Lewis Carroll

Copyright Michael D. Robbins 2005

Astro-Rayological Interpretation & Charts
Quotes
Biography
Images and Physiognomic Interpretation

to Volume 3 Table of Contents

Lewis Carroll—Logician, Mathematician and Author of Alice in Wonderland

(1832-1898) January 27, 1832, Daresburg, England, 3:48 AM, LMT. (Source: Sabian Symbols, Daath in Modern Astrology, and Lyndoe in American Astrology. LMR gives 3:45) Died, January 14, 1898, Guidford, England.         



(Ascendant Sagittarius with Moon in Sagittarius exactly on the Ascendant; MC, Libra; Sun conjunct Neptune in Aquarius, both widely conjunct Uranus in Aquarius with Jupiter also in Aquarius; Mercury in Capricorn; Venus and Mars conjunct in Sagittarius; Saturn in Virgo, H9; Pluto in Aries)           

Charles Ludwidge Dodgson, a logician and mathematician. Stammered badly and was deaf in one ear. A shy, fussy bachelor, regarded as a crank. Created the fantasy stories of Alice in Wonderland (1865). and Through the Looking-Glass.

And thus they give the time, that Nature meant for peaceful sleep and meditative snores, to ceaseless din and mindless merriment and waste of shoes and floors.

Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop.

But I was thinking of a plan to dye one's whiskers green.

Curiouser and curiouser!

Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

He was part of my dream, of course - but then I was part of his dream too.

I have had prayers answered - most strangely so sometimes - but I think our heavenly Father's loving-kindness has been even more evident in what He has refused me.

I think I could, if I only knew how to begin. For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.

I'm very brave generally, he went on in a low voice: only today I happen to have a headache.

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. Which road do I take? she asked. Where do you want to go? was his response. I don't know, Alice answered. Then, said the cat, it doesn't matter.

Photography is my one recreation and I think it should be done well.

Speak roughly to your little boy, and beat him when he sneezes: he only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases.

Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.

The regular course was Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with; and then the different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.

The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday - but never jam today.

There comes a pause, for human strength will not endure to dance without cessation; and everyone must reach the point at length of absolute prostration.

What I tell you three times is true.

'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'

While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.

Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.

Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

With a sort of mental squint.

Yet what are all such gaieties to me whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?

Now, here you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, “Who in the world am I?” Ah, that’s the great puzzle!

Lewis Carroll. Possibly a self-portrait taken with assistance.The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27, 1832–January 14, 1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman, and photographer.

His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass as well as the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky".

His facility at word play, logic, and fantasy has delighted audiences ranging from children to the literary elite. But beyond this, his work has become embedded deeply in modern human culture. He has directly influenced artists as diverse as James Joyce, John Lennon, Jefferson Airplane, Aceyalone, Marilyn Manson and Jorge Luis Borges.

There are societies dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works and the investigation of his life in many parts of the world including North America, Japan, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.

His biography has recently come under much question as a result of what has come to be termed the "Carroll Myth"

Antecedents
Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, with some Irish connections. Conservative and High Church Anglican, most of Dodgson's ancestors were army officers or Church of England clergymen. His great-grandfather, also Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become a bishop; his grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in 1803 when his two sons were hardly more than babies.

The elder of these sons — yet another Charles — was Carroll's father. He reverted to the other family business and took holy orders. He went to Rugby School, and thence to Christ Church, Oxford. He was mathematically gifted and won a double first degree which could have been the prelude to a brilliant academic career. Instead he married his first cousin in 1827 and retired into obscurity as a country parson.

Young Charles' father was an active and highly conservative member of the Anglican church who involved himself, sometimes influentially, in the intense religious disputes that were dividing the Anglican church. He was High Church, inclining to Anglo-Catholicism, an admirer of Newman and the Tractarian movement, and he did his best to instill such views in his children. Young Charles, however, was to develop an ambiguous relationship with his father's values and with the Anglican church as a whole.

Young Charles
Young Dodgson was born in the little parsonage of Daresbury in Warrington, Cheshire, the oldest boy but already the third child of the four-and-a-half year old marriage. Eight more were to follow and, remarkably for the time, all of them—seven girls and four boys— survived into adulthood. When Charles was 11, his father was given the living of Croft-on-Tees in north Yorkshire, and the whole family moved to the spacious Rectory. This remained their home for the next twenty-five years.

In his early years, young Dodgson was educated at home. His "reading lists" preserved in the family testify to a precocious intellect: at the age of seven the child was reading The Pilgrim's Progress. He also suffered from a stutter — a condition shared by his siblings — that often influenced his social life throughout his years. At twelve he was sent away to a small private school at nearby Richmond, where he appears to have been happy and settled. But in 1845, young Dodgson moved on to Rugby School, where he was evidently less happy, for as he wrote some years after leaving the place:

I cannot say ... that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again ... I can honestly say that if I could have been ... secure from annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would have been comparative trifles to bear. [1]

The nature of this nocturnal "annoyance" will probably never now be fully understood, but it may be that he is delicately referring to some type of sexual molestation. Scholastically, though, he excelled with apparent ease. "I have not had a more promising boy his age since I came to Rugby" observed R.B. Mayor, the Mathematics master.[2]

Oxford
He left Rugby at the end of 1850 and, after an interval which remains unexplained, went on in January 1851 to Oxford, attending his father's old college, Christ Church. He had only been at Oxford two days when he received a summons home. His mother had died of "inflammation of the brain" — perhaps meningitis or a stroke — at the age of forty-seven.

His early academic career veered between high-octane promise and irresistible distraction. He may not always have worked hard, but he was exceptionally gifted and achievement came easily to him. In 1852 he received a first in Honour Moderations, and shortly after he was nominated to a Studentship, by his father's old friend Canon Edward Pusey. However, a little later he failed an important scholarship through his self-confessed inability to apply himself to study. Even so, his talent as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship, which he continued to hold for the next twenty-six years. The income was good, but the work bored him. Many of his pupils were older and richer than he was, and almost all of them were uninterested. However, despite early unhappiness, Dodgson was to remain at Christ Church, in various capacities, until his death.

Physical appearance
The young adult Charles Dodgson was about six feet tall, slender and handsome, with curling brown hair and blue eyes. He was described in later life as somewhat asymmetrical, or as carrying himself rather stiffly and awkwardly, though this may be on account of a knee injury sustained in middle age. At the age of seventeen, he suffered a severe attack of whooping cough which left him with poor hearing in his right ear and was probably responsible for his chronically weak chest in later life. The only overt defect he carried into adulthood was what he referred to as his "hesitation", a stammer he acquired in early childhood and which plagued him throughout his life.

Stammer
The stammer has always been a potent part of his myth; it is part of the mythology that Dodgson only stammered in adult company, and was free and fluent with children, but there is no evidence to support this idea.[3] Many children of his acquaintance remembered the stammer while many adults failed to notice it. It came and went for its own reasons, but not as a clichéd manifestation of fear of the adult world. Dodgson himself seems to have been far more acutely aware of it than most people he met; it is said he caricatured himself as the Dodo in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, referring to his difficulty in pronouncing his last name, but this is one of the many 'facts' oft-repeated, for which no firsthand evidence remains. He did indeed refer to himself as the dodo, but that this was a reference to his stammer is simply speculation.

Personality
Although Carroll's stammer troubled him, it was never bad enough to stop him using his other qualities to do well in society. At a time when people devised their own amusements and singing and recitation were required social skills, the young Dodgson was well-equipped as an engaging entertainer. He could sing tolerably well and was not afraid to do so in front of an audience. He was adept at mimicry and storytelling, and was reputedly quite good at charades.

He was also quite socially ambitious, anxious to make his mark on the world as a writer or an artist. His scholastic career may well have been seen as something of a stop-gap to other more exciting attainments that he desired. The traditional image of his entirely child-centred life has recently been challenged (see 'Karoline Leach's work on the "Carroll Myth"' below), and we have been reminded that he did enjoy a very active adult social life. In the interim between his early published writing and the success of Alice, he began to move in the Pre-Raphaelite social circle. He first met John Ruskin in 1857 and became friendly with him. Dodgson developed a close relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his family, and also knew William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Arthur Hughes among other artists. He also knew the fairy-tale author George MacDonald well — it was the enthusiastic reception of Alice by the young MacDonald children that convinced him to submit the work for publication.

He soon excelled at the art and became a well-known gentleman-photographer, and he seems even to have toyed with the idea of making a living out of it in his very early years.

A recent study (Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling's Lewis Carroll, Photographer (2002) exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over fifty percent of his surviving work depicts young girls. Alexandra Kitchin, known as 'Xie', was a favourite photographic subject; Dodgson made over 50 studies of her from 1869 until his cessation of photography in 1880, when she was sixteen years old. However before attempting to draw any conclusions, it should be noted that less than a third of his original portfolio has survived (see below). We do know he also made many studies of men, women, male children and landscapes and in all his subjects ranged from skeletons, through dolls, dogs, statues and paintings to trees, scholars, old men, scientists and (indeed) little girls. His infamous (and possibly misunderstood) studies of child nudes were long presumed lost, but six have since surfaced, four of which have been published and another two of which little is known.

Photo of John Everett Millais and his wife Effie Gray with two of their children, signed by Effie. (c1860)He also found photography to be a useful entré into higher social circles. During the most productive part of his career, he made portraits of notable sitters such as John Everett Millais, Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron, Michael Faraday and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Dodgson abruptly ceased to photograph in 1880. Over 24 years, he had completely mastered the medium, set up his own studio on the roof of Tom Quad, and created around 3,000 iimages. Fewer than 1,000 have survived time and deliberate destruction. His reasons for abandoning photography remain uncertain.

With the advent of Modernism tastes changed, and his photography was forgotten from around 1920 until the 1960s. He is now considered one of the very best Victorian photographers, and is certainly the one who has had the most influence on modern art photographers.

The Author
From a young age, Dodgson wrote poetry and short stories, sending them to various magazines and enjoying moderate success. Between 1854 and 1856, his work appeared in the national publications, The Comic Times and The Train, as well as smaller magazines like the Whitby Gazette and the Oxford Critic. Most of this output was humorous, sometimes satirical, but his standards and ambitions were exacting. "I do not think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication (in which I do not include the Whitby Gazette or the Oxonian Advertiser), but I do not despair of doing so some day", he wrote in July 1855. In 1856 he published his first piece of work under the name that would make him famous. A very predictable little romantic poem called "Solitude" appeared in The Train under the authorship of 'Lewis Carroll'. This pseudonym was a play on his real name; Lewis was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll being an anglicised version of Carolus, the Latin for Charles.

The ruin of Godstow Nunnery.In the same year, 1856, a new Dean, Henry Liddell, arrived at Christ Church, bringing with him a young wife and children, all of whom would figure largely in Dodgson's life, and greatly influence his writing career, over the following years. He became close friends with the mother Lorina and the children, particularly the three sisters Ina, Edith and Alice Liddell. It is from the latter he is often said to have derived his own "Alice", however, Dodgson himself later denied his "little heroine" was based on any real child, [4].

Though information is scarce (Dodgson's diaries for the years 1858-62 are missing), it does seem evident his friendship with the family was an important part of his life in the late 1850s, and he grew into the habit of taking the children (first the brother Harry, but later the three girls) on rowing trips to nearby Nuneham or Godstow.

It was on one such expedition, on July 4 1862, that Dodgson invented the outline of the story that eventually became his first and largest commercial success. Having told the story and been begged by Alice Liddell to write it down, Dodgson eventually (after much delay) presented her with a handwritten, illustrated manuscript entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground in November 1864.

Before this, however, in 1863, he had taken the unfinished MS to Macmillan the publisher, who liked it immediately. After the possible alternative titles Alice Among the Fairies and Alice's Golden Hour were rejected, the work was finally published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 under the Lewis Carroll pen name which Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier. The illustrations this time were by Sir John Tenniel; Dodgson evidently realised that a published book would need the skills of a professional artist. The first edition copy of Alice's Adventures Under Ground, now highly sought after by literary collectors, changed hands to a private collector on January 26, 2006. It was sold at Christie's for GBP4,800 by the Duke of Gloucester, its previous owner, to pay for his father's death duties[5]

The overwhelming commercial success of the first Alice book changed Dodgson's life in many ways. The fame of his alter ego 'Lewis Carroll' soon spread around the world. He was inundated with fan mail and sometimes unwanted attention. He also began earning quite substantial sums of money. However, perhaps oddly, he didn't use this income as a means of abandoning his seemingly disliked post at Christ Church.

In 1872, a sequel — Through the Looking-Glass — was published. Its darker mood possibly reflects the changes in Dodgson's life. His father had recently died (1868) plunging him into a depression that would last some years.

The Hunting of the Snark
In 1876, Dodgson produced his last great work, The Hunting of the Snark a fantastic 'nonsense' poem, exploring the adventures of a bizarre crew of variously inadequate beings, and one beaver, who set off to find the eponymous creature. It contains some of Dodgson's best and most mature writing. Most oddly, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti reputedly became convinced the poem was about him.

The Later Years
Over the remaining twenty years of his life, throughout his growing wealth and fame, his existence remained little changed. He continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881, and remained in residence there until his death. His last novel, the two-volume Sylvie and Bruno, was published in 1889 and 1893 respectively. Its extraordinary convolutions and apparent confusion baffled most readers and it achieved little success. He died in his Guildford home on January 14, 1898 of pneumonia following influenza. He was not quite sixty-six years old.

Possible Drug Use
There has been much speculation that Dodgson used drugs, however there is no direct evidence that he ever did. It is true that the most common painkiller of the time—laudanum—was in fact a tincture of opium and could produce a 'high' if used in a large enough dose. We can infer Dodgson probably used it from time to time since it was the standard domestic painkiller of its day and was to be found in numerous patent medicines of the time, but there is no evidence he ever abused it or that its effects had any impact on his work. The rumour that he smoked cannabis is entirely without any foundation in any known fact.

The Priesthood
Charles Dodgson had been groomed for the priesthood from a very early age and was expected, as a condition of his residency at Christ Church, to take holy orders within four years of obtaining his master's degree. However, for reasons not presently explained, he became reluctant to do this. He delayed the process for some time but eventually took deacon's orders in December 1861. But when the time came, a year later, to progress to full orders, Dodgson appealed to the dean for permission not to proceed. This was against college rules, and Dean Liddell told him he would very likely have to leave his job if he refused to take orders. He told Dodgson he would have to consult the college ruling body, which would almost undoubtedly have resulted in his being expelled. However, for unknown reasons, Dean Liddell changed his mind and permitted Dodgson to remain at the college, in defiance of the rules.[6] Dodgson never became a priest. Dean Liddell's behavior remains puzzling and unexplained, though some theories have been put forward to explain it.

There is currently no conclusive evidence about why Dodgson rejected the priesthood. Some have suggested his stammer made him reluctant to take the step, because he was afraid of having to preach, but this seems unlikely given his willingness to take on other public performances (story-telling, recitations, magic lantern shows), and the fact that he did indeed preach in later life, even though not in orders. Others have suggested, perhaps more plausibly, that he was having serious doubts about the Anglican church. It is known that he was interested in minority forms of Christianity (he was an admirer of F.D. Maurice) and 'alternative' religions (Theosophy) so this may well have been a reason. However, it is also true that Dodgson was deeply troubled by an unexplained sense of sin and guilt at this time (the early 1860s), and frequently expressed the view in his diaries that he was a "vile and worthless" sinner, unworthy of the priesthood [7], so this may well also have been a contributing factor.

Currently we do not know why Dodgson was consumed with a sense of sin at this time, though again several theories have been put forward.

The Missing Diaries
At least four complete volumes[8] and around seven pages[9] of text are missing from Dodgson's 13 diaries. The loss of the volumes remains unexplained; the pages have been deliberately removed by an unknown hand. Most scholars assume the diary material was removed by family members in the interests of preserving the family name, but this has not been proven.[10]

All of the missing material, except for a single page, is believed to date from the period between 1853 (when Dodgson was 22) and 1863 (when he was 32).[11] Many theories have been put forward to explain the missing material. A popular 'explanation' for one particular missing page (June 27 1863) was that it might have been torn out to conceal the fact that Dodgson had proposed marriage on that day to the 11-year old Alice. However, there has never been any hard evidence to suggest this was so, and a paper[12] that came to light in the Dodgson family archive in 1996 provides some evidence to the contrary. This paper, known as the 'cut pages in diary document' gives a brief summary of two of the missing pages, including the one for June 27 1863. The summary reveals that there was gossip circulating about Dodgson and the Liddell governess as well as 'Ina', Alice's older sister. The 'break' with the family that occurred after this point was presumably in response to this gossip. [13] [14]

Suggestions of paedophilia
Dodgson's undeniable fondness for little girls, together with his perceived lack of interest in forming romantic attachments to adult women; psychological readings of his work—especially his photographs of nude[15] or semi-nude girls, have all led to speculation that he was, in modern parlance, a paedophile. This possibility has underpinned numerous modern interpretations of his life and work, most particularly, Dennis Potter's play Alice, his motion picture, Dreamchild, and numerous recent biographies, including Michael Bakewell's Lewis Carroll, a biography (1996) , Donald Thomas's Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background (1996) and - most notably, Morton N. Cohen's Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1995). All of these latest works more or less unequivocally assume that Dodgson was a paedophile, albeit a repressed and celibate one. Cohen claims Dodgson's "sexual energies sought unconventional outlets", and further writes:

We cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Charles's preference for drawing and photographing children in the nude. He contended the preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his emotional attachment to children as well as his aesthetic appreciation of their forms, his assertion that his interest was strictly artistic is naïve. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself. [16]

Cohen further notes that Dodgson "apparently convinced many of his friends that his attachment to the nude female child form was free of any eroticism", but adds that "later generations look beneath the surface" (p 229).

Cohen - and many other biographers - also argue that Dodgson may have wanted to marry the 11-year old Alice Liddell and that this was the cause of Dodgson's unexplained 'break' with the family in June of 1863 (Cohen pp 100-4). But there has never been much evidence to support such an idea, and the 1996 discovery of the 'cut pages in diary document' (see above) seems to imply that the 1863 'break' had nothing to do with Alice Liddell. But the document's provenance is disputed, and its final significance is unknown.

Those writers, like Derek Hudson and Roger Lancelyn Green, who have fallen short of accepting Dodgson was a paedophile, have tended to concur that he held a unique passion for small female children and had next to no interest in the adult world. The issue is considered at length in Darien Graham-Smith's 2005 PhD thesis Contextualising Carroll.

"The Carroll Myth"
The accepted view of Dodgson's biography — and most particularly his image as a potential paedophile — has received a challenge in quite recent times, when a new and controversial analysis of Dodgson's sexual proclivities (and indeed the evolution of the entire process of his biography) appeared in Karoline Leach's 1999 book In the Shadow of the Dreamchild. She claims that the image of Dodgson's alleged paedophilia was built out of a failure to understand Victorian morals, as well as the mistaken idea that Dodgson had no interest in adult women which evolved out of the minds of various biographers. She termed this simplified — and often, in her view, fictional — image "the Carroll Myth".

According to Leach, Dodgson's real life was very different from the accepted biographical image. He was not, she says, exclusively interested in female children. She acknowledges he was fond of children, but claims this interest has been exaggerated. She claims he was also keenly interested in adult women and apparently enjoyed several relationships with them, married and single. She claims that many of those Dodgson described as 'child-friends' were not children at all, but girls in their late teens and even twenties.[17] She cites examples of many such adult friendships, such as Catherine Lloyd, Constance Burch, May Miller, Edith Shute, Ethel Rowell, Beatrice Hatch and Gertrude Thomson (to name but a few of the many she cites). Some of these were girls he met as children but continued to be close to in adulthood, others were, says Leach, women he met as adults and with whom he shared very close and meaningful friendships. Suggestions of pedophilia only evolved many years after his death, says Leach, when his well-meaning family had suppressed all evidence of his adult friendships in order to try to preserve his reputation, thus giving a false impression of a man only interested in little girls.

According to Leach the image of 'Lewis Carroll' was constructed almost accidentally by generations of biographers. One of these, Langford Reed, writing in 1932, was the first to claim that all of Carroll's female friendships ended when the girls reached the age of 14,[18] though Reed apparently only intended to suggest that Dodgson was thereby a "pure man" untainted by sexual desire.[19] This claim that Dodgson lost interest in girls once they reached puberty was later caught up by other biographers, including Florence Becker Lennon (Victoria Through the Looking-Glass — UK title "Lewis Carroll", 1945) and the highly influential Alexander Taylor (The White Knight), 1952 who remained unaware of the evidence to the contrary since Dodgson's family refused to publish his diaries and letters. By the time more evidence became available this image was so ingrained that any revision seemed "unnecessary, even impertinent," [20]and thus a 'mythic' biography was preserved. This, in essence, is Leach's case.

Reactions to Leach's work have been generally polarised. In a review of the title Michael Bakewell in The Carrollian wrote: "after Leach's book Carroll studies can never be quite the same again; we may not agree with it but we cannot ignore it and it should certainly be read by anyone concerned with Dodgson's life and work."[21] However, contrastingly, in a review of the title in Victorian Studies (Vol. 43, No 4) reviewer Donald Rackin wrote, "As a piece of biographical scholarship, Karoline Leach's In the Shadow of the Dreamchild is difficult to take seriously". Martin Gardner was similarly dismissive in a recent article.[22] Morton N. Cohen repudiates Leach's position as being simply a plea for the defence, and, in a recent article in the Times Literary Supplement has labeled Leach and her supporters as 'revisionists' attempting to rewrite history. [23]

Leach has received enthusiastic support from other scholars and writers (most notably Hugues Lebailly), some of whom have united to form Contrariwise, the 'association for new Lewis Carroll studies'. The group argues collectively that a 'myth' has grossly distorted our reading of Dodgson's biography, and that considering Dodgson's relationship with 'the child' within the context of his real — as opposed to legendary — life, and the fashions and mores of his time, makes nonsense of the claims of paedophilia, which amount to a failure to understand the complexity of Dodgson's real life as well as the "Victorian Cult of the Child."