened between Carroll and the Liddell family – an event which has puzzled writers for years. Carroll’s diary entry for 27 June 1863 reads, in part: ‘Wrote to Mrs. Liddell, urging her either [the word ‘either’ has been crossed out, apparently by another hand] to send the children to be photographed’. The next page of the journal has been removed. Carroll later added a note about the missing page, cross referencing it with the entry on 17 May 1857, which tells of the rumours about him and Miss Prickett. And after that, there is a resounding emptiness where the Liddells used to be.

  At the end of June, the Dean and his family departed for their new holiday home in Llandudno, and Carroll did not refer to them again (other than a brief meeting in October 1863) until 5 December 1863, when he coldly noted that he saw Mrs Liddell and the children but ‘held aloof from them, as I have done all this term’.

  Many have puzzled over what happened during the time for which the page was removed, why Carroll subsequently ‘held aloof’, and why things were never the same again. Gossip, as usual in claustrophobic Christ Church, was rife. The idea went around that Carroll had proposed either to Alice or to one of the sisters, and been told to go away by the parents. This rumour is confirmed by a note on the cover of a skit published some years later. I
n this scurrilous little play, Carroll is portrayed in thin disguise as an objector to the joint marriage of the Liddell daughters, and a contemporary note on the British Library’s copy of the play states that ‘D-dgs-n had been rejected.’11

  Over the years this supposition was fed (as will be seen) by a grossly misleading statement by Ina Liddell, and blossomed into a wholly imaginary scenario in which Carroll proposed to Alice, or was turned out of the Liddell’s lives for a variety of reasons which are neither convincing nor tie up with the known facts.

  So what really happened?

  A small piece of paper in the Dodgson Family Collection archive in Surrey gives, among other things, a brief note of the contents of the missing page of Carroll’s diary. The note also refers to another missing page which mentioned Carroll’s troublesome younger brother Skeffington. (A third page also mentioned, in which Carroll referred to Alice’s ungracious behavior, was not removed.) The handwriting on the little slip of paper is almost certainly that of Menella Dodgson, daughter of Carroll’s brother Wilfred. Menella was a hardworking and conscientious woman, and assisted her brother, Major C H W Dodgson, in dealing with the family papers in the early part of the 20th century. The part of Menella’s note relating to the missing pages reads: ‘L.C. learns from Mrs. Liddell that he is supposed to be using the children as a means of paying court to the governess. He is also supposed by some to be courting Ina.’

  So Menella saw the missing pages of the diary before they were removed. With the knowledge of her brother, who kept the diaries in his house, she jotted down what was on the pages that she (or they together) planned to take out. We know this was so, because she did not remove the page about Alice’s ungraciousness after all, but scribbled it out heavily instead. Menella had examined every word of the diaries. Yet, busily censoring away with her pen and scissors, she did nothing to remove the earlier reference to Miss Prickett. The repetition of that rumour did not concern her. The gossip about Carroll courting Ina was, therefore, the problem.

  Ina was well-developed and mature for her age. Photographs of her suggest that she was the best looking of the Liddell daughters, having inherited her mother’s glamorous, sultry, and almost Spanish appearance; at 14, she was also old enough to be considered eligible for marriage. She had no doubt also started developing some of what were then coyly termed ‘womanly feelings’. She had been out and about a good deal with Carroll, who was only 31 in 1863; and sometimes they were not chaperoned. Even Carroll knew there was risk attached to this; he had noted himself in 1862 that she was starting to look ‘too tall’, as he euphemistically put it, to be out with him. How much less suitable would it have seemed by 1863 – although of course nobody would have expected a 14-year-old actually to marry. She would be ‘promised’ and the wedding would take place years later. Alice, at 10 or 11, would be considered too young to have serious admirers.

  So is there the slightest chance that Carroll would have proposed to Ina, Alice, or any of the Liddell girls? Whatever he thought of them, the answer must be no. For a start, he never expressed the slightest inclination to marry anyone. Secondly, it was not practical for him to marry at that time. Thirdly, he was, to be frank, not the type of husband Mrs Liddell wanted for her girls.

  Mrs Liddell wanted her daughters to marry well. Since girls were not allowed independence or careers, their main chance of succeeding in life was to marry someone rich. Carroll later sarcastically referred to Mrs Liddell as a ‘King-fisher’ – literally a ‘fisher of kings’ – for her daughters.12 She wanted to do everything possible to help them to marry royalty, or aristocrats, or at the least very rich men. Carroll, although well-bred and the social equal of Mrs Liddell, was a worse marriage bet even than many of his colleagues, something of which he would have been perfectly aware. Far from having good prospects, his main prospect seems to have been the loss of his job upon marriage, since all men in his position were supposed to be bachelors.

  Just weeks before, Alice’s father had finally relieved Carroll of the obligation to take priest’s orders. The main route out of Christ Church involved being a priest, so he now had even less chance than before of getting a good job if he quit his bachelor post. There was no family money; he would have no inheritance. How could he propose to anyone, when he could not adequately support a wife?

  As Ina grew older, too, her marriage prospects would be damaged by socializing too closely with Carroll, even though he was a family friend. She did not need a reputation as the sort of girl who hung around with men, and it would have been reasonable for Mrs Liddell to point this out. A little unjust, perhaps, since she and the Dean had let the easy relationship go on for so long – but not unreasonable. Carroll no doubt agreed that the gossip was unpleasant, and so agreed to stay out of the family’s way for a while so it would all die down. And this is exactly what he did.

  So surely this clears up the matter? Not quite. Because it made no sense, all those years later, for Menella to remove the page itself, yet keep a note of what was on it. The only possible reason for her doing this could have been that she wanted to note what had been on the page – but not exactly what had been on it. Her note, in other words, is a censored version of what was on the missing diary page.

  This missing material was almost certainly not an emotional diary outburst from Carroll. Over and over again, he showed himself to be tight-lipped about his troubles, at least as far as his diary was concerned. From early on, he seems to have had an eye on posterity – even if the posterity he had in mind was only his relatives reading his diaries after his death. He rarely went into detail about unpleasant or upsetting matters.

  To the mystery of this missing information, must be added the behavior of Ina Liddell many years later, when speaking to a biographer. In the late 1920s, the American writer Florence Becker Lennon began researching her biography of Lewis Carroll. Ina and Alice were both still alive, and although Alice was too ill to be interviewed, Mrs Becker (as she was then) met Ina in early 1930. After the meeting, Ina wrote to Alice in some dismay: ‘My dear!! see what I’m let in for! On thinking to myself, I think she tried to see if Mr. Dodgson ever wanted to marry you! She said he had such a sad face, and she thought he must have had a love affair. I said, “I never heard of one” and it did occur to me at the time what she perhaps was driving at!! … I begin to tremble at what I said to her …’ Two days later, on 2 May 1930, returning to the theme in another letter to Alice, Ina continued:

  … I suppose you don’t remember when Mr. Dodgson ceased coming to the Deanery? How old you were? I said his manner became too affectionate to you as you grew older and that mother spoke to him about it, and that offended him so he ceased coming to visit us again, as one had to give some reason for all intercourse [i.e. personal communication] ceasing. I don’t think you could have been more than 9 or 10 on account of my age! I must put it a bit differently for Mrs. B.’s book. …”13

  So, in these letters, Ina was saying that she had needed to give Mrs Becker some reason why Carroll had stopped visiting the family. Whatever the real reason was, she did not want to say. Instead, she told the biographer that Carroll had become too fond of Alice.

  The matter might have remained there. A few scholars have puzzled over the letter, which only came to light in recent years, but have surmised nothing more. None apparently noticed another letter from Ina, written around the same time, now at the University of Colorado. Colorado is not a centre of Carroll studies, but happens to be the institution to which Mrs Becker bequeathed her correspondence.

  In this letter of 28 April 1930, Ina told Mrs Becker, ‘my childish recollections of Mr. Dodgson are very small, as we saw little of him after I was about ten or so …’. Yet as her letter to Alice just four days later makes clear, this was completely untrue. Ina was elderly in 1930, but she was not in the slightest bit dotty. Her letter to Alice shows that she was well aware Alice had been pre-pubescent, on account of her own age of 14. Just like the actress Isa Bowman all those years earlier, Alice�
��s sister had pretended she was about 10 when she was close to Carroll – when she knew she was in fact older, and of an age when she would be considered eligible.

  Ina continued to emphasize to Mrs Becker just how very young she really had been. A little further on in the letter, she added that she and her sisters were ‘young children’, underlining the word ‘young’. And on 4 May, she artlessly remarked, with two exclamation marks, that ‘… I don’t know how we first knew Mr. Dodgson! I suppose because he liked little girls!!’ Just to make her point crystal clear, she added that, ‘The whole story of “A in W” has no mystery!’

  Then she launched into the familiar tale of the ‘three little sisters’ going out on the boat, and asked Mrs Becker to remove the reference to Carroll having been ‘too affectionate’ towards Alice. Mrs. Becker believed her unquestioningly, and used Ina’s quotations as she had been asked to do.

  Ina’s letters raise some interesting questions, however. First, why did she lie at all? Mrs Becker was interviewing her in 1930, not 1860. Elderly as she was, Ina had not retired from the modern world. It may have been rather unconventional in the 1860s for a 14-year-old girl and her small sisters to be taken out by a male family friend of 31. It was not considered the slightest bit wrong in the 1930s, and there would have been no need to treat it with secrecy.

  Secondly, by putting the idea into Mrs Becker’s head that Carroll had become too fond of Alice rather than her, Ina was only shifting the spotlight. By 1930, the idea of Carroll being too fond of Alice sounded just as bad (if not worse) than the idea that he had been too fond of Ina herself.

  Might it not be more believable that Ina had been too fond of him? A 14-year-old, particularly a physically mature one, is very susceptible. Grown men, particularly youngish ones, are often targets for teen dreams, as many male schoolteachers are well aware. Carroll could not suppress his playfulness – it shone out constantly when he was relaxed, and he charmed both women and children. He was witty, clever, enormously entertaining and not at all bad-looking. He was unconventional enough to run a race with Ina and he had also enjoyed little adventures with her: adventures which seem insignificant by today’s standards but would not have seemed so to a sheltered mid-Victorian girl.