Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [6]
However uncongenial he found the all-male, sport-dominated culture of public school, he typically won prizes in almost every subject, and soon found himself, under the patronage of his father’s mentor Dr Pusey, at his father’s college, Christ Church, Oxford, where he took up residence in 1851. Dr Pusey wrote to his father, commending his ‘uniform, steady and good conduct’, and young Charles continued to follow in his father’s footsteps. He read classics and mathematics like him, like him emerged with a First in mathematics (falling short of his father’s Double First), and like him ended up with a studentship at Christ Church with the expectation of going on into the Church. Though young Charles was eventually ordained in 1861, after some soul-searching, he didn’t go on, like his father, to a parish and family of his own. Christ Church was not to be a stepping-stone but his home for the rest of his life.
His childhood was over, but the idea of it lived on. Nothing could be much less like the Brontës’ childhood in that other Yorkshire parsonage than the Dodgsons’ at Croft, but as for the Brontës at Haworth, the children’s home-made writing culture helped shape Charles’s future career. As Donald Thomas notes, ‘the most impressive and durable memorial of Croft was the succession of magazines for the younger children that Charles wrote, edited and produced’.28 A far cry from the Brontës’ chronicles of Angria, these largely comic productions were full of spoofs, parodies and jokes. They included the ironically entitled ‘Useful and Instructive Poetry’ written for Wilfred and Louisa in about 1845 and ‘The Rectory Magazine’ of 1848, culminating in ‘The Rectory Umbrella’, christened after the giant yew tree in the garden, which Charles wrote and illustrated on his own for a year and a half before going up to Oxford.29 There is a sense in which these occasional performances established the pattern he was to follow for the rest of his life. In the closed environment of the God-fearing, conservative vicarage of his childhood, Charles discovered a quasi-magical role as children’s entertainer in contrast to that of preacher like his father. Though he did eventually become a clergyman and a reluctant preacher, he remained a comic writer, puzzle-maker and spellbinder, whose inventive gifts were largely directed towards an audience of children (or, in the Oxford squibs and pamphlets, his fellow dons at Christ Church). ‘The Rectory Umbrella’ seems an inspired umbrella title for all the comic household magazines devised in the school holidays, in the margins of his serious, prize-laden academic career in Rugby. The frontispiece of ‘The Rectory Umbrella’ shows a figure sheltering below an umbrella of Jokes, Riddles, Fun, Poetry and Tales, taking refuge from the stones slung at him by the demons of woe, crossness, ennui and spite. Dodgson’s long career as a solo entertainer was lived out under sheltering familial umbrellas – first that of the parental rectory at Croft, then that of Christ Church, Oxford, which in 1851 became his permanent home. In both places, the comic art of this most defensive personality clearly functioned as a defence against anxieties that could not be held at bay even there.
In his diary for 1855, which he calls ‘the most eventful year of his life’, Dodgson notes that he had begun it ‘as a poor bachelor student’, and ended it as ‘a master and tutor in Ch. Ch., with an income of more than £300 a year, and the course of mathematical tuition marked out by God’s providence, for at least some years to come’.30 In fact, providence ordained that Dodgson would be a mathematics lecturer for twenty-five years and persist in the even tenor of his way at Christ