by Jenny Woolf
He began running into overdraft almost from the start. By the eighth transaction, his account was in the red, and he slid in and out of overdraft for ever after. At these times, a glance at the account gives the impression of a careless, emotional and headstrong man with little anxiety about debt and no interest in planning for the future. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that at certain periods of his life, Carroll’s account could be picked out of the many others in the ledger simply by the amount of red ink it displayed. His carelessness must have been as noticeable to the bank clerks as his fussiness was to his friends. Perhaps, standing at their desks in the back room of the bank, they occasionally commented upon Revd Mr Dodgson’s habits, as the red ink bottle came out for him once more.
Carroll successfully hid this manifestation of his acute inner inconsistency from outsiders, and in the same way he was able to reconcile some of the forces which pulled him in opposing directions where his money was concerned. Although Alice did not make him a fortune, the annual revenues, which quickly reached several hundred pounds a year, became a lifebelt in an ocean which could become turbulent when Carroll’s recklessness brought him near to losing control.
The most serious financial problem Carroll had occurred in the early 1880s, when he was in his early fifties. By then, he had decided he was earning enough from writing to be able to quit his unloved lecturing job. Once free of the lecturing, however, he seemed to start feeling a little lonely and cut off from life. Even an uncongenial job leaves a gap when it has gone, as many retirees quickly discover. Carroll had stopped taking photographs in 1880, and the loss of this hobby must have hit him hard. He needed something else to do. In an unusual burst of confidence, he confessed to his diary that his life was ‘tending to become too much that of a selfish recluse’.6 He accordingly took the extraordinary decision to accept the curatorship of the Common Room at Christ Church.
Many worthy people have held this post, which has also been compared with running a tea-shop. It involves the administration of the college dons’ social club, and requires some routine hard work, but flair and originality are less in demand. Carroll, who could not help being original, was not an obvious candidate for the job, but he threw himself into the work with desperate energy, allowing no detail of the Common Room’s needs to pass unnoticed. He made many improvements, thereby hugely increasing his workload in a job which would not otherwise have been onerous. He modernized the lighting, stocked the wine cellars with excellent wines, introduced afternoon tea and even established a complaints book. He was a good curator, and yet reading the carbon copies of his Common Room correspondence is a somehow uncomfortable, even saddening experience.
The copybook’s pages are not large, Carroll’s handwriting was looped, flourishing and of reasonable size, and the contents of the letters are excruciatingly pernickety. The overall effect is disturbing, even slightly crazy. It is a glimpse of a man devoting far too much time and emotion to desperately trivial things. Carroll’s diary comments that he took the job with ‘no light heart’ and taking on a heavy responsibility for the sake of the social contact suggests that he, too, felt a certain concern at his own inner state of mind.
The unemotional contemporaneous figures in the bank account reveal how dramatically his frantic nitpicking in the Common Room contrasted with the lack of control in his personal financial affairs which developed in the early 1880s and was to continue for some years. Between 25 September 1883 and 22 January 1885, as he obsessed over pennies in the Common Room, money drained from Carroll’s personal account at a noticeable rate. His overdraft rose to over £666 in January 1884, a sum which would (if only it had been a credit) bought a sizeable house at the time. Even his entire annual income from Macmillan was not enough to pay it off. An annotation on the ledger suggests that the bank had correspondence with him about it, and of course he had to pay interest.
None of Carroll’s surviving diaries or correspondence even hint at this financial crisis, let alone suggest what caused it, or what he thought about it. Only these figures, penned by bored clerks and preserved by a company with no interest in Carroll’s image, provide the truth. They suggest that something was going on. A little further investigation shows what it was.
In Carroll’s day, banks always noted the name of recipient or payee beside each transaction. Many of the names in Carroll’s account appear nowhere else in the diaries and letters, and refer to people or businesses whose details have not come down to posterity. Other entries suggest that individuals who previously merited only a footnote were more important than they at first seemed. One of these people in Carroll’s life was a Mr Thomas Jamieson Dymes. Mr Dymes was an Oxford man (though not a Christ Church one) who had become a boarding house master at Eastbourne College. He is usually mentioned only briefly in biographies, if at all, as a recipient of Carroll’s generosity. Yet Mr Dymes seems to be the reason why Carroll got himself into such a secret mess in the 1880s.
According to the letters and diaries, Carroll met Dymes and his wife in 1877, when Carroll called at Eastbourne College on behalf of a friend who thought she might send her son to the school. Over the following years, he spent a good deal of time with Mr and Mrs Dymes and their many children. In 1883, Dymes got himself into financial difficulties, and Carroll resolved to help him. It is known that he sent a printed circular to 180 friends, asking if they could offer employment to Dymes or his family. He also made contact with the historian Frederic Harrison, who had helped Dymes in the past.
Harrison and friends collected money to help Dymes and gave it to Carroll, and Carroll busied himself in paying off creditors, landlords, lawyers. He also contributed nearly £420 of his own money. A letter he wrote to Harrison on 4 October 1883 shows that he considered that at least £200 of the total amount of £419 7s 0d could be written off as a gift, although he was calling it a loan.7 Yet there was no way that Carroll could afford to pay this money to Dymes. The overdraft he built up lasted for months, and then years, and there was no obvious prospect of his clearing it.
So what was the truth about Carroll’s involvement with Dymes? Was there any reason why Carroll should be paying large sums of money to someone he apparently only knew socially? Dymes’ surviving letters do not present an attractive picture. He comes over as a rather incompetent man who felt he had been badly treated by life, and blamed others rather than himself. Nothing from his wife appears in the archives of the London School of Economics, which owns all the relevant letters, but it is reasonable to guess that Dymes’ family probably suffered a good deal during their tribulations. Mrs Dymes was an invalid, and Dymes (as he was entitled to do by law until 1882) had spent her only money – an inheritance. Hard-done-by women often touched Carroll’s heart, and the fact that Dymes had many daughters probably weighed with him, too. With seven sisters of his own, he knew the responsibility that unprotected females could be – and the risks to which they were exposed when no man was looking after them properly.
Carroll liked the Dymes girls well enough, particularly Ruth and Margie, two of the older ones, whom he tried to help with jobs. But although his letters to them are cheerful, friendly and teasing, he was not particularly devoted to them, as a casual 1882 comment in his diary about a social occasion shows: ‘Margie and Ruth Dymes were also a failure, though in a less degree: they do talk, but are dull: the family have not mind enough to interest one.’8 There is little indication that he saw the Dymes girls as anything other than pleasant companions. Nothing much has come down to posterity about Mrs Dymes, but there is no suggestion that Carroll had especially strong feelings about her, either.
What does come across is that the Dymes family offered Carroll constant contact with their family life. Just as Harry and the other little Liddells had become his substitute siblings when he was young and lonely in Christ Church, so the Dymes family offered domestic companionship when he was restless and lonely in his fifties. His own family no longer contained children for him to entertain and had no scope for the ch
ats he enjoyed having with mothers about their family lives. His generation of Dodgsons did not go in much for marriage and children. Five of his spinster sisters were now spending their time doing good works in Guildford, and a sixth lived in flourishing eccentricity with many cats in Brighton. The seventh, the only married one, lived in genteel poverty with an ill husband and two growing sons far away in north-east England. The two married brothers eventually had twelve children between them, but they too lived far away, and they, of course, were the kings of their own castles.
The Dymes’ joys and sorrows offered interest to a bachelor who otherwise had only himself to think of. His diary shows how he dropped by often to see them, and how he became involved in their family affairs. The children spent time with him and accompanied him on outings to Eastbourne, London, Oxford and Surrey, and he helped them sort out various practical matters which bothered them.
So, as Mr Dymes sat at his desk morosely writing long, sad letters to people whom he hoped might help him, Carroll spent time with Dymes’ family, making himself more important to them than would otherwise have been possible. Although in truth he was hardly in control of himself, to them he must have seemed a model of competence and a rock of solidity compared with the hapless Mr Dymes.
Could this have justified the outlay of all that money? Perhaps. As an unknown writer, Carroll had been prepared to gamble money he could not afford on publishing a children’s book. So he was probably capable of blowing hundreds of pounds of his personal money on making a woman and her helpless daughters feel more happy and secure, especially if it meant turning himself into a well-loved figure within their family circle.
As the years went on, Carroll apparently continued to get on well with Mrs Dymes and the children, but he went right off Dymes, if he had ever been on him in the first place. Eventually matters came to some kind of a head. In 1891 Carroll wrote in his diary, ‘The Rev. G. R. Green called to talk about Mr. Dymes, from whom he is thinking of trying to recover some of his debt. I rather encouraged the idea. Mr. Dymes will never pay any of his debts unless forced to do so.’9 This sour comment covered a falling-out, for after that the Dymes family fades entirely from his diary and are never mentioned again.
As he looked back during the 1890s, did Carroll regret the Dymes involvement which had cost him so much money, and given him so little long-term reward? And did the loss of personal contact with the Dymes family upset him more than losing the money? We cannot know, but it always seems that, for him, money was important as a means to an end, rather than as an end in itself. He had, by that time, recovered his finances, anyway.
Carroll’s personal lifestyle was comfortable but modest. As a Christ Church resident, he paid a small sum to the college to cover his daily needs, and when he had friends to stay, he paid the college a little extra. He was not reclusive, and spent about the same on Common Room socializing as other people, as a glance at other mens’ Common Room bills in the old ledgers confirms.
Several payments to booksellers appear, for Carroll was a really ardent bibliophile, and may have had a small sideline in book dealing. He certainly acted as a bookseller’s contact point for his friends who were seeking particular books for sale. In a privately printed circular to booksellers of 1893, he asked the booksellers to stop sending him their catalogues so frequently. He had, he said, around 80 catalogues on his shelves which had been sent in the last few weeks!10
The account also shows several payments to artists. In 1869 Carroll paid Thomas Heaphy £14 4s 0d for copying a painting of a fainting child, and, in 1863, Arthur Hughes received £26 5s 0d for the painting Lady of the Lilacs. Carroll particularly loved this latter painting, which hung on his wall until his death. There were also frequent payments to the photographic printers Hills & Saunders, and to chemical suppliers such as Telfer’s, where payments for chemicals were substantial. There were payments to colourists and, later, to photographic studios, after he had stopped taking photographs himself. And there were gadgets.
Carroll was a lover of gadgets. In later life he became an eager purchaser of peculiar Victorian devices such as the Stylographic pen and Velociman adult tricycle, as well as one of the earliest typewriters. The Stylographic pen had a writing top consisting of a metal tube with a fine wire inside to regulate ink flow, rather similar to a modern drafting pen or rollerball.
The Velociman was a tricycle costing nearly £50. It was an extraordinary contraption, with two large wheels at the front and a small one at the back. It could, it was advertised, travel at six to eight miles per hour. Rather oddly, it was hand-propelled, so must have been intended for invalids.11 Carroll had perfectly good use of his legs, and it is a slight mystery why he would have purchased such a device. Perhaps he wished to build up his arm muscles, as he later acquired a Whiteley’s Exerciser which had that purpose. Unsurprisingly, he could not get on with the Velociman, and the state of the roads in those days cannot have made travelling in it any easier. He spent some time figuring out ways in which it could be improved, and discussing these with the mechanic who supplied it. Finally, he gave it away to his brother Skeffington. What Skeffington made of it is not recorded.
Curious contraptions aside, Carroll’s life seems to have been simple enough. Although he helped his family and friends unstintingly, he kept no household and employed no staff of his own. He was abstemious, never travelled much abroad and he was not interested in luxury. Indeed, one side of his complicated nature seems to have disapproved of too much wealth. As he approvingly quoted Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village in his 1867 parody ‘The Deserted Parks’:
This wealth is but a name
That leaves our useful products just the same
Not so the loss. The man of wealth and pride
Takes up a space that many poor supplied.
He took just one foreign holiday in his life, an overland trip to Russia, and his purchase of £100-worth of Circulating Notes (which could be exchanged for foreign currency) shows approximately what it cost him.
The bank account does not offer a great insight into Carroll’s social life in general. Not everything he bought appeared in the account: there are no payments for theatre tickets in London, for example. He undoubtedly spent a good deal of money on the theatre, but Macmillan’s staff, who were based in London, often bought his tickets for him and deducted the cost from his book revenues.12 No regular payments to individuals outside his family occur, and no payments suggest that he had a special lady friend, as has sometimes been conjectured. However, other friends appear in flashes with the odd payment here and there.
Payments to ‘Vanbrugh’ refer to his friend Irene Vanbrugh, the celebrated comedienne, then aged about 20, or one of her theatrical sisters. Several payments to ‘Quin’ relate to Minna Quin, a distant cousin whom Carroll discovered and helped to support as she began her acting career. The money he gave them may have been to help with tuition, as he took a keen interest in developing the skills of his theatrical friends, whoever they were.
Isa Bowman was another actress who was a close and beloved companion. She always acknowledged how much he had helped her in establishing her professional career. A large payment to ‘De Bunsen’ of £12 12s 0d relates to Carroll’s diary entry of 24 October 1891 in which he commented that, ‘Dear Isa was to go at 11 this morning, to sing to Mddle. Victoria de Bunsen, who is to give her opinion on the capabilities of her voice. I shall then decide about lessons.’
Another friend, Gertrude Thomson, was an artist who socialized alone with him in defiance of Victorian convention, and his letters and diaries suggest they were fairly close. He employed her to create several pictures for him, and his generous payments to her mask the fact that she was not, by all accounts, very good at delivering her drawings on time – or at all.
Others were also beneficiaries of Carroll’s generosity. An artist friend, Ethel Hatch, recalled gratefully in her unpublished memoirs13 how he kindly offered to pay her fees to study with the artist Herkomer, even though she did no
t take his offer up. The account also shows for the first time how he helped support the writer Henry Kingsley in his dying days. Henry, brother of the more famous Charles Kingsley, had been one of the first adults to spot the commercial potential of Alice in Wonderland, and he and Carroll had been friendly for some years. In 1865, when Carroll was publishing the book, he had stayed with Henry in his cottage near Wargrave, and Henry’s response to the copy of the book which Carroll presented to him was ebullient and enthusiastic, as his delightful letter of thanks shows.
I received [it] … in bed in the morning and in spite of threats and persuasions, in bed I stayed, until I had read every word of it … I could not stop reading your book till I had finished it. The fancy of the whole thing is delicious …14
He was almost as enthusiastic about Looking-Glass. But by 1871, Kingsley, afflicted by debts, had moved back to London. He was not on very good terms with his famous brother. On 10 January 1872, Carroll’s diary records laconically, ‘Called on H. Kingsley, but he was out.’ The diary makes no mention that he had left £100 for him; the cheque was cashed a few days later: Kingsley had obviously needed the money. He died in May 1876, and in November 1876 a repayment of just £37 9s 6d appeared in Carroll’s account.
So Carroll gave generously to individuals, but he also gave generously to charity. In fact, his payments to charity are a very marked feature of his overall spending. In early life his gifts were unsystematic, but when he reached the age of 50, he embarked upon one of the frenzies of organization which sometimes consumed him, and he arranged his charity giving from then onwards with ardent precision. From 1882 until his death, he made payments to over 30 charities annually, as well as one-off payments for specific appeals. They differed slightly from year to year, so he obviously considered them all afresh each time.
His choice of charities shows that his main concern was for the ill, unprotected and vulnerable: ‘him that hath no helper’ as he once put it. As a group, the people whom he helped cover the spectrum of wretchedness that formed the dark side of the generally smug, secretive and sanctimonious Victorian era. He cared, as we have seen earlier, about the countless women and children whose poverty laid them open to illness and abuse. He supported the Homes of Hope for ‘fallen and friendless young women’ and the Clerkenwell women’s prison where ‘betrayed’ and ‘sincerely repentant’ fallen women were rehabilitated. For many years he regularly supported The Society for the Rescue of Young Women and Children, which helped women and children who were at risk of prostitution. Until the end of his life, he also regularly supported the Society for the Protection of Women and Children, which fought against sexual exploitation and trafficking of children, and sometimes mounted legal prosecutions against men who abused children.
