by Jenny Woolf
The account reveals that Carroll made a relatively modest amount of money from his books, and by no means a fortune. The great media and publicity machine which now dominates the lives of modern authors did not exist in his day – and nor did the huge sums of money which that media machine can generate for a successful book. In fact, Carroll hardly cashed in financially on his fame at all, and his lack of interest in doing this suggests that he may have had a fundamental lack of interest in becoming rich. As the bank’s ledgers also show, never in a single year of his life did he earn anything approaching the annual income of Alice’s father, Dean Liddell, at the time Alice in Wonderland was written.
Carroll’s diary never gives the impression that he thought Alice in Wonderland would be a goldmine. In fact, he even seemed resigned at first to the idea that he might lose money. In a diary entry of 2 August 1865, he mused that he had committed himself to paying about £600 for the first 2,000 copies, and anticipated they would bring in £500 – a loss of £100. In addition, ‘the loss on the first 2000 will probably be £100 leaving me £200 out of pocket’, he continued.‘ But if a second 2000 could be sold it would cost £300, and bring in £500, thus squaring accounts: and any further sale would be a gain: but that I can hardly hope for.’2
Of course, the books did far better than he had cautiously hoped, and after they became well known he was able to earn some money from what would these days be called merchandising. However, by modern standards, this merchandising was very modest indeed. He created a nursery version of Alice in Wonderland with charming new illustrations, and issued a facsimile of the original book he had written and decorated for little Alice Liddell. He also invented a nifty Alice postage-stamp case, and on one occasion he agreed to let an Alice biscuit tin be made.
Rather surprisingly, he did not press hard for Alice in Wonderland to be transferred to the stage, although he allowed various amateur entertainers to put on scenes from it without asking them for money. He once approached Sir Arthur Sullivan to write some Alice music, but it came to nothing because Sullivan, understandably, was not prepared to write songs on spec and Carroll did not have a definite proposal for paying him. He also considered the idea of a pantomime, starring a children’s troupe called The Living Miniatures, and he mentioned the matter of an Alice in Wonderland adaptation to the strangely-named Mr German Reed, whose drawing-room entertainments were popular in genteel society. That too came to nothing – which was perhaps just as well, since German Reed’s entertainments were held to be rather weak, not least by Carroll himself.
It was only when he was in his fifties, nearly twenty years after Alice in Wonderland was published, that Carroll finally agreed to let the dramatist Henry Savile Clarke adapt the books for the stage. Even then, his main concern seems to have been that the production should contain nothing of ‘coarseness, or anything suggestive of coarseness’, rather than how much money he would make from it. It is hard not to wonder whether things would have been different if he had had an agent. But Victorian gentlemen did not have agents.
Carroll’s apparent lack of interest in increasing his own wealth does not mean he let people walk all over him, however. He was no fool, and he was not prepared to allow anyone to make him feel like one. He took steps to protect his copyright in the books, and kept an eye on his percentages. Indeed, an extraordinary correspondence he had with his publisher, Macmillan & Co, is often quoted to show how financially astute he was, although in truth it could equally likely have been used to demonstrate his twin loves of fussing and winning arguments.
After he had analysed the Alice accounts in 1875, Carroll complained to Macmillan that on every thousand copies sold, their profit was £20 16s 8d, his was £56 5s 0d, and the bookseller’s was £70 16s 8d. This seemed to him ‘altogether unfair’.3 After bombarding the company with letters on the subject, he began fixing the sale prices of his books himself to obtain a larger profit. He thereby earned himself the deep enmity of booksellers, and enhanced his reputation for financial sharpness. The book did earn more money, but it made him unpopular all round. Still, Macmillan & Co took it in their stride. They were used to getting difficult letters from Carroll.
His bank account, of course, reveals the financial framework behind his various publishing ventures. Carroll funded the publication of Alice in Wonderland from his income from lecturing at Christ Church, and the account shows that this income was all he had, other than dividends from a few shares. Spending all this money on publishing his little book was a daring thing to do when he had no plans to become – and never did become – a professional children’s writer. In fact, some might think that it shows a certain recklessness.
Most of the accounting was done by Macmillan (this topic was touched upon in Chapter 6, see pp 179–80). Since they published his works essentially on commission, but marketed the books themselves, he gave them in exchange a percentage of the profit after costs for advertising and distribution (including discounts to book dealers) had been dealt with. They paid the bills on his behalf from the income generated on sales, sending him his money half-yearly in arrears. So the bank account shows that the first money he saw from Alice in Wonderland took a long time to arrive, because the 1865 first edition made a loss, and he had to wait for the reprint to generate some income.
The Macmillan payments were usually for several hundred pounds (they never topped a thousand a year). They came in towards the beginning of the year, but it is not always possible to identify which incoming payments are from them, for Carroll did not seem to have any system for keeping payments clear in his account. He often told the clerks that incoming payments were simply ‘Cash’, without any suggestion as to whom they came from. The first credit labelled with Macmillan & Co’s name came in on 17 February 1868, but an earlier one was probably deposited under ‘Cash’ in early 1867.
The many payments that Carroll made for printing, binding, engraving and so on appear clearly over the years. Sir John Tenniel’s £138 fee for doing the pictures for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland appeared in the account in 1865. That can be seen to be about a quarter of Carroll’s entire annual income, but when Through the Looking-Glass came out a few years later, Tenniel’s fee had jumped sharply to £290. There are eight more drawings in the second book than in the first, and Tenniel’s fame had increased still further by then; but even so, it was a large increase.
It has been speculated that Tenniel may have been upping his price to try and put Carroll off. If so, he did not know his man. A later illustrator, Harry Furniss, who did the pictures for Sylvie and Bruno, always maintained that Tenniel had told him that Carroll was difficult to work with, but although Tenniel did observe rather pointedly that he had never somehow felt an inclination to do any book illustrations again after Alice, cordial relations between the two men were maintained. Many years later, Tenniel asked for only £100 to redraw and colour his illustrations for The Nursery Alice (1889).
Carroll’s bank account begins in 1856, and there are relatively few entries in the early years. This is mostly because fewer people had bank accounts in 1856 than later in the century, and cash was far more widely used then. As time went on, the number of transactions increased.
Usefully, the account does run right through the early period 1858–62, the time for which most of Carroll’s diary record is missing, probably destroyed. Hence, it is one of the very few documents that offers information about Carroll’s private life during this period. It shows that in December 1859 he took his first plunge into the stock market, with a few investments. In June 1860 he splashed out the high price of 2 guineas (£2 2s) to the British Association for a ticket to the famous lecture at Oxford in which Huxley and Wilberforce argued about Darwin’s work. That debate sustained Carroll’s interest in evolution – an interest which lasted the rest of his life.
The account also gives some rough idea of Carroll’s movements, showing that he spent Christmas at Croft-on-Tees in 1861, because he drew cash in Darlington at the time. Commission st
amps on certain cash payments indicate other times when he drew money away from home, with the extra charges this entailed. The most interesting payment during this missing diary period is one which occurred in November 1861, and this raises a mystery to add to the several other mysteries which shroud those blank years. The payment is for £94 4s 0d, getting on for a quarter of Carroll’s whole annual income at the time, and it is to someone called Forster. It left the account on 8 November 1861, just weeks before Carroll, with considerable reluctance, took Holy Orders. The way the bank wrote the details shows that Forster lived in the Oxford area, but no Forster appears elsewhere in the account. Nor is it possible to identify any tradesmen or tradeswomen called Forster in Oxford at the time.
No surviving documentation links Carroll with anyone called Forster, except for a letter written on 13 January 1872, over 10 years later, to John Forster (1812–76) the biographer, historian and friend of Dickens. The tone of the letter indicates that the two men had previously met and were on cordial but distant terms; they had a mutual contact in Carroll’s favourite uncle Skeffington Lutwidge, who, like Forster, had been a Commissioner for Lunacy. However, that John Forster did not live in Oxford, and as the bank showed no extra charges for an out of town payment, it does not seem to have been him. Nor did Carroll seem to have any connection with the Revd Thomas Forster of another Oxford college, whose account – which is also at Old Bank – shows no sign of incoming money at that date.
The payment may not have been connected with the feelings of distress so evident in Carroll’s writings at around this time, yet there is some mystery as to why he would have been paying such a large sum of money to anyone. Furthermore, he was drawing rather large sums of cash relative to his income at the time. However, until or unless further evidence comes to light, the Forster payment stands as a reminder that Carroll did have a private life, however inaccessible it may be to us today.
The account’s incoming payments are not quite as easy to interpret as the outgoing ones, but there is some historical interest in the money he received from Christ Church, especially in the early days. At that time, most of his income came from his teaching work. As was often the case then, he was paid half-yearly. He received in total about £450 a year, but the amounts credited were rarely the same from one payment to the next, and occasionally money from Christ Church appeared at odd times of the year.
These payments obliquely reflect how the Christ Church that he knew was, in so many ways, still stuck in a quasi-medieval way of life. Although changes were on the horizon, Carroll’s income, like everyone else’s, reflected the exact amount and character of the work that he did personally. He received certain small fixed payments associated with his tenure at the college, and to this was added a proportion of the money which the college received from the properties it owned in the countryside. In practice, that depended on harvests and other farming events. So the fruitfulness of particular orchards and wheat fields in some remote corner of the land actually had a direct bearing on how much went into Carroll’s pocket. He also received teaching income from his pupils, but the amount that they paid depended on their incomes, with wealthy men paying him more than poorer ones. This is why it is difficult for the modern reader to know exactly what salary he received – because that salary was not entirely fixed. To add to the confusion, dons who held college office often paid for college expenditures out of their personal accounts, suggesting a mutual trust and interdependence in the organization which must have seemed archaic even in Victorian times.
One of the other features which comes out very strongly in the account is the extent to which Carroll was involved with other members of his family. Some of the first names to appear in the account – and some of the last – are those of family members. He probably opened the account in the first place so that he could supervise the money his father had set aside for his brothers Wilfred and Skeffington during their studies at Christ Church. From the start, his father deposited money with him via Coutts Bank’s agency. In the 1850s, no national cheque clearing system existed, but there were several companies, like Coutts, which transferred money between subscribing banks. It was Carroll’s job to allocate and supervise this money, and render an account at the end of term to his father. So, in his early twenties, it is clear that Carroll still existed firmly within the context of his large family and was expected to take care of his siblings.
After his father died in 1868, he, as the oldest son, became official head of the family, and his account quickly reflected his new responsibilities. Shortly after his father’s death, it recorded various costs relating to removing everyone from the rectory at Croft-on-Tees, where the family had lived for 25 years, and settling them into the new house in Guildford, Surrey. From then onwards, he made many payments to his sisters, for he was a trustee of the fund that his father had set up to support his daughters after his death. The sums which he began to pay to his sisters probably included not only the money from the fund, but also money from his own pocket, either as gifts to his sisters or as a contribution towards the costs of accommodating himself and his friends when they came to stay.
The name of his only married sister, Mary Collingwood, also begins to appear fairly soon after her marriage in April 1869. Not a great deal is known about Mary’s marriage, but her husband was often unwell. Carroll helped Mary educate her sons, and the large number of transactions in her name suggests that perhaps she had also arranged for him to handle any private money that she had; for until the early 1880s, married women were not allowed to control their own money.
Carroll also paid a regular £30 a year, and sometimes more, to the widow of his cousin William Wilcox, of whom he was very fond. The Wilcox clan figure very prominently in the account one way and another, and are involved in some of the largest financial transactions Carroll ever made. The most disastrous of these was in the 1880s, when Carroll invested huge sums in steamships, partly to help out one of his cousins, Herbert Wilcox, who was involved in the business. Sadly, Herbert was ruined, and the steamships were anything but a good investment, and yet this does not seem to have destroyed their relationship. Carroll did his best to recoup his losses, though with only moderate success, and despite years of aggravation and financial anxiety, he was still exchanging friendly letters with Herbert many years later.
In short, Carroll’s family could rely on his support and care, and his money, if not exactly at their disposal, was obviously available to help and support them if necessary. His niece, Violet, remembered how unstintingly he helped her as a young woman when she came to study in Oxford, not only with money but with everything else: ‘… words almost fail me. Every day until we found our own feet and made friends he came to fetch us, showed us round Oxford, gave us tea in his rooms, introduced us to people, saw to it that we had everything we wanted and in short was the perfect uncle.’4
Carroll was protective and caring, he was undeniably in charge, he was deeply involved with family members, and he played his role efficiently and well. With such a large family to deal with, there were bound to be personal problems, disagreements and awkward moments, however. Fascinating hints of family tensions are hidden behind some of the entries, such as the payments which Carroll made to his siblings who got married.
Only three of the 11 ventured into matrimony: the second son, Skeffington, the third son, Wilfred, and the fourth daughter, Mary. The account shows that Carroll gave Wilfred £400 when he married in 1871. It was a generous gift that was obviously intended to help Wilfred in setting up a home and eventually supporting a brood of children. His artistic sister, Mary, had a painting for her wedding gift: not as generous a present as Wilfred’s, but then Mary was supposed to be supported by her husband. Skeffington, ever the individualist, had not involved the family in his choice of bride. He had not even told Carroll he was planning to marry. And when he did marry, he did not tell him he had done so. Surely there is a touch of huffiness in Carroll’s diary for 21 September 1880 as he recorded, ‘Re
ad a letter from Skeffington to Fanny, about his marriage (on Sep. 14) to a Miss Cooper, at Bridlington. He had kept it all a secret, and I am thankful to have no responsibility.’ Skeffington did not receive a penny.
The account also strikingly displays some of Carroll’s fundamental self-contradictions. A kind of fussy obsessiveness ran through his nature and made an impression on those who knew him; but, as was so often the case in his later life, the appearance was a caricature, and the reality was far more subtle.
Isa Bowman’s description of the ‘fussy’ aspect of Carroll is typical of the kind of thing people said of him in later life. She knew him in the 1880s and 1890s, and she described how he would exactly calculate the amount of money that must be spent. He would then, ‘… in different partitions of the two purses that he carried, arrange the various sums that would be necessary for cabs, porters, newspapers, refreshments and the other expenses of a journey …’.5 It is only too easy to imagine the satisfaction with which the ageing Carroll produced these exact sums from his various pockets, conjuror style, at the appropriate moments.
Behind the scenes at Old Bank, though, it was a different story. When he did not have an elaborate plan involving railway journeys or something equally interesting to fuss about, and when nobody else was there to be impressed, Carroll often could not be bothered to notice how much was in his account from month to month, let alone consider what was happening with the odd 10, 20 – or 50, or 100 – pounds.
