by Jenny Woolf
Oxford’s own religious upheavals of the 1830s and 1840s had arrived with the traditionalist High Church Oxford Movement, which aimed to take the Church back to its Catholic roots. Carroll’s father had attended Christ Church at this time, and was High Church and orthodox, although he drew the line at Roman Catholicism. Mr Dodgson Senior looked only to the past for religious authority, and accepted only orthodox sacraments and words as holy. His beliefs sometimes got him embroiled in religious controversy with those who had less authoritarian views.
Carroll owed his position at the college to Dr Pusey, not only a friend of his father, but a leading light of the Oxford Movement and a hard-line religious conservative, in the modern sense. Pusey was quiet and austere, with long, curling side-whiskers; the Pope is reported once to have said of him that he saw him as the bell which called people to church (by this he meant the Catholic Church), yet stayed outside it himself. Several of Carroll’s colleagues and friends were also very High Church, and the Christ Church at which the young Carroll arrived was still old-fashioned and strongly ecclesiastical in tone.
However, the Oxford Movement had lost its fire by Carroll’s time, and Pusey was getting old. A new liberalism had begun replacing the backward-looking ideas, and Carroll took a deep interest in this new wave. All his life, he was more than willing to give new ideas a hearing, however challenging they might be. As early as April 1856, Carroll attended a lecture by the Italian preacher Alessandro Gavazzi, who, as an anti-Papist, was at the opposite end of the religious spectrum from Pusey. Gavazzi was booed and hissed throughout by his undergraduate listeners. Carroll did not approve of the booing, and thought Gavazzi spoke well, but he felt his arguments were nonsense.10
He was also at Christ Church, and in his late twenties, when Darwin published his Origin of Species and of course it was the huge idea of evolution which would be the greatest challenge of the period. By the middle of the 19th century, it was becoming increasingly difficult for an educated person to deny the scientific and historical evidence accumulating against the literal truth of the Bible. Even the most devout had begun to suspect that the Biblical description of the Creation might not be literally, scientifically true.
Darwin had crystallised this subject in the public mind. He had been the one to develop a bold and intellectually coherent theory, though some of his contemporaries developed less structured, less scientific theories on evolutionary themes, both before and after the publication of Origin of Species. The Bible itself was still taken as the Word of God, of course, but now people began to reflect upon the fact that the Bible had been translated – not necessarily very accurately – from archaic foreign language sources. Some of its content, furthermore, reflected a world whose attitudes were very different from those of 19th-century England.
Carroll’s library contains several books which develop the theme of evolution, although, rather surprisingly, there is no copy of Origin of Species in the auction catalogue of his effects. It is all but inconceivable that he would not have read the book, and it is known that he paid a considerable sum to attend the seminal debate on evolution between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce at the newly built Oxford Museum of Natural History in 1860. Unfortunately, his diaries are missing and so we will never know what he thought about the debate itself. However, it can be assumed that he felt fairly positively towards Darwin, since in later life he wrote him a friendly letter offering him an extraordinary photograph he had taken as a possible illustration for Darwin’s book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).
As well as reading widely on the subject of evolution, Carroll also became friendly with F D Maurice, the founder of Christian Socialism. He was almost certainly introduced to Maurice’s ideas by his good friend the writer George MacDonald, who was also one of Maurice’s friends and disciples. Maurice had been close to and influenced by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1825) was an important book to Carroll, who read it more than once. In the book, Coleridge addresses the difficulties faced by those for whom traditional forms of worship no longer seemed relevant, and considered a more inward approach to religion. Maurice was a firm, yet humane man whose views were, of course, significantly at odds with those of Pusey – and, of course, with Carroll’s father. Despite its name, Christian Socialism was essentially a religious movement. It focused on the idea that God’s Kingdom already existed on earth and, if allowed to surface, would (among other benefits) put an end to divisions between rich and poor.
Maurice stood firmly against the concept of eternal punishment in Hell, and taught that God would not condemn any man to live forever without His love – a view which he backed with quotations from Holy scriptures. His ideas were revolutionary, and for these and other reasons he had been dismissed for heterodoxy from his posts (including the Chair of Divinity) at King’s College London.
The concept of God’s goodness transcending written dogma suited Carroll’s temperament. What is more, his favourite poet Tennyson also admired Maurice, and Carroll and his sisters had already put together an index to Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’, a long and closely wrought poem which viewed human systems of religion and philosophy as mere specks within God’s eternal existence. The view of religion that Tennyson expressed in this poem was essentially that religious and philosophical systems helped man to organize his thoughts, but did not provide true knowledge of God. For Man, true knowledge could be experienced only through faith. This ‘Power in the Darkness whom we guess’, as he put it, was a call against atheism, replacing rational doubt with inward emotional certainty. It was a message which resonated with Carroll and many others of his generation.
It was all part of the movement away from slavish adherence to the literal truth of the Bible, and it had a huge effect on Carroll. It was during the 1860s that the ‘dual personality’ which some commentators insist that he had starts to make its presence felt. Those who knew him insisted that he did not have a dual personality, but in fact his behaviour did begin to change and he started to become inconsistent in certain ways, as if a wish to defy convention vied with an equally desperate desire to live a conventionally religious life. He was conscious of his own sin, he found it hard to accept his faith without understanding it, and he had to deal with the developing revolutions in religious thought of which Oxford was an epicentre. He was under a lot of pressure from several directions, and at first it was not clear which way he would go.
The fantasy Wonderland Carroll created, underground and out of sight, simply sidestepped the whole matter; it was notable for having no elements of sin or virtue. Perhaps Wonderland’s freedom from all hint of religion, and the relief it must have afforded Carroll to write it, is part of the reason why Alice’s adventures are so oddly compelling.
Alice’s lack of moralism was certainly very unusual among Victorian children’s stories, many of which even had a tag at the end proclaiming the moral message, just in case anyone had possibly managed to miss it. Carroll parodied these books in Alice in Wonderland, as in the passage where Alice is enduring the conversation of the Duchess, who inconsequentially declares that:
… the moral of that is – ‘Oh, ’tis love, ’tis love, that makes the world go round!’
‘Somebody said,’ Alice whispered, ‘that it’s done by everybody minding their own business!’
Furthermore, in the 1860s, Carroll wrote to 15-year-old Lilia MacDonald that he had sent her a book of which ‘the inside is not meant to be read. The book has got a moral – so I need hardly say it is not by Lewis Carroll.’11
It can thus be seen to what extent his alter ego of ‘Lewis Carroll’ was, at this time, prepared to show doubts about belief in his books, even though religion was not specifically mentioned. The conversation between Alice and the Queens in Looking-Glass jeers at the inherent ridiculousness of trying to make yourself believe something when you simply can’t. Alice says:
‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
‘I
daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’
The depth of Carroll’s inner confusion is shown by the sharp contrast between the perceptive, free-speaking, independent-minded rationality of ‘Alice’ and the over-religious emotional anxiety which clouded so much of his other behaviour. Alas, no amount of literary scepticism about conventional morality could stop him from yearning to be good, or craving redemption from whatever he felt his sin was.
Shortly after writing Alice in Wonderland but before Through the Looking-Glass Carroll put together an idea for a sentimental and unrealistic play called ‘Morning Clouds’, which stands in fascinating juxtaposition to both Alice books. The play was never completed, but its sketchy plot revolves around a mother, and also, as is so often the case with Carroll, a motherly sister and their son/brother. This boy has been stolen and used by various evil men. The section which most caught Carroll’s heart was the final scene, which was central to his vision of the play. He explained to the impresario and playwright Tom Taylor how, in this final scene, the erring boy was returned to the loving arms of his mother and sister. Against all expectations, he was going to take his rightful place in the family once more. The play ends with a highly conventional vision of idealized happiness around the family fireside.
Interestingly, there are no women, good or bad, in the play, except for the widowed mother and the sister. Carroll said that he wished specifically for no love interest, and wrote that ‘I should much like to see a piece without any lovers at all: it would be a feat in dramatic writing, and a bone for the critics.’12
One wonders what his own family’s reaction was to his religious difficulties, but not a single public word of their views survive, even though his determination not to embrace the priesthood must have caused a good deal of discussion in his home. Whatever the cause of his confusion, it was obvious after 1861 that he could no longer progress on the conventional route.
He probably never did beat out a new religious path to his own satisfaction, but he tried bravely to graft elements of progressive, even somewhat revolutionary religious ideas onto a much simpler, straightforward approach to religion which he made his own. His essential approach, as his colleagues commented, was in some ways almost childlike. He accepted the idea that Man was continually sinning, and so constantly in need of God’s forgiveness. He saw moral improvement as a constant struggle to do good and be good. He both adored and feared God.
But he was probably only partially successful in his efforts to reconcile his conflicts. As he passed into middle age and then later life, his torment at his own grievous sin became less acute, but the horror of sin most certainly did not disappear from his mind. The older he grew, and the nearer his death came, the more he seems to have worried about it. The preface to Sylvie and Bruno, first published in 1889, shows that towards the end of his life, Carroll developed a constant fear of dying suddenly and meeting his Maker while in a state of sin. A long passage in the preface to the book explains how no man can defer his own death for a single moment, and may at any time hear the call: ‘We dare not live in any scene in which we dare not die.’
The simple and pure-minded company of children was a consolation for him as he continued to dwell on problems of good and evil. He wondered who should be considered sinful and who blameless in various different circumstances. An as yet unpublished manuscript entitled ‘Theatre Dress’,13 which he wrote in 1888, shows that he had not entirely resolved his ideas about sexuality, as he mused upon who was to blame for the fact that women dancers in theatres wore provocative costumes.
Typically, he did not blame the young and beautiful women – and it clearly never crossed his mind that they themselves might enjoy wearing flimsy, provocative costumes. His rage and anger were nearly always directed at bullying old women or at grubby-minded males, for he rarely hated young and beautiful women for any reason. So the guilty ones in the theatre world were, in his view, the men. There were the male managers who made the girls dress this way to pull in customers, and the lecherous male customers who demanded such things. In a telling aside, the 56-year-old Carroll conceded how extraordinarily hard it was for young men seeing these women to refrain from doing what they would bitterly regret later.
By the end of his life Carroll had moved entirely away from the non-moral refuge of ‘Alice’. Instead, he had adopted a ludicrous and egregious moralism, apparently to assuage his anxieties about being caught in any form of sin. He tried to control every aspect of his mental life and, famously, the preface of Curiosa Mathematica Part II: Pillow Problems (1893), a book of mathematical recreations, recommends mathematics as a way of blotting out ‘sceptical thoughts, which seem for the moment to uproot the firmest faith’ in the middle of the night.
At around the same time, he wrote a clever and interesting double acrostic for the young actress Isa Bowman. Both the first letter of each line and the first letters of each verse spell her name. The restrictions involved in writing acrostics often pushed him to write particularly well, and many of his acrostics contain interesting ideas. That may be because he was concentrating on perfecting the technical form rather than on trying to push a message, thereby giving his usually-controlled unconscious thoughts an opportunity to see the light of day.
His little poem has nothing whatever to do with Isa (or Sylvie, or Bruno), but instead has a chilling, glooming quality which spotlights the loneliness of the man writing in the dark shadow of a God who might not be a loving God – or might not be there at all.
Is all our Life, then but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time’s dark resistless stream?
Bowed to the earth with bitter woe
Or laughing at some raree-show
We flutter idly to and fro.
Man’s little day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.
As his life went on, Carroll also devoted increasing time to trying to codify rules by which he and others could identify and hate Sin yet still remain humane and loving human beings. An unpublished letter of 1894 to his cousin Herbert Wilcox set out some of his carefully developed views on more general manifestations of Sin. He argued that someone who is offered bad advice or a bad example in his formative years may show catastrophically wrong behaviour as a result of it, yet could not necessarily be considered sinful for it. He quoted one of his favourite philosophers, Herbert Spencer, in citing a ‘bad environment’ which might diminish or even remove this person’s guilt in the sight of God. However, as he wrote to Wilcox, to set this distinction between Right and Wrong against the conventional religious view that God was almighty, led to a contradiction. A genuinely almighty God would, in theory, be capable of turning Wrong into Right. Since the distinction between Right and Wrong was unmovable, Carroll would, in those circumstances, deny that God was ‘almighty’.
More detail of some of the beliefs Carroll arrived at late in life are set out in written discussions he had in 1889 with the grown-up child-friend Mary Brown. He told Mary that he believed that he was responsible to a personal Being for everything he did in his life, and he referred to that personal Being, he said, as ‘God’. He believed God to be perfectly good.
The first and most important tenet of his belief, he explained, was that there was an absolute, self-existent, external distinction between Right and Wrong. He defined Right as ‘what we ought to do’ and Wrong as ‘what we ought not to do’, without reference to rewards or punishments.14 He also denied the absolute power of God to Mary Brown when he was considering the question of eternal punishment. He really was unable to countenance the idea of a God who was able to condemn people to endless suffering.
He and Mary Brown discussed the question of whether God would punish two people equally if they committed the same sin as each o
ther, even though the temptation may have been, owing to difference of circumstances, irresistible for one, and easily resisted by the other. Carroll decided that God would take account of all circumstances in judging any action, and would only punish wilful sin and not punish anyone who wanted to repent. ‘And if any one urges “then, to be consistent, you ought to grant the possibility that the Devil himself might repent and be forgiven,” I reply “and I do grant it!”’ he wrote. He concluded with a resonant piece of advice, clearly hard won. He said that when two things contradicted, one should decide which belief to hold to personally. ‘I think you will find peace and comfort in such belief,’ he concluded.15
In addition, while prepared to allow that God may not be all-powerful, he also considered the possibility that God was not all-loving either. In 1893, in a circular which he distributed to booksellers, Carroll stated that he wished to buy a copy of Hamilton’s Animal Futurity, which discussed whether animals had souls that could survive death. The conventional view is that they do not and cannot. However, Hamilton’s book made the point that if animals are not compensated for the suffering they undergo in this life, then the idea of a just and loving God is compromised. Carroll’s search for this book shows that he was prepared to consider this possibility in order to satisfy his own mind.
By the time he was elderly, Carroll had begun to feel that he should be taking his religious views out to a wider public. As he had never been ordained priest, he did not conduct services, but, just as he had done for F D Maurice, he sometimes assisted priests at services, and would preach when invited to do so.
He did not, of course, enjoy any occasions where he was obliged to speak to the congregation, and often found the prospect completely terrifying, but he eventually concluded that it was his duty to preach when asked, and so he did. In his diary for 31 October 1862, he described the humiliating experience of reading through a service perfectly well until he came to the first verse of the hymn before the sermon. There, he said, the two words ‘strife, strengthened’ coming together were too much for him, and he had to leave the verse unfinished. This and other incidents haunted him through his later years. It was desperately important to him that all aspects of his religious expression should remain pure and unsullied but, unfortunately, his speech hesitation did make people laugh at him, and, by extension, at the Word of God.
