Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [11]
Dodgson’s life, with the exception of his unlikely trip to Moscow in 1867, was lived at the heart of upper-middle-class England, anchored to Christ Church, Oxford. From this base, he kept an eye on his many unmarried, stuttering siblings, who went to settle in Guildford after their father’s death, and took long seaside holidays, first on the Isle of Wight, then at the more respectable Eastbourne, where he could indulge his passion for other people’s young daughters. During the rest of the year, he took regular trips to London, to photograph the famous, visit family and friends, and pursue his main cultural interests by visiting theatres and galleries. As with photography, however, his cultural interests too revolved almost exclusively around little girls. He enjoyed their company, and regularly took them to plays and pantomimes, art galleries and exhibitions, where he was particularly interested in viewing other girls on stage or in the picture frame. His taste in theatre was largely determined by his taste for child actresses – like Ellen Terry – and by the real or imagined taste of his child friends. He disapproved of music-hall and in Podsnappish vein told Marianne Richards, ‘I have a dream of Bowdlerising Bowdler’, that is ‘editing a Shakespeare that shall be absolutely fit for girls’.56 He disapproved of Isa Bowman when she played morally questionable roles, and was a ceaseless campaigner to keep theatre free of any remote sexual innuendo or whiff of ‘irreverence’.57 Much the same can be said of the visual arts. Though he was a keen admirer of the Pre-Raphaelites, the views on art recorded in his diaries are largely confined to remarks about the beauty or otherwise of the children represented there. It was fortunate for him, in this respect, that Victorian painting catered so generously for his particular tastes – had he been born in the heyday of Cubism or Abstract Expressionism, he would not have fared so well. Year by year, his diaries scrupulously record not only these visits to studios, galleries and theatres, but the list of child conquests made on trains, beaches and in other places of public amusement. Dodgson was the Casanova of the Victorian nursery. In 1863, he listed in his diary the names of 108 children (all girls) that were ‘Photographed or to be Photographed’, arranging them alphabetically (there were five Alices, five Beatrices, six Constances and so on). His diaries year by year are a roll-call of conquests. Eastbourne 1877 was a particularly good year for cruising at the seaside (‘I could, if I liked, make friends with a new set of nice children every day!’ he wrote in August) and when he set off for Guildford in late September, he listed thirty-four children’s names in his diary, all female.58 He was writing Euclid and His Modern Rivals at the time. In 1879 he told the twelve-year-old Kathleen Eschwege, one of the many girls he met on trains: ‘I am fond of children (except boys) and have more child friends than I could possibly count on my fingers, even if I were a centipede (by the way have they fingers? I’m afraid they’re only feet, but, of course, they use them for the same purpose and that is why no other insects, except centipedes, ever succeed in doing Long Multiplication)’.59 Dodgson’s particular variation on Long Multiplication with little girls earned him Jean Cocteau’s title of ‘Impuni Don Juan des naïves amours’.60
With the exception of his anomalous pursuit of this endless sequence of little girls, he led a thoroughly conventional, industrious and parochial life as a don in Oxford, and, after his father’s death in 1868, as head of the largely unmarried Dodgson family (he had six unmarried sisters), now housed at Guildford. In addition to his children’s books and comic verse,