What Was on Lewis Carroll's Mind?

(by Judith Shulevitz )

 

ART begets certainties that biography can't confirm. We know, for instance, that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, whose nom de plume was Lewis Carroll, loved little girls a little too much. Only a man with a dangerous affinity with female children could have produced the defiantly sane Alice, debunker of Wonderland; the beautiful and troubling photographs of her real-life counterpart, Alice Liddell; and all those other portraits of startlingly unbashful prepubescent maidens. The historical record, riddled with gaps made when Dodgson's family excised passages from his diary or mislaid volumes altogether, doesn't prove Dodgson's -- let's not call it pedophilia, let's call it obsession -- but doesn't disprove it either, and so into the evidentiary void generations of biographers and novelists and filmmakers have poured their beliefs about his secret sexual predilections, which have been repeated so often they have attained the status of fact.

 

But what if those beliefs turned out to be wrong? In a book published three years ago in Britain, called ''In the Shadow of the Dreamchild,'' the British playwright Karoline Leach proposed a revision of the reigning perception of Dodgson. Dodgson, she argues, was not the man his hagiographers made him out to be. He was not a sweet, saintly, shy, stuttering Oxford mathematics don, afraid of grown women and drawn to under-age females in partial or total undress. He was a witty, urbane, well-connected roué, a bit bored by his academic duties but completely alert to women -- and not just preteenage women, but full-breasted teenagers, women nearing or past the age of majority, and in one notable case, a woman five years his senior.

 

This last is the subject of Leach's most interesting and problematic claim, which is that the great love of Dodgson's life was not Alice, as has been unanimously supposed, but her mother, Lorina Liddell, a famous beauty married to a man widely believed to have been in love with one of his male colleagues. (Her husband, Henry George Liddel, was the dean of Christ Church, the Oxford college where Dodgson taught.) Leach, like all Dodgson biographers, bases her argument on a reading of three obscure but crucial passages in the Dodgson story. There was, first, the mysterious incident in late June 1863 that led to the Liddells' break with Dodgson after years of close friendship. Second, there is the page cropped clumsily from his 1863 diary, in which the causes of the break were presumably explained. Third, there are the many entries in that diary and others from the period in which Dodgson chronicles his anguished battles with sin, and begs God for strength to resist it.

 

Morton N. Cohen, considered the greatest living Dodgson scholar, speculated in his 1995 biography that the sin was his love for Alice and that the incident involved her in some way. He suggests that Dodgson may have alarmed her mother by hinting at marriage with Alice. Leach, however, has since discovered a scrap of paper in the archives written in the hand of Dodgson's niece, one of the guardians of his papers. The paper is headed ''Cut Pages in Diary'' and contains a short summary of three entries. One of these is the missing entry, which appears to have described a conversation between Mrs. Liddell and Dodgson in which she tells him that he is thought to be using the children to get to the governess or else to be courting the oldest Liddell daughter, Alice's sister Ina.

 

Leach makes much of the fact that the missing page says nothing about Alice -- indeed, there is little mention of Alice in any of the diaries -- and shows, instead, intense anxiety about gossip. To bolster her theory, Leach adduces other evidence, all of it circumstantial: that Dodgson frequently quoted Psalm 51, King David's hymn of repentance after his adultery with Bathsheba, in his pleas for God's forgiveness; that the heroine of Dodgson's love poetry written at that period was an elusive woman, not a child; that in 1862 Dodgson got the dean to exempt him from an Oxford rule requiring certain teachers to become priests in the Church of England -- something the proper Liddell would only have done if he had to, perhaps out of a fear of scandal. Leach points out that in Victorian society an adulterous affair would have been much more damaging to all parties implicated than mere attraction to a child, which would have been dismissed as a charming foible.

 

Is Leach right? Her book has been well received in British literary circles, and she tells the story of the hypothetical affair, and both families' efforts to suppress all trace of it, with the flair of a writer of scholarly detective fiction. More important than the truth of her thesis, though, is the skepticism she brings to the stereotype of the genius as emasculated misfit. But in an effort to explain the origins of the myth of pedophilia, Leach also advances a theory that strikes this reader as too subtle by half.

 

Later in life, after the ''Alice'' books had made him famous, Dodgson began to cultivate a public image as a patron of little girls. He prowled beaches and streets to strike up their acquaintance; he begged mothers to let him escort the girls around town; he photographed them naked. Reading Dodgson's letters carefully, Leach shows that many of the females Dodgson called his ''child-friends'' were actually postpubescent teenagers and even young adult women, and concludes that Dodgson, and later his family, stressed his love of children in order to deflect attention from his intimacies with unmarried women, which his contemporaries would have found far more disgraceful.

 

And yet, to emphasize Dodgson's adult sexuality, Leach feels she must play down the unusual attention he unquestionably paid to girls of, say, 8 and up. Many of his older ''child-friends'' entered his life as actual children, and faded out of it in their mid-20's. It is as if he made no distinction between the child and the adult. A refusal to respect the sanctity of childhood may be even more disturbing than excessive love of it, but this does help us understand the one body of work that appears to contradict Leach's thesis: Dodgson's photographs. The best of these are of little girls; none of his pictures of boys or grown men and women are half as good. Their success lies in their unsentimentality and Dodgson's ability to solicit from the girls expressions of emotion as full-blown and complex as any adult's.

 

One girl in her nightgown stares at the photographer in dismay at her uncombable hair. Another stands on her father's back and crows with triumphant glee. Alice Liddell looks out from her beggar maid's and Chinese costumes with an inquisitiveness so grave it can't help being seductive, as if to say, I'm not sure what game you're playing here, but I know it has consequences. There are both love and trust in that look, feelings that had to have been encouraged and reciprocated, whether romantically or in some less categorizable way. Art may not be enough to solve the puzzles of life, but if it's good, it doesn't lie.

 

Text published in April 7, 2002

 

Text taken from:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C06E7DA1E3BF934A35757C0A9649C8B63 (last viewed in 5th November 2008 at 21.00 pm)

 

 

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