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Searching for truth in Wonderland
25 April 2010 Reviewed by Andrew Lynch
Lewis Carroll The Mystery of the Author of Alice in Wonderland
By Jenny Woolf
Haus Books, €22.80
Of all the fantastical characters that Alice meets when she tumbles down the rabbit hole and ends up in Wonderland, the Cheshire cat is perhaps the most elusive of all.
‘‘I do wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly," she exclaims at one point. ‘‘You make me feel quite giddy."
Anyone who sets out to write a biography of Lewis Carroll will know how Alice felt. Despite creating one of the most popular and enduring children’s stories of all time, the stammering mathematician born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson has always been a frustratingly shadowy figure.
His posthumous reputation has steadily declined in recent years, as various books have accused him of being a paedophile, a drug addict and even, most ludicrously of all, Jack the Ripper.
Jenny Woolf comes not to bury her subject but to praise him. Divided into thematic chapters rather than a strict chronology, her book revisits every major controversy surrounding Carroll and finds him not guilty on all counts.
In the end, however, even her best efforts are defeated by the sheer paucity of available evidence - which means that the mystery, as she rather grandly defines it, will almost certainly never be solved.
The bare facts of Carroll’s life can be summed up very quickly. Born in 1832, he was the eldest son of a Cheshire vicar, attended the prestigious Rugby School (where he was deeply unhappy and possibly sexually abused), and entered Christ Church College in Oxford at the age of 19. A fellowship allowed him to stay there for the rest of his days, teaching mathematics, until he died from pneumonia at the age of 65.
He never married, only travelled abroad once and was described by Mark Twain as ‘‘the stillest and shyest full-grown man I have ever met’’.
Contrary to popular perception, however, he was not a recluse. His friends included the family of ten-year-old Alice Liddell, to whom he spun a series of nonsensical tales to keep her amused on boat trips down the Thames.
Eventually he was persuaded to write them down and found himself more shocked than anyone when they became the most translated works in English literature after Shakespeare.
The best anecdote in Woolf’s book, sadly, turns out to be apocryphal. Queen Victoria supposedly enjoyed Alice’s adventures so much that she asked for the first edition of Carroll’s next publication to be delivered to her. Two years later, a beautifully wrapped package arrived at the palace, containing an inscribed copy of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Geometry.
As this invented story suggests, Carroll took his mathematical work far more seriously than his absurd stories and comic verse. Papers found after his death showed that, if he had lived to write up his research, schoolchildren might well have been taught Dodgson rather than Venn diagrams. He also sent an eloquent argument for a proportional representation voting system to his fellow undergraduate, Lord Salisbury, which would have changed the political history of Britain if the future prime minister had been persuaded to adopt it.
The murkiest aspect of Carroll’s life by far is his enthusiasm for photographing young girls, sometimes in the nude. Woolf argues vigorously that children in Victorian England were seen as symbols of sexless purity, pointing out that the parents involved were always happy to leave their offspring in the author’s care. Although some readers might retort that the same was said of Michael Jackson, she makes a strong case that retrospective accusations of paedophilia have to be put in the cultural context of the times.
Her biggest coup is the discovery of Carroll’s bank account, which shows that he made surprisingly little money from his books and donated most of it to children’s charities anyway. It also reveals that, in his late 20s, he gave away a quarter of his income to somebody called Forster.
The identity of this person cannot be ascertained since Carroll’s diaries for the period were destroyed by his family, but it does inspire Woolf to imagine a scenario that might explain her subject’s secretive personality.
Her theory is that around this time Carroll became entangled in an adulterous affair that ended badly and left him wracked with guilt.
This inspired him to cultivate friendships with children, which allowed the sensitive author to enjoy affection and appreciate physical beauty without the complication of sexual attraction.
It’s a reasonable hypothesis and Wool f presents it skilfully, but since the trail has gone cold it can never be any more than that.
One of Carroll’s Christ Church friends wrote that ‘‘any account of his life that is truthful must in some measures be disappointing, because the life of an Oxford don is for the most part not rich in incidents that are likely to attract the general reader’’.
Woolf has done her level best with the available material, producing a lively and enjoyable biography in the process - but despite her valiant efforts, the mystery of Lewis Carroll remains firmly stuck down the rabbit hole.
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