by Jenny Woolf
The story is about a boat trip into uncharted seas in search of a sinister but wholly unimaginable creature, and it has a cruelly inevitable vanishing at the end. The crew who embark into the Bellman’s crazy boat with its blank sea charts include a Barrister, a Banker, a Beaver, a Butcher, and a doomed Baker. The Baker is an over-dressed, over-heated character who has been warned against the fearsome Snark by a dying uncle. He has forgotten his own name, so is known by a variety of cries such as ‘Fry me!’, ‘Candle-ends’ or ‘Toasted-cheese’, and he has a heart like ‘a bowl brimming over with quivering curds’.
The scholar Fernando Soto has pointed out that contemporary medical books compare certain signs of consumption to curds and melting cheese,14 and it is indeed the feverish Baker who finally succumbs to the Snark. He has one final fit, with waving hands and wagging head, before coming face to face with the grim and unknowable Snark, and disappearing entirely.
They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
Where the Baker had met with the Snark.
In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away –
For the Snark WAS a Boojum, you see.
Although Carroll was constantly being asked what the poem meant, he consistently said that he did not know. Eventually he said he thought he agreed with a lady who had interpreted it as an allegory of the pursuit of happiness.15 It is an illuminating comment, for despite the darkness and fear which runs through the poem – the horrifying end of the Banker who turns black in the face, the terrified Beaver who purchases a ‘second-hand dagger-proof coat’ and the utter disappearance of the Baker – the overall effect is somehow comical and entertaining.
Some of Carroll’s lesser-known poems are full of private jokes, and so have never achieved such a wide circulation, although they are also witty, thought-provoking and even haunting. He created some good ballads for the entertainment of his family household, apparently inspired by Scottish traditional ballads and Aytoun’s popular Bon Gaultier parodies, among others. One, ‘The Two Brothers’ (1853), a spoof old-world song, could easily have made a music hall turn. It was none-too-subtly based on the tragic Borders ballad ‘There Were Twa Brothers At the Scule’. For Carroll, however, there was no tragedy, and the first line was ‘There were two brothers at Twyford School’. It refers to Carroll’s two younger brothers Wilfred and Skeffington, who both attended the school at Twyford and liked to fish from the bridge (‘brigg’) over the River Tees near their home.
It is too long to quote in full, but in its entirety it creates a punning and dryly witty picture of the fate that befell the two quarrelsome schoolboys:
… He has fitted together two joints of his rod
And to them he has added another
And then a great hook he took from his book
And ran it right into his brother.
Oh much is the noise that is made among boys
When playfully pelting a pig
But a far greater pother was made by his brother
When flung from the top of the brigg …
… Said he ‘Thus shall he wallop about
And the fish take him quite at their ease.
For me to annoy, it was ever his joy,
Now, I’ll teach him the meaning of ‘Tees’! …
Carroll’s poem ends genially with the brothers being called in for tea, in cheerful contrast with the real ballad, which concludes with an ominous dirk dripping with ‘the blude of my a’e brother’.
‘The Three Voices’, first published in 1856, also seems to relate to some family incident or joke. It has been described as a parody of Tennyson’s ‘The Two Voices’, but actually it is nothing like Tennyson’s poem. It describes a naive young man walking on the beach, as Carroll and his family often did at the nearby coast, and meeting with an aggressive and deeply boring umbrella-wielding lady who seems to have been lying in wait. Although Carroll himself described it as ‘“slight’, the poem has been the subject of intense analysis for mysterious hidden meanings in recent years. No solutions have been proposed, but one verse suggests that Carroll was mischievously referring to a real and deeply unwelcome habitual visitor to the family home, since:
He saw in dreams a drawing-room,
Where thirteen wretches sat in gloom,
Waiting – he thought he knew for whom …
So perhaps the 13 members of Carroll’s immediate family knew only too well who the irritating and intimidating lady with the umbrella might be. The poem remains entertaining and readable despite its mysteries.
As he grew older and more famous, Carroll’s light-hearted creative genius was, then as now, at risk of exposure to the withering attention of unimaginative adults. He took steps to deal with it as best he could. Not only did he consistently refuse to own up as ‘Lewis Carroll’ in most social situations, but when he did entertain groups of children – for he never liked to disappoint children – he worked up certain tried-and-tested stories as ‘parlour turns’. He saved his original poems and stories to tell informally, and usually privately, to children he liked, and who liked him. He simply refused to co-operate with any of the grown-ups if he did not feel like it.
However, he continued to display a great deal of creativity in his amusing letters to his friends of all ages and both sexes, and there was a light-hearted unconventionality even in his communications with outsiders. A letter he wrote to his dentist six years before his death must have been more imaginative than any of the other business correspondence the good man received that year, and it shows that Carroll’s comic fancies were still part and parcel of his approach to life:
Dear Mr. Whatford. The appearance of a small gum boil, opposite that double tooth which you thought you had quite killed, has, I think, convicted it of being the cause of the pain I have had. And the aching of the front teeth seems to be due merely to a brotherly sympathy between tooth and tooth, which, however creditable it may be to the teeth themselves, is decidedly inconvenient to me! I enclose the well earned 5 guineas. Very truly yours, C.L. Dodgson.16
Little Lorina ‘Ina’ and Alice Liddell pose in Chinese garb for Carroll’s camera. Carroll liked creating imaginative pictures and had a collection of fancy dress costumes and ‘props’ which he sometimes used in photography sessions.
Carroll’s 1857 image of his friend Reginald Southey with his arm affectionately round a human skeleton, which in its turn is clasping the hand of a small monkey skeleton
9
‘… the camera of rosewood’
Photography
Finally, he fixed each picture
With a saturate solution
Which was made of hyposulphite
Which, again, was made of soda.
(Very difficult the name is
For a metre like the present
But periphrasis has done it.)
from ‘Hiawatha’s Photographing’
Carroll was fascinated by the visual world. He liked to accompany the stories that he told children with wild and impish sketches of his own, full of humour and life. He was under no illusions about his academic drawing ability, though, and nor, it seems, was anyone else. He lived in an age when draughtsmanship was highly valued, and even comic Punch cartoonists drew in what would seem today an academic style. Nobody was much impressed by amateur caricatures, however lively and entertaining they might be. No less a critic than John Ruskin scanned Carroll’s portfolio, and made it witheringly plain that he did not think much of it. Carroll, said Ruskin, did not have enough talent to make it worth his while spending much of his time sketching.1
Yet despite his lack of technical drawing skill, Carroll had a highly developed artistic sensibility. He loved attending galleries and exhibitions, and he bought original artworks, sometimes at considerable expense. He also
looked closely and carefully at the world with an artist’s eye, as is shown in a letter he wrote to his sister Mary in 1861:
… Brown glossy hair would (in the light) have a line of white where the eye caught the reflected light, and gold on the two sides of that while (in the shade) it would all be dead brown … shadows are coloured but the colours don’t depend on the thing that throws them, nor does it depend on the colour of objects which another part of the shadow falls on …2
Had he lived even 20 years earlier, he would probably have languished on the sidelines of the visual arts, admiring other people’s work but not contributing much himself. But by the 1850s, middle-class amateurs were starting to get involved in photography. By the time Carroll reached his early twenties, he too was earning enough money to take up the hobby, and it was rather an exciting one.
Photography, the ‘pencil of nature’, had thrown a bombshell into the Victorian art world. ‘From today, painting is dead,’ Delaroche the painter had said, on first clapping eyes upon a daguerreotype. That was not quite true, but photography certainly did liberate a whole generation of artists – artists who could not draw. A man (or, not infrequently, a woman) who had previously struggled to catch a likeness with pencil and paper now had the chance to create convincing art. At last it was possible to capture in just a few short minutes the authentic lineaments of a human face and figure. There was something very personal about the whole process too. As the subjects looked out at the viewer from the picture, so would they originally have stared at the photographer’s face, surrendering their images to him for ever.
Carroll’s early humorous story, ‘A Photographer’s Day Out’, published in 1860, is one of several comic works he wrote on the subject of photography, and it describes the lure of capturing another person’s image. In this cynical little tale, the narrator spends the day in a fever of desperate anxiety, for he wants to take and own a photograph of Amelia, a lady he secretly admires. Nothing goes well. He describes how he photographs the family: pompous cross-eyed Papa, simpering Mamma, who was ‘very fond of theatricals in her youth’, and the three youngest girls,
as they would have appeared, if by any possibility a black dose could have been administered to each of them at the same moment, and the three tied together by the hair before the expression produced by the medicine has subsided from any of their faces. Of course, I kept this view of the subject to myself, and merely said that ‘it reminded me of a picture of the three Graces’ …
To his glee, the lovely Amelia consents to sit for him. First, though, she says, she would like him to photograph a particular cottage for her. He ecstatically agrees, and rushes off to take the requested picture; ‘muttering “Amelia, ’tis for thee!” removed the lid of the lens; in 1 minute and 40 seconds I replaced it: “it is over!” I cried in uncontrollable excitement, “Amelia, thou art mine!”’ Just as he is about to get his hands on Amelia, of course, everything goes sadly wrong. Here, as so often, Carroll’s references to grown-up love resonate with feelings of ignominy, betrayal or heartbreak. In this case, the photographer ends up beaten black and blue, then discovers that the faithless Amelia was engaged to an army captain all along. He does not obtain his yearned-for photograph.
The idea of capturing likenesses was attractive, but the actual business of making photographs was cumbersome, chancy and expensive. Still, it suited many aspects of Carroll’s nature. Although his fussiness did not become excessive until he was much older, he had a painstaking approach and a love of sheer complication even as a young man. Both these traits were amply satisfied by the use of the wet collodion process. This was the first really popular photographic technique, and its exposures, at just a few seconds, were shorter than most other processes of the time. It also had the great advantage that many paper copies could be made of the same picture, because the plate gave a negative rather than a positive image, which allowed prints to be made easily.
To make a wet collodion negative, bromide, chloride or iodide salts were first dissolved in a solution of pyroxylin in ether and alcohol. This made the collodion. An immaculately polished glass plate was coated with this sticky, freshly mixed solution, and it was left for a few moments. It was then taken into a darkened place and dipped into a silver nitrate solution which would convert the salts into silver bromide, chloride or iodide respectively. It was then ready for use.
Meanwhile, the subject would have been waiting, ready posed. A few final adjustments on the part of the photographer, and the lens cap would be removed from the lens for a few seconds. This would expose the plate inside the big wooden camera while it was still wet. Although exposures with wet collodion were not enormously long, the subject often leaned against a post or chair back in order to avoid the slight movements that might lead to blurring.
The photographer would then remove the plate from the camera, and hurry into the darkroom, and develop it in a solution of iron sulphate, acetic acid and alcohol in water. In Carroll’s day, the darkroom had either to be rigged up on the premises or brought along on every photographic trip, for there would be less than 20 minutes available to coat, process and develop the wet plate.
Each part of the procedure had to be done deftly and correctly: the chemicals must be evenly spread on the plate, no dust or smudges must contaminate any surfaces, and the chemicals had to be at the right temperature. Contact prints were made, since enlargers had not yet been developed; if a large picture were required, then a large plate had to be used. It was a primitive system, but the results could be very good, and the best wet collodion photographs have excellent detail and gradations of tone.
The equipment was large and heavy, and transporting the glass plates, clanking bottles of chemicals, blankets, gauzes, tripod, dishes and so on involved much careful packing and the use of a barrow or even a cab. To add to the challenges, the light had to be bright enough to give contrast to the image, otherwise it would be flat and lose detail. The artificial light available in those days was very dim, so photographs were usually taken outside on a bright day, or at least in a studio with a glass roof. Some of the photographs Carroll apparently took inside were in fact taken outdoors against a backdrop, as some surviving untrimmed prints reveal. The brightness of the scene had to be judged by eye, since there were no exposure meters and photographers had various dodges by which they could assess the exposure. The Swedish photographer Gustav Rejlander actually used his cat, checking to see how much its pupils were dilated in order to assess how long an exposure to give.
One of the reasons Carroll succeeded in photographing children so well is that he was able to entertain them and keep them cheerful during these lengthy procedures. Even so, according to Evelyn Hatch, whom Carroll photographed as a young child, being photographed ‘meant much patience, for the photographer was always determined to get his picture “just right”.’3 Carroll sweetened the pill for his young subjects by allowing them to come into the darkroom afterwards to see how the image magically appeared. ‘What could be more thrilling than to see the negative gradually take shape, as he gently rocked it to and fro in the acid bath?’ remembered Alice Liddell, looking back nearly three quarters of a century in her little memoir of 1932.4
Between 1856 and 1880, Carroll made nearly 3,000 negatives, and he is acknowledged as an important amateur photographer of the Victorian age. In their careful layout and varied selection of images, his surviving albums offer mute testimony to his perfectionism, his care and his pride in his work. His pictures were mounted to accord with a set of registration marks he made on each album page in fine pencil, and he considered the shape of each picture very carefully. Few of them were plain and simple rectangles.
He has gone down in posterity as a photographer of little girls, but really just over half of his output shows children, and at first he did not specialize in taking photographs of individual children at all. Many of his early diary entries record his pursuit of distinguished and celebrated ‘victims’ – the contemporary slang word for photographic
subjects – and his camera caught many colleagues, friends and celebrities. Among them were Alfred, Lord Tennyson, George MacDonald, Thomas Huxley, Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Michael Faraday and Ellen Terry. He even managed to capture royalty with his camera. In mid-November 1863, he reported the exciting news in his diary that his friend Kitchin had called at about 11.30 to say that he would bring ‘The Prince’ to be photographed at half-past twelve. This was Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark, who was staying at Christ Church at the time. Carroll hurried over to his studio, and when the prince arrived, he took two negatives, a 6 × 5 inch half-length, and a 10 × 8 inch full-length. The prince chatted pleasantly to him, and the gratified Carroll confided to his diary that he thought him ‘a much brighter specimen of royalty than his brother-in-law’.5
The camera also offered Carroll the chance to record places that were of interest to him: these included, among others, pictures of scenery in Oxford and Yorkshire, and of his childhood home at Daresbury, Cheshire. The parsonage he photographed is plain and small, and it rather resembles a farmhouse, with animal sheds and fields beyond. It burned down in the 1880s, and so his pictures of it are the only ones that now survive to show its appearance.
He also photographed scientific specimens, including some splendid fish skeletons. One amusing image, taken in 1857, shows his friend Southey with his arm affectionately round a human skeleton, which is in its turn clasping the hand of a small monkey skeleton. It was two years before Darwin was to publish Origin of Species, so either Carroll showed scientific foresight or – more likely – was just having a joke.
