2 Academics

He left Rugby at the end of 1849 and, after an interval which remains unexplained, went on in January 1851 to Oxford: to 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. Many of his pupils were stupid as well as older and richer than he was, and almost all of them were disinterested. They didn't want to be taught, he didn't want to teach them. Mutual apathy ruled.

3 Photography

In 1856, Dodgson took up the new art form of photography. He excelled at it 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.

His favorite subjects for photography were portraits of famous persons, such as Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as well as little girls, both with and without clothing. Dodgson either destroyed or returned the nude photographs to the families of the girls he'd photographed. They were long presumed lost, but four nudes have surfaced.

Dodgson's practice of photographing or sketching nude girls has led to speculation that he was a paedophile, see below.

4 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, but 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 Carroll only stammered in adult company, and was free and fluent with children, but there is nothing to support this idea. Many children of his acquaintance remembered the stammer; 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, when singing and recitation were required social skills, this youth 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 something of a star at charades. He could be charming, pushy, and manipulative, with the kind of ready sensitivity vulnerable women are apt to find irresistible.

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 nakedly socially ambitious, anxious to make his mark on the world in some way, as a writer, as an artist. His scholastic career was only a stop-gap to other more exciting attainments that he wanted hungrily.

5 Writing career

During his academic career, Carroll wrote poetry and short stories, sending them to various magazines and already 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'. His ideas got better as he got older, but the 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—Ina, 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 was evidently struck by its potential to sell well. He took the MS—at this stage entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground—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 pen-name Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier—Lewis Carroll.

With the launch and 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. Dodgson's reality remained and remains largely obscure. It has been ignored, even by the most recent and reputed of modern biographers in all but its briefest outline.

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, and his last novel, the two-volume Sylvie and Bruno , in 1889 and 1893 respectively. He also published many mathematical papers under his own name, courted scandal through his associations with women, toured Russia and Europe on an extended visit (in 1867) and bought a house in Guildford, where he died suddenly of violent pneumonia on January 14 1898, leaving mystery and enigma behind him.

6 Allegations of paedophilia

Dodgson’s undeniable fondness for children — and especially his photographs of nude or semi nude girls, and his sketchbooks featuring his own drawings of nude or seminude girls — have led to speculation that he was a paedophile.

The issue is contentious, with some noting that there is no evidence that Dodgson abused girls, or arguing that child nudes were not uncommon during the era.

Having taken up photography in 1856, Dodgson recorded brief notice in his diary of his first nude in 1867.

Robert Taylor has written that Dodgson’s nude photographs were “limited to eight sessions spread over thirteen years” and are “not the record of a habitual voyeur, pornographer or paedophile, but the response of an overtly sentimental bachelor to the innocent beauty and grace of childhood. Whether this type of photography was Dodgson's way of satisfying or sublimating his sexual desires can never be known and will always remain fruitless speculation. Certainly the fear that this might be the case never troubled the families involved, and we can be certain that any whiff of impropriety would have been keenly scented." [1]

Taylor's argument that the nudes "never troubled the families involved" is perhaps countered by Dodgson's experience with the Mayhew family.

In 1879, Dodgson wrote what have been called "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." [2] 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)

In his biography of Dodgson, Cohen writes that “a current of whispers ran through Oxford about Charles’s nude photography, and he was aware of it,” and notes that Carroll had “not compromised his standards of moral rectitude,” but he would have been bothered if the rumors had “reached the ears of his child friends.” (p. 171)

Cohen further writes that, “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 naive. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself. Certainly he always sought to have another adult present when nude prepubescent modeled for him.” Cohen notes that the children’s mothers were encouraged to be present, and asks if these precautions were the result of Dodgson “insuring himself against slipups.” (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.” (p229)

7 Jack the Ripper Suspect

In 1996 author Richard Wallace published a book entitled Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend. The book expressed his theory that Lewis Carroll and his colleague Thomas Vere Bayne were responsible for the Jack the Ripper murders. Their hypothesis found little support, and for most Ripperologists Carroll remains a well-known but unlikely suspect.

This theory was based primarily on a number of anagrams derived from passages in two of Carroll's works, The Nursery Alice, an adaptation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for younger readers, and from the first volume of Sylvie and Bruno . Carroll first published both works in 1889 and was probably still working on them during the period of the canonical murders. Wallace claimed that both books contained hidden but detailed descriptions of the murders. This theory gained enough attention to make Carroll a late but notable addition to the list of suspects.

However a number of arguments raised by Carroll's recent biographers and fellow Ripperologists have shown that this theory can hardly be taken seriously. Among them was Karoline Leach , who in a lecture about Wallace's theory gave three main arguments against it:

• The same method of anagrams can be applied to any number of works written in the Latin alphabet and using the English language without proving any intention by the original author. Leach demonstrated her point by applying it to passages of Alan Alexander Milne's Winnie the Pooh.

• Carroll and Bayne had clear alibis for the murders:
  • On April 3, 1888, when Emma Elizabeth Smith was attacked in London, Carroll was in Oxford and was temporarily unable to walk due to health problems.
  • From August 31 through September 30, 1888, when Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, and Catherine Eddowes were killed, Carroll was vacationing in Eastbourne, East Sussex along with Isa Bowman, an actress and personal friend of his. Meanwhile, Thomas Vere Bayne had severe back pain during the summer of 1888 and was barely able to move.
  • On November 9, 1888, when Mary Jane Kelly was killed, both Carroll and Bayne were reportedly in Oxford.

• Carroll had some interest in the Jack the Ripper case. An August 26, 1891 passage of his diary reports that he spoke that day with Dr. Dabbs, an acquaintance of his, about "his very ingenious theory about 'Jack the Ripper'". Although the theory he refers to is unknown, the passage does not indicate that Carroll was personally involved in the case.

8 Sources

• The basis for most of this article is an extract taken from the 'controversial' book In the Shadow of the Dreamchild by Karoline Leach, which was copied with permission from the author. The original extract is also available on the Victorian Web which includes a detailed biography section on Carroll.

There is a new website devoted to Carroll and based on the work of Leach and others at Looking for Lewis Carroll

Mortimer Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biography, Vintage, 1996

9 References

To gain some understanding of the complex things going on beneath the surface of the Alice tales, the book The Raven and the Writing Desk by Francis Huxley, BooksEnthsiast.com (1976) is recommended. It is somewhat like Zen: Huxley seeks to give enlightenment on Carroll by using Carroll's own wild methods of concealed logic and wordplay.

A largely biographical book that offers some insight into the works is Inventing Wonderland by Jackie Wullschläger, BooksEnthsiast.com, which looks at not only Carroll but Edward Lear (of the "nonsense" verses), J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan), Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows), and A. A. Milne (Pooh). Wullschläger attempts to show how those several authors go together as well as what distinguishes them in the light of the era and outlooks they jointly embodied.

Still She Haunts Me is a novel by Katie Roiphe based on Carroll's biography, that deals with his affection for little girls. However, it has been described by some critics as factually very inaccurate and somewhat behind the times. (BooksEnthsiast.com).

10 External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about .

• The Lewis Carroll Home Page
• Victorian Web
• Looking for Lewis Carroll
• The Lewis Carroll Society
• Lewis Carroll: an introduction to his fiction

10.1 Electronic texts

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about .

Freely downloadable e-texts from Project Gutenberg:

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Through the Looking-Glass
• The Hunting of the Snark
• Phantasmagoria and Other Poems
• Sylvie and Bruno
• The game of logic
• The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
• eLook Literature: Lewis Carroll - HTML version separated chapter by chapter

Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis

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