CREATIVITY AND LEWIS CARROLL

(by Jenny Woolf)

Lewis Carroll was a subtle, original thinker whose imaginative creations have inspired and amused millions of people. But nobody can read through his "Collected Works" without noticing that his creativity flowered only in fits and starts. Works of great brilliance and lasting appeal sparkle out amidst slabs of sentimental, hackneyed or downright eccentric prose and poetry - often written at around the same time.

Why?

The answer to this question is crucial to an understanding of Carroll's work, behaviour and personal relationships.

It's not really a matter of whether he possessed the famous "split personality" sometimes attributed to him. And - with respect to those who believe he was a lonely weirdo - he didn't show any signs of the major emotional or psychological problems that might cause such wild inconsistency. The real reason is likely to lie in the very structure of his creative process.

There is a feeling of uncertainty at the heart of this process. He sometimes seems reluctant to reveal his true feelings in his work. Often, too, he seems oddly incapable of judging the impact that his writing is having on his readers. And the descriptions of those who knew him suggest that he didn't express his creativity in a controlled or consistent way.

As regards true feelings, any good writing must contain interesting ideas. But for fiction to be any good - and have popular appeal - it must also be driven by feelings, by emotion: and the writer needs to use his art to draw his readers into sharing that emotion.

Carroll's best work conveyed emotion extraordinarily well. He even wrote emotion-driven material on what would normally be considered highly unemotional subjects - like logic and puzzles - because these subjects appealed to him emotionally as well as intellectually. Just read his introduction to "Symbolic Logic": it is bursting with enthusiasm as he tries to persuade his readers to try this method for themselves. And the liveliness and readability of his letters show that he could communicate emotionally in writing, right up to the end of his life.

So he never found it hard to convey genuine emotion through his writing, if he wanted to - but he didn't always want to. This is particularly obvious in Sylvie and Bruno , a gigantic two-volume work he wrote towards the end of his life. Sylvie and Bruno consists in a large part of what might be called "idea-driven fiction". A blunter term for this is propaganda, where the writer aims to make people react in pre-determined ways, rather than creatively involving them in the development of new ideas. Although Sylvie and Bruno is full of quirky and often entertaining conversations and eccentricities, it also, as Carroll admitted himself, conveys many moral ideas and arguments that he approved of. This kills large sections of it.

The book also contains emotional propaganda, with many passages steeped in emotions that Carroll enjoyed and approved of, but which don't involve the reader. Now you may ask what the difference is between communicating emotions and enjoying them. The answer is that when a writer is solely enjoying his own emotions, he is not deploying his skill to bring us emotions that we can relate to as well.

So few people relate to Carroll's doting descriptions of the unreal fairy-child Sylvie, and the reason for this is that they are sentimental and false. We know that in real life, Carroll, like the rest of us, would have detested little girls who moralised constantly at him or preferred their little brothers to him. But he ignores this uncomfortable fact, because the moralizing Sylvie is essentially his puppet acting out his own desires for goodness, purity and love. She is no more convincing than the devoted party-member of a communist propaganda film.

We can hypothesise quite convincingly that Carroll identified himself with the little brother Bruno, the recipient of Sylvie's selfless undivided adoration - after all, all that love had to go somewhere. But most of us don't envisage a sort of sexless girl guide fairy as the answer to our prayers, as Carroll apparently did. Sylvie is such a contrast with Alice, who has very realistic and natural emotions.

It may be helpful I quote a couple of passages to illustrate this.

From Sylvie And Bruno:

"[Sylvie] sang timidly, and very low indeed, scarcely audibly, but the sweetness of her voice was simply indescribable. I have never heard any earthly music like it. On me the first effect of her voice was a sudden sharp pang that seemed to pierce through one's very heart. I had felt such a pang only once before in my life, and it had been from seeing what at the moment realised one's idea of perfect beauty... then came a sudden rush of burning tears to the eyes, as though one could weep one's soul away for pure delight. And lastly there fell on me a sense of awe that was almost terror - some such feeling as Moses must have had when he heard the words "Put off thy shoes from off thy feet for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground"

You can perhaps see - even sympathise with -how emotional he feels, but unless you feel the same yourself it certainly won't bring tears to your eyes to imagine the scene (although his use of language may provoke a groan or two). Nor, probably, would many people feel very keen on sharing his emotions about Sylvie. There is something odd and unreal about them which Carroll does not seem to be aware of.

Just compare that with this extract from Through the Looking Glass, which is also about singing and tears.

"You are sad" the Knight said in an anxious tone "Let me sing you a song to comfort you". "Is it very long?" Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day. "It's long" said the Knight. "But it's very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it - either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else - "

"Or else what?" said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause. "Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called "Haddock's Eyes".

"Oh, that's the name of the song is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested.

"No - you don't understand" the Knight said, looking a little vexed "that's what the name is called- "

I hope you can hear from that that Alice and the Knight are somehow alive - they offer something to think about even if we don't sympathise with them - because Carroll is using his artistic skill to involve us, his readers, without swamping us with his own ideas and theories.

Secondly, his ability to assess the impact of his work was inconsistent. To judge how well his work is coming over, a writer must first identify exactly who he's trying to communicate with, and secondly, assure himself that his methods and techniques are appropriate to that readership. In its most basic sense, this means that no book on "Quantum Physics For Toddlers" will ever succeed, because toddlers will never understand quantum physics, however well it is explained to them.

In Sylvie And Bruno, Carroll actually confesses in the introduction that for years he wrote down ideas that hit him out of the blue, and then tried to stick everything together so it somehow made sense. From this we can see that the book wasn't saying anything in particular to anyone in particular - except perhaps himself.

In addition, he refused to discuss his writing with adults, walking out of the room if they mentioned his writing: so he got almost no adult feedback. But he didn't create Sylvie And Bruno for children either - or he'd have realised on reaching page 2 that he'd already lost them. So who did he write the book for? I don't think he knew. No wonder he couldn't control how effectively he was communicating.

Thirdly, his creative methods varied, and that had a big effect on the finished result. He wrote "Alice", we're told, to capture on paper a story that he had spontaneously told a particular person. But Sylvie And Bruno started as written notes for himself. People read the latter and say he lost his powers of storytelling as he grew older, or they say he stopped caring about telling stories. But this is because they are only looking at what he wrote. and in fact writing does not seem to have been his main way of being creative. He was, in his quiet way, a performer, and there is considerable evidence that he never stopped telling stories to children in ways they describe as magical, and always new and different - right to the very end of his life.

To see him as primarily a verbal storyteller rather than a writer puts him into proper focus. That is why so many of his comic poems are so good, and are still popular today. They sound good when spoken, you want to speak them. They are rhythmic, subtle, enticing, and they almost demand to be said aloud.

Perhaps his life would have been different if he had not been afflicted by his hated stammer which stopped him speaking spontaneously and freely. The stammer seemed to diminish when he recited, and appeared to be better when in the company of people he knew and felt comfortable with. It cannot be coincidence that so much of his best work was created for members of his family, friends, children. Storytelling or poetry were clearly natural and pleasurable creative activities which he could share with people he liked in a way that did not make him self-conscious.

Importantly, too, storytelling also offered a break from being coolly intellectual. Intellect ruled so much of his life, and intellect is such an enemy of creativity. It stamps on fantasy and feeling, it makes us nigglingly conscious of what we say. Being with children helped free up Carroll's very powerful imaginative, emotional side. He himself said that the effect of children on him was so refreshing it was almost like a physical tonic, particularly after he had been doing too much "brain work".

So as essentially a story teller rather than a story writer, he'd work best where there was a social element that gave him direct feedback. That's what storytellers need. I would suggest that if Sylvie And Bruno - not to mention some of his bad poetry and prose - had been created for one particular person he really wanted to please, then it would have been very, very much better. As it is, one of his closest child friends, Enid Stevens, describes him rushing in to write down particularly good stanzas for "The Mad Gardener's Song" which they had made up on their walks together. Most, though not all of the present song was published before Dodgson met Enid, but her story shows how being with friends inspired Dodgson to create work which he consciously intended to use in print.

There is also a simple human element here. Anyone who has sat and told stories to children knows that it brings forth so much direct and delightful appreciation. Children can't get enough of the storyteller: they utterly respond and believe. It's a great deal more fun to tell children stories than it is to slave away all alone for months producing books for people you'll never meet. Carroll's letters and diaries show so clearly that he loved to give and share pleasure. The surprising thing starts to seem that he ever bothered to sit down all by himself and write out Alice in Wonderland at all - but I'll come to that later.

I'd briefly now like to turn to some aspects of the creative processes as experienced by writers, and some of the triggers that set it going, in order to illuminate Carroll's creativity in particular.

Stephen Spender wrote a very good essay in which he mentioned how poets commonly refer to the necessity of writing. The same goes for most other serious creative artists and writers. They don't just "like" doing it: it's a necessity. And yet, oddly, writers more often than not have great difficulty getting into the right frame of mind and have all sorts of little rituals and habits to help them.

Spender also pointed out that when your work goes well you feel true to yourself, everything feels right in some fundamental way, almost like a spiritual process. So the need for it is compelling, and yet needs nurturing, it's about expressing some kind of inner truth, and it adds up to something that feels very important to the writer.

As for what actually triggers the creative process, this varies, but several things keep cropping up in studies of creativity. Some people are attempting to defend themselves against feelings of depression and alienation. And even if they are not depressed, the very things that make them inclined to being creative in the first place can cause problems, - the extra sensitivity or vulnerability perhaps. Carroll's nephew Collingwood mentions his uncle's extremely sensitive nature.

Anthony Storr emphasises that expressing such deeply felt emotions as a part of the creative process is a good way of dealing with them. It's the idea behind art therapy and music therapy - and on a more mundane level we all know that you can often put a difficult problem into perspective by talking about it, getting it outside yourself into the real world.

There is little doubt that the world inside Lewis Carroll's mind was a pretty amazing place. Many people believe he was a drug addict (though there is no evidence at all for this) because some of his images and ideas echo those produced under the influence of hallucinogens. It has been conjectured that he suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, which can produce odd visions and states of mind, and he also had an interest in fits, seizures and other medical matters. We also know from a study of the books in his library that he was fascinated by different states of mind and consciousness: not to mention madness, dreams, fairies, ghosts, angels, legends, and 'alternative' religion of all kinds. The huge number of books he owned on these subjects show how much he dwelt on spiritual and non physical matters in so many different forms, some of them very unusual.

But he probably couldn't say much about the more colourful aspects of these subjects to his fellow dons or friends who probably thought he was a bit odd anyway. He was close to his large family of siblings, but they seem to have been conventionally religious, and to have kept a strict eye on each others' morality and ideas. In many respects, Carroll seems to have tried very hard indeed to seem "normal", - at least until his late middle age - because he had a professional image to keep up and an academic career to maintain. Almost certainly, he had to hide a great deal of himself from other people, and I'd suggest that he did not link his surreal, dreamlike and illogical thoughts and fancies with reality by chatting about his wacky ideas to his donnish friends or conventionally religious family.

It seems that an important way in which he chose to keep in touch with the ferment of his inner, real self, was by creating amazing imaginative stories which wove these extraordinary ideas and thoughts into narratives, and then telling them to children who would totally accept and enjoy them. And that way he would bring his inner self into contact with other human beings, into the real world in a way which was also socially acceptable.

He seemed to find the visual arts an outlet too. He loved all forms of art, and was a skilled photographer, although the physical ability to draw and paint eluded him. However, children liked his pictures well enough, and there are descriptions of how he would sit down to tell stories while constantly drawing as he went along. He also paid much attention to the illustration of his works. He never stopped trying to improve his draughtsmanship, but his serious drawings are tense, amateur efforts quite different from the lively, expressive caricatures he drew in order to entertain. Just as with the writing, he needed unselfconsciously to communicate unthinkingly and directly, away from the mainstream, before he could express himself properly.

Unfortunately he didn't use his intellect to work out that he needed a sympathetic, non-intellectual environment to create good material. In fact, it is debatable how much he valued his creative work, despite the success of "Alice". Although he was glad that somehow he had managed to please people by writing it, he told his friend Gertrude Thomson that he'd never really understood what people saw in it. It was, after all, a mere entertainment, a charming children's tale. Better perhaps to be remembered for something more profound, spiritual or intellectually convincing

"Alice" certainly didn't do him any good professionally - the comments of some of the other dons towards him are terribly patronising. Even today in an academic environment there would be an edge of condescension towards any don whose main claim to fame was a story for little girls. Dean Liddell's biography doesn't even mention "Alice", even though there is a whole chapter on Liddell's family life. It's not so surprising that his colleagues say they rarely saw the slightest sign of the man who wrote "Alice" in the prim, serious C.L. Dodgson, who laboured to create a respectable, acceptable middle class image. .

Another indication of the lack of value he put on his own creative work is that he never tried to publish any of the countless other original stories we're told that he constantly made up for children. He had worked a few stories into parlour performances - "The Pixies" , "The Little Foxes" and "Bruno's Picnic" were three which he told frequently to groups. There are versions of "Bruno's Picnic" and "The Foxes" tucked away, slightly adapted, in Sylvie And Bruno, and when read aloud they are very effective, even though some of the sentiments in them would hardly meet with the approval of today's child psychologists. His spontaneous stories would have been wilder, and he could have done so much more to preserve them - but he didn't do anything.

So it seems really possible that at some basic level Lewis Carroll did not value or understand his storytelling gifts, except when he was among children and speaking to them - despite the fame it brought him. To him, they must have been part of himself, and a rather private part, in some ways, but with little to do with the real business of his life.

And this leads us to his life. Where did his storytelling originate, and how did it fit in to his own personal history?

It is striking how little Carroll said about his childhood. None of his child friends recalls anything he told them about his childhood. Some contemporary letters and humorous writings from his teenage years have been preserved, but in adult life he does not seem to have written anything about specific childhood memories, apart from some negative comments about Rugby School, some negative comments about the kind of boy he was, and one remark to an old family friend about some books he once gave the Dodgson children. . He occasionally mentions childhood in general, in an idealised, impersonal way - but were it not for the contemporary documents, one might almost wonder if he ever had been a child himself.

In addition, the Dodgson family apparently destroyed all Lewis Carroll's childhood and teenage diaries, which he kept from the age of nine, with just a 3 year gap when he was at Rugby. Furthermore, none of his immediate family or friends ever said anything about his childhood in public, except for a few uninformative tales that Stuart Collingwood, his nephew, quoted in the biography he wrote soon after Carroll's death.

But Collingwood also points out that he specifically chooses not to write in detail about certain things, which include Lewis Carroll's teenage years. About these, he says:: "We all have to pass through that painful era of self consciousness which prefaces manhood, that time when we feel so deeply, and are so utterly unable to express to others, or even to define clearly to ourselves, what it is we do feel. The natural freedom of childhood is dead within us, the conventional freedom of riper years is struggling to birth, and its efforts are sometimes ludicrous to an unsympathetic observer. In Lewis Carroll's mental attitude throughout this critical period there was always a calm dignity which saved him from these absurdities, an undercurrent of consciousness that what seemed so great to him was really very little"

This suggests that there was some noticeable discomfort or turbulence during Carroll's teenage years, greater than is usual. Otherwise why would Collingwood specifically have declined to write about it? Could he not have found something positive to say, such as that Carroll was a dutiful son to his parents, or that he strove to be good? Apparently not.

Carroll loved the theatre, which had a rackety reputation in his youth. Most of his brothers and sisters refused to set foot in one, even to see productions of "Alice", and his parents would never have gone to one. Carroll also had what Collingwood coyly described as some "bohemian" friends, and adds that his aim was originally for a literary or artistic career rather than a university life (an ambition which would probably not have pleased his father). Perhaps the young Carroll took photography so seriously, and chased his celebrities so determinedly, because he wanted to build up a portfolio that would enable him to pursue an artistic career.

Whatever clashes there were during his childhood and teenage years, the young Lewis Carroll got on well with his ten brothers and sisters. He wrote them poems, took them out, bought them thoughtful presents, paid for them to come on holiday with him, and they all visited each other frequently, even after they were grown up.

Carroll's mother described in her own letters how closely involved he was with them as a boy, and Collingwood states that all his life his siblings thought a lot of him. So it seems highly credible that he loved the "older brother" role and did very well in it. And he discovered that from an early age that he could be appreciated on his terms by children that he entertained - even if he felt generally misunderstood by the conventional adult world.

No doubt he had many ways of communicating his imaginative fantasies to his brothers and sisters. Collingwood says that he made them a marionette theatre, wrote and performed plays for them, and created elaborate games for them. There are preserved some delightful and amusing letters he wrote them, and personal, funny, quirkily illustrated family magazines he wrote and got them involved in. When he reached Christ Church in his late teens, it is obvious that communicating with children was well established for him as a delightful occupation that enabled him to feel free and relaxed and accepted and valued. It is not very surprising that he sought out children to amuse sometimes, and the children nearest to hand were those of the Dean.

There is also, in my view, another important factor to be considered when seeing Carroll as a storyteller. The popular view of him is of an essentially inhibited man who only blossomed in the presence of children. On the contrary, an analysis of his behaviour suggests that he was essentially an expressive and emotional man who forced himself to become inhibited in the presence of adults. He controlled his behaviour by intellectually working out elaborate rules of personal conduct for himself, and then following them exactly, thus creating an image of himself as a sober, religious and professional person.

Children would act out many of the things he liked but simply dared not let himself do. If the young people dressed up in exotic clothes - or wore no clothes at all - or ran and jumped and acted and pretended, went to pantomimes and played with toys, it was all right because they were just children. Yet he could be intensely involved too - without going too far himself.

Many of these children describe how much like a child himself underneath. his serious and grown up exterior. They say he was genuinely sympathetic and unpatronising, talked to them on an equal level, yet had no hesitation in correcting them if they were not good - shades surely of his rectory childhood, when brothers and sisters all kept an eye on each others' moral welfare. . He liked best the children who liked the kind of things he liked: the theatre, games, puzzles, and jokes, and he liked children who chattered unselfconsciously and drew him in with them. He did not like sophisticated children, or children who wanted to be grown up, because he did not want that himself. His relationships with children were highly reciprocal.

Nevertheless, despite his desire to enter into a childhood world, he was an intelligent and sensitive grown up man with adult preoccupations and adult ideas. And the reality of those adult preoccupations - beneath the surface of the stories - creeps out in his emotionally-driven work, particularly "Alice", which is of course far more than just a children's story.

So let's start wondering what might have happened that stopped him telling stories and got him writing "Alice".

He said that Alice Liddell was the chief or even the only cause of his writing the book, and without her "infant patronage" he may well not have done it. But we should also note that he did not say that Alice Liddell was the "Alice" in the book. Indeed he said the opposite. He said his Alice was "named after a real Alice but nonetheless a dream child". And in a gift inscription of "Alice" which he later gave to the adult Mrs. Hargreaves, nee Alice Liddell, he specifically wrote it to "Her whose namesake inspired the book"

The story of Alice was told in 1862, when Lewis Carroll was 31. But years before that, in the late 1850s his diaries show him relaxing from his "weary round of lecturing" (his words) with the Liddell children. At that time, he was taking a great interest in Harry Liddell - and indeed he wrote more about Harry than he ever wrote about Alice. Then, when Harry went off to school, Carroll spent time with the three girls, doing puzzles and games with them, getting involved in their childish preoccupations, including them in his photography, chatting to them. He obviously found their company relaxing, in the way he seems to have done at home with his own siblings.

Now, think of him telling "Alice in Wonderland" on that boat. It has very little plot and is specifically without a conventional moral - in other words it's almost like a stream of consciousness . And it obviously had a particular resonance - not only to Carroll's friend Duckworth, who was also in the boat, but also to the children. He himself also realised it was more important and relevant than the usual stories, had an edge to it somehow.

He told the story in July 1862, roughed out the headings very soon afterwards, and then put it aside. He only started writing it in November, 1862, by which time it had become harder - indeed almost impossible - for him to tell stories to the Liddell children in person.

Because by October 1862 he was out of Mrs. Liddell's 'good graces', he said. He had not seen Alice and her sisters very much for some time. He still loved them and they loved him, but he was probably more lonely for them than they were for him, for he had no-one to take their particular place.

What is also known is that during 1862, and for some years afterwards, Carroll was in a state of deep emotional dismay about something. His diaries are missing between 1858 and May 1862, but comments about his own sin, unworthiness and weakness were to last for some years. Some biographers have attempted to link this in with the ups and downs of his relationship with Alice, but there seems to be no link at all between his expressions of distress and his extremely few (and not always flattering) references to Alice Liddell in his diaries.

Nobody knows now what the problem was, but it seems possible that it was connected with the fact that he had refused to progress to full Holy Orders, as Christ Church required him to do. This is probably relevant to the creation of "Alice" and so deserves a brief digression.

As a condition of his Studentship (Fellowship) at Christ Church, Carroll was required to take Holy Orders - first, Deacon's Orders and then Priest's Orders. However, he only ever took Deacon's Orders. These days it is very unusual for anyone to take Deacon's orders and then stop. Lewis Carroll was not necessarily expected to become a vicar with a parish - but nevertheless his decision not to become a priest created a major flutter in the hen coop. In his diary, Carroll records that Dean Liddell said he had probably already lost his studentship by not taking full Orders within 4 years, and in any case he was obliged to do it now. And Carroll says in his diary that he "differed" with Liddell about this, and they parted with Liddell saying he would take the matter further.

So in fact what he was saying is that he wouldn't obey the rules. He was expected to take priest's orders, and he said "no".

By taking this step he was risking his future, and making himself conspicuous in the worst possible way. His studentship was at risk - and thereby of course his home - very likely his income and job... thereby his independence from his father - and by extension, his photography, his theatre going and everything he liked to do. Being obliged to leave Christ Church would have cast a shadow over his future career, both within and outside the university, and would have greatly upset his family. Yet Carroll was apparently prepared to defy Liddell, flout college rules, ignore university tradition, fail to keep the solemn vow with which he had accepted his studentship. He was willing to fail religiously, morally and professionally by insisting on this course of action.

Why? His own explanations and those of his nephew-biographer Collingwood are varied but not convincing. Carroll said he had no inclination for parochial work, and had felt that a mathematical lecturer should not have to take Orders. Collingwood says that Carroll wasn't prepared to endure the almost puritanical life of a clergyman in those days, and that his stammer held him back. All good enough reasons, but not nearly enough to justify such a major step. It is also known that Carroll's friend, the celebrated preacher H P Liddon, advised him that he was justified in declining to progress to Priest's orders, presumably on religious grounds. There is no evidence of impropriety or scandal.

Whatever the details, this matter was certainly distressing and preoccupying him intensely when he wrote "Wonderland", and it seems possible that the repercussions also overshadowed "Looking Glass".

So returning more directly to his creative processes, we see him in November 1862, obviously badly stressed, with no Liddell children around to help him feel better. He settles down to cheer himself up and write out Alice's story and give it to her as a present, even though she isn't actually there in person. He turns to communicating with children, because it makes him feel better and more lovable to do so. .

He himself always emphasised the crucial importance of the fact that Alice asked him to write the story. . He loved her and she loved him in an uncomplicated, familiar way. With the innocence of a child, Alice wanted to hear his stories, whatever he had done. These were good feelings, loving emotions, unclouded by prejudice and adult sins and preoccupations. They lifted his spirits. He started writing.

The tale itself gripped him in its own right, and obviously gave him support as he created his own personal "Alice" to travel through the confusing nether world he had also fallen into. He didn't stop writing the book even after he had withdrawn from contact with the Liddell family. The real Alice Liddell could grow up and change into the haughty and unsympathetic young lady she ultimately became, but he could write for the child she had been, and the child upon who he had superimposed his own (as he called it) "dream-Alice"..

He could write with love and emotion - all disguised as joking fantasy and fun - for innocent little Alice, for her sisters and also for himself. . For them, he could turn harshness into humour, darkness into light. Lewis Carroll was an intensely constructive person: a winner and not a loser, and there is good reason to believe that writing "Wonderland" helped him to struggle back towards a sense of personal equilibrium. For all its disturbing elements, it is ultimately a reassuring book which shows that Alice can coexist - or at least escape from - senseless chaos and terrible restrictions, misunderstandings and a whole world that just doesn't make any sense.

There is in my view little point in attempting a detailed analysis of "Wonderland" (or any of Carroll's other works). Undoubtedly they do contain elements of his real life experience, but the creative process combines and transforms important elements of real life in a dreamlike, unconscious way. This isn't to say that stories or dreams don't give valuable insights, because it is, for instance, usually possible to guess at many of the artist's underlying feelings about a work by noticing what emotions of one's own are inspired by the work. But it is no more possible to work backwards accurately from the story to see what inspired it, than it is to work back from someone's dream to the exact incidents that inspired that.

So I'll leave theWonderland analysis to others, and just move on now to Through the Looking Glass, which was written several years later. He'd certainly planned to write a sequel to "Wonderland" since the mid 1860s, and from what Alice Liddell said later, he probably used up some of his original 1862 material in it, meaning that some Looking Glass material may well relate to the "Wonderland" period.

But it is arguable that Looking Glass could have been very different if he hadn't started writing it in earnest in August 1868. This was within weeks of the death of his father, which he later said was the worst blow that had ever fallen on him in his life. He was too upset to write his diary in August 1868, but he was not too upset to write "Through the Looking Glass". Which again suggests that writing about his "Alice" character was helping him deal constructively with severe emotional pain, when he felt very alone.

Collingwood said that Carroll fell into a long and severe depression after his father's death, a depression from which he wondered if he would ever emerge. Since on his own admission his father's death devastated him more than anything else in his life, one must admit the possibility that something more than normal grief was afflicting Lewis Carroll at this period. For why should the death of an old man approaching seventy seem so much worse than the death of his mother? She was relatively young, and was in good health, but had died with horrible timing the day after Carroll's birthday, at the very time he was taking up his university place in Oxford. No sooner had he arrived than he had to turn around immediately and go home again to her funeral. It is very strange that he recollected many years later how much worse his father's death had seemed.

It is true that his pulling out of Holy Orders can hardly have failed to sadden his father - but this matter had come to a head many years before. Was there some ongoing problem between them which was never resolved? If so, there is absolutely no indication as to what it may have been. All we know is that after his father's death Carroll's behaviour changed in many significant ways. In particular he began to seek out the company of little girls in a far more focused way than before, and he also started to develop an almost eccentrically severe sense of religious morality.

With his father's death, he also became head of the family. All ten siblings were at this stage partly dependent on the father, and when the rectory was given up, nine of the brothers and sisters were left seeking another home. Mr. Dodgson had provided for his children financially, so they had enough to maintain a frugal lifestyle, but the responsibility on Lewis Carroll was still very great. It was a miserable period for him. All this time, he was writing Looking Glass.

Looking Glass is every bit as good as Wonderland and has the same feeling of hidden significance and emotion. We know it deals with growing up and parting and loss, and has a more sombre feel than Wonderland. Although Carroll's dream "Alice" character must have been in some ways himself, it does still seem that both books were genuinely told for the little child Alice Liddell, sitting listening in Carroll's imagination to the continuation of "her" story. The Liddell girls were now in fact grown up, but still in his magical world they remained, listening, helping him once more to turn painful reality into just a dream.

Indeed, if you read the acrostic poem he wrote at the end of Looking Glass, this seems to be what he is saying. The children did listen long ago, he begins: but then memories of that faded. Yet, he is still haunted by his dream "Alice", and now the children have now moved to Wonderland. They are not real any more, but they're still listening, and always will, because they themselves have become part of his dream - which in turn seems to him as real as life itself.

A boat beneath a sunny sky

lingering onward dreamily

in an evening of July

Children three that nestle near

eager eye and willing ear

pleased a simple tale to hear

Long has paled that sunny sky

echoes fade and memories die

Autumn frosts have slain July

Still she haunts me, phantomwise

Alice, moving under skies

never seen by waking eyes

Children yet, the tale to hear

eager eye and willing ear

lovingly shall nestle near

> In a Wonderland they lie

dreaming as the days go by

dreaming as the summers die

Ever drifting down the stream

- lingering in the golden gleam

- life, what is it but a dream?

It is not possible to see how Looking Glass developed from its early drafts, as it was possible to some extent with Wonderland. But just as the Queen of Hearts is generally considered to be the most memorable character in Wonderland so the most memorable character in Looking Glass is usually considered to be the White Knight.

Many of the "Alice" analysts have decided that the White knight is meant to represent Carroll bidding farewell to Alice. Who is to say it is not? It is after all only a dream-story. But, having said it is pointless to try and analyse "Alice" I would just point out that the White Knight represents the only character in the book who offers Alice protection, who actually tries to look after her, who appears to care about her. In his way, the ridiculous White Knight is the only character in either book who acts like a parent figure to Alice.

Mr. Dodgson's children recalled him as a man who took strong views about how they should conduct their lives. But surviving documentation also shows that he was also lively minded, and took a constructive, supportive and protective interest in them, devoting much thought and effort to their welfare. The White Knight might well reflect in typically humorous form, some of the aspects of the man whom Lewis Carroll called "my dear, dear father" .

How heedlessly his dream-"Alice" wants to run off and get on with her life and leave the old man behind; and she doesn't agree with much he says either, but at his request she willingly waits with him to say goodbye. She kindly watches him go and waves to "encourage him" as he reaches the end of his move, and disappears for ever. Then she skips away eagerly, convinced it's going to be splendid being a grown up. But alas, she finds that taking an adult role is dreadful, and offers her no more freedom than before. In fact, she is more pinned in by etiquette and rules, until her existence starts to seem like an overwhelming nightmare. .

Without sounding too simplistic, let's remember that Lewis Carroll couldn't say goodbye to his father, who died very suddenly. And, although he had nobody telling him what to do after that, it wasn't a release, because he was then burdened with responsibility for his ten jobless, unmarried brothers and sisters. Losing his father forced him to grow up after all those years of ivory tower life in Christ Church. It would be surprising if some elements of the feelings he had did not appear in "Looking Glass", although more than this we cannot say for sure.

This article would be impossibly long if I were to go into detail about all Carroll's works, although the brilliant The Hunting of the Snark deserves a mention. This was written during the period when Carroll was nursing his slowly dying godson. Snark has considerable emotional force, but Carroll, predictably, always denied knowing what it was actually about. Without being dogmatic, we do know his godson died by fits and starts, and the poem is rather oddly entitled "an agony in eight fits". It contains a journey into uncharted seas with an unexpected yet somehow cruelly predictable vanishing at the end. And yet it is amusing and interesting enough to entertain a bedridden young man and his carers. Other very interesting works, like "Three Voices" also deserve more study.

As time went on, things became harder for the creative side of Lewis Carroll. Despite his best efforts, his growing fame meant his inner "Lewis Carroll" self was being exposed to the withering social attention of adults, who were certainly not the uncritical, unsophisticated audience that he needed. Most creative writers will agree that it can be desperately demoralizing to feel you're writing for people who don't relate to what you're trying to say, however nice they try to be.

Within weeks of his father's death, Lewis Carroll started actively seeking out little girl friends in trains and on the beach, and before long he was almost collecting them, like a stamp collector. Eventually they began to take a very major role in his life. Many people have correctly found this obsessive quality rather disturbing. It is also disturbing that he became increasingly interested in photographing them in the nude. Certainly the little girls loved him and he was very good (and totally proper) with them. More than this, he seems to have craved the reassurance of their innocence and unselfconsciousness, almost as if it was a refuge. We start to see echoes of the man who could write so longingly of the loving purity of Sylvie. It must be that as well as genuinely appreciating little girls' company at this time, he also saw them as part of the solution to some kind of pressing personal problem - a problem which became truly significant at the time of his father's death

This article isn't the place to discuss that, except to point out that chasing little girls soaked up huge amounts of Carroll's emotional energy in a very introverted and repetitious way. He attempted to soak up some of his other energy by taking on the demanding job of Curator of Christ Church Common Room, and eventually he began writing his final novel, Sylvie And Bruno.

This book, on which he spent many years, is very interesting psychologically - but creatively it has a static, frustrating theme, because the main character, the narrator, doesn't progress to getting what he personally wants at all. In fact, he's hardly allowed to even say what he wants, he's only allowed to observe others' happiness or get little corners of it for himself. He's resigned to doing without adult emotional satisfaction, particularly in relation to the beautiful adult heroine, Lady Muriel, whom he obviously deeply admires but comments a few times that cannot have. He is, however, loved and fully accepted by the beautiful loving motherly fairy Sylvie and her clever, mischievously logical little brother Bruno. But even they are likely to disappear without warning, and they eventually leave the narrator behind when they return to their father.

Sylvie and Bruno is not exactly an unhappy book - but it seems to me the work of someone who is quite stressed, and who has made up his mind to content himself with crumbs rather than the whole cake. And those feelings of frustration are the true feelings that he was conveying, despite himself, in Sylvie And Bruno. This is why it is so hard to care what happens to the other characters, because the main character, the narrator, is not allowed to express himself properly.

Furthermore, the book culminates in the savage locking up forever of the selfish boy Uggug, who tried to grab everything for himself and doesn't care about others. He eventually grows a coat of prickles, and has to be lured down a tunnel into a cage in which he is trapped forever, raging, raving, and fed on a meagre starvation diet of carrots. The illustration (closely supervised by Carroll) shows a truly horrifying out-of-control monster remniscent of Goya's Saturn. Worst of all, Uggug is condemned to a fate of being forever unloved. There is no reprieve, no salvation for him.

Sylvie and Bruno is ultimately a very unsatisfactory book, and the underlying messages are in striking contrast to those more uplifting emotions Carroll was obviously aiming to convey. But eventually, thankfully, it seems, he emerged from this frustrating situation.

Towards the end of his life, he stopped chasing little girls. He still loved them, but their place had been taken in his life by many respectable, virtuous, affectionate grown-up women and teenage girls. They doted on him, kissed him and had long chats with him, even stayed with him for days or weeks as willing companions. He adored it, blossomed under their attention, and his letters gradually started to contain ill-concealed bragging at how many of them there were, how old they were, and what liberties and freedoms they allowed him. He was exceeedingly careful never to cross the line into behaviour of which he felt God would not approve, but he started to take an impish pleasure in offending conventional morality, and revelled in the fact that he was now considered too old to be a sexual threat to anyone. His diaries are guarded and circumspect, but his letters hint at amusing, sometimes crazy adventures, such as an outing with 23 year old May Miller, when both of them deliberately tried to get as wet as possible on a steamer trip, thereby ruining their official plans for the day, whereupon May returned to his rooms, changed into the maid's clothes (in which she looked "very pretty") and had a tete-a-tete supper with him into the night.

In other ways, too, life gradually seemed to work out for him. He was secure at Christ Church, and he loved his regular summer holidays at Eastbourne, where he had a whole circle of friends and plenty of free time. He got on with his sisters and brothers, he was respectable and famous, he had a good body of moderately distinguished professional work. He had more friends than he possibly had time to write to or see, his health was good, and his many attractive lady companions provided a great deal of fairly innocent fun, affection and companionship in those later years.

He never returned to Wonderland, never created a whole world again or wrote any more books like "Alice". He almost certainly made sure he didn't have to. He arranged his life so that eventually he was able to concentrate on Symbolic Logic, which he absolutely loved, and had a family who stuck with him and nursed him when he died and looked after his reputation as best they could after his death.

And in fact, the children tell us that he did continue to tell wonderful stories to them when he felt like it. Sadly, none of them asked him to write the stories down - but he probably wouldn't have done it anyway. He told stories to make a personal contact, not so that "Lewis Carroll" could immortalise another child with another story.

It is questionable whether he ever fully understood his own creativity, or knew why some parts of his work interested people more than others. It's strange that he himself didn't put his writing into an intellectual context - but perhaps he instinctively knew that he must not do so. For us, though, trying to look at his creative processes analytically does help us to consider some of what was going on in his work, and it may help us to understand a little more about the man himself.

Note: There are various formal psychological approaches to creativity which I have only touched upon here, but anyone interested in the subject should certainly read The Dynamics of Creation, by Anthony Storr

Text taken from: http://contrariwise.cc/carrollscreativity.html (last viewed in 3^rd November 2008 at 18.00 pm)

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