Upbringing
Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, with some Irish
connections. Conservative and High Church Anglican, most of Dodgson's
ancestors belonged 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 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
old year marriage. Eight more were to follow and, incredibly 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 instill
such views in his children.
Young Charles grew out of infancy into a bright, articulate boy.
In the early years he 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. 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 abuse. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The first hints on Dodgson's alleged paedophilia 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, the claim being later caught
up by other biographers despite the evidence of the contrary. Before
publication of complete Dodgson's diaries in 1953, 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). After
the diaries were published, revealing that many prior notions on
Dodgson's life were incorrect, subsequent biographers tended to
take an "apologetic" stance, arguing that Dodgson had
been a latent deviant.
The issue was rekindled in 1995 with Lewis Carroll, a Biography
by Morton Cohen, which deals with the issue much in the line of
The White Knight by Alexander Taylor. 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 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)
Factual material on Dodgson's nude photography is scant. 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.”
The only instance of trouble associated with the nudes was 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." 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)
Julia Margaret Cameron was another Victorian-era photographer who
made several images of nude children. More recently, the contemporary
portraitist Sally Mann has made nude images of her daughter Jessie
and other children.
Jack the Ripper theories
In 1996 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.
For more information, see the Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend
article.
Carroll did show some interest in the Jack the Ripper case, however.
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.
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