Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass - Lewis Carroll [2]
There really are curious persons so down on fantasy that they find no pleasure in Carroll’s Alice books. Consider what H. L. Mencken says about them in his autobiographical Happy Days:
I was a grown man, and far gone in sin, before I ever brought myself to tackle “Alice in Wonderland,” and even then I made some big skips and wondered sadly how and why such feeble jocosity had got so high a reputation. I am willing to grant that it must be a masterpiece, as my betters allege—but not to my taste, not for me.
Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a shy bachelor who taught elementary mathematics at Oxford University’s Christ Church, and who had a passion for photography when that art was in its infancy. He loved attractive little girls much more than boys. He was especially fond of the real Alice, Alice Liddell, daughter of the dean of Christ Church. Her last name rhymes with “fiddle.” Carroll puns three times on the name’s closeness to “little” in his prefatory poem to the first Alice book, and again in Chapter 7 where he writes about the three little girls (Alice had two sisters) who lived at the bottom of a well. There is convincing evidence that Carroll was romantically in love with Alice.
Morton Cohen, in his splendid biography of Carroll, speculates that Carroll may actually have approached Mr. and Mrs. Liddell with a suggestion that he wished to marry Alice someday. At any rate, Mrs. Liddell suddenly decided that Carroll should stop seeing Alice, and she burned all his letters to her. The page in Carroll’s diary for the time when this occurred has been torn from the diary and presumably destroyed. It is widely believed that in the second Alice book, Carroll intended the White Knight to be a caricature of himself. When he waves good-bye to Alice, as she moves to the final square of the chessboard to become a queen, the scene represents his final sad parting with the only child-friend he truly loved.
Among Carroll’s superb photographs of famous persons and young children were hundreds of pictures of unclad little girls. After gossip implied there was something unhealthy in such picture taking, Carroll destroyed all his nude negatives. The four that survived are reproduced in Morton Cohen’s beautiful volume, Reflections in a Looking Glass: A Centennial Celebration of Lewis Carroll, Photographer.
There is no question that Carroll’s fondness for young girls, and photographing them without clothes, was in his mind a completely innocent admiration of their charms. He was a devout Anglican, an ordained deacon who often preached in nearby churches. His religious opinions were strictly orthodox except for an heretical refusal to believe God would eternally punish anyone, including Satan. Entries in his diary constantly repeat a yearning to obey God’s will and to be forgiven for sins that are never specified.
Lewis Carroll was born in 1832, in Cheshire, England, the third of eleven children of the Reverend Charles Dodgson, an Anglican priest. Although Carroll’s major hobby was photography, he was also fond of showing magic tricks to child friends and taking them to see conjuring shows. He liked to form a handkerchief into a mouse, then make it jump from his hand when he stroked it. He would fold from paper what he called “Paper pistols” that made a loud bang when swung through the air. He was an avid patron of the theater, though frequently offended by stage profanity and scenes he considered sacrilegious or licentious. The famous actress Ellen Terry was a lifelong friend.
The first Alice book had its origin in a story Carroll told Alice and her two sisters when they were on a rowing trip up the Isis, a branch of the Thames. Alice begged him to write it down for her. This he did, calling it Alice’s Adventures Underground.