The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

by Jenny Woolf

  As already discussed, Carroll is sometimes accused of being a paedophile, or alternatively he is thought to have been too innocent to understand the crime. These regular donations show that he was well aware of the problem, and he loathed it. He did not support these particular organizations for show, nor did he single them out for his special support. He contributed to them quietly as part of a larger system of giving to many good causes over many years.

  The Reformatory and Refuge Union was another beneficiary. It operated about 90 homes all over the country to shelter the fallen, destitute and neglected, particularly women and children. Additionally, the quaintly-named Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants looked after ignorant young female servants who were far from home. These girls had nobody to turn to and were often sexually exploited by men in the families for which they worked.

  Carroll was always realistic about the human body, and he did not flinch from the ugly side of physical life. There are regular payments to ‘Lock Hospital’ in the account. The precise Lock Hospital is not specified, but Carroll supported several London hospitals and female refuges in poor areas, and it is likely that this was the one situated in Westbourne Grove, London, which also operated as a refuge for prostitutes. Lock Hospitals were very unpopular, not only among many of those who were confined in them and obliged to accept treatment, but among the moralistic middle classes too. Dr Frederick W Lowndes, who worked in Liverpool Lock Hospital, produced a pamphlet illuminating the moral reasons why they were so reviled. ‘Lock Hospitals are principally for the reception and treatment of persons suffering from diseases, the direct result of their own vicious indulgence … this is why they enjoy so little of the liberality so lavishly bestowed upon other hospitals and infirmaries,’ he wrote gloomily.15 It is hardly surprising that Carroll also supported the Society for the Suppression of Vice – sexual ‘vice’ being the cause of most of the misery that caused women and children to ‘fall’ or be cruelly exploited.

  His religious faith showed in his many contributions to Christian charities, and his interest in medicine led to several hospitals appearing on the list, for in those pre-National Health days, most hospitals relied on subscriptions to keep going, and those in poor areas were particularly hard pressed. Some of the many other social charities that he approved of included The Workhouse Infirmary Nursing Association, established by Louisa Twining (of the tea family) to improve the standard of nursing in workhouses. He also supported The House of Charity for Distressed Persons, which offered shelter to people of good character who fell on hard times, and the Society for the Relief of Distress, founded in 1860, which helped anyone who needed it, with no distinction of creed or race.

  Carroll never kept pets himself, but he hated to see animals mistreated and he was an early anti-vivisectionist. He supported The Dog’s Temporary Home, the forerunner of the Battersea Dogs’ Home for unwanted dogs, and he contributed to the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association, which built drinking fountains for people and water troughs for animals.

  Despite all his gifts to charity, Carroll was not gullible. His eccentricity and kind-heartedness always had a steely edge of realism, and he also supported the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity. Subscribers earned the right to direct scroungers and beggars to the society’s offices, where their claims would be investigated, and payments only made if they were genuinely found to be necessary.

  In all this flurry of charitable giving and gifts for family and friends, one thing particularly stands out. Although he was happy to help and support others, Carroll was strangely uninterested in safeguarding his own future. When he was young, his father had advised him to take out insurance, but although there is an annual 16s premium to Norwich Fire (and, in Looking-Glass fashion, a strange payment from him to Clerical Medical Assurance after his death), there is no sign that he insured his life.

  He probably trusted in God. God looked after him but, as it turned out, his decision had difficult consequences for his dependents. His income mainly came from book sales, and was a respectable but not enormous sum. It had eventually dawned on him to arrange a regular overdraft facility to cover times when he ran out of money, and these arranged overdrafts tided him over till the annual payment arrived, usually in late February or March. When he died on 14 January 1898 the account was overdrawn, by arrangement, by £222 15s 8d. The annual payment from Macmillan & Co was almost due, but there were bills to be paid immediately and no life insurance.

  The money had to be found somewhere. So the family sorted out his most private documents. They chose mementoes for themselves from among his books and personal possessions, and then they auctioned as much of the remainder as possible, as quickly as possible, to get cash in hand.

  There was some snobbish criticism of them at the time. One of Carroll’s colleagues even wrote a poem decrying the sale. Looking at what the family had to deal with, that now seems unfair. One hopes they did not mind the criticism any more than he would have done. They all knew that their brother had specified that he wanted the cheapest funeral that was, as he said, ‘consistent with dignity’. If the bank account is anything to go by, he would have been the first to agree that it was of no importance what happened to his worldly goods and chattels any more.

  A Personal Conclusion

  My First is singular at best:

  More plural is my Second:

  My Third is far the pluralest -

  So plural-plural, I protest

  It scarcely can be reckoned!

  First verse of double acrostic, describing the word ‘Imagination’

  After so much consideration, then, what are we left with? A good deal of the mystery that surrounds Carroll’s personal image since his death has been associated with the crumbling of the Victorian ‘spin’ that portrayed him as some kind of saint in human form. The often bizarre depictions of him which replaced that unrealistic image do not tie up, either with each other or with the facts of his life. My aim was to find out what Carroll might really have been like – what sort of a person he really was. Now, at last, brushing aside the countless tiny mysteries that inevitably obscure any historical figure, I believe we can spot him in the distance, living out his life beneath a slightly different sky from our own. In spite of the mysteries that remain, a real man has come into view.

  Although his external existence appeared placid, dull and simple, Carroll himself was not. He was highly imaginative, an individualist, a tease and an iconoclast, and the roller-coaster progress of his personal finances and the almost scandalous get-togethers with young women show an irrepressible recklessness at his centre, a recklessness that he strove all his life to control.

  Carroll was dramatic, creative and emotional, but none of these qualities were particularly admired in Victorian middle-class society, and he did not choose to express them much in public. Instead, he took pains to adopt the dull and respectable outward lifestyle that he, his family and the outside world expected and wanted. He seems to have felt more secure when he faded into the drab, black-clad world of the conservative clerical don, hedged in by a thicket of rules and regulations.

  His drifting into self-caricature later in life suggests that some parts of that role pinched him, but at least by then he had convinced himself logically that his self-contradictory ideas were consistent with the purity and godliness which mattered so much to him, and he had largely put his mind at rest about himself. Perhaps it was as well that he also possessed a toughness and canniness that was bolstered by his important practical place in his family circle, for, without secure footings and the rigid boundaries he had the sense to impose on himself, one suspects Lewis Carroll could have been something of a loose cannon.

  Just as his ultra-moral appearance distracted attention from behaviour that sometimes teetered on the edge of unconventionality, so his love of over-elaborated daily planning counterbalanced a certain difficulty in organizing himself sensibly in everyday situations. His Christ Church colleague
T B Strong described a characteristic example of the latter which occurred after Carroll agreed to mark some examination papers. Carroll, said Strong, had decided that the fairest way to assess the papers was to read them all at one sitting. However, he did not get around to doing this until the day before the results were due, and Strong discovered him toiling amid a gigantic pile of papers that literally rose higher than his own shoulders. Carroll worked heroically through the night, finishing just before the announcement of the results the following morning. He did not enjoy the experience, yet it did not seem to occur to him that he could have handled it differently. ‘Of course,’ he told the incredulous Strong, years later, ‘I never examined again.’1

  Carroll’s handwriting also gives a hint of his acute self-contradictions. It is precise and clear, and however quickly he has written, it is readable. But it spreads, looping and flourishing, across the page, often hitting the right hand margin before the word is finished, and sporting scrolls and ornaments more appropriate to an artist or actor than an habitually silent mathematics don. In short, the opposing forces in his nature dictated how he lived his life, and ran through him like the letters in a piece of seaside rock.

  His family knew what he was like, of course. Early in his adult life he recounted to his sister Mary how he had recklessly led friends to the station by climbing a steep cliff rather than going by road in the normal way. When he was halfway up he realized this was a bad idea, not just for him, but for the friend following him:

  … both my feet had lost hold at once … if the root I was hanging to had broken I must have come down and probably carried him with me … just at the top it was hardest of all; it was only to be done by crawling up through the mud, holding by 2 roots, without whose help it would have been impossible. … [once at the station we] boasted as much as possible of our feat, to prevent ridicule at our appearance …2

  Carroll used humour like this to entertain, to charm and to cover up his feelings. The normally clean and tidy young man might have felt rather silly turning up covered in mud, but by making his audience laugh with him, he was deftly stopping them from laughing at him.

  His wit was usually kindly, and he was gentle, sympathetic and compassionate, yet there was a darker side to him, too. He is said by Collingwood to have suffered from depression, and a persistent streak of unfocused horror flickers throughout even his humorous work. Sometimes the grimness is so unobtrusive that it passes almost unnoticed, as the following extract from Through the Looking Glass displays:

  ‘Seven years and six months!’ Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully. ‘An uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you’d asked my advice, I’d have said, “Leave off at seven” – but it’s too late now.’

  ‘I never ask advice about growing,’ Alice said, indignantly.

  ‘Too proud?’ the other enquired.

  Alice felt even more indignant at this suggestion. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that one can’t help growing older.’

  ‘One can’t perhaps,’ said Humpty Dumpty. ‘but two can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven.’

  ‘What a beautiful belt you’ve got on!’ Alice suddenly remarked …’

  No wonder Alice suddenly changes the subject here. Was Humpty Dumpty’s comment a sinister threat to Alice, a veiled suicidal wish or an indication of Carroll’s yearning for the childish lost innocence which preoccupied him? Nobody knows. But the shadows in Carroll’s stories put into simple form our diffuse understanding of the insecurity, danger and sadness that underlies all life. Both the books about Alice were written during deeply unhappy periods, which suggests they may somehow deal with Carroll’s emotional efforts to conquer misery and pain. Alice alchemically transforms fury, passion and nonsense into calmness, sense and humour, and transforms unanswerable questions into amusing puzzles, double meanings and jokes.

  Carroll’s love of puzzles and double meanings went alongside a feeling for dreams and marvels and mysteries. His interest in the supernatural is seen in many of his works, although not a great deal of other information about this has survived. There is little documented record of his interest in other-worldly experiences other than his lifelong support of the Society for Psychical Research. The sale catalogue of his effects does not list many books from what sounds to have been a fairly extensive supernatural library, but of course this lack of information does not mean that the books were not originally there. Some supernatural topics blend into philosophy and religion, and books on both these subjects are well represented in the catalogues. Also, his large family had gone through his library before putting it up for sale, and would have removed many books for all kinds of reasons.

  Carroll was also particularly interested in what Stuart Collingwood described in 1898 as ‘psycho-physiology’,3 which would have dealt with the relationship between body and mind, strange mind states, hypnotism, delusions and hallucinations, curious psychosomatic conditions and early psychology. Unfortunately, his vast collection of medical books was bequeathed to a nephew, and none reached the auctioneer’s catalogues, so little is known about them either. Frustratingly little, too, is known about any supernatural experiences he may have had, although he did hint that he had them, and he was sure he had received answers to prayer. He was also superstitious enough to note that Tuesday was his lucky day, although he is not recorded as having explained why.

  So the sum total of what is known does not sound very spooky, and yet the closing scenes of Through the Looking-Glass are among passages in his work that show a startling sense of horror and the supernatural. The characters are grotesque, from the misshapen, zombie-like servants to the bizarre queens who suddenly fall into a dead sleep, one on each of Alice’s shoulders. Equally chilling are the incidental characters, such as the hunk of meat which Alice prepares to cut, only to find that the meat, although cooked, is not dead after all. Indeed, it knows etiquette, for it raises itself on end and bows to her. As the story lurches towards its climax, the table starts rising too, and the food begins to fly around just as it did in the crazy real-life seances of Mrs Guppy. ‘Take care of yourself! Something’s going to happen!’ screams the White Queen. The candles shoot up to the ceiling, still alight and flaming. The diners change places with the food. A ‘hoarse laugh’ beside Alice indicates that the piece of cooked meat has somehow left its plate and is now sitting alongside her. It laughs, but it does not speak.

  One of the most surprising things about this second ‘Alice’ book is the way that Carroll has managed to introduce these hideous images in a book for sheltered little children. His preoccupation with death is particularly clear in Looking-Glass, probably because he was still emotionally shattered by the death of his father. Yet in the end, in the middle of her terror, Alice shakes the frightening red queen into a sweet little kitten, and all ends well.

  Nevertheless, it can be seen that death was a subject that increasingly preoccupied Carroll in later life; the ‘silent end’ which awaits us all. In public – and perhaps consciously to himself – Carroll used his religion to put a positive gloss on it. How wonderful it was going to be, he mused, when one could awaken at last and realize that the hurdle of dying was now behind! Yet the question of eternal punishment troubled him, and he was terrified at the idea that he himself might accidentally die in the midst of a sinful act and have to justify his own evil-doing to God. He created elaborate intellectual reasons why a loving God would never allow human souls to suffer torture for eternity, and vowed he would rather have a loving God without great power, than an all-powerful God who could hate. But his letter to his friend Mary Brown offered a revealing glimpse of his real feelings when he advised her that the greatest comfort could be achieved by believing whatever seemed right to her.4

  Religion and morality, plus their ugly sister, moralism, must also have influenced his sexual life. Speculation about that never ceases, but common sense dictates that it is impossible to know all there is to know about another person’s sexual life when they have been dead fo
r well over a century. What is certain is that during Carroll’s lifetime few opportunities existed for loving, mutual sexual relationships outside marriage. There was no effective contraception, and women were the ones who took most of the terrible risks attached to extra-marital sex. He seems to have had strong feelings about this, and so it is unlikely that he patronized the huge sexual underworld which seethed behind the façade of middle-class Victorian morality and wrecked the lives of so many women and children. His private donations to charity show how consistently he supported charities which helped women and children who were misused by men.

  However, he very much liked female company, and was unusual for his times in treating women more or less as equals. This sense of equality could not include anything sexual, for Victorian women did not have the opportunity to behave equally about this matter, and there are suggestions that Carroll may have overstepped the mark sexually at least once with a woman, to his great regret.