by Jenny Woolf
Lovingly shall nestle near.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream –
Lingering in the golden gleam –
Life, what is it but a dream?
Is it surprising that so many readers have instinctively detected dark shadows in both the Alice books? Just as the terror of depersonalization hangs over Wonderland, so the shadow of Death lies blackly athwart Looking-Glass.
In 1885, Carroll decided to issue a facsimile of the original story, and asked Alice Liddell, then aged 33, if he could borrow the manuscript. She did not exactly break down his door in her eagerness to help. She wrote to her father about it, and her letter is now lost, but his reply, in March 1885, suggests what her views were.
Dearest Alice, I think you cannot refuse Mr. Dodgson, although he has sold 120,000 copies. If you like to ask for the plates when he has done with them I do not suppose he will object. Probably he will re-process the pages by the new photographic process, so the reproductions will be very exact.
Ever your loving Father, HGL23
Mrs Liddell, Alice’s mother, made Alice destroy all the letters Carroll had sent to her, according to Alice’s son. This may have been mere motherly tidying-up, but in the biography of her husband which Mrs Liddell commissioned after his death, a whole chapter is devoted to the Dean’s family, but there is not a single mention of Alice in Wonderland, nor of Lewis Carroll. Alice herself was also reluctant to tell her story, and was only persuaded to do so by her son, shortly before her death. However, in 1928, when she was in her late seventies, Alice sold Carroll’s original manuscript for a then record price of £15,400, so her earlier snobbishness about Carroll’s commercial success had obviously faded. In 2001, Alice’s entire Carroll collection of letters, memorabilia and photographs was sold by her descendants for a sum of just under £2 million. Whoever his ‘Alice’ really was, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland did Alice Liddell and her family proud.
Carroll’s picture of Xie Kitchin as a Dane, taken in 1873, was one of his particular favourites. A relative of his sister-in-law, named Alice Emily Donkin, later used this photograph as the basis for her painting ‘Waiting to Skate’ which Carroll then hung in his rooms. Xie was the daughter of Revd George Kitchin, Dean of Winchester.
7
‘That awful mystery’
Religion and the Supernatural
‘And he, who allows himself the habit of thus uttering holy words, with no thought of their meaning, is but too likely to find that, for him, God has become a myth, and heaven a poetic fancy – that for him, the light of life is gone, and that he is at heart an atheist, lost in “a darkness that may be felt”.’
Preface, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
People who knew Carroll usually described his religious belief as straightforward and childlike. Some said it was the foundation of his existence, and in many ways this was true. Without the devout underpinning of his faith, and his constant awareness of God, he would have been an unimaginably different person from the man that he was.
So his religion sustained, guided and supported him; and yet there is ample evidence that it also confined and concerned him, and made him twist and turn like a trapped eel in his efforts to reconcile his sincere beliefs with the logical approach to life that was so important to him. In fact, the more closely his religious beliefs are examined, the harder they are to grasp. Carroll once suggested that other people might find them ‘strange and wild’,1 and in some ways, they were. As with so many other aspects of his life and work, the apparent simplicity was deeply deceptive.
Carroll was a minister of the Church of England, and everyone knew it. He rose faithfully each morning to attend chapel, and he sometimes went to several services on Sundays, just as he had done in his childhood. He owned hundreds of books on a huge variety of religious topics, and he spent a good deal of his time reading, meditating upon and debating moral and theological ideas. It is less well known that he had been very reluctant to become a clergyman, and that although he was a reverend, he was only a deacon and never became a fully ordained priest. This failure to take priest’s orders was one of the most important issues of his whole life.
His family had not expected there to be any problem, it seems. His father had probably hoped that all his sons would follow in his own footsteps and become clergymen. Even better if one or two could be clergymen scholars, working and studying at Christ Church as he himself had done, until the time came for them to marry and earn their livings in a parish.
Edwin and Skeffington Dodgson duly became clergymen, although neither showed any inclination to be scholars. Wilfred, the third son, was exceedingly bright, but he had no wish to be either a clergyman or a scholar – his tastes ran towards country life, and he became an estate manager, ending up considerably wealthier than his brothers.
Carroll had no interest in a business career and was willing and able to take on the scholarly lifestyle. His father’s friend, the famous churchman Dr Pusey was impressed by Carroll, and agreed to nominate him in due course for a Studentship (similar to a Fellowship) at Christ Church. Pusey made it plain that he was not doing this out of nepotism but because he genuinely thought Carroll was worthy of the post. His high opinion of Carroll might sadly have rubbed salt into the wounds when Carroll later found himself unable to progress to priest’s orders.
As explained in Chapter 2, Carroll needed to accept various conditions laid upon him under the medieval rules that were still in operation. These included the obligation to remain celibate during his Studentship, and to take priest’s orders within four years of becoming an MA – that is, deacon’s orders by 1861 and priest’s orders shortly after that. His subject of mathematics had nothing to do with religion, but Christ Church had a semi-ecclesiastical history, and the requirement to be ordained was, to some extent, an anachronistic relic of this.
So it was all settled, and at first Carroll did exactly what was expected. In an early letter which his father wrote to him about organizing his finances, he assumed Carroll would be a scholar and a celibate priest, and then, after a few years in Christ Church, would accept one of the Christ Church livings, marry and have a family.
In the earliest surviving diaries, Carroll referred sometimes to his clerical training and his possible future as a clergyman. Yet, although he was a dutiful son, there were hints that all was not well in his mind. His anxiety first surfaced in an argument he recorded with his brother Wilfred in 1857, when Wilfred was an undergraduate at Christ Church. Wilfred’s somewhat unconventional view was that people ought to decide for themselves which college rules they wanted to follow. Carroll believed that, in order to respect discipline, people should obey rules even if they did not want to do so. He was completely unable to bring Wilfred round to his own point of view, and his failure to convince even his little brother of what seemed to him like a self-evident matter left him racked with doubts. ‘If I find it so hard to prove a plain duty to one individual, and that one unpractised in argument, how can I ever be ready to face the countless sophisms and ingenious arguments against religion which a clergyman must meet with!’ he agonised.2
Further diary entries show that he found it hard to keep up with the divinity reading he had to do in preparation for ordination. By the eve of New Year 1858, he was planning to settle the subject of being ordained priest ‘finally and definitely’ in his mind – a clear indication that he was still not settled about it. A page has been removed from his diaries at this point, suggesting that his family wanted to prevent posterity from learning the full extent of his religious difficulties.
Much of Carroll’s intellectual problem with religion lay in the difficulty of reconciling the belief-based approach of traditional religion with the demands of rational argument. With his particular and precise turn of mind, he would always find it difficult to assert anything that he himself did not entirely understand or belie
ve, let alone persuade others that it must be true. His studies in preparation for ordination at Cuddesdon Theological College obviously did not help him resolve his difficulties. As most of his diaries for the period are missing, there are large gaps in the information, but it is known that he delayed taking deacon’s orders until the very last possible moment. In fact, he only took the plunge just before Christmas 1861, less than two months before the final deadline. If he had delayed any further, he would almost certainly have lost his Studentship.
Not only are there no diaries, but no contemporary letters survive to give any insights into the matter. However, a letter he wrote 25 years later to his godson Willie Wilcox gives a glimpse of his state of mind. His language is measured, but he tells Willie that shortly before the time when he was to take deacon’s orders, he realized he had ‘no inclination’ to work as a vicar with a parish. Indeed, his work as a mathematical lecturer was well established, he added, and so he had wondered if it might perhaps be his duty not to take Holy Orders of any kind.3
This was, of course, a non-sequitur. His own father had been an educator, and many schoolteachers at the time were clergymen. Typically, in his letter, Carroll left Willie to fill in the gaps for himself, and did not actually say that he believed educational work was unsuitable for a clergyman himself. If Willie chose not to question the assumption – and it seems that he did not – Carroll would not expand further.
After discussing the matter with his bishop, Carroll continued to Willie, he had conceded that there was no conflict between teaching and the priesthood after all. Yet still he had not left the matter alone. He had gone to his holy friend, the preacher H P Liddon, for more advice. This time he had wanted to know whether he could take deacon’s orders without taking priest’s orders afterwards. Perhaps he could take deacon’s orders as a ‘sort of experiment’, he had suggested to Liddon, to see how the occupations of a clergyman suited him. Liddon had reassuringly replied that that was fine, adding that a deacon was in a totally different position from a priest, and ‘much more free to regard himself as practically a layman’.4 So Carroll had gone ahead as a deacon, but even after this, he did not give up on debating the matter of how much further he should go.
Less than a year after being ordained a deacon, he approached Alice’s father, Dean Liddell, to ask whether he was really obliged to continue onwards to priest’s orders. This time, he offered yet another reason to justify his reluctance. He tried to interpret the Christ Church rules to make the case that he need not become a priest because he had been a lay student of the college and not a clerical student. This was just not so, and the Dean, not surprisingly, disagreed. At the very least, he said, Carroll was bound to take priest’s orders as soon as possible. In fact, he should have done it already, and since he had not, he had probably already lost his Studentship. Liddell now talked of laying the whole matter before the college electors.
This was a serious matter which would take the issue onto a different and more dangerous plane. What the Dean was proposing could have cost Carroll his job. It could have meant the loss of his home and the ruination of his prospects. He must have been terrified. All he wrote in his diary, laconic as ever, was ‘I differed from this view’5
The Dean finally decided not to take the matter further. Nobody knows quite why, but Liddell was a reformer, impatient of old ways, and the issue was certainly archaic. He had plenty of plans for Christ Church, and he would be facing opposition about these, so may not have wanted to cause a fuss over something which Carroll sincerely felt that he could not face. He was a kindly man in his own way, and perhaps Carroll’s obvious distress also struck him as sincere.
Although the Dean’s decision took the college’s ordination pressure off him once and for all, Carroll continued to fret over the matter. His increasingly desperate efforts to escape his sworn obligations, and his misery (discussed in Chapter 4) about his own unspecified ‘sins’ raise the real possibility that his difficulties over Biblical truths were not the only reason for his reluctance to become a priest. There is no doubt that he was very troubled by the conflict between the impossibility of accommodating his two intense needs: to believe in God and to think logically. He knew that as a clergyman he would be in line for many searching questions about religious truths, and it does not seem that he felt competent to deal with these in depth.
Somewhere along the line, also – probably during the 1858–1862 period for which his diaries are missing – he seems to have done something which made him hate himself for what he perceived as evil behaviour. Whatever this matter was, it was now also tormenting and oppressing him.
At the end of 1863 he wrote miserably of ‘how much of neglect, carelessness, and sin have I to remember! I had hoped, during this year, to have made a beginning in parochial work, to have thrown off habits of evil, to have advanced in my work at Ch. Ch. – how little, next to nothing, has been done of all this!’6 In 1866, hearing from a friend about his work as a clergyman among workmen, he was again plunged into depression, as he concluded that he himself was unfit for such work. ‘Oh Lord, make me Thine indeed. Make me a clean heart, oh God, and renew a right spirit within me,’ he wrote.7 Things appeared to get worse. By 1867 he was writing that ‘To have entered into Holy Orders seems almost a desecration, with my undisciplined and worldly affections.’8
Collingwood admitted in his biography that Carroll’s mind was ‘much exercised’ about becoming a priest, and he conscientiously listed the arguments which his uncle had given the family both for and against the idea. In favour of the priesthood, said Collingwood, Carroll had thought that being ordained would increase his influence and his power to do good among the undergraduates. On the other hand, he added, Carroll thought that his speech impediment would stop him carrying out his clerical duties, and he had not wanted to live with the ‘almost puritanical strictness’ which was then considered essential for a clergyman.
The Bishop of Oxford had forbidden men in Holy Orders from attending theatres or operas, although he later said that applied only to parochial clergy, not deacons. In fact, Carroll could have avoided that stricture by refusing to take a parish. But in any case, it is scarcely possible that going to the theatre was more important to Carroll than doing his duty by God. He was capable of vigorous wriggling in order to escape from things he did not want to do, but he never showed any sign of shirking difficult tasks once he had accepted that they were his duty. From a young age, as his argument with Wilfred had shown, he had thought one should conform with rules on principle, as a form of discipline.
As for the speech impediment, it was true that it made preaching fearsome to him sometimes. He loathed the idea of having to read from the Bible in front of an audience and making people laugh when they should be feeling reverent. Yet there is plenty of evidence from those who knew him, and from his own letters, that he did force himself to preach even though the idea distressed and intimidated him.
None of these many reasons seem quite enough to justify taking the huge step of risking his job, his home and his prospects. Nor were they enough to justify the dismay that his refusal to become a priest would be likely to cause in his family circle.
Collingwood also added that Carroll’s preacher friend H P Liddon believed that a deacon should not have to do parish work if he felt himself unfit for it. Carroll had also used the concept of ‘unfitness’ about his own clerical work.9 Further, on 24 July 1862 he wrote in his diary: ‘I have also been asked by Hackman and by Chamberlain to preach for them: till I can rule myself better, preaching is but a solemn mockery – “thou that teachest another, teachest thou not thyself?” God grant this may be the last such entry I may have to make! that so I may not, when I have preached to others, be myself a castaway.’ Carroll, who knew enormous passages of the Bible off by heart, was quoting from Romans 2 and Corinthians, Chapter 9, in reference to himself:
Thou therefore, that teachest another, teachest not thyself: thou, that preachest that men should not steal, steale
st. Thou, that sayest men should not commit adultery, committest adultery: thou, that abhorrest idols, committest sacrilege: Thou, that makest thy boast of the law, by transgression of the law dishonourest God. For the name of God through you is blasphemed …
and
But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.
His entry makes it clear that he felt his own preaching was a mockery and blasphemy, because he had failed to ‘rule himself’ physically and done something that transgressed the Commandments of God. He was not fit to preach because of the gravity of what he saw as his own moral failings.
By destroying or mislaying the relevant diaries, one or more members of the Dodgson family made sure that posterity will never know exactly what the sin was that caused Carroll so much distress, but it is clear that the issue was for him a really important one. Some commentators have stated that Carroll was merely hypersensitive about sin, or that he felt bad about oversleeping sometimes, or not working hard enough at his mathematics. The lengths to which he went show that the issue was more important than this, and to pretend otherwise is to trivialize his difficulty.
Throughout all his miseries, there was never any sign that his faith was wavering. His personal problems were compounded by the fact that, like others of his generation, he was also having to navigate through the maze of contemporary religious discussion and decide on his own position on the new thinking. He lived at a time of great religious energy – of church-building, of debate, of evangelizing. Both before and after the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, a fundamental reassessment of the basis of Christian belief was occurring. So lively was the subject of religion that young people would gather in their droves to hear famous preachers when they arrived at local churches.
