Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [9]
Spent the day at the Deanery, photographing, with very slender success. Though I am disappointed in missing this last opportunity of getting good pictures of the party, it was not withstanding one of the pleasantest days I have ever spent there. I had Alice and Edith with me till 12; then Harry and Ina till the early dinner at 2, which I joined; and all four children all afternoon. The photographing was accordingly plentifully interspersed with swinging, backgammon, etc. I mark this day most specially with a white stone.46
This is as close as the diary ever comes to telling us what the children meant to him, but it conceals as much as it reveals. The ‘annalist’ is no analyst. The cryptically jubilant sign-post of the ‘white stone’ is also a burial stone, a symbol of what his contemporary Matthew Arnold called ‘The Buried Life’. When we look for evidence of Carroll’s ‘inner life’, what kinds of experience might lie buried behind the rigidly ‘externalized’ record of the diaries and letters, the pamphlets and memoirs, this is what meets us: a white stone.
A number of ‘serious’ poems dating from these years and published later in The Three Sunsets (1898) suggest a preoccupation with sexual guilt, contrasted with visions of childlike innocence: ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’, ‘Beatrice’, ‘Stolen Waters’, ‘Only a Woman’s Hair’. They may tell us something of Dodgson’s mysterious paedophile sexuality. The watery guilt scenario played out in ‘Stolen Waters’ of 1862,
for example, though largely stolen from Coleridge and Keats’s exercises in the Gothic ballad form, invokes a ‘happy, innocent child’ (apparently five years old), and this ‘sainted, ethereal maid’ is threatened by ‘a grim wild beast’, a ‘savage heart’ in ‘human guise’.47 During the same period, Dodgson’s diaries are particularly racked with conventionally pious expressions of guilt and resolutions to change his life, as his best recent biographer, Morton N. Cohen, notes.48 Such entries occur overwhelmingly in the decade 1862 to 1872, his great creative decade, most intensively in the years from 1862 to 1867, culminating in 1863, the year of the break with the Liddells and the time of the genesis of the Alice books. Some time later, his friend Lord Salisbury wrote, ‘They say Dodgson has gone out of his mind in consequence of having been refused by the real Alice (Liddell)’, adding that ‘It certainly looks like it.’49 Dodgson himself, while noting the fact of his banishment from the Liddells, says nothing of this – or anything else about his state of mind at the great watershed in his life represented by the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1866 and the break with its only begetter, Alice Liddell.
There’s a telling moment in Through the Looking-Glass which bears on Dodgson’s resistance to autobiography. ‘“The horror of that moment”’, the King cries after Alice has put the little royal chess piece down, ‘“I shall never, never forget!”’ Advised by the Queen to make a note of this in his memorandum book, he starts to do so, only to have Alice force his hand and write ‘The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He balances very badly’. Reading it, the Queen exclaims, ‘“That’s not a memorandum of your feelings!”’ The same holds true not only of Dodgson’s diaries but Carrollian nonsense: they hold both ‘horror’ and ‘desire’ at bay. In fact nonsense can convert the disorderly world of unbalanced feeling into externalized absurdity.50 Much of the obsessional inventiveness of Dodgson’s life, in particular his imaginative life – his investment in inventing games, puzzles, ingenious gadgets like his Nictograph for night-writing, his lists and catalogues – can be seen as a defensive construction against not only anxiety but his own subjectivity, and