Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [10]
There are sceptical thoughts, which seem for the moment to uproot the firmest faith; there are blasphemous thoughts, which dart unbidden into the most reverent souls; there are unholy thoughts, which torture with their hateful presence, the fancy that would fain be pure. Against all these some real mental work is a most helpful ally.51
This tells us something about his thoughts, as well as his thoughts about how to divert and disperse them by ‘mental work’. His taste for mathematical problems, such as those in A Tangled Tale, for new word games such as Doublets and Syzgies, for logical puzzles such as are described in The Game of Logic, obviously provided him with harmless, obsessional activity which deflected him from the dangerous world of subjective feeling. This must have been one of the attractions of nonsense too, with its systematic, playful derangements of sense, its experiments in disorder from within an unshaken framework of orderliness. Yet in the nonsense of the Alice books, as nowhere else, Dodgson found a licence to explore not only his identifications with his child heroine, but the disorienting, ‘sceptical’ dimension of his own intelligence, which most of his life he had to hold at bay.
Dodgson by all accounts was profoundly preoccupied by balance, orderliness and control. As Isa Bowman noted, ‘all the minutiae of life received an extreme attention at his hands’ and his hands always ‘wore a pair of grey cotton gloves’.52 There were two sides to this. It made him a stickler for detail, principle, rules and regulations when it came to running the college, which led to regular altercations with the Dean, college servants, and fellow dons when he was Curator of the Common Room. ‘Except to little girls, he was not an alluring personage’, wrote William Tuckwell of New College. Tuckwell characterized him as ‘austere, shy, precise, absorbed in mathematical reverie, watchfully tenacious of his dignity, stiffly conservative in political, theological, social theory, his life mapped out in squares like Alice’s landscape.53 Yet to girls he clearly was an alluring personage, as many of them testified later, and his rooms in Tom Quad appeared to Isa Bowman as ‘a fairyland for children.’54 If so, it was a fairy-land which, like the squares in Alice’s landscape, was precisely mapped out. As Through the Looking-Glass, The Game of Logic and his popularizing works on logic all show, Dodgson remained a Euclidean even at play.
At the heart of the Alice books is Dodgson’s dream identification with his child heroine. The writer sees through Alice’s eyes. In his later work he never attained this kind of identification again. In his other literary and pictorial representations of children, they remain very much objects of adult manipulation. They are viewed through the sentimentalist’s or the voyeur’s lens, as idealized fictional innocents like the protagonists of Sylvie and Bruno or as the carefully staged beauties, captured clothed, partially clothed or unclothed in the huge archive of his photographs of child models. The newly invented camera was Dodgson’s passport to respectable middle-class and artistic homes, allowing him to gratify his passion for capturing the famous social, literary and artistic ‘lions’ of the day on the one hand – Tennyson, the Rossettis, Millais, George MacDonald, Ellen Terry, Prince Leopold and other Oxonian and national celebrities – and little girls on the other. The girls might be dressed as themselves or in theatrical costume, or in what came to be his ‘favourite costume’, wearing nothing at all. Alice Liddell was his passport to Wonderland – and Alice in Wonderland became his passport to Fame, a fame that, for all his notorious touchiness about his incognito (he would return letters addressed to ‘Lewis