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Lewis Carroll's controversial interest in children

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The Real Alice In Wonderland Lewis Carroll Had an Unusual Relationship With

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The Real Life Alice | Lewis Carroll's Wonderland | Absolute History

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Disturbing Horrors Behind Alice in Wonderland That'll RUIN Your Childhood • EWU Story Time

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10 Controversial Facts Behind The Real Alice in Wonderland

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Understanding Concerns About Lewis Carroll

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Understanding Concerns About Lewis Carroll

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During ANTIQUES ROADSHOW's stop in Indianapolis in July 2016, guest Julia [brought in a book she knew to be a signed first edition of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. But she didn't know its value. The book was accompanied by a letter from Carroll and had come from her father's collection. Appraiser Ken Gloss gave a retail price for the book of $8,000 to $10,000. The letter, written to 11-year-old Mona Margaret Paton, would retail for $2,500. Gloss added that Carroll "had a lot of young girls that he wrote letters [to]... It wasn't just Alice."

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, on January 27, 1832. The eldest son in a family of 11 children, Carroll would often entertain his siblings with stories and drawings - early talents that later helped bring him much literary success.

Both before and during his life as an internationally beloved author, Carroll was also a mathematician, instructing students at the College of Christ Church, Oxford. His male contemporaries at the university often recalled him as awkward and unfriendly, with a noticeable stammer. Biographers state he had easier relations with women and a warm, friendly way with children; and that Carroll, a life-long bachelor, was a very private individual and very close to his family.

Carroll took on the role of a sort of favorite uncle with several of the children of his colleagues and acquaintances. One family Carroll spent time with was that of his boss, Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ Church. Liddell had a son and three young daughters, one of whom, Alice, was the inspiration for the title character in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Carroll made up the foundation of the story that became his best-selling debut to entertain 10-year-old Alice Liddell and her siblings on a boat trip in 1862. Alice urged Carroll to write down the imaginative story he had created, and after completing a manuscript in February 1863, Carroll met with Alexander MacMillan who agreed to publish it. In 1864 Carroll presented Alice Liddell with an expanded manuscript volume called "Alice's Adventures Under Ground," complete with his own illustrations. MacMillan published the first and second editions of what came to be Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (illustrated by John Tenniel) in 1865.

When he died in 1898, Carroll was a lauded celebrity. But posthumously, Carroll's reputation suffered somewhat as some scholars interpreted his life and work to be tainted with possibly pedophiliac tendencies. These suspicions about Carroll's true intentions toward young girls began in the 1930s when critics used popular-at-the-time Freudian analysis to deconstruct Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and critique Carroll's photography. Carroll had been a prolific amateur photographer, making approximately 3,000 photographs in his lifetime. Just over half of these images are of children, and about 30 depict nude or semi-nude children.

During the Victorian era children were considered the embodiment of innocence, and as defenders of Carroll have pointed out, pictures of posed nude and semi-nude children were not out of the ordinary. Carroll is known to have received parents' permission to photograph at least some of the children, as he did for the picture of a 6-year-old Alice Liddell, whom he posed as a beggar-child in tattered clothing.

Biographer Jenny Woolf, in her book, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, lays out evidence that Carroll was likely attracted to and romantically pursued teenagers and young women throughout his adult life. Woolf suggests that Carroll may have repeatedly used the role of an older, non-threatening, uncle-type figure to circumvent rigid Victorian social rules around romantic relationships that would have strictly forbidden a bachelor spending time alone with a teenage girl or a single woman. Had Carroll done that very thing when he developed his close relationship with the Liddell children? Woolf says there had been a rumor circulating around the time of the falling out between Carroll and the Liddell parents that Carroll was wooing the children's governess, or perhaps the teenage Ina Liddell. No definitive proof exists that the rumor was true. And since Carroll's journals from that period have not been found (it's thought his family members removed those pages after his death), we can only speculate about the veracity of the contemporary gossip.

Was Carroll's love of children innocent, or did his affection mask a troubling fixation? Or were those relationships benign subterfuge for romantic pursuits? Were his photographs merely reflecting a Victorian aesthetic, or were they perversely erotic? Carroll continues to have his defenders and critics, and as the debate continues his legacy remains as foggy as a clouded looking glass.

You can watch the full appraisal from Indianapolis Hour 2 below:

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During ANTIQUES ROADSHOW's stop in Indianapolis in July 2016, guest Julia [brought in a book she knew to be a signed first edition of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There . But she didn't know its value. The book was accompanied by a letter from Carroll and had come from her father's collection.

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Why has popular opinion of the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland undergone such a dramatic reversal?

The Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a teacher of mathematics at Oxford and a deacon of the Anglican Church. Some colleagues knew him as a somewhat reclusive stammerer, but he was generally seen as a devout scholar; one dean said he was "pure in heart." To readers all over the world, he became renowned as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Alice was popular almost from the moment it was published, in 1865, and it has remained in print ever since, influencing such disparate artists as Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, just released in movie theaters nationwide, is only the latest of at least 20 films and TV shows to be made from the book. But if Alice has endured unscathed, its author has taken a pummeling.

Since the 1930s, biographers and scholars have questioned the nature of Dodgson's relationship with the 10-year-old girl to whom he first told the story, and since the 1960s his work has been associated with the psychedelic wing of the countercultural movement. When some of Dodgson's photographs-he was an accomplished portraitist-were exhibited in 1999, a New York Times reviewer quoted Vladimir Nabokov (who had translated Alice into Russian) as saying there was "a pathetic affinity" between the photographer and the pedophilic narrator of Nabokov's novel Lolita. Tim Burton recently described Dodgson's stories as "drugs for children" and Wonderland as a place where "everything is slightly off, even the good people."

The decades of interpretation and reinterpretation have created a widening chasm between how modern readers perceive the author and how they receive his work. "Lewis Carroll is treated like a man you wouldn't want your kids to meet," says Will Brooker, author of Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture, "yet his stories are still presented as classics of pure, innocent literature." As Burton's movie beckons us down the rabbit hole once again, it might be wise to ask: How did we arrive at this curious state of affairs?

Charles Dodgson was born in 1832 in Daresbury, a village in northwest England, the third child (and first son) of Charles Dodgson, an Anglican clergyman, and his wife, Frances. As the household grew to include 11 children, Charles did not lack for company. "He told his brothers and sisters stories, made up games and wrote magazines with them," says Edward Wakeling, who spent 12 years annotating Dodgson's diaries. Later in life, "he really enjoyed entertaining children, and they loved him in return."

After enrolling at Oxford in 1850, at age 18, Dodgson became a "senior student"-the equivalent of a fellow-at the university's College of Christ Church. According to college rules, senior students had to be ordained as priests and take a vow of celibacy; Dodgson evaded the ordination rule and lived at the college unmarried, until his death in 1898, less than two weeks before his 66th birthday.

Like many Victorian bachelors, he became a sort of uncle to his friends' children, making up stories and games and taking them on short trips; the role ensured him a warm welcome in many homes. In 1855, dean Henry Liddell arrived at Christ Church with his wife, Lorina; their son, Harry, and daughters Lorina (or "Ina"), Alice and Edith. (The Liddells would have five more children.) Before long, Dodgson struck up a friendship with Harry, then 9.

"He taught Harry rowing and arithmetic, spent time with him and took him on outings," says Wakeling. As Harry's sisters grew older, he says, "Dodgson also took them under his wing, with their parents' blessing."

Dodgson particularly liked to pack a picnic lunch and take the Liddell children boating on the Thames, with adult friends or family to share in the rowing. On a July afternoon in 1862, he took the three Liddell sisters on a stretch of the river between Oxford and Godstow and told them the story that would become Alice. Alice Liddell, then 10, was delighted that the main character bore her name and asked Dodgson to write down the story.

At this time, Dodgson was taking photographs. Although the camera was still a relatively new technology, he had been an early enthusiast, starting in 1856, and he found no shortage of friends who wanted him to make likenesses of them or their children. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, England's poet laureate, befriended the then-obscure don and let Dodgson photograph him after becoming impressed by one of his child portraits. "You, I suppose, dream photographs," he said.

Of the approximately 3,000 photographs Dodgson made in his life, just over half are of children-30 of whom are depicted nude or semi-nude. Some of his portraits-even those in which the model is clothed-might shock 2010 sensibilities, but by Victorian standards they were...well, rather conventional. Photographs of nude children sometimes appeared on postcards or birthday cards, and nude portraits-skillfully done-were praised as art studies, as they were in the work of Dodgson's contemporary Julia Margaret Cameron. Victorians saw childhood as a state of grace; even nude photographs of children were considered pictures of innocence itself.

In discussing the possibility of photographing one 8-year-old girl unclothed, Dodgson wrote to her mother: "It is a chance not to be lost, to get a few good attitudes of Annie's lovely form and face, as by next year she may (though I much hope won't) fancy herself too old to be a 'daughter of Eve.' " Likewise, Dodgson secured the Liddells' permission before taking his now-famous portrait of Alice at age 6, posing as a beggar child in a tattered off-the-shoulder dress; the family kept a hand-colored copy of it in a morocco leather-and-velvet case.

Dodgson's relationship with the Liddells apparently hit some kind of pothole in June 1863: he stopped seeing both the children and their parents for several months. And although he resumed socializing with the dean and his wife, he never took their daughters out again. In 1864, however, he did give Alice a present: a bound manuscript titled Alice's Adventures Under Ground.

The next year an expanded version of the story was published as a book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It quickly made the name "Lewis Carroll" famous. He published a sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, in 1871, and a long-form nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark, in 1876.

Dodgson's identity as Alice 's author was an open secret, and the author gathered about him a large circle of affectionate children and their parents. His slight air of mystery added to his fame, which spread by word of mouth. Eventually he was invited to entertain two grandchildren of Queen Victoria herself.

He retired from teaching mathematics in 1881. While visiting some of his sisters in Guildford, just outside London, in 1898, he became ill. He died there of pneumonia on January 14 of that year.

By then, Dodgson's reputation as a merry, child-doting-and entirely proper-maker of nonsense needed little burnishing; the London Daily Graphic 's obituary noted that "like many bachelors, he was very popular with children and very fond of them." Before the year was out, Dodgson's nephew Stuart Collingwood published a biography that devoted two effusive chapters to Dodgson's many "child friends," including references to his hugging and kissing girls, and largely omitted references to his many friendships with women.

"The popular Victorian image of Lewis Carroll was of a sort of child-loving saint," says Brooker. "It is an image which Dodgson himself helped to create, and it suited Victorian attitudes."

In 1932, the centennial of Dodgson's birth, Alice Liddell, then an 80-year-old widow, traveled with her son and sister to New York City to receive an honorary doctorate from Columbia University for "awaking with her girlhood's charm the ingenious fancy of a mathematician familiar with imaginary quantities, stirring him to reveal his complete understanding of the heart of a child." An informal group of his admirers commemorated the centennial by praising Dodgson as a "great lover of children" and raising the equivalent of almost $800,000 in today's currency to fund a Lewis Carroll children's ward at St. Mary's Hospital in London. That may have been the last time he was so simply remembered.

The next year, a writer named A.M.E. Goldschmidt presented at Oxford an essay titled "Alice in Wonderland Psycho-Analysed," in which he suggested that Dodgson was suppressing a sexual desire for Alice. (Her fall down the well, he wrote, is "the best-known symbol of coitus.") Goldschmidt was an aspiring writer, not a psychoanalyst, and some scholars say he may have been trying to parody the 1930s vogue for Freudian ideas. Whatever his intent, unambiguously serious writers picked up the thread.

"We are reasonably sure that the little girls substitute for incestuous love objects," wrote New York University professor Paul Schilder in 1938. The meaning of an illustration of a long-necked Alice is "almost too obvious for words," psychoanalyst Martin Grotjahn offered in 1947. Similar analyses would appear as the literature on the Alice author grew.

In 1945, Florence Becker Lennon advanced the case that Dodgson had had an unhealthy attraction to Alice with Victoria Through the Looking Glass, the first modern critical biography of him. "People have wondered what he did with his love life," Lennon wrote. "Now it can be told. He loved little girls, but, like Peter Pan, he had no intention of marrying them." But Alice, she wrote, "was the first and most favoured of his girl friends," and she speculated about the idea that Dodgson precipitated the rift with the Liddells by proposing "honourable marriage to [Alice] directly or through her parents" in 1863. Alice was 11 then-too young, even by Victorian mores.

Lennon's basis for the assertion may have seemed sound: Ina was one of her sources. (Alice did not talk to Lennon because, her sister said, she was ill.) But in a letter to Alice, Ina wrote, "I tremble at what I said" to Lennon about the Liddell family's supposed rift with Dodgson. "I said his manner became too affectionate to you as you grew older and that mother spoke to him about it, and that offended him, so he ceased coming to visit us again." Ina had also told Lennon that she, Ina, was 10 at the time-but she was 14, or old enough to entertain formal suitors.

Whether Ina was mistaken, duplicitous or confused when she spoke with Lennon, her letter to Alice does not say. (One conjecture is that she lied to conceal Dodgson's interest in her, or hers in him; given his finances and prospects at the time, her parents would have discouraged the match.)

The idea that Dodgson had an unhealthy involvement with Alice has persisted, although there is no evidence to support it. Three major biographies published in the 1990s, by Donald Thomas, Michael Bakewell and Morton Cohen, suggested that he had pedophilic urges but never acted on them.

Lennon acknowledged that she wrote without the benefit of Dodgson's diaries, which were published in abridged form in 1954 and in full, with Wakeling's annotations, beginning in 1993. But even they are an imperfect source. Four of the 13 volumes are missing-as are the pages covering late June 1863, when his break with the Liddells occurred. A Dodgson descendant apparently cut them out after the writer died.

But if the diaries offer nothing about his romantic interests, other documents do.

One is a note, purportedly written by one of Dodgson's nieces, summarizing what was in the missing diary pages from 1863: "L.C. learns from Mrs. Liddell that he is supposed to be using the children as a means of paying court to the governess-he is also supposed...to be courting Ina," it reads, meaning that the children's mother told him that people were gossiping about him, saying he was courting either the Liddells' governess or their eldest daughter.

In addition, Dodgson's surviving letters suggest that he had a keen interest in women-and worked to circumvent the Victorian proscription of mingling between unmarried adults of the opposite sex.

"I wish you could come and stay here a bit!" he wrote to 22-year-old Edith Rix in 1888. "I believe the 'Mrs. Grundy' risk might be altogether avoided by simply arranging 2 or 3 visits to be paid consecutively." (Mrs. Grundy was British society's fictitious guardian of morality.) In 1879, he asked Gertrude Thomson, a new acquaintance in her late 20s, "Are you sufficiently unconventional (I think you are) to defy Mrs. Grundy, and come down to spend the day with me at Oxford?" (She was, and did.) In a 1967 memoir, the stage designer Laurence Irving, a son of one of Dodgson's friends, summarized Oxford gossip from previous decades in dubbing him a "greying satyr in sheep's clothing."

In 1999, Karoline Leach published yet another Dodgson biography, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, in which she quoted the summary of the missing diary information and argued that her predecessors, misunderstanding the society in which Dodgson lived, had created a "Carroll myth" around his sexuality. She concluded that he was attracted to adult women (including Mrs. Liddell) after all.

The reaction among Dodgson scholars was seismic. "Improbable, feebly documented...tendentious," thundered Donald Rackin in Victorian Studies. Geoffrey Heptonstall, in Contemporary Review, responded that the book provided "the whole truth."

Which is where Dodgson's image currently stands-in contention-among scholars if not yet in popular culture. His image as a man of suspect sexuality "says more about our society and its hang-ups than it does about Dodgson himself," Will Brooker says. We see him through the prism of contemporary culture-one that sexualizes youth, especially female youth, even as it is repulsed by pedophilia. The nature of his relationships with Alice, with other girls and with women may never be established with certainty. But then, uncertainty is a consistent theme in the Alice books.

Jenny Woolf, a London-based journalist, is author of the recently published The Mystery of Lewis Carroll.

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The Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a teacher of mathematics at Oxford and a deacon of the Anglican Church. Some colleagues knew him as a somewhat reclusive stammerer, but he was generally seen as a devout scholar; one dean said he was "pure in heart."

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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was an English novelist, best remembered for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1871) and for poems such as The Hunting of the Snark , which gave birth to the "nonsense" literary genre.

But he was also a logician, mathematician, photographer and much more. Today we remember him on the day of his death, January 14, 1898. His life was rich and somewhat controversial, ready to read his story? We will show you how deep the White Rabbit's lair is ...

The first years

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on January 27, 1832, in England.

Dodgson was the eldest child and third child in a family of seven girls and four boys born to Frances Jane Lutwidge and Reverend Charles Dodgson. The little Dodgsons, who lived in a sort of isolated country village, had few friends outside the family but found a thousand opportunities to entertain each other.

Accomplice was also little Charles who showed great aptitude for inventing games to amuse them. At the age of 12, he began contributing to the Rectory Magazines, a compilation of manuscripts that the whole family should have participated in. In fact, Charles wrote almost everything that survives even today.

By now you will be used to my rhetorical question: what did we do at 12? On the one hand there was Arthur Rimbaud who wrote poems in Latin, on the other hand, myself, who chose her first (horrendous) blouse without parental help ... and you?

Meanwhile, young Dodgson went to public school, and he didn't like the four years there. Mainly due to his innate shyness, even though he was subject to a certain amount of bullying. In order not to miss anything, he also suffered from several diseases, one of which left him deaf in one ear. In 1851 he went to Oxford University.

Lewis Carroll "becomes a priest"

Dodgson excelled in both mathematical and classical studies, which earned him a scholarship. In 1854 he took first place in the mathematics finals and, in the meantime, earned a degree in literature.

A curious thing is that, as in the case of all scholarships at the time, even that of Christ Church, Oxford, depended on Carroll staying celibate and, in this specific case, taking vows. Dodgson was ordained a deacon in the Church of England on December 22, 1861.

Had he pursued the path to becoming a priest, he could have married. But he felt unsuitable for parish work, and although he considered getting married, he decided he was perfectly happy to remain a bachelor. Another bachelor writer in our short stories! Let's think for example of Christina Rossetti or Jane Austen, of whom we have spoken to you in recent weeks. Could this be the road to literary success?

Speaking of literature, the name Lewis Carroll was only adopted for written works. In 1856 Dodgson used the pseudonym for the first time in a romantic poem in The Train magazine. The name Lewis Carroll was a playful distortion of his real name: Lewis is in fact the English version of Ludovicus, from which Lutwidge derives; Carroll is the Anglicization of Carolus, the Latin for Charles.

Lewis Carroll photographer

In addition to literary success, as we have said, Lewis Carroll was interested in photography since the dawn of this scientific art form.

Photography suited Carroll well as a man of infinite patience, attentive to the smallest details. The process was very meticulous at the time and it is thought that he gave it up in 1880 when dry development was introduced because he felt that photography was becoming easy for everyone.

The collection

Less than a third of his collection survives. Some photos were even destroyed by Carroll himself ... we will soon reveal why. Lewis Carroll is considered to be one of the best amateur photographers of his time, particularly in his images of Victorian children, but he also photographed friends, family, fellow scholars and well-known personalities of his time, including Lord Tennyson and members of the Rossetti family.

From the essay Lewis Carroll, Photographer by Roger Taylor (not the drummer of Queen!), Which contains all the photos of Carroll still in our possession, it appears that over half of his works were portraits of little girls. In 1880, when he stopped shooting, he tried to get permission to photograph sixteen-year-old "Xie" in a bathing suit, but failed.

As mentioned above, Carroll is thought to have destroyed (or perhaps returned to families after some rumors circulating in Oxford regarding the reverend's photographic hobby) the photographs of naked girls; however, at least six survived and four of them went to press.

The fact that Carroll photographed or drew naked girls contributed to the contention that he was a pedophile.

Today, after a period of oblivion, Carroll is considered one of the greatest photographers of the Victorian era, and certainly one of those who most influenced modern photography for being able to free himself from the symbology of the time by portraying girls as free creatures of the woods instead of educated figures of good English society.

The Alice saga itself is a tale without morals, written during a period, the Victorian one, in which even the legs of the tables had to be covered.

The Lewis Carroll enigma

A couple of paragraphs ago we threw a bomb, namely the thesis that Lewis Carroll was a pedophile. We explain all the components that led to these conclusions.

Supporting elements

STUTTERING.

An important component of the Lewis Carroll myths is the theory that he stammered in the presence of adults, while with children he felt free and spoke fluently. There is no evidence that this is true. Carroll was certainly as stammering as six of his sisters. However, the birth of The name is nothing more than the first syllable of Dodgson repeated due to stuttering! (Do-do-dodgson) Dodo, one of the characters from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, is interesting.

THE ADMIRATION BY CHILDREN

At a time when the ability to sing and even act were important requisites in society, Carroll was quite at ease. He sang pretty well and wasn't afraid to perform in public. He was good at storytelling and was known for his ability to entertain with witty riddles and charades. That's why the kids loved it. When Alice in Wonderland became a hit, Reverend Dodgson became popular with all the children of England.

PHOTOGRAPHIC CURIOSITY.

As we said before, Carroll's favorite subject was the little girls but, if we look at the photos themselves, there is nothing vulgar about them. Mischievous sometimes yes, but never vulgar. In fact, it seems that Carroll always asked the mothers of the girls to be present during the photo sessions. What is certain is that the photos that have come down to us, for example of Evelyn Hatch, would not be very understood nowadays.

THE GENESIS OF Alice'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND.

The story goes that Lewis Carroll and Reverend Robinson Duckworth went on a boat trip on the Thames with the three young daughters of Henry Liddell (vice chancellor of the University of Oxford and dean of Christ Church): Lorina; Alice and Edith.

The trip ended due to a thunderstorm, but during the trip Carroll told the girls a story that featured a bored little girl named Alice who goes in search of an adventure. The girls loved her and Alice Liddell asked Carroll to write the story for her. There was another boat trip a month later, during which the writer worked out the plot of Alice's story. Et voila.

This story is translated into the book in the meeting between Dodo - Dodgson and Alice; in fact the other characters that appear in the same chapter are the Duck which is the reverend Robinson Duckworth, while Lorina and Edith Liddell, Alice's sisters, are represented as the parrot and the eagle. Among other things, the only merit of Dodo is that of proposing a caucus-race to ensure that everyone gets dry after the unscheduled swim of the previous chapter.

The possibile reality of facts

For the record, we must say that Alice Liddell and her sisters Lorina and Edith were obviously not Dodgson's first friends. They had been preceded or even seen along with the children of writer In particular George Macdonald, the children of the poet Tennyson, and various other casual acquaintances. But Liddell's children undoubtedly held a particularly high place in her affections. Alice, who was certainly the inspirational muse for Carroll's most famous literary work as we can read in the last chapter of Through the Looking Glass. Alice Pleasance Liddell was the full name of the real Alice.

Theories

Perhaps for Carroll, girls were simply just a symbol of innocence and purity: like a mathematical formula that has no human impulses. Various attempts have been made to solve the "Lewis Carroll riddle". Psychologists argued that his friendships with girls were some sort of unconscious substitute for a married life and that his hidden dream was to marry Alice Liddell.

In support of the thesis, some find in the famous episode in which Alice meets the Dodo-gson a marriage metaphor. In fact, at the end of the race, due to a logical dispute ( here the chapter), the Dodo gives Alice a thimble in a sort of award ceremony after which the participants eat confetti.

But there is little or no clear evidence to support this theory. Carroll in fact dropped the knowledge of Alice Liddell when she was 12, as he later did with most of her young friends. In the case of the Liddells, his friendship with the younger children, Rhoda and Violet, was severed sometime later.

In a famous BBC documentary, Vanessa Tait, Alice Liddel's great-granddaughter says, "My understanding is that (Lewis Carroll) was in love with Alice, but he was so repressed that he would never cross borders." She adds that explicit photography could explain the rift that broke contact between Carroll and the Liddell girls in 1863, when Alice was 11. Unfortunately, Carroll's diaries from April 1858 to May 1862 are missing, the period that coincides precisely with his friendship with Liddell's girls.

The Victorian Age

We must remember that the Victorian era was a time of enormous moral repression. It is the period, for example, in which Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published. Marriages between very young women and mature men were not isolated cases. It is perhaps illustrative to recall the story of a colleague of Lewis Carroll and former Oxford student: John Ruskin; in fact, the frustrated and contradictory dynamics of the time had an impact on him too.

A 21-year-old Ruskin met 13-year-old Effie Gray and in 1848, at the request of his family, married her. When the two got married, Effie was now 20 years old, but the marriage was canceled six years later, in 1854, by the Anglican church. It was a great scandal: the marriage was never consummated and her wife, after five years of marriage, denounced him for impotence. Ruskin explained that the causes of marital default were his wife's poor physical attractiveness (but there are engagement letters in which Ruskin himself is concerned about his future wife's too much beauty), his emotional instability, and his own morbid attention to the very young. After the cancellation, Ruskin courted a 9-year-old girl.

The legacy of Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll died of bronchitis in Guildford, Surrey, in 1898 and was interred in the same town cemetery.

Many scholars speak of a double personality in reference to today's protagonist and there is only one that has passed down a huge legacy. One is that of the Reverend Dodgson, a reserved and demanding bachelor who always kept out of the political and religious storms that plagued England during his lifetime.

The other, luckily for us, is that of Lewis Carroll, a friend of the children for whom he created his books, his stories and nonsense poems. Not only that, we have seen that Carroll has delivered photos, essays and much more to history.

His extraordinary intelligence is also demonstrated by some of his inventions. In 1891 Carroll created a writing system called nyctography that allowed writing in the dark, using a code of signs on a rectangular grid with square holes. It seems that he has also invented a paper and pencil game, the word ladder (the "word ladder"). Although the attribution is uncertain, this game is quite popular all over the world. With this article we hope to have shed some light on the life of Lewis Carroll.

A man who certainly, to be understood in his genius, must necessarily be contextualized in the uses and customs of the Victorian era, in which what seemed meaningless or controversial was actually an escape from rigid schemes.

Now sorry, we have to take our leave, a cup of tea awaits us with the Mad Hatter!

#dodododgson

#weareallmadhere

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The controversial life of Lewis Carroll - Zoa Studio - 14/01/2021

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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was an English novelist, best remembered for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1871) and for poems such as The Hunting of the Snark , which gave birth to the "nonsense" literary genre.

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Charles Dodgson- better known as Lewis Carroll- is generally regarded as the father of modern children's literature. His primary contribution to the canon of English literature, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Alice Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872), have earned a great deal of affection from the better part of ten generations of readers, many of whom maintain their love of Alice and Lewis Carroll over the course of their entire lives. Carroll's cultural staying power is not up for debate (regardless of his relatively obscure entries, like 1889's Sylvie and Bruno). It is Lewis Carroll himself, along with his dubious intentions as an author and as a human being, who is under scrutiny in literary and historical circles. Wonderland has held our attention for 150 years, but something about it gives us pause. Speculation on Lewis Carroll's sexual violence toward children are one strike against him; another is the hippies who adopted his books as a metaphor for psychedelic drug use. These historical details indicate a dark figure lurking just behind the books' fantastical window dressing. It is for this reason that many modern readers regard Carroll's works as they might a picturesque pond with a murky underbelly, despite the story's presupposed innocence.

Before we begin our review of Carroll's cultural impact, it is necessary, I believe, to review Dodgson's personal history. Lewis Carroll aka Charles Ludwig Dodgson was born in 1832, Daresbury UK. He was noted throughout his life as timid, somewhat sickly, and "painful[ly] thin" (Wallace 172). As a child, he suffered from whooping cough (174), walked with a herky-jerky limp as an adult, and stuttered terribly when speaking. He was the third in a line of eleven Dodgson children, all of whom, with the exception of Charles himself, lived into the 20th Century (lewiscarrollresources.net). As a young man, he studied mathematics at Christ Church Oxford University and graduated with First Class Honors. In the years that followed, Dodgson would climb the academic ladder, becoming a mathematics lecturer at his alma mater (1855-1881) and later attending a "Masters of Arts" program in 1857 where he would be named Christ Church's "Senior Student" (ibid). In 1861, he became an ordained deacon, like his father (Archdeacon Charles Dodgson) and grandfather (Captain Charles Dodgson) before him. He neglected, however, to follow in their footsteps to completion by becoming a priest.

Dodgson was noted by his peers for a number of seemingly paradoxical personality quirks. He and his biographers support the claim that he was a man of reasonable health, although he died in his early 60s after bouts with "...severe migraine attacks, synovitis (most likely osteo-arthosis), ague, eczema, boils, and cystitis, all of which were reported in his diary from age 53 until his death" (175). His peers often characterized him in a contradictory light. "Some colleagues knew him as a somewhat reclusive stammerer, but he was generally seen as a devout scholar; one dean said he was 'pure in heart'" (Woolf); meanwhile, Martin Gardner describes him as a classist conservative who was "awed by lords and inclined to be snobbish towards inferiors." Dodgson's affectionate relationship with Alice, Lorina, and Edith- the daughters of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford- was only one instance of his serial "child friendships," as he spent a great deal of time writing to and traveling with them. "Like many Victorian bachelors, he became a sort of uncle to his friends' children, making up stories and games and taking them on short trips; the role ensured him a warm welcome in many homes" (Woolf).

On the now famous date, July 4th, 1862, Dodgson rowed himself, the Liddell sisters, and his friend and colleague Robin Duckworth along the River Isis. It was during this trip that he first formulated the story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which the fictional Alice's real-life namesake urged its author to write down and publish. An early manuscript would ultimately be presented to her as a Christmas present, complete with original Carroll illustrations, prior to its official publication. The presence of Duckworth may have been a key influence of the book's subject matter, as there are many mathematical, logical, and linguistic problems baked into Alice's escapades; Dodgson spun this story to entertain all of his passengers, after all, and it is only natural to joke about philosophy with a fellow philosopher.

Reportedly, Dodgson was quite close with the entire Liddell family- including the sisters' parents and brother Harry- but a rift developed between them in June 1863. "...Something happened, and Lewis Carroll was exiled from the deanery" (Kearney). It is unknown why Dodgson was ejected from the deanery or the Liddells' personal lives. When exploring his diary for answers, Kearney and other researchers like her can only find "razor cut[s]" where specific pages (presumably pertaining to the incident) were removed, presumably by Dodgson's nieces after his death. For five months following this apparent rift, there's no mention of the Liddell girls in the diaries at all, until we come to the December 5th, and there's a theatrical evening. At the very end of that day, Lewis Carrol writes: "Mrs. Liddell and the children were there, but I held aloof from them, as I have all this term" (Kearney).

The cause of Carroll's dislocation from the Liddell family is still unknown today. Evidence- such as letters exchanged between Alice and Lorina- suggests that Carroll was meant to be courting Lorina or perhaps the Liddell family's governess, Mary Prickett. However, like most of the finer details from Carroll's life, the information one might scavenge is cryptic. This is only a rough sample of the facts- dry, if incomplete. Many scholars are compelled to parse the details in search of fuel for a psychoanalytic fire or to uncover the bare truth of Dodgson's character, be it pure and bittersweet or contaminated by sexual deviance.

Wonderland is an explicit dream world populated by self-proclaimed madmen and madwomen. Insanity and the unconscious mind form the thematic backbone of Carroll's work, and thus, he drew the attention of early 20th Century psychoanalysts as sun-cooked meat attracts flies. According to Woolf, Carroll's popularity as a Freudian target began in the early 30's:

[In 1933], a writer named A.M.E. Goldschmidt presented at Oxford an essay titled "Alice in Wonderland Psycho-Analysed," in which he suggested that Dodgson was suppressing a sexual desire for Alice. (Her fall down the well, he wrote, is "the best-known symbol of coitus.") Goldschmidt was an aspiring writer, not a psychoanalyst, and some scholars say he may have been trying to parody the 1930s vogue for Freudian ideas. Whatever his intent, unambiguously serious writers picked up the thread. (Woolf)

Woolf goes on to cite the work of Goldschmitdt's contemporaries, Paul Schindler and Martin Grotjahn, who published more explicit remarks on Alice in Wonderland's psychosexual content. "'We are reasonably sure that the little girls substitute for incestuous love objects,' wrote New York University professor Paul Schilder in 1938. The meaning of an illustration of a long-necked Alice is 'almost too obvious for words,' psychoanalyst Martin Grotjahn offered in 1947." The 1990s, however, saw another boom of psychoanalytic Wonderland discourse, with "Three major biographies published in the 1990s, by Donald Thomas, Michael Bakewell and Morton Cohen..." (ibid) and the work of Richard Wallace, to which we will frequently return over the course of this essay. In The Agony of Lewis Carroll (1992), Wallace supports the theory that Dodgson was some shade of sexual deviant (sometimes by Victorian standards- a homosexual; sometimes by modern standards- a man who took sexual interest in teenagers; sometimes by the standards of both cultures- a pedophile). He relies heavily on a Freudian framework as applied to Carroll's biography, as we can see in the following passage:

Some writers and biographers have discussed a perceived "split" in the Dodgson personality. Langford Reed takes the strongest position when he contrasts the pedantic, stammering, shy Oxford don with the humorous, childlike Lewis Carroll. There is generally a rejection of that notion. I reject it to as a clear split between Dodgson and Carroll; for as we shall see, both sides of Charles Dodgson appeared under both identities. But there most certainly was a split within the fragile Dodgson character. There was firstly the split that occurs when the damaged self unconsciously creates a false self and hides the true self within the one person. In Dodgson's case, we have a much more serious split, that much like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a story written and published in the mid 1880's. (Wallace 168)

Wallace also goes on the assert a suspicion of psychosis in Carroll's early years and reads much of his work as autoerotic, incestuous, and homosexual allegory. His contemporary Carroll biographer, Karoline Leach, however, argues the exact opposite position:

Dodgson's surviving letters suggest that he had a keen interest in women-and worked to circumvent the Victorian proscription of mingling between unmarried adults of the opposite sex. [...] In 1999, Karoline Leach published yet another Dodgson biography, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, in which she quoted the summary of the missing diary information and argued that her predecessors, misunderstanding the society in which Dodgson lived, had created a "Carroll myth" around his sexuality. She concluded that he was attracted to adult women (including Mrs. Liddell) after all. (Woolf)

Even more bizarre is Martha Kearney's exploration of Carroll's controversial photographs of naked children, particularly a "full frontal picture of a naked young teenager, a picture which no parent would have consented to" (Kearney). The photograph is attributed to Lewis Carroll and labeled "Lorina Liddell." Kearney spends the latter twenty minutes of her BBC Two documentary, The Secret World of Lewis Carroll (2015), attempting to verify or dispel the photograph's validity.

She brings the original image to several forensic researchers: a picture conservationist (who establishes that the photograph was taken in the Victorian period and that it was taken and developed in the way Carroll was known to take and develop his photos) and a forensic imagery analyst (who compared the nude photograph to confirmed images of Lorina Liddell and reported that "forensically speaking... there is moderate support for the contention that the girl in the photograph is Lorina as shown in the other images. As this is not a court case, I'm prepared to get off the fence and say, in my opinion, this is Lorina Liddell"). Kearney concludes that the evidence is compelling but not concrete. In contrast, Woolf writes of Dodgson's retrospectively disquieting hobby:

Of the approximately 3,000 photographs Dodgson made in his life, just over half are of children-30 of whom are depicted nude or semi-nude. Some of his portraits-even those in which the model is clothed-might shock 2010 sensibilities, but by Victorian standards they were... well, rather conventional. Photographs of nude children sometimes appeared on postcards or birthday cards, and nude portraits-skillfully done-were praised as art studies, as they were in the work of Dodgson's contemporary Julia Margaret Cameron. Victorians saw childhood as a state of grace; even nude photographs of children were considered pictures of innocence itself. In discussing the possibility of photographing one 8-year-old girl unclothed, Dodgson wrote to her mother: "It is a chance not to be lost, to get a few good attitudes of Annie's lovely form and face, as by next year she may (though I much hope won't) fancy herself too old to be a 'daughter of Eve.'" Likewise, Dodgson secured the Liddels' permission before taking his now-famous portrait of Alice at age 6, posing as a beggar child in a tattered off-the-shoulder dress; the family kept a hand-colored copy of it in a morocco leather-and-velvet case. (Woolf, ellipsis in original)

This may be enough to dismiss his many nude portraits of children, but it leaves the problem of the maybe-Ina nude photograph intact. The age of consent in Carroll's time was twelve (Kearney), meaning that this image is on a bizarre cultural borderline. Today, it would be considered child pornography, but at the time, it was not an angelic artistic nude of a child; it was a naked portrait of a woman, ergo, standard issue pornography and still frowned upon if not fully exploitative. There is a distinct chance that the photograph was taken by Dodgson and that it is of Lorina, but we have no incontestable evidence in any direction. This clash of ambiguous information only adds yet more frustration and disquiet to the overall Lewis Carroll debate on all sides.

After over 150 years of cross-cultural popularity and historical inquiry, Lewis Carroll has become an illusory figure. Each person who so chooses to examine his character, works, and/or personal life is at liberty to imagine their own version of why he wrote and what he was like-theories which can conceivably be supported by extant evidence. There is no firm reason not to think of Carroll as a "child-loving saint" (Woolf) any more than there is no firm reason not to observe him as a pederast. At present, no fact left behind is quite damning nor absolvent enough to end the debate.

In two centuries, the popularity of the Alice books has never waned, and as such, its revered author has gathered a great deal of cultural lint. "Since the 1930s, biographers and scholars have questioned the nature of Dodgson's relationship with the 10-year-old girl to whom he first told the story, and since the 1960s his work has been associated with the psychedelic wing of the countercultural movement" (Woolf). Our understanding of Lewis Carroll will always be somewhat blurred by the cultural differences between Victorian England and the 21st Century West. His contemporaries were blissfully ignorant of post-Freudian anxiety and "stranger danger"; they viewed homosexual behavior as a perversion and a crime. Today, a man behaving as Carroll did in his time would be regarded in a wildly different light, mainly because behavioral flags and their translations have changed. If a Victorian man could receive a parents' blessing to take artistic nude photographs of their prepubescent daughter without any suggestion of squeamishness, then can it be accepted as evidence of pedophilic interests? Hard to say. Would a 21st Century Carroll still make such a request? Doubtful. If his admiration for children was truly as pure as one would hope, then a modern Carroll would shudder at the very idea; were he really a pedophile, then he would have to find a sneakier way to acquire child pornography than simply asking for it. Thus, we are left at square one again, still without any indication of whether the Alice books were informed by sexual predation, intergenerational commiseration, both, or neither. At this stage in our inquiry, we have wandered onto Rolland Barthes's doorstep; for why do we long to understand Lewis Carroll if not to understand the beloved books he had authored?

The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work; the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his "confidence." (Barthes 2)

When prodding into Dodgson's personal letters and affects, we are searching for the quirk at the center of his universe: "blank" is to Carroll as madness is to Van Gogh and vice is to Tchaikovsky, etc. Whatever we fill that blank with radically changes the text. If the causal element we settle on is "pedophilia," the most pivotal work in the canon of English speaking children's literature suddenly becomes a twisted erotic romp in which a small child is tormented and worn down to tears for the writer's amusement. If we select "empathy for children," then the book is a lighter tome, a bittersweet exploration of the existential frustrations all children experience but cannot yet articulate. A radical shift towards "queerness"- gender dysphoria or homosexuality, perhaps- makes Alice's adventures yet more Freudian and more autobiographical: the young girl Carroll was never allowed to be stumbling through a world of internal obstacles. Yet more conceptual still is "love of philosophy": perhaps the whole thing was a screed against abstract mathematics and a vehicle for punning logic games.

The truth is, Carroll's Authorly Quirk may be all, none, or some of these, and it wouldn't matter quite so much if the worst-case scenario weren't so disturbing. For example, Edgar Degas's vehement anti-Semitism might be difficult to swallow, but it is easy to set aside when viewing his lovely paintings, as those paintings are not directly related to Jewishness or Nationalism. Carroll, however, found his muse in children, so the suggestion that his fascination was sexual rather than fatherly or fraternal rankles. If Degas's sin was serial sexual abuse of ballerinas, it might yet destroy the beauty of Ballet Rehearsal on Stage (1874).

Naturally, this type of thing has become a topic of heated debate among Carroll fans and scholars. For example, when Leach introduced In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, "The reaction among Dodgson scholars was seismic. 'Improbable, feebly documented...tendentious,' thundered Donald Rackin in Victorian Studies. Geoffrey Heptonstall, in Contemporary Review, responded that the book provided 'the whole truth'" (Woolf). There is no postulation that will universally please Carrollians without undeniable hard evidence (which is, at this stage, unlikely to be recovered). Our apprehension towards Carroll is, perhaps, more about ourselves and our own culture now than it is about preserving the sanctity of a literary classic. "Dodgson's image currently stands... in contention... among scholars if not yet in popular culture. His image as a man of suspect sexuality 'says more about our society and its hang-ups than it does about Dodgson himself,' Will Brooker says. We see him through the prism of contemporary culture- one that sexualizes youth, especially female youth, even as it is repulsed by pedophilia" (Woolf).

Perhaps, the best thing to do at this stage is to practice radical acceptance: we must accept the shadow of doubt cast over Carroll's legacy, acknowledge that both he and the "real" Alice are long dead, and appreciate the joys they have left behind. There is little percentage in clinging to any particular image of the man behind Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, much as Barthes's Author is a figment of our "contemporary culture, [which] is tyrannically centered on the author" (Barthes 2). Our readings of the Alice books can be informed by what we know of Carroll- he was a conservative mathematician; he wrote to entertain a particular child; he was noticeably eccentric and neurotic- but we must restrain ourselves from skewing his work towards a Freudian autobiography. The Wonderland Carroll created is a place which deals in ambiguity: half-answers, careless dismissals, key information leaked out among needless details and punning stopgaps. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what tormented Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll or how much of that torment figured into his writings. Wallace argues that he struggled with a rainbow of discouraged sexual urges: the pedophilic, the homosexual, and the masturbatory. Martha Kearney fears the worst and launches herself into an inquisition of Carroll's personal affects in the hopes of finding salient evidence of anything, only to turn up frustrated and unsure. Regardless of these researchers' potential factual accuracy or lack thereof- regardless of their deep-tissue exploration of the facts- Lewis Carroll is 120 years dead in 2018, and there is little use in batting his biography back and forth if our hope is to uncover the truth. What he has left us with is scattered biographical details, signs of some stripe of mental illness, and childhood paraphernalia tainted by trauma. Much like Alice and, most probably, Carroll himself, we have been left to suffer the terrible ambiguities of life, logic, sexuality, and childhood. Ironically, it is all that we can be sure of in Wonderland or in any other setting.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. "Death of the Author," Aspen, 1967.

Degas, Edgar. Ballet Rehearsal on Stage, Musée d'Orsay Station, Paris.

Gardner, Martin. Introduction to The annotated Alice: Alice's adventures in Wonderland & Through the looking glass, W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

"The Dodgson Family Tree," Lewis Carroll Resources, 2018. lewiscarrollresources.net/dodgsonfamily/.

The Secret World of Lewis Carroll. Directed by Clare Beavan, performance by Martha Kearney. BBC Two, 2015.

Wallace, Richard. The Agony of Lewis Carroll. Gemini Press, 1990.

Woolf, Jenny. "Lewis Carroll's Shifting Reputation," Smithsonian Magazine, 2010. www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/lewis-carrolls-shifting-reputation-9432378/.

What do you think? .

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Charles Dodgson- better known as Lewis Carroll- is generally regarded as the father of modern children's literature. His primary contribution to the canon of English literature, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Alice Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872), have earned a great deal of affection from the better part of ten generations of readers, many of whom maintain their love of Alice and Lewis Carroll over the course of their entire lives.

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The author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which sees its 150th anniversary this year, remains to this day an enigmatic figure. Jenny Woolf explores the joys and struggles of this brilliant, secretive, and complex man, creator of one of the world's best-loved stories.