The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  Before giving out the second hymn, the curate read out some notices. Meanwhile I took my hymn-book, and said to myself (I have no idea why) ‘it will be Hymn 416,’ and I turned to it. It was not one I recognized as having ever heard: and, on looking at it, I saw ‘it is very prosaic: it is a very unlikely one.’ And it was really startling, the next minute, to hear the curate announce, ‘Hymn 416!’25

  In general, Carroll’s attitude towards spiritualism, rather like his attitude towards religion, was a mixture of an intense interest and wish to believe, and an inherent scepticism and rationalism where non-material matters were concerned. His view of himself was immovably grounded in his identity as a Christian, and his parents’ devoted religious training and the continuing piety of his own large, close family, were strong lifelong influences upon him. Yet it would not have been like him to brush aside the difficulties and doubts which increasingly became part of Victorian intellectual life. As his revealing aside to Mary Brown has shown, he eventually took the decision to settle on what he intended to believe, and stick to it. His resulting simple and luminous piety was noted by several of his friends, but the hundreds of theological books in his library show that this apparently childlike sincerity was hard won – and not quite as clear and bright as it seemed. The mathematician in him yearned for indisputable certainties, the uneasy clergyman sought closeness with a loving, personal God, and the clear, rational and independent thinker needed to confront whatever the cold truth might really be. He never stopped trying to reconcile these views. He might have been a less interesting man if he had succeeded in doing so, but also, perhaps, a rather happier one.

  The three Alices: Carroll’s own hand drawn version (p 211) Tenniel’s version and Carroll’s photograph of the little Alice Liddell, aged 8, sitting by a potted fern, two years before he told her the story of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’.

  8

  ‘And would you be a Poet?’

  Literature and Storytelling

  Then proudly smiled that old man

  To see the eager lad

  Rush madly for his pen and ink

  And for his blotting-pad –

  But, when he thought of PUBLISHING,

  His face grew stern and sad …

  ‘Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur’ (A Poet is Made, not Born)

  There is a famous story about Queen Victoria and Lewis Carroll. It tells how the queen is so touched by her children’s devotion to Alice in Wonderland that she issues a royal command that she should be the first person to receive a copy of Mr Carroll’s next book. After a couple of years, a beautifully wrapped package arrives addressed to the queen. When Her Majesty opens it, she finds inside an inscribed personal copy of Carroll’s next work – An Elementary Treatise on Determinants with their application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Geometry.

  It is a good story, but, like so much that is written about Carroll, it is not true. It fits the conventional picture of a boring don producing two amazing children’s books, and then running out of steam; but nothing could be further from the reality. Carroll was creative all his life. However, like many creative people, he needed certain conditions in order to do his best work. He did not need to separate himself from the world, like many writers. Far from it – what he needed was an audience.

  ‘He was a born story teller, and if he had not been affected with a slight stutter in the presence of grown ups, would have made a wonderful actor. His sense of the theatre was extraordinary,’ recalled the actor-manager Bert Coote, who as a little boy had been friendly with the grown-up Carroll.1

  Carroll told his family stories, he made poems up for them and he gave recitations; for like many stammerers, he had few problems when singing or reciting lines that he knew well. As a child, he created vast games for his brothers and sisters in the garden, and spent hours entertaining them, as his mother mentioned in a letter to her sister:

  … Charlie really has got the Hooping cough [sic], after having been so proof against the complaint during the whole of his last summer holiday, constantly nursing and playing with the little ones who had it. … his appetite and spirits never fail at the Railroad games, which the darlings all delight in. He tries and proves his strength in the most persevering way, Edwin [aged 3] always being glad to accept any number of tickets …2

  The youthful Carroll drew cartoons for his brothers and sisters, he mystified them with conjuring tricks, he involved them in writing stories and poems with him. He took careful note of what worked with them, and what did not.

  His first ever published work had been called, with some prescience, ‘The Unknown One’. No doubt his family admired it when they read it in the Richmond School magazine in which it appeared, but no copy of it has ever been found. After this, Carroll produced several family magazines, of which one of the biggest and best is The Rectory Magazine, dating from when he was 18. This was created in what is obviously an old exercise book from Rugby School, for the endpaper, dated 1846, contains notes in various hands saying such things as ‘Dodgson excused calling over’ and ‘C.L. Dodgson, Sick Room’. No doubt he joyfully ripped out whatever had been in it beforehand to begin instead the handwritten ‘Compendium of the best tales. Poems, essays, pictures etc. that the united talents of the Rectory inhabitants can produce … 1850’, to which he jokingly added ‘Fifth Edition, carefully revised and improved’.

  Seven brothers and sisters, as well as his Aunt Lucy contributed to The Rectory Magazine. The youngest was Louisa, then aged 10, who produced a very creditable ‘Ode to Wild Beasts’. Carroll put the whole thing together, complete with amusing and lively illustrations. It contains parodies of the kind of songs and stories that the children would have read, and Carroll also included ‘Answers to Correspondents’, in which it clearly tickled his fancy to imagine the questions to which he was supplying the answers:

  D.S. Your question is unintelligible. What do you mean by ‘withsome’?

  M. We do not know the way in which Indian Rubber balls are made.

  E.L.K. Whatever you please, my little dear! You pays your money and you takes your choice!

  As well as needing regular ‘fixes’ of fun, drama and performance, there was another reason why Carroll liked having an audience. With 10 brothers and sisters, he would have had little personal time with his parents, and would have had to find a way of gaining individual attention and love. Entertaining the children in the family got him noticed and put him in the centre of things, and, according to Collingwood, his brothers and sisters always thought a lot of him.

  It would follow that he would assume that entertaining other children would make them love his company too – and this is exactly what happened. After Carroll left home, he still found children, particularly well-mannered ones, an easy and satisfying audience. His family background had equipped him for dealing with them, and they found him so interesting that they really wanted his company. Throughout his bachelor existence in the monastic surroundings of Christ Church, no professional actor could have adored their bouquets more than Carroll basked in his child-friends’ attention and devotion. So many of his letters and diaries show how much he put into entertaining them. With them, he could be his creative, human self: direct, funny, spontaneous, and gently teasing; and his letters show how he liked to create ridiculous alternative possibilities to amuse them.

  ‘My dear Gertrude,’ he wrote to one favourite, Gertrude Chataway,

  Explain to me how I am to enjoy Sandown without you? How can I walk on the beach alone? How can I sit all alone on those wooden steps? So you see, I shan’t be able to do without you; you will have to come … you will have to engage me a bed somewhere in Swanage and if you can’t find one I shall expect YOU to spend the night on the beach and give up your room to me. Guests, of course, must be thought of before children and I am sure that on these warm nights the beach will be quite good enough for YOU. If you did feel a little chilly, of course, you could go into a bathing machine, which everybody knows is ver
y comfortable to sleep in. You know they make the floor of soft wood for that very purpose. …3

  As well as his flights of fancy, his listeners also appreciated the way in which Carroll wove aspects of their own lives into his narratives. This characteristic of his can be spotted even in the story of Alice in Wonderland. He not only named some of the characters in the book after those who were present at the telling of the original story, but he also drew upon other aspects of the little Liddells’ lives, turning them inside out and upside down in the process.

  Alice’s French book at the time was La Bagatelle.4 It contained a sequence of lessons titled ‘The Rabbit’, ‘The Fall’ and ‘The little girl who is always crying’, while a later lesson is about ‘the tea table – take some bread and a little butter’. These lessons must have been dreary for Alice to recite, but it would have been very different when they had been imported into Wonderland and utterly transformed.

  The Alice poems also mischievously poked fun at songs and poems which the little Liddells themselves recited and sang. Children of the period were forced to learn by heart many ‘improving’ verses such as Robert Southey’s drearily moralistic ‘The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them’:

  … ‘You are old, father William,’ the young man cried,

  ‘And pleasures, with youth pass away.

  And yet you lament not the days that are gone;

  Now, tell me the reason I pray.’

  ‘In the days of my youth,’ Father William replied,

  ‘I remember’d that youth could not last;

  I thought of the future, whatever I did,

  That I never might grieve for the past.’

  Who could possibly fail to prefer Carroll’s version?

  … ‘You are old,’ said the youth, ‘as I mentioned before,

  And have grown most uncommonly fat;

  Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door –

  Pray what is the reason for that?’

  ‘In my youth,’ said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,

  ‘I kept all my limbs very supple

  By the use of this ointment–one shilling the box–

  Allow me to sell you a couple?’

  Like all good children’s storytellers, Carroll had a special gift for re-packaging his own ideas, and even his personal feelings, in ways that children could empathize with, relate to and accept. He never forgot that the children he talked to were also real people with their own emotions. They were less sophisticated than adults, but were more honest and expressive. Carroll knew just what they were capable of understanding, and he did not talk down to them.

  He thoroughly disliked outsiders poking their nose into the informal, friendly little world he created with children, and he also resented the interference of anyone he thought might jeer at him or be bored by him and his fancies. He had a real hatred of being expected to perform in front of an unsympathetic audience – mischievous boys and conventional adults in particular. His friend Isa Bowman described how one day when she was young he took her to a Panorama of Niagara Falls which was being exhibited in London, and began to weave her a story about a wax dog on display. When he looked up and discovered that several strangers had gathered round to hear the tale, he was so upset that he began stammering at once, and abandoned the story.5

  Sometimes, though, an adult (usually a woman) was as charmed by his stories as the children were, and might become a friend. Such was a lady called Mrs J N Bennie, who met him at an hotel in the 1870s. She described how she had spotted the ‘grave’ stranger at dinner, but had no idea who he was. The next day, as she relates,

  Nurse took our little twin daughters in front of the sea. I went out a short time afterwards and found them with my friend of the table, who was seated between them with his knees covered with minute toys. They were listening to him open-mouthed, and seeing their great delight, I motioned to him to go on. A most charming story he told them, about sea urchins and ammonites. When it was over, I said ‘You must be the author of Alice in Wonderland.’ He laughed and replied, ‘My dear madam, my name is Dodgson, and Alice’s Adventures was written by Lewis Carroll.’ I replied: ‘Then you must have borrowed the name, for only he could have told the story as you have done.’6

  Carroll continued to deny it, but Mrs Bennie persisted. Eventually, he confessed, and he, Mrs Bennie and her daughters became lifelong friends.

  Mrs Bennie was unusual in that she was able to step across the barriers of convention and communicate with Carroll the man. Something about her must have appealed to him enough to persuade him to let her sit and listen to him, for an audience of adult strangers or acquaintances did not suit Carroll’s storytelling gift at all. He needed to relax and forget himself in order to create freely, and the conventions of middle-class English society rarely encouraged relaxation. He was always in some ways an outsider in society, as a letter he wrote as a young man illustrates only too well. In it he described to his friend Mrs MacDonald how he was introduced to the wife of a well-known artist, and made a mess of it: ‘… I stepped forwards to shake hands with her, my hat being still on my head! My left hand was full of coat and umbrella, so my only alternative was to offer her my hand or my hat, to shake: I chose the former as the least absurd of the two, but must, I fear, have made her an enemy for life!’7

  Pity the man who makes enemies by wearing his hat at the wrong time! Carroll never ceased to find conventional society a bore, and often a stressful bore. Throughout his life he was impatient of the unspoken rules that hedged all social interactions. He often stayed still and silent in formal company, performing only when he was with family, with good friends – or with children.

  He does not seem to have had the slightest problem in appealing to children. The actress Irene Vanbrugh recalled how his entertaining stories during rehearsals so enthralled the child actors that on occasions Carroll was sent away by the harassed manager, desperate to get his actors back to work.8 And not only did Carroll enjoy the experience of performing, he also loved watching others perform. Perhaps the glare of the limelight and the high emotion of the drama offered him a kind of freedom, an escape into an alternative reality where the normal rules of life did not apply.

  It is not known what Carroll’s father thought about his son’s views on the theatre and theatre-going, but he was probably not very enthusiastic, for theatres and theatrical life were frowned upon in many respectable households during his lifetime. Carroll’s sisters did not visit playhouses, and his father, as a Church of England parochial clergyman, was forbidden even to set foot within a theatre’s doors.

  Until the second half of the 19th century there was, it must be admitted, some justification for the Church’s disdain. As so often in Victorian times, sexual morality was the issue. Then, as now, glamour was an important part of the drama’s popular appeal, and contemporary playhouses were gaudy places tricked up with cheap gilt and flaring lights. They were particularly known for popular songs, dances, and ‘ballets’ featuring bevies of pretty dancing-girls twirling around in flimsy dresses and showing off their legs. Men flocked to see these young beauties and it is no surprise that theatres were also well known as places where the company of dancers (or that of other girls) could be purchased after the show.

  In addition, many theatrical performances were anything but intellectually elevating. Although Shakespeare was reasonably popular, most theatres tended to show short runs of hastily produced plays backed with sensational or humorous supporting acts. In 1867, a typical evening out for Carroll at the New Royalty Theatre featured ‘Meg’s Diversion’, ‘Sarah’s Young Man’ and ‘The Latest Edition of Black Eyed Susan’. Carroll enjoyed these very much, and claimed in his diary that the latter was ‘a good burlesque, in which a song (and dance for five) “Pretty Susan, don’t say No” was encored four times!’9

  He happily attended many other low-brow plays and pantomimes like The Statue Bride, Goodnight Signor Pantalon, A Bottle of Smoke, The Boots at the Swan and Fee F
o Fum. The fantasy and fun of these, not to mention Hanky Panky the Enchanter and The Maid and the Magpie, were probably not too warmly received back at the rectory, but no amount of disapproval appeared to put Carroll off. He seemed to need the theatre. His nephew said after his death that the clerical ban on attending theatres had been one reason Carroll had refused to take the priesthood. It is unlikely to have been the whole reason, but it is a measure of the extent of his lifelong passion for the stage that it could be given as a reason at all. In the 36 years of theatre-going which are documented in his surviving diaries, Carroll saw several hundred plays, concerts and operas, and undoubtedly attended many more that nobody now knows about, since several of the diaries are missing.

  The theatre’s magic, glitter, and ability to create other worlds and other lives were not its only attractions for him. There were the performers themselves, the people who inhabited this enchanted world. In the catalogue of his possessions made after he died is an album of more than 160 photographs of actors and actresses. Each photo is inscribed with the sitters’ names in Carroll’s own hand, and there was also a register listing each one separately – a real fan’s collection.

  The perceived immorality of his favourite recreation caused Carroll considerable stress, particularly as he became older, and the way he coped with this may have contributed to his growing reputation for eccentricity. After his father’s death, Carroll stayed away from theatres for two years, perhaps as a sign of mourning, for he had inadvertently attended two performances on the day the old man had unexpectedly died. His biographer Stuart Collingwood says that those two years sent Carroll into a depression from which he feared he might never recover, and perhaps staying away from the theatre deepened his unhappiness during this time.