St. Martin's Press first edition - 2010
On our visit to London in early January, I visited Judd Books in Marchmont Street (scene of my old stomping ground as a university student in the late 1960s. It was like an old-fashioned 'village' street then; now, half of it has been destroyed by a huge concrete shopping centre. Ugh!) Back to the bookshop. I never come away without at least one purchase from a huge stock of what are termed 'remainder books'. This time, I bought two biographies of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll. The more substantial one - Edward Wakeling's Lewis Carroll: The Man and his Circle (I.B. Taurus, 2015) - I shall leave for another day. Jenny Woolf's slighter tome, I have enjoyed reading over the past week.
Her chapter headings are strange and mildly off-putting: 'Nose in the Middle, Mouth Under', 'Child of the Pure Unclouded Brow',...'took the Camera of Rosewood'; but explanatory sub-titles follow them: 'The Human Body', 'Alice', 'Photography'. The Foreword by Edward Wakeling, editor of Lewis Carroll's Diaries, gives credit to the author's viewpoint: She has painted a picture of the man based on her thorough research, with accurate descriptions, and her evidence is clear and well presented. Wakeling also submits that Carroll's personality is many-faceted and complex. Maybe that is what attracts us to him - he is a very interesting person. After reading Woolf's book, I can thoroughly agree.
She explains the importance of Carroll's early years, being brought up as the eldest boy in a large family. Although Carroll himself hardly ever spoke about his own childhood and his brothers and sisters supplied only a few carefully edited recollections of him as a boy, Woolf is able to piece together an account of the years in the village of Daresbury, Cheshire and then at Croft-on-Tees in North Yorkshire. Apparently, as he grew older, Carroll emerged as the family entertainer. He attended a small boarding school at Richmond and then moved to the now famous Rugby School. He hated the three years he spent there: I cannot say that I look back upon my life at a Public school with any sensation of pleasure, or that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again. However, the picture that emerges of Carroll is of a boy with considerable reserves of toughness and concentration beneath a sensitive exterior. Woolf argues that Carroll may have had some issues about mothers and sons; there are a lack of mothers in his work and the brutal, domineering female figures that occur in it have attracted comment. On the other hand, Carroll - as the oldest son - had a special relationship with his father. When the latter died aged 68, his son appeared to fall into a kind of depression from which he thought he might never recover.
Carroll became a student and then a tutor at Christ Church College, Oxford - where he was to spend the rest of his life. He spent his time there as an Oxford mathematics don - numbers formed a thread running through his life. Inevitably, the sections devoted to this important angle of his life left me cold - maths was my least favourite subject at school and, even now, I find it difficult to show any interest in the topic. Carroll was also fascinated in the ways and workings of both the human body and mind. He particularly focussed on the possible cause[s] of his mild stammer - he spent a great deal of time, effort and money on trying to cure it. Unsurprisingly, when he was tired or stressed. his stammer was far worse. Carroll put together a huge library of medical books; he nursed, visited and sat with the sick. He was very curious about madness and mental abnormalities; this interest in mental functioning spilled over into his books - not only is everyone mad in Wonderland but altered mental states figure in his later Sylvie and Bruno.
The three chapters in the middle of Woolf's book are possibly the most interesting - or unsettling! 'This strange wild man from other lands' is subtitled 'Love and Sex; 'Children are three-fourths of my life'; and 'Child of the pure unclouded brow', on Alice Liddell. In his later life, many looked on Carroll as a quaint old bachelor, but he was far from being a maidenly nun-figure who was ignorant of sexual matters. He strongly disapproved of pornography, but owned some very frank books on sexual matters. During his moralistic later years, he demonstrated a well-honed and effective knowledge of how to win over girls in their teens and grown-up women, as well as children. In fact, he attracted a large female retinue and tongues did wag. During the 1860s, Carroll's diaries recorded an increasing concentration on being with children, especially on 'pure' little girls. Perhaps over the next 20 years, he was able to channel his intense yearnings for romantic love into the company of children. They were beautiful, but their purity was the antithesis of predatory female sexuality. In the 1860s and 1870s, he photographed many children in family settings, including some nude photographs of under-sevens which he (and their families) considered perfectly virtuous. The 21st century is a very different world. A Review of a BBC documentary in 2015, had as its heading Was Lewis Carroll a Paedophile? His photographs suggest so. Will Self certainly agrees: I think Carroll was a heavily repressed paedophile, without doubt. Of the approximately 3,000 photographs Carroll made in his life, just over half are of children - 30 of whom are depicted nude or semi-nude It is disconcerting, to say the least.
This Blog is too long already, so suffice it to say that the chapters on Literature and Storytelling, on Photography and Woolf's finding of Carroll's bank account are all worthy of more detailed comment. The author finishes her biography with A Personal Conclusion. She emphasises that whilst he very much liked female company and was unusual for his times in treating women more or less as equals, men do not seem to have attracted him emotionally. His time at Rugby School is said to have revolted his sensitive nature. Carroll did not desire men and boys, and he could not have women, so his preoccupation with little girls therefore seemed to his contemporaries to be a total rejection of sexuality... he said that what he got from his child friends was love, which he equated with the pure love of God.
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