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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27, 1832
– January 14, 1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was a
British author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman and
photographer.
His most famous writings are Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as
well as the comic poem The Hunting of the Snark, and the nonsense poem
Jabberwocky.
His facility at word play, logic, and
fantasy has delighted audiences ranging from the most naïve to the most
sophisticated. His works have remained popular since they were published
and have influenced not only children's literature, but also a number of
major 20th century writers such as James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges.
There are societies dedicated to the
enjoyment and promotion of Lewis Carroll's works in many parts of the
world including North America, Japan, the United Kingdom and New
Zealand.
****
Upbringing
Dodgson's family was predominantly northern
English, with some Irish connections. Conservative and High Church
Anglican, most of Dodgson's ancestors belonged to the two traditional
English upper-middle class professions: the army and the Church. His
great-grandfather, also Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of
the church to become a bishop; his grandfather, another Charles, had
been an army captain, killed in action in 1803 while his two sons were
hardly more than babies.
The elder of these—yet another
Charles—reverted to the other family business and took holy orders. He
went to Westminster School, and thence to Christ Church, Oxford. He was
mathematically gifted and won a double first degree which could have
been the prelude to a brilliant academic career. Instead he married his
first cousin in 1827 and retired into obscurity as a country parson.
Young Charles was born in the little
parsonage of Daresbury in Cheshire, the oldest boy but already the third
child of the four-and-a-half year old marriage. Eight more were to
follow and, remarkably for the time, all of them—seven girls and four
boys— survived into adulthood. When Charles was 11 his father was given
the living of Croft-on-Tees in north Yorkshire, and the whole family
moved to the spacious Rectory. This remained their home for the next 25
years.
Dodgson senior made some progress through
the ranks of the church: he published some sermons, translated
Tertullian, became an Archdeacon of Ripon Cathedral, and involved
himself, sometimes influentially, in the intense religious disputes that
were dividing the Anglican church. He was High Church, inclining to
Anglo-Catholicism, an admirer of Newman and the Tractarian movement, and
he did his best to instil such views in his children.
In the early years young Charles was
educated at home. His "reading lists" preserved in the family testify to
a precocious intellect: at the age of seven the child was reading The
Pilgrim's Progress. It is often said that he was naturally left-handed
and suffered severe psychological trauma by being forced to counteract
this tendency, but there is no documentary evidence to support this.
Charles also suffered from another disability, a stutter that often
influenced his social life throughout his years. At twelve he was sent
away to a small private school at nearby Richmond, where he appears to
have been happy and settled. But in 1845, young Dodgson moved on to
Rugby School, where he was evidently less happy, for as he wrote some
years after leaving the place:
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.
The nature of this nocturnal 'annoyance'
will probably never now be fully understood, but it may be that he is
delicately referring to some form of sexual molestation. Scholastically,
though, he excelled with apparent ease. "I have not had a more promising
boy his age since I came to Rugby" observed R.B. Mayor, the Maths
master.
Academic life
He left Rugby at the end of 1850 and, after
an interval which remains unexplained, went on in January 1851 to
Oxford, attending his father's old college, Christ Church. He had only
been at Oxford two days when he received a summons home. His mother had
died of "inflammation of the brain"—perhaps meningitis or a stroke—at
the age of forty-seven.
Whatever Dodgson's feelings may have been
about this death, he did not allow them to distract him too much from
his purpose at Oxford. He may not always have worked hard, but he was
exceptionally gifted and achievement came easily to him. The following
year he received a first in Honour Moderations, and shortly after he was
nominated to a Studentship (the Christ Church equivalent of a
fellowship), by his father's old friend Canon Edward Pusey.
His early academic career veered between
high-octane promise and irresistible distraction. Through his own
laziness, he failed an important scholarship, but still his clear
brilliance as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical
Lectureship, which he continued to hold for the next 26 years. The
income was good, but the work bored him and his stammer hampered him.
Many of his pupils were older and richer than he was, and almost all of
them were uninterested. They didn't want to be taught; he didn't want to
teach them. Mutual apathy ruled.
At Oxford he was also diagnosed as an
epileptic, then a considerable social stigma to bear. However, recently
John R. Hughes, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago's
epilepsy clinic, has argued that Carroll may have been misdiagnosed.
Photography
In 1856, Dodgson took up the new art form
of photography, first under the influence of his uncle Skeffington
Lutwidge, and later his Oxford friend Reginald Southey and art
photography pioneer Oscar Rejlander.
Dodgson soon excelled at the art, and it
became an expression of his very personal inner philosophy; a belief in
the divinity of what he called beauty, by which he seemed to mean a
state of moral or aesthetic or physical perfection. He found this divine
beauty not simply in the magic of theatre, but in the poetry of words,
in a mathematical formula and perhaps supremely, in the human form; in
the body-images that moved him.
When he took up photography he sought with
his own representations to combine the ideals of freedom and beauty into
the innocence of Eden, where the human body and human contact could be
enjoyed without shame. In his middle age, he was to re-form this
philosophy into the pursuit of beauty as a state of Grace, a means of
retrieving lost innocence. This, along with his lifelong passion for the
theatre, was to bring him into confrontation with Victorian morality and
his own family's High Church beliefs. As his main biographer Morton
Cohen noted... "He rejected outright the Calvinist principle of original
sin and replaced it with the notion of inborn divinity."
The definitive work on his photography
(Roger Taylor's Lewis Carroll, Photographer (2002) exhaustively lists
every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over fifty
percent of his surviving work depicts young girls. However it should be
noted that less than a third of his original portfolio has survived (see
below). His favourite girl model was Alexandra Kitchin ("Xie"), whom he
photographed around fifty times from the age of four until the age of
about 16. In 1880 he was striving to be allowed to photograph the 16
year old Xie in 'bathing dress', but was not allowed this liberty. Most
of his girl subjects would write their name on the corner of the print
in coloured ink. It's assumed that Dodgson either destroyed or returned
the nude photographs to the families of the girls he had photographed.
They were long presumed lost, but six nudes have since surfaced, four of
which have been published and another two of which little is known.
Dodgson's practice of photographing or sketching nude girls has added to
speculation that he was a pedophile (see below). There is a clear
difference between Dodgson's girls and depictions by other Victorian
artists; in almost all of his solo portraits of girls they are depicted
unburdened by the heavy weight of Victorian symbolism, and are simply
and strongly themselves.
He also found photography to be a useful
entré into higher social circles. Once he had a studio of his own, he
made portraits of notable sitters such as John Everett Millais, Ellen
Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron and Alfred, Lord
Tennyson. He also made some landscapes and anatomy studies.
Dodgson abruptly ceased to photograph in
1880. Over 24 years he had completely mastered the medium, set up his
own studio at the top of Tom Quad, and created around 3,000 images. Less
than 1000 have survived time and deliberate destruction. He spent
several hours each day creating a diary detailing the circumstances
surrounding the making of each photograph, but this register was later
destroyed.
With the advent of Modernism tastes
changed, and his photography became forgotten from around 1920 until the
1960s. He is now considered one of the very best Victorian
photographers, and is certainly the one who has had the most influence
on modern art photographers.
Character
The young adult Charles Dodgson was about
six foot tall, slender and handsome in a soft-focused dreamy sort of
way, with curling brown hair and blue eyes. At the unusually late age of
seventeen, he suffered a severe attack of whooping cough which left him
with poor hearing in his right ear and was probably responsible for his
chronically weak chest in later life. The only overt defect he carried
into adulthood was what he referred to as his "hesitation"—a stammer he
had acquired in early childhood and which was to plague him throughout
his entire life.
The stammer has always been a potent part
of the myth. It is part of the mythology that Dodgson only stammered in
adult company, and was free and fluent with children, but there is no
evidence to support this idea. Many children of his acquaintance
remembered the stammer while many adults failed to notice it. It came
and went for its own reasons, but not as a clichéd manifestation of fear
of the adult world. Dodgson himself was far more acutely aware of it
than most people he met. Although his stammer troubled him — even
obsessed him sometimes — it was never bad enough to stop him using his
other qualities to do well in society.
He was naturally gregarious and egoistic
enough to relish attention and admiration. At a time when people devised
their own amusements and singing and recitation were required social
skills, the young Dodgson was well-equipped as an engaging entertainer.
He could sing tolerably well and was not afraid to do so in front of an
audience. He was adept at mimicry and story-telling. He was reputedly
quite good at charades.
There are brief hints at a soaring sense of
the spiritual and the divine; small moments that reveal a rich and
intensely lived inner life. 'That is a wild and beautiful bit of poetry,
the song of "call the cattle home",' he suddenly observed, in the midst
of an analysis of Charles Kingsley's novel Alton Locke:
I remember hearing it sung at Albrighton: I
wonder if any one there could have entered into the spirit of Alton
Locke. I think not. I think the character of most that I meet is merely
refined animal... How few seem to care for the only subjects of real
interest in life.
He was also quite socially ambitious,
anxious to make his mark on the world in some way, as a writer, or as an
artist. It was perhaps the realisation that his talent as an artist was
not sufficient that he eventually turned to photography. His scholastic
career was seen as something of a stop-gap to other more exciting
attainments that he desired.
In the interim between his early published
writing and the success of Alice, he began to move in the Pre-Raphaelite
social circle. He first met John Ruskin in 1857 and became friendly with
him. Dodgson developed a close relationship with the Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and his family, and also knew William Holman Hunt, John Everett
Millais and Arthur Hughes among other artists. He also knew the
fairy-tale author George MacDonald well - it was the enthusiastic
reception of "Alice" by the young MacDonald daughters that convinced him
to submit the work for publication.
Writing career
During his writing career, Carroll wrote
poetry and short stories, sending them to various magazines and enjoying
moderate success. Between 1854 and 1856, his work appeared in the
national publications, The Comic Times and The Train, as well as smaller
magazines like the Whitby Gazette and the Oxford Critic.
Most of his output was funny, sometimes
satirical. But his standards and his ambitions were exacting. "I do not
think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication (in which I
do not include the Whitby Gazette or the Oxonian Advertiser), but I do
not despair of doing so some day," he wrote in July 1855. Years before
Alice, he was thinking up ideas for children's books that would make
money: 'Christmas book [that would] sell well... Practical hints for
constructing Marionettes and a theatre'. The ideas got better as he got
older, but his canny mind, with an eye to income, was always there.
In 1856 he published his first piece of
work under the name that would make him famous. A very predictable
little romantic poem called "Solitude" appeared in The Train under the
authorship of 'Lewis Carroll'. This pseudonym was a play on his real
name, Lewis being the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin
for Lutwidge, and Carroll being an anglicised version of Carolus, the
Latin for Charles.
In the same year, a new Dean, Henry
Liddell, arrived at Christ Church, bringing with him a young wife and
children, all of whom would figure largely in Dodgson's life over the
following years. He became close friends with the mother and the
children, particularly the three sisters Lorina, Alice and Edith. It
seems there became something of a tradition of his taking the girls out
on the river for picnics at Godstow or Nuneham.
It was on one such expedition, in 1862,
that Dodgson invented the outline of the story that eventually became
his first and largest commercial success — the first Alice book. Having
told the story and been begged by Alice Liddell to write it down,
Dodgson eventually presented Alice with a hand-written, illustrated
manuscript entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground (now in the British
Library, Add. MS 46700). Later he took the little book to Macmillan the
publisher, who liked it immediately. After the possible alternative
titles Alice Among the Fairies and Alice's Golden Hour were rejected,
the work was finally published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in
1865 under the Lewis Carroll pen-name Dodgson had first used some nine
years earlier. The illustrations this time were by Sir John Tenniel;
Dodgson evidently realised that a published book would need the skills
of a professional artist.
With the immediate, phenomenal success of
Alice, the story of the author's life becomes effectively divided in
two: the continuing story of Dodgson's real life and the evolving myth
surrounding "Lewis Carroll." Carroll quickly became a rich and detailed
alter ego, a persona as famous and deeply embedded in the popular psyche
as the story he told. To him belongs a large part of the image of little
girls and strange otherworldliness that we know from the author of
Alice.
It is undisputed that throughout his
growing wealth and fame, he continued to teach at Christ Church until
1881, and that he remained in residence there until his death. He
published Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There in 1872;
his great Joycean mock-epic The Hunting of the Snark, in 1876 (inspired
by and dedicated to his other great child-friend after Alice Liddell,
Gertrude Chataway), and his last novel, the two-volume Sylvie and Bruno,
in 1889 and 1893 respectively.
He also published many mathematical papers
and books under his own name.
Other selected works
An Elementary Treatise on Determinants
Symbolic Logic
Euclid and his Modern Rivals
The Alphabet Cipher
What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.
Hiawatha's Photographing (a parody of The
Song of Hiawatha)
Allegations of drug abuse
An allegation arose at some point that
Carroll used the fungus ergot, which is what LSD was eventually derived
from, can induce psychoactive experiences at large enough quantities,
and was used as a medical treatment during the 19th century. While some
artists and poets have been inspired by hallucinogenic drugs, Lewis
Carroll was probably just a brilliant man with an incredible
imagination—there is no factual evidence for the allegation that Carroll
took psychoactive drugs. Similar allegations exist for Robert Lewis
Stevenson during his writing of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde (1886), but again not based on factual evidence.
Allegations of pedophilia
Dodgson’s undeniable fondness for little
girls (especially Alice Liddell, from whom it is often said he may have
derived his own "Alice", a suggestion backed up by the acrostic of
Alice's full name that appears at the end of Through the Looking Glass),
the sheer number of his child-friends, his collection of the early child
photographs by Oscar Rejlander, his love of the London theatres before
the child-actress reforms, and psychological readings of his work —
especially his photographs of nude or semi-nude girls and his
sketchbooks featuring his own drawings of nude or semi-nude girls — have
all led to speculation that he was a pedophile, albeit probably a
celibate one.
The issue has been contentious, with some
arguing that child nudes were not uncommon during the era. (Other
notable Victorian-era photographers who took images of nude children
include Julia Margaret Cameron, Francis Meadow Sutcliffe, and others.)
According to the 'controversial'
investigation by Karoline Leach into what she calls the 'Carroll Myth'
(see below), the first hints of allegations that Dodgson was a pedophile
seem to have appeared in 1932, in The Life of Lewis Carroll by Langford
Reed. Reed apparently was the first to claim that all of Carroll's
female friendships ended when the girls reached puberty (around 16 in
1870s England), though Reed apparently only intended to suggest that
Dodgson was thereby a pure man untainted by touch of lust for adult
flesh. This claim that Dodgson lost interest in girls once they reached
puberty was later caught up by other biographers, who remained unaware
of the evidence to the contrary since Dodgson's family refused to
publish his diaries and letters.
The view of Dodgson as having no adult life
and being preoccupied with children persisted among his biographers,
including Florence Becker Lennon (Victoria Through the Looking-Glass -
UK title "Lewis Carroll"), 1945) and the highly influential Alexander
Taylor (The White Knight, 1952). The debate tended to veer between those
who believed Dodgson to have been innocently obsessed with children and
those who believed this obsession to have been pedophilic.
The issue was rekindled in 1995 with the
authoritative Lewis Carroll, a Biography by Morton Cohen. Cohen writes:
"We cannot know to what extent sexual urges
lay behind Charles's preference for drawing and photographing children
in the nude. He contended the preference was entirely aesthetic. But
given his emotional attachment to children as well as his aesthetic
appreciation of their forms, his assertion that his interest was
strictly artistic is naïve. He probably felt more than he dared
acknowledge, even to himself. Certainly he always sought to have another
adult present when nude prepubescents modelled for him."
Cohen further notes that the children's
mothers were encouraged to be present, and asks if these precautions
were the result of Dodgson "insuring himself against slip-ups." (p
228–229) Cohen concedes that Dodgson "apparently convinced many of his
friends that his attachment to the nude female child form was free of
any eroticism," but adds that "later generations look beneath the
surface" (p 229).
The only recorded instance of trouble
associated with the nudes of children was Dodgson's experience with the
Mayhew family. In 1879, Dodgson wrote what have been called by Cohen
"several curious letters ... to the family of Andrew Mayhew, an Oxford
colleague ... He asked permission to take nude photographs of the three
Mayhew daughters, ages 6, 11, and 13, with no other adults present." The
Mayhew parents, who had previously allowed Dodgson to photograph their
children, refused, and Cohen notes this same period saw a "sudden break
in the friendship" between Dodgson and the Mayhew family (p. 170). Leach
suggests that the problem lay with his desire to study the older
daughters in frontal positions and not with the younger children.
Karoline Leach's work and the 'Carroll
Myth'
A new analysis of Dodgson's sexual
proclivities (and indeed the evolution of the entire process of his
biography) appears in Karoline Leach's 1999 book, In the Shadow of the
Dreamchild. She claims that the image of Dodgson's alleged pedophilia
was built out of a failure to understand Victorian morals, as well as
the mistaken idea that Dodgson had no interest in adult women which
evolved out of the minds of various biographers. She termed this
simplified, often frankly fictional image 'the Carroll Myth'.
According to Leach, who cites much prima
facie evidence, Dodgson's real life was very different from the accepted
biographical image. He in fact was keenly interested in adult women and
apparently enjoyed several relationships with women, married and single;
some of these were his child-friends with whom (in complete refutation
of the mythic idea that he 'lost interest' in any girl over the age of
14) he retained good relations into adulthood, but others — like
Catherine Lloyd, Constance Burch, Edith Shute, Gertrude Thomson (to name
but a few) — were women he met as adults and with whom he shared very
close and meaningful friendships. Suggestions of pedophilia only evolved
many years after his death, when his well-meaning family had suppressed
all evidence of these adult friendships in order to try to preserve his
reputation, thus giving a false impression of a man only interested in
little girls. While not all pedophiles are attracted solely to children,
this does repudiate some of the classical evidence for the claim.
Dodgson's problems with societal
disapproval, Leach says, stemmed not from his usage of nude child models
but his attempts to get slightly older models to pose in 'bathing dress'
and other immodest clothing. These studies of scantily-dressed older
models have all disappeared, leaving commentators only the photos of
young girls to comment on.
In a review of the title in Victorian
Studies (Vol.43, No.4) reviewer Donald Rackin wrote, "As a piece of
biographical scholarship, Karoline Leach's In the Shadow of the
Dreamchild is difficult to take seriously", however, for all the
emotional intensity of his attack, he visibly failed to detail any
actual errors in her work. Nor have any errors been pointed out so far
by any other authorities, and many now regard her work as an important
step towards a better understanding of Carroll. Her work has been
paralleled by that of Hugues Lebailly whose studies of Dodgson's
artistic and social interests also support the idea that the image of
his 'obsession' with little girls was largely simplistic or mythic in
origin.
Jack the Ripper theories
Many wild theories have been woven around
the life of Lewis Carroll. Perhaps the most extreme emerged in 1996 when
author Richard Wallace published a book titled Jack the Ripper,
Light-Hearted Friend accusing Lewis Carroll and his colleague Thomas
Vere Bayne of being Jack the Ripper. It was largely based upon anagrams
Wallace constructed from Carroll's writing. Carroll and Bayne have
strong alibis for most of the nights of the Ripper murders, and
Wallace's theory has not found support from other scholars.
Carroll did show some interest in the Jack
the Ripper case, but this is hardly unusual, given the profound
publicity surrounding the crimes. A passage in his diary dated August
26, 1891, reports that he spoke that day with an acquaintance of his
about his "very ingenious theory about 'Jack the Ripper'". No other
information about this theory has been found.
Inventions
Lewis Carroll seems to have thought a lot
about how to solve some common technical problems of the day. The fact
that he was able to understand and use new technologies is amply
demonstrated by his use of the camera, which was not as user-friendly as
it is today.
One such invention, as cited in his journal
on September 24, 1891 and as published in, was a system of writing
called Nyctography and a tool called the Nyctograph. He invented this
because he would be unable to sleep at night and would want to write
down his ideas to clear his head. But, wanting to go quickly back to
bed, he did not want to go through all the mechanical steps involved in
lighting a lamp. He designed a card with square holes in a regular grid.
One would always make a dot in the upper-left corner and then make other
dots and/or strokes. These symbols were designed to look somewhat like
the letters or numbers they represented. This did not seem to be used
for any longer writings, since no writings with these symbols survive.
But it is probable that Lewis Carroll himself would use this to make
short notes to jog his memory, and then he would probably write the idea
out in his journal. He also invented the pencil and paper game Word
Ladder.
References
Lewis Carroll by Richard Kelly, Twayne,
1990.
Lewis Carroll: A Biography by Morten Cohen,
Vintage, 1996.
In the Shadow of the Dreamchild by Karoline
Leach.
Victorian Web's detailed biography section
on Carroll.
"Did all those famous people really have
epilepsy?" by John R. Hughes. Department of Neurology, School of
Medicine, University of Illinois at Chicago. Epilepsy & Behavior, Volume
6, Issue 2, p.115–139. March 2005.
The Raven and the Writing Desk by Francis
Huxley, 1976. (ISBN 0060121130).
Inventing Wonderland by Jackie Wullschläger,
(ISBN 0743228928) — also looks at Edward Lear (of the "nonsense"
verses), J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan), Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the
Willows), and A. A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh).
Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of
Lewis Carroll. Yale University Press & SFMOMA, 2004. (Places Carroll
firmly in the art photography tradition).
Roger Taylor & Edward Wakeling. Lewis
Carroll, Photographer. 2002. (Has a definitive list of every Carroll
photograph that is still in existence.)
****
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