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Lewis Carroll Biography
born: January 27, 1832
died: January 14, 1898
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 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.
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, 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 instil such
views in his children.
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. 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.
He
left Rugby at the end of 1850 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 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.
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 paedophile
(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.
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 Carroll 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.
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 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 manuscript — at this stage
titled 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 Lewis Carroll pen-name
Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier.
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.
Dodgson’s
undeniable fondness for little girls (especially Alice Liddell,
from whom it is often said he may have derived his own "Alice",
although he himself seems to have denied this origin), 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 paedophile, 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, Oscar Rejlander,
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.
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 paedophilia 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 paedophiles
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 small female children was largely
simplistic or mythic in origin.
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.
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: A Biography by Morten Cohen, Vintage,
1996.
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. Lewis Carroll, Photographer. 2002.
(Has a definitive list of every Carroll photograph that
is still in existence.)
In the Shadow of the Dreamchild by Karoline Leach.
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