Lewis Carroll

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Image:LewisCarrollSelfPhoto.jpg Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27 1832–January 14 1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was a English 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 children to the literary elite. 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 his works in many parts of the world including North America, Japan, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.

Contents

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Early life

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 when 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 Rugby 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 Dodgson was born in the little parsonage of Daresbury in Warrington, 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 twenty-five 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 his early years, young Dodgson 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 suppress this natural tendency, but there is no documentary evidence to support this. He also suffered from a stutter — a condition shared by his silbings — 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. Template:Fact

The nature of this nocturnal "annoyance" will probably never now be fully understood, but it may be that he is delicately referring to some type 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.Template:Fact

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.

His early academic career veered between high-octane promise and irresistible distraction. He may not always have worked hard, but he was exceptionally gifted and achievement came easily to him. In 1852 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. However, a little later he failed an important scholarship through his self-confessed inability to apply himself to study. Even so, his talent as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship, which he continued to hold for the next twenty-six years. The income was good, but the work bored him. Many of his pupils were older and richer than he was, and almost all of them were uninterested.


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Photography

Image:Alice Liddell 2.jpg 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.

He soon excelled at the art and became a well-known gentleman-photographer, and he seems even to have toyed with the idea of making a living out of it in his very early years.

A recent study (Roger Taylor's Lewis Carroll, Photographer (2002) exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates (we can't presently say on what authority) 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), and it is therefore very difficult to draw any firm conclusions. We do know he also made many studies of men, women, male children and landscapes and in all his subjects ranged from skeletons, through dolls, dogs, statues and paintings to trees, scholars, old men, scientists and (indeed) little girls. His infamous (and possibly misunderstood) studies of child nudes were long presumed lost, but six have since surfaced, four of which have been published and another two of which little is known.

Image:Effie&john.jpg 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.

Dodgson abruptly ceased to photograph in 1880. Over 24 years, he had completely mastered the medium, set up his own studio on the roof of Tom Quad, and created around 3,000 images. Fewer than 1,000 have survived time and deliberate destruction. His reasons for abandoning photography remain uncertain.

With the advent of Modernism tastes changed, and his photography was 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.

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Character and Appearance

The young adult Charles Dodgson was about six feet tall, slender and handsome, 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 acquired in early childhood and which plagued him throughout his life.

The stammer has always been a potent part of his 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 seems to have been far more acutely aware of it than most people he met; it is said he caricatured himself as the Dodo in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, referring to his difficulty in pronouncing his last name, but this is one of the many 'facts' oft-repeated, for which no firsthand evidence remains. He did indeed refer to himself as the dodo, but that this was a reference to his stammer is simply speculation. One thing is for certain, 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. 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 storytelling, and was reputedly quite good at charades.


He was also quite socially ambitious, anxious to make his mark on the world as a writer or an artist. His scholastic career may well have been seen as something of a stop-gap to other more exciting attainments that he desired. The traditional image of his entirely child-centred life has recently been challenged, and we have been reminded that he did enjoy a very active adult social life. 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 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 children that convinced him to submit the work for publication.

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Dodgson the author

From a young age, Dodgson 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 this output was humorous, sometimes satirical, but his standards and 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. 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 was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll being an anglicised version of Carolus, the Latin for Charles.


Image:GodstowNunneryRuin20050326 CopyrightKaihsuTai.jpg 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, and greatly influence his writing career, over the following years. He became close friends with the motherLorina and the children, particularly the three sisters Ina, Edith and Alice Liddell. It is from the latter he is often said to have derived his own "Alice", however, Dodgson himself later denied his "little heroine" was based on any real child.

Though information is scarce (Dodgson's diaries for the years 1858-62 are missing), it does seem evident his friendship with the family was an important part of his life in the late 1850s, and he grew into the habit of taking the children ( first the brother Harry, but later the three girls) on rowing trips to nearby Nuneham or Godstow.

It was on one such expedition, on July 4 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 (after much delay) presented her with a handwritten, illustrated manuscript entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground in November 1864.

Before this, however, in 1863, he had taken the unfinished MS 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 which 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. The first edition copy of Alice's Adventures Under Ground, now highly sought after by literary collectors, changed hands to a private collector on January 26, 2006. It was sold at Christie's for £4,800 by the Duke of Gloucester, its previous owner, to pay for his father's death duties (The Sunderland Echo, 28th January, 2006).

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The Later Years

Over the remaining thirty-three years of his life, throughout his growing wealth and fame, his existence remained little changed. He continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881, and remained in residence there until his death. He published Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There in 1872; his great mock-epic poem The Hunting of the Snark, in 1876 (dedicated to the ten-year old Gertrude Chataway), and his last novel, the two-volume Sylvie and Bruno, in 1889 and 1893 respectively. He died in his Guildford home on January 14 1898 of pneumonia following influenza. He was not quite sixty-six years old.

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Allegations of paedophilia

Dodgson's undeniable fondness for little girls has led to speculation that he was, in modern parlance, a paedophile.

The issue has been prey to much confusion and partisanship, and Dodgson's 'honor' has been both defended and attacked with some equally specious reasoning. It is only comparatively recently that a movement has begun to assess the matter more objectively by placing Dodgson in the often neglected framework of his time. Scholars like Hugues Lebailly argue that considering Dodgson's conduct in the light of the fashions and mores of his time (when child-nude photography was quite mainstream, even fashionable) makes a nonsense of the claims of paedophilia which amount to a failure to understand the "Victorian Cult of the Child". Others, like Morton Cohen, repudiate this line of reasoning as being simply a plea for the defence.


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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 image "the Carroll Myth".

According to Leach, Dodgson's real life was very different from the accepted biographical image. He was in fact keenly interested in adult women and apparently enjoyed several relationships with them, married and single. Some of these were his child friends with whom he retained close relations into adulthood (in refutation of the idea that he "lost interest" in any girl over the age of about 14). Others, such as Catherine Lloyd, Constance Burch, Edith Shute, and Gertrude Thomson (to name but a few) were women he met as adults and with whom he shared apparently close and meaningful friendships.

Suggestions of paedophilia, says Leach, 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.

Dodgson's problems with social disapproval, Leach says, stemmed not from his relationships with 'little girls', but from his 'numerous' relationships with adult women, married and single. She demands a complete revision of the accepted biographical framework, which she describes as being "subsumed by myth, fantasy and inaccuracy" (In the Shadow of the Dreamchild).

In a review of the title in The Spectator, Patrick Skene Catling described Leach as a "patient, resourceful and common-sensical literary detective", and her book as "excellent", while Michael Bakewell in The Carrollian wrote: "after Leach's book Carroll studies can never be quite the same again; we may not agree with it but we cannot ignore it and it should certainly be read by anyone concerned with Dodgson's life and work". The London Guardian claimed "we are nearer now than before to the reality of Carroll"

However, contrastingly, 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".

Leach's work has been paralleled by that of Hugues Lebailly whose studies of Dodgson's artistic and social interests also suggest that the image of his "obsession" with little girls was largely simplistic or mythic in origin.

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References

  • Lewis Carroll by Richard Kelly, Twayne, 1990.
  • Lewis Carroll: A Biography by Morton Cohen, Vintage, 1996.
  • In the Shadow of the Dreamchild by Karoline Leach.
  • Victorian Webs analysis of Carroll and Henri Bergson.
  • Victorian Web's detailed biography section on Carroll, which reproduces the entire first chapter of Leach's book, as a 'corrective' to the traditional viewpoint
  • "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.
  • Rare book by Alice author makes £4,800, by Paul James. The Sunderland Echo page 9, Saturday 28th January, 2006.
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See also

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External links

Template:Wikiquote Template:Wikisource author

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Official websites

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Works available online

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Other selected works


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Additional information

bg:Луис Карол cs:Lewis Carroll da:Lewis Carroll de:Lewis Carroll et:Lewis Carroll es:Lewis Carroll eo:Lewis Carroll fr:Lewis Carroll fy:Lewis Carroll gl:Lewis Carroll hr:Lewis Carroll is:Lewis Carroll it:Lewis Carroll he:לואיס קרול nl:Lewis Carroll ja:ルイス・キャロル no:Lewis Carroll pl:Lewis Carroll pt:Lewis Carroll ru:Кэрролл, Льюис simple:Lewis Carroll sr:Луис Керол fi:Lewis Carroll sv:Lewis Carroll ta:லூயி கரோல் tr:Lewis Carroll zh:路易斯·卡羅

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