Reminiscences of Lewis Carroll

I

To recall my first meeting with the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, or — as he was familiarly known to the world — ‘Lewis Carroll,’ I must, I regret to say, go back fifty-eight years. But, though I was only a chubby five-year-old, through one of those odd quirks of memory by which certain scenes or episodes of childhood are indelibly etched upon the brain I remember every detail of that meeting as if it were yesterday.

It was a typical Oxford afternoon in late autumn — damp, foggy, cheerless; the gray towers of the distant colleges across the ‘Parks,’ as they are called (not because they are more than one park, but because Cromwell stationed his parks of artillery on the ground later made into one of the loveliest open spaces in the world), looked grayer than usual in the dim autumnal light. A number of little girls, bursting with youthful spirits and all agog for mischief, danced along one of the paths, a staid governess bringing up the rear. Presently one of the number spied a tall black clerical figure in the distance, swinging along toward the little group with a characteristic briskness, almost jerkiness, of step.

‘Here comes Mr. Dodgson,’ she cried. ‘Let’s make a barrier across the path so that he can’t pass.’

No sooner said than done. The clerical figure, appreciating the situation, advanced at the double and charged the line with his umbrella. The line broke in confusion, and the next moment four of the little band were clinging to such portions of the black-coated figure as they could seize upon. Two little people, however, hung back, seized with shyness and a sudden consciousness of audacity, a sudden awe of this tall, dignified gentleman in black broadcloth and white tie. But in a moment he had shaken off the clinging, laughing children, and before the two little strangers had time to realize what was happening they found themselves trotting along beside him, a hand of each firmly clasped in his strong, kind hands, and chattering away as if they had known him all their lives. Thus began a lifelong friendship between Lewis Carroll and the younger of those two little girls — myself.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born at Daresbury in Cheshire, of which parish his father was vicar, on January 27, 1832. There is nothing much to record of his boyhood or early manhood. There was little to single him out from the hosts of English boys and young men who come from clerical homes and pass through the ordinary routine of public school and university. He showed marked mathematical ability white at Oxford, and, though only taking a third in greats, he took a first in the final school of mathematics. This led to a mathematical studentship and lectureship at Christ Church, which, in turn, led to his taking deacon’s orders in 1861. In those days orders were an essential qualification for most of the teaching posts in the University. He never took priest’s orders, as, owing to a slight but decided stammer, he felt himself cut off from parochial work; and, for the academic life he had embarked upon, deacon’s orders were sufficient.

When I first met him, in 1870, he had already reached the comfortable goal of his career; that is to say, he was what is called a senior student, of Christ Church and mathematical lecturer to the college — a combination of posts which brought him in a good income and gave him lifelong possession of what was perhaps the most spacious and beautiful suite of college rooms in Oxford.

And what an El Dorado of delights those rooms were to his innumerable child friends! The large sitting room was lined with well-filled bookshelves, under which ran a row of cupboards all round the four walls. Oh, those cupboards! What wondrous treasures they contained for the delectation of youth! Mechanical bears, dancing dolls, toys and puzzles of every description, came from them in endless profusion. Even after I was grown up I never paid a visit to his rooms without experiencing over again a thrill of delicious anticipation when a cupboard door swung open.

Lewis Carroll was one of the first of the immense family of amateur photographers — and photography in those days was a very different thing from what it is now. It was no case then of ‘Press the button and we do the rest’; you had to do everything yourself, from the coating of your plates with the old wet silver emulsion to the development and printing. Photographing or being photographed in those days was no joke; and for a nervous child, dressed up as a heathen Chinee, a beggar girl, or a fisher maiden, to keep still forty-five seconds at a time was no mean ordeal. I was an extremely bad subject, I am sorry to say, and Mr. Dodgson only took me when he was afraid my feelings would be hurt by his constant preference for my sister as a sitter. She was one of his very best child subjects, and some of the photographs we still have of her are really beautiful specimens of early photographic art.

Almost all the famous men and women of the day posed before Lewis Carroll’s camera in the studio he erected on the Christ Church leads; but, with the whimsical contrariness which was characteristic of him, as soon as the wet plate with all its attendant difficulties and messiness went out and the clean, convenient dry plate came in, he abandoned photography, and not one photograph did he ever take by the new and infinitely simplified process. But I never catch a whiff of the potent ordor of collodion nowadays without being transported on the magic wings of memory to Lewis Carroll’s dark room, where, shrunk to childhood’s proportions, I see myself watching, open-mouthed, the mysterious process of coating the plate, or, standing on a box drawn out from under the sink to assist my small dimensions, observing the still more mysterious process of development. And then the stories — the never-ending, never-failing stories he told in answer to our never-ending, never-failing demands! He was indeed a bringer of delight in those dim far-off days, and I look back upon the hours spent in his dear and much-loved company as oases of brightness in a somewhat gray and melancholy childhood.

II

The other day, looking through bundles of old letters yellowed by the flight of years, I came upon this delicious little note, written in 1874 to my sister Julia and myself, aged respectively eleven and nine: —

What remarkably wicked children you are! I don’t think you would find in all history, even if you go back to the times of Nero and Heliogabalus, any instance of children so heartless and so entirely reckless about returning story-books. Now I think of it, neither Nero nor Heliogabalus ever failed to return any story-book they borrowed. That is certain, because they never borrowed any, and that again is certain because there were none printed in those days.
Affectionately yours, C. L. D.

Another letter written years later, when I was eighteen and my sister twenty, I cannot resist quoting. It refers to a visit paid to his rooms by my sister and myself and Miss Marion Terry, who, with her sisters Kate and Ellen, had been a friend of Lewis Carroll’s from childhood. He introduced me to Marion Terry when I was seventeen, and I promptly developed a girlish adoration for her, to which he alludes in the letter: —

MY DEAR ETHEL,
To save the few surviving fragments of our friendship (blighted as it is by the transference of all your capabilities of affection to one single individual in London) from drifting away into oblivion, I will, if Thursday afternoon be fine, be at our usual rendezvous at 3 1/2, and if you are there we will take a walk and then come round here and partake of the cup that does not inebriate, and you shall tell me your experiences in the society of one who was once my friend.
You will be kind enough to tell Judy (with my love, which I send most reluctantly) tliat I may forgive, but cannot forget, her utterly heartless behaviour in my rooms yesterday. You were not present, and I will not pain your sensitive nature by describing it. But I will be even with her some day. Some sultry afternoon, when she is here, half fainting with thirst, I will produce a bottle of delicious cool lemonade. This I will uncork, and pour it foaming into a large tumbler, and then, after putting the tumbler well within her reach, she shall have the satisfaction of seeing me drink it myself — not a drop of it shall reach her lips!

However, it was very nice of you to bring my dear old friend to see me, and when she had vanished from my gaze what had I but mathematical considerations to console me? ‘She may be limited and superficial,’ I said to myself. ‘She may even be without depth. But she is at least equilateral and equiangular — in one word, what is she but a Poly-gon?’¹

I enjoyed the proud distinction of being one of the very few of his child friends with whom he remained on terms of close friendship after they had attained years of discretion. In fact, I believe I was almost the only one of his Oxford child friends who could claim that distinction. He always used to say that when the time came for him to take off his hat when he met one of his quondam child friends in the Oxford streets it was time for the friendship to cease. Even our friendship was threatened with disruption when I had reached the age of twenty — through a much-loved dachshund of mine, the gift of Professor Max Müller. (Oddly enough, both Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll detested dogs, a trait I have always found it difficult to reconcile with the rest of their characters.) My dachshund, with that unfailing intuition as to friends and enemies which may be said to constitute a sixth sense in the canine race, attacked Mr. Dodgson’s legs without provocation on the occasion of an afternoon call upon my mother. Nothing would induce Mr. Dodgson to enter the house after this outrage, though no real injury had been inflicted. Next day came a letter containing an elaborate diagram of the rent which had been made in his left trouser leg by Bergmann’s teeth, and announcing his determination never again to cross our threshold until the dog had been destroyed. Needless to say, Bergmann was not sacrificed even on the altar of so old and valued a friendship, but Mr. Dodgson stuck to his resolution, and ever after I had to meet him at a particular spot inside the Park gates when he wished to take me for one of our regular walks, ending with tea and buttered toast in his rooms.

Two more letters belonging to the adult period of my friendship with Lewis Carroll are worth quoting, not only for their touches of humor, but for the light they throw upon certain unexpected sides of his curiously complex personality. The first is dated Christ Church, May 22, 1883, the year I left the Oxford High School. I give it in full, as it contains one or two allusions which call for explanation and comment: —

Now, my dear Ethel, I have a really complicated problem to put before you. What you have had in the High School is nothing to it! Here are the data — On Saturday morning (hour unsettled) I go up to Town, and on Saturday evening (hour unsettled) I return. And in the interim I go (of course with a friend — but identity unsettled) to see the Danischeffs (spelling unsettled). Now the problem is — who will come with me? Here are my ideas. If your Mother is well enough for such an expedition and would like to come, it would give me great pleasure to treat her to it — and you would probably be glad that she should see for herself what manner of being the Miss Marion Terry is, for whom you have formed such an attachment — Quite possibly, when she has seen her, she may be inclined to think that she is rather nice after all! — But suppose Mrs. Arnold, for any cause, declines— what next? Well, I think Judy ought to have the next chance; you see, I have taken both Lucy and you to things — but her never. I don’t know, by the way, what HE² would say to it! If she thinks HE would n’t like it, perhaps SHE had better not come!
If she fails, then I think you should have the next chance, because I am hoping to take Lucy to Guildford before long — and if once we get there, we are sure to go larking about among the theatres!
If you fail, Lucy remains as the last surviving possibility — and if she fails too, then please let me know with all speed that I may secure another companion.
Love to your sisters,
Yours always affectionately,
C. L. DODGSON.
(The long tail to the ‘ Y’ is to emphasise the question ‘ Y should I be affectionate?’)

The allusion to taking my sister Lucy to Guildford referred to a projected visit to his six unmarried sisters, who lived together in a charming old house in Guildford called ‘The Chestnuts.’ In stating their number as six I am trusting entirely to memory and asserting what for many long years I have believed to be true. But I must confess to being somewhat shaken in this long-cherished belief recently on meeting an old Oxford friend and contemporary — also a child friend of Lewis Carroll — who was quite positive that there were only three Miss Dodgsons when she stayed at ‘The Chestnuts.’ I can only repeat my assured conviction that when I stayed there there were six!

It is, of course, possible that the state of extreme nervousness to which these rather alarming, austere, devoutly evangelical, and learned ladies (one of them, Miss Henrietta, was, if I remember rightly, an advanced mathematician) reduced me, when, as a rather shy girl of eighteen or nineteen, I paid my only visit to their hospitable and charming home, caused me to see double. On the occasion of that visit Mr. Dodgson read family prayers before breakfast each morning and also the Lessons at the morning service at the neighboring church, in the churchyard of which he who brought the priceless gift of common laughter to the civilized world now sleeps his last, most quiet sleep.

The phrase, ‘larking about among the theatres,’ taken in conjunction with his allusion to his sisters’ home at Guildford, brings us up against what was perhaps one of the most curious combinations of an oddly self-contradictory and paradoxical character. What one may call the basic paste, both hereditary and individual, of his personality was a rigid evangelicalism. His sense of humor, exquisite as it was, failed absolutely when any allusion to the Bible, however innocuous, was involved. The patriarchs, the prophets, major and minor, were as sacrosanct in his eyes as any of t he great figures of the New Testament; and a disrespectful allusion to Noah or even to Nebuchadnezzar would have shocked and displeased him quite as much as any implied belittlement of Saint Paul. Stories of children which even remotely hinged upon Biblical episodes or characters, or even upon any of the hymns in Hymns Ancient and Modern, were received always with the severest rebuke to their narrators, and I shall never forget the snub administered to one unfortunate acquaintance, unaware of this characteristic of his, who ventured to tell him the familiar story of little Miss Bellairs and her orisons!

Taken by itself, this stern evangelical rigidity in regard to the Bible and religious matters would not have been unexpected or remarkable in a man of his heredity and upbringing. But what did strike the student of psychology as curious, and to a certain extent as incongruous, was that, side by side with this narrowness of outlook in one direction, was a certain strain of what can only be called Bohemianism, manifested in his love of the theatre, his enjoyment and pride in the friendship of distinguished theatrical artists such as the Terry sisters, and more particularly perhaps in his love of child actresses. The latter trait showed itself first in the delight he took in dressing up his little girl friends in all sorts of fancy dresses (of which he kept an almost inexhaustible stock in the great cupboard to be found in his spacious Christ Church rooms) for the purposes of photography, and found its full satisfaction and fulfillment in the various dramatic versions of Alice in Wonderland which, to his great delight, were produced upon the London stage.

The next and last letter which I reproduce is as follows: —

CHRIST CHURCH.
May 12/84.
DEAR ETHEL,
Are you up to about 6 miles (altogether) of walking? If so, I should much like to have your society in going to Hampton Poyle to call on an old ‘child-friend,’ Mrs. Kidston that is, Mona Patou (daughter of Sir Noel Paton) that was. The train to Woodstock Road goes at 3, and I would meet you at 1/4 to 3, punctually, on the shady side of Beaumont St. We should reach W. Road at 3.12, and (after a mile’s walking) H. Poyle about 3 1/2. We might stay about 1/2 an hour and we must then walk home (about 5 m.), as there is no train handy. We ought to be home about 6 — I would go almost any day that suited you but the more choice of days you can give me the better.
Ever affectionately yours,
C. L. DODGSON.

There is a baby boy there to be admired — about two years old I think, and in this matter you will he of incalculable service to me, and relieve me of all responsibility as to saying the proper thing when animals of that kind are offered for inspection.

The letter, apart from its characteristic touch of fun, is interesting as showing the age at which his love for children began — and ended! With regard to the proposal contained in the letter (though after the lapse of fortyfour years I cannot be absolutely certain on the point), I think I may say without fear of inaccuracy that I did not join him on that particular expedition, ‘6 miles (altogether) of walking’ being almost as much beyond my powers or inclination then as now!

III

But to turn from personal reminiscences to facts of more general interest, in connection with the origin of Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll’s mode of writing, and so forth.

On July 4, 1862, we find this ever-mcmorable entry in his diary, which he kept with the same methodical care he bestowed upon everything he did.

Made an expedition up the river to Godstow with the 3 Liddells; we had tea on the bank there and did not reach Christ Church till half past 8.

On the opposite page he added, somewhat later:—

On which occasion, I told them the fairytale of ’Alice’s Adventures Underground,’ which I undertook to write out for Alice.

Alice Liddell, daughter of the Honorable and Very Reverend Henry George Liddell, D.D., Dean of Christ Church, was the original ‘Alice,’ to whom, with her sisters, the tale was first told, and for whom the book was originally written. I have had the precious manuscript in my hand many a time — a slender leather-bound notebook in which Lewis Carroll had printed the story in a clear neat print, adorned with his own inimitable illustrations. It was a lifelong regret with him that he could not draw, and the illustrations are certainly remarkable for their anatomy, or, rather, lack of it. But at the same time they are full of the same whimsical humor as marked the text, and anyone who studies these original drawings in the original text, which was reproduced in facsimile many years later, will see how many suggestions Tenniel obtained from them for his own illustrations to the story in the enlarged form it ultimately assumed for publication. I remember meeting Mr. Dodgson in the street in Oxford one morning, just after the reproduction of this facsimile had been decided upon, and the naive vanity with which he said, ‘Well, you see, it seemed to me that the public might like to see the original form of a book of which over seventy thousand copies have been sold in England alone.’ Then he went on to tell me of the precautions the publishers had had to take to prevent the theft of the priceless little notebook,—of how a detective had been engaged to sit in the room all the time the pages were being photographed for reproduction, — and as he spoke his face beamed with the pleasure the scheme had given him. He was indeed a curious mixture of harmless vanity and an almost morbid shrinking from publicity. Nothing annoyed him so much as any revelation of the identity of Lewis Carroll with the Reverend C. L. Dodgson, senior student of Christ Church, and he often used to chuckle at the thought of the numerous autographs, presumably his but which he had persuaded his fellow college dons to write for him, which were included in the albums of autograph hunters all over the world.

Alice Liddell, afterward Mrs. Reginald Hargreaves, has put on record her recollections of the story’s inception: —

Most of Mr. Hodgson’s stories were told to us on river expeditions to Nuneham or Godstow near Oxford. I believe the beginning of ‘Alice’ was told one afternoon when the sun was so burning that we had landed in the meadows up the river. Here from all three came the old petition, ‘Tell us a story,’ and so began the ever-delightful tale. Sometimes, to tease us, — and perhaps being really tired, — Mr. Dodgson would stop suddenly and say, ‘And that’s all till next time.’ ‘Oh, but it is next time!’ would be the exclamation from all three — and after some persuasion the story would start afresh. Another day, perhaps, the story would begin in the boat, and Mr. Dodgson, in the middle of telling a thrilling adventure, would pretend to go fast asleep, to our great dismay.

‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’ was the original name of the story — later on it became ‘Alice’s Hour in Elfland.’ It was not until June 18, 1864, that the author finally decided to call it ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.’ When he promised to write out the story for Alice he had no idea of publication, and it is to his old friend George Macdonald, the well-known poet and novelist, himself author of some of the most enchanting children’s stories in the English language, that we owe the ‘Alice’ we know and love so well. Macdonald urged him to send the story to Messrs. Macmillan, who immediately agreed to publish it, and in July 1865 the book first saw the light of day. It was translated into almost every European language, and Mr. Dodgson gave me a copy of all the translations, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and so forth; but alas, out of all those much-treasured volumes — to say nothing of the English versions and all the copies of his later books which he gave me — I now possess only the German, Italian, and French translations. All the other precious volumes are reposing on the bookshelves of immoral and soulless book borrowers, whose consciences, I hope, may some day awake and prick them!

Lewis Carroll’s later books were written on a different plan altogether from the first ‘Alice.’ He used always to keep a pencil and piece of paper by his bedside, for he found that his most absurd ideas generally came to him on the borderland of dreams, and as soon as they had assumed form and shape he jotted them down. In this way most of the verses scattered through Through the Looking-Glass and Sylvia and Bruno were written, and the story afterward was woven round the poem. He was often asked what he really meant by The Hunting of the Snark, which by many people was held to contain a profound philosophical thesis, by others a political allegory, and so forth. To all such questions he would reply, ‘I meant nothing at all. I happened one day to be walking along the sands at Eastbourne, and the line came into my head: “For the Snark was a boojum, you see” — and the whole poem arose out of that one totally meaningless line!’

And now it is time to bring these few brief reminiscences of a unique personality to an end, and I feel I cannot say farewell to a much-loved and deeply honored friend in more fitting words than by quoting from the sermon preached in Christ Church Cathedral on the Sunday after his death in 1898, by the Very Reverend Dean Paget: —

' We may differ, according to our difference of taste or temperament, in appraising Charles Dodgson’s genius, but that that great gift was his — that his best work ranks with the very best of its kind — has been owned with a recognition too wide and spontaneous to leave room for doubt. The brilliant, venturesome imagination, defying forecast with ever-fresh surprise; the sense of humor in its finest and most naïve form; the power to touch with lightest hand the undercurrent of pathos in the midst of fun; the audacity of creative fancy and the delicacy of insight — these are rare gifts, and surely they were his. Yes, but it was his simplicity of mind and heart that raised them all, not only in his work, but in his life, in all his ways, in the man as we knew him, to something higher than any mere enumeration of them tells: that almost curious simplicity, at times; that real and touching childlikeness that marked him in all fields of thought, appearing in his love of children and in their love for him, in his dread of giving pain to any living creature, in a certain disproportion now and then of the view he took of things — yes, and also in that deepest life, where the pure in heart and those who become as little children see the very truth, and walk in the fear and love of God.’