by Vanessa Tait
He could see very quickly that his own picture was nothing like her. His pen and its awkward scratchings could never do her justice. He started again on her dress, white cotton with a frill round the neck – that was easily done. But her hair, of which he had always been so fond, its short fringe cut halfway up her forehead and its sides so soft in her photograph, quickly became a bulbous spiky mass under his own pen.
He stood up and went to the window. The grass of the lawn was blackening to the colour of ink. He tried to imagine Alice walking across it, but he found he could not picture her face, only the horrible spikiness of his pen’s re-creation.
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
Every minute night seeped into day and made it darker.
Alice would be twelve and a half years old. He would hardly know her now. She would be going through that awkward phase of transition.
Charles sat down again in front of his papers. So the boat wound slowly along, beneath the bright summer-day, with its merry crew and its music of voices and laughter, till it passed round one of the many turnings of the stream and she saw it no more.
He would start with her nose; not too much expression in a nose.
Now then, her mouth. A smile, or the idea of one.
But he put too much ink there and it looked pinched. He gripped on to the pen until he could see the creases that ran over his knuckles, dead-end pathways.
He was not an artist. Was he always doomed to fall so far short of what he wanted to achieve?
He straightened his back without releasing his grip on his pen. He permitted himself a long sigh. He must continue, imperfect as he was.
Her eyes. What was the expression that he was trying to capture? He stared at her photograph. Wistfulness; her eyes seemed to contain within them the knowledge that childhood could not last.
He bent very low over the page, his breathing shallow. He looked at the photograph, then back at the page. The eyebrows slanted upwards; the eyes were dark, almond-shaped.
Then she thought (in a dream within a dream as it were) how this same little Alice would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman: and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood.
When Charles sat back up and looked at his drawing, he saw he had got nothing of her eyes. Nothing, in fact, of Alice at all. No coolness, no beauty, no softness, no arrogance. None of the things he had loved her for. She looked more like a beetle than a girl.
His own eyes stung and he rubbed them with the palms of his hands.
Oh God, I pray thee, for Jesus Christ’s sake, to help me live a more recollected, earnest and self-denying life. Oh, help me break the trammels of evil habits, and to live better year by year. For Jesus Christ’s sake, Amen.
He opened his eyes and left the table to fetch a pair of scissors. He cut into the photograph he had been working from, going round Alice’s head. Then he fetched some glue and stuck the photograph on top of the hated drawing.
There now, there she was, his dream child. It was no wonder he could not approach her with his pen.
Charles gathered up his papers. It was dark now. He had finished Alice’s story at last. He was glad, but his gladness was tinged with melancholy.
Although, of course, he had not finished.
He took off his shoes, loosened his tie. Last year he had given the manuscript to his friends the MacDonalds to read. He had lent the story only to amuse the children, but Mrs MacDonald had written back to him exhorting him to publish. Publish! That had not been his intention at all, but the idea had taken hold. The vanity of such a project could perhaps be excused if the story could give pleasure to other children.
He had gone to meet Mr Macmillan, who to his surprise had liked it. He needed an illustrator, of course, and Duckworth had suggested Mr Tenniel. Mr Tenniel was already well known from his cartoons in Punch, but when Charles had called on him at the beginning of the year he found him very friendly and favourably disposed to do the pictures.
The original story needed to be expanded on if it were to be published. And the name needed to be changed. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, perhaps.
It might be well received, there was no telling. Children’s pleasure, that was the main thing.
Well then, time for bed. Pray God his sleep would not be haunted by some worrying thought that no effort of the will could banish.
Postscript
My story is based on real characters and real events, but I have moved the scenes around and, of course, fictionalized them. I have also compressed the seven years of Alice’s friendship with Mr Dodgson into the space of one year.
But because I have based most of my characters on real people, it may be of interest to recount what did actually happen to them, in the Victorian tradition.
Charles Dodgson was forced to watch from the sidelines as he was replaced by a far more important suitor, Prince Leopold, Victoria’s youngest son. Oxford gossip had it that Lorina was angling for a royal match; she was satirized by Dodgson as a ‘kingfisher’ in one of his pamphlets. Nothing came of the affair, however. Queen Victoria would never have allowed her son to marry a commoner and she put an end to it. But Alice and Leopold’s feelings endured: each named one of their children after the other, and Leopold was godfather to his namesake, Alice’s second son.
In 1880, Alice married Reginald Hargreaves, a well-off country gentleman whose favoured pursuits were dispatching animals in the name of sport. She settled into life as the wife of a county gentleman: village committee meetings, running her household, bringing up her three sons. She does not mention it in her letters but I cannot help thinking she must have been bored: Reggie was not an intellectual match for her, and they were often apart as Reggie embarked on one shooting party after another. It was a far cry from her glamorous childhood.
Alice saw Dodgson very rarely after her marriage. She asked him to be godfather to one of her sons, but he refused when he found out it was a boy.
Dodgson did not forget her, however. The memory of Alice as a seven-year-old girl endured, grew more perfect even, fed by Dodgson’s fondness for melancholy and nostalgia. ‘My mental picture is as vivid as ever,’ he wrote in 1885, ‘of one who was, through so many years, my ideal child-friend. I have had scores of child-friends since your time, but they have been quite a different thing.’
Mary Prickett continued to work for the Liddells for many years. In 1871, at the age of thirty-eight, she married Charles Foster, a prosperous local wine merchant and owner of the Mitre Hotel, one of the best hotels in Oxford. Mary, at last, had a place of her own, and as proprietor, social standing too.
The story of the Alice books, of course, continues to run and run. Alice treasured the handwritten manuscript until she was an old lady, selling it only just before she died to pay her husband’s death duties, for the then astronomical fee of £15,400. It came into the possession of Eldrige R. Johnson, the American phonograph millionaire; and when he died it was bought by a group of Americans, who presented it to the British people ‘in recognition of Britain’s courage in facing Hitler before America came into the war’. The manuscript now lives in the British Library. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass have entered the public psyche and are said to be the third most quoted works of literature after Shakespeare and the Bible.
A short untangling of fact and fiction. The letters at the end of the book that Mrs Liddell reads are actual letters Dodgson wrote, but to other children. ‘My mother tore up all the letters that Mr Dodgson wrote to me when I was a little girl,’ Alice told her son, my grandfather, Caryl, in ‘Alice’s Recollections of Carrollian Days’ published in the Cornhill Magazine. And yes – his name really was Caryl, and although Alice denied that it had anything to do with Lewis Carroll, it seems a pretty big coincidence.
Dodgson’s diaries do not reveal much about his inner life, except for his exhortations
to be a better man. My suggestion that he suffered sexual abuse at school is based on a quote, written later: ‘I cannot say . . . that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again . . . I can honestly say that if I could have been . . . secure from annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would have been comparative trifles to bear.’ Added to which, sexual abuse was common at public schools in those days.
There is no evidence that Dodgson was a paedophile, except for in the classical sense, as a lover of children. After Alice’s time he had many other child friends. He met new children on the beach, where he advanced towards them with pins to save their dresses from the sea; he fell into conversation with them on trains; he approached mothers he knew to have daughters of a suitable age – that age being in Dodgson’s case around seven years old – even, once their mothers’ permission had been gained, photographing them nude. One must not forget that in those days this was more normal than it is now – it was the pursuit of women of one’s own age that was absolutely not allowed.
And yet I find something odd in this quest, even trying to look at it through Victorian eyes. Whilst I believe that he did not actually touch any of these little girls, I think his lens was focused on them to an unusual degree, especially in his later years.
Alice remained silent on the matter, in private and in public, except for a rather anodyne piece written by her son, my grandfather, in the Cornhill Magazine in 1932. Dodgson used to tell her stories, she said, and then take her picture. ‘Being photographed was therefore a joy to us and not a penance, as it is to most children. We looked forward to the happy hours in the mathematical tutor’s rooms.’
The gossip at the time in Oxford, and the tradition in my family too, was that Dodgson was too fond of Alice. Some said he wanted to marry her. For my part I cannot imagine him actually proposing, to Alice or anyone else. But that does not mean that he was not in love with her in his own way.
My mother owned a letter written to Alice by Ina when they were both old ladies. Ina had been questioned about the split that occurred between Dodgson and the Liddell family by Florence Becker Lennon who was writing a biography of Dodgson. ‘I don’t suppose you remember when Mr Dodgson ceased coming to the Deanery? I said his manner became too affectionate to you as you grew older and that Mother spoke to him about it and that had offended him so he ceased coming to visit us again as one had to give some reason for all intercourse ceasing. I don’t think you could have been more than 9 or 10 on account of my age! I must put it a bit differently for Mrs B’s book. . . . Mr Dodgson used to take you on his knee . . . I did not say that!’
This letter can be read in two ways. Either Ina is lying, and the truth is elsewhere, for example, that Mr Dodgson was courting Ina. The other explanation is that Ina felt under pressure to come up with a reason for the split to Florence Becker Lennon, and is explaining to Alice why she let the truth slip. The com ment about Alice sitting on Mr Dodgson’s knee seems to bear this out.
As far as character goes, I have coloured in interior lives from known facts. Some examples: Mary was called Pricks by the children, ‘the thorny kind’, as Dodgson put it. As Alice later wrote, she was not ‘the highly educated governess of today’. She came from a relatively lowly family and was ashamed of it: her father was a steward at Trinity College, but she called him a ‘gentleman’, which he was not, according to the standards of the day. There were rumours around Oxford that Charles Dodgson was courting Mary, and no doubt she would have heard those rumours, although there is no textural evidence that Mary had feelings for him.
For the character of Mrs Liddell I read the letters that she wrote to her husband and children, which were owned by my family, and of course Charles Dodgson’s diaries, which document the split from the family as well as her various ups and downs. She was a well-known figure around Oxford; the ditty, ‘I am the Dean, this Mrs Liddell,’ was current at the time.
Mr Wilton, Mary’s mother and Mrs Chitterworth are all entirely fictional.
Wherever possible I have relied on existing source materials, which include Lewis Carroll’s diaries; The Rectory Magazine and Mischmash (ed. Dodgson Dodgson); Curiosa Mathematica, Part II: Pillow Problems; The ‘Wonderland’ Postage-Stamp-Case, Invented by Lewis Carroll (Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-writing); The Collected Verse of Lewis Carroll; Collected Letters of Lewis Carroll (ed. Morton Cohen); Lewis Carroll Interviews and Recollections (ed. Morton Cohen); Memoirs of H. G. Liddell by Henry Thompson; Alice’s recollection of Carrollian days as told to Caryl Hargreaves in the Cornhill Magazine; the Historical Journal, Vol. 22, Alden’s Illustrated Family Miscellany and Oxford Monthly Record. Also a number of family letters once owned by my mother; Henry Liddell’s handwritten diary which, although it does not cover the events of The Looking Glass House, were good for atmosphere and character. And of course, family recollection.
Table of Contents
The Looking Glass House
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue
Postscript
