Lewis Carroll
Cohen, Morton N.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Lewis Carroll" Charles Dodgson Through the Looking Glass Lewis Carroll: A Biography Morton N. Cohen Alfred A. Knopf /577 pages /$35 REVIEWED BY George McCartney He was a shy math lecturer at Christ Church,...
...She has this habit of growing and shrinking and entering rabbit holes, you see...
...Cohen is convinced there's no evidence, not a hint, that Dodgson ever molested Alice...
...He wanted, as he put it, nothing more than to hear "a little child's whispered thanks...
...On the deepest level, perhaps, he wanted to embrace their guileless energy, an energy that was so conspicuously absent in his own hemmed and circumspect life as a don and cleric...
...But "many critiques of the Alice books," Cohen observes, "seem to have been written by people who seldom laugh...
...Although he doesn't seem to have taken any nude poses, Dodgson's photographs manage to reveal Alice as a vital and charming imp with prematurely knowing, almost seductive eyes...
...But by the time Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson died in 1888, he had become Lewis Carroll, the internationally celebrated children's writer...
...In short, Dodgson creates a child's view of adult lunacy with this difference: In the course of events Alice grows large enough to dismiss these denizens of Wonderland for what they are, a pack of cards playing a game by arbitrary rules...
...Dodgson's brother broached the subject with the parents of a 14-year-old when he was 27 and subsequently married the young woman when she turned zo...
...After the Bible and Shakespeare, they are the most frequently quoted texts in the Western world...
...One Freudian even suggests Alice is, allegorically speaking, a phallus...
...While allowing that this last theory at least has rhyme on its side, Morton Cohen finds such readings reductive and therefore vulgar...
...Modern literary critics marvel at the way the texts presciently confirm their commitment to language's semiotic self-sufficiency...
...It wouldn't be until our own peculiar century that Nabokov's Lolita would wise us up...
...68 May 1996 • The American Spectator...
...Her mother was by all accounts intent upon marrying her daughters into the aristocracy...
...From Dickens to James, little girls were pressed into service as icons of innocent vulnerability, alternately objects of villainous abuse and heroic rescue...
...The 29year-old Ruskin's image of feminine perfection had been wholly based upon his acquaintance with Greek statuary which was and, I believe, still is remarkably hairless...
...They don't "come to grips with these books, where the jests, the shattered shams, the punctured pretenses, and the peals of laughter are essential elements to understanding and enjoying...
...Dodgson doubtless knew his novella The Strange Case ofDr...
...Did Dodgson recognize in Stevenson's tale an image of his own dual nature...
...The American Spectator May 1996 67 usually ranging in age from five to twelve...
...it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less....The question is...
...There is nothing to suggest that Dodgson was being anything but sincere...
...There is, however, a troubling aspect to Dodgson's identification with the universe of childhood...
...Women were legally allowed to marry at 12, and many Victorian gentlemen made such arrangements with girls in their early teens, usually waiting a few years before taking vows...
...Cohen doesn't mention it, but Dodgson's acquaintance and correspondent, John Ruskin, provides a relevant anecdote...
...Not exactly a world-beater...
...They advise her to speak correctly while they utter nonsense, to be consistent while they sputter incoherently...
...And it all began as nothing more than a casual tale he improvised to amuse his dean's three young daughters during a boating excursion in 1862...
...If he did, he clearly decided against Jekyll's strategy...
...astated by the rejection...
...perhaps there was something in the Victorian climate...
...The books, together with the Alice industry of toys, games, note paper, and theatrical adaptations, had made him wealthy...
...Here, instead of mischievous and intriguing, she looks grim and sullen, as though resigned to the fate decreed by parental authority...
...Or perhaps you don't...
...The woman of his dreams was accordingly prepubescent, charmingly uncontaminated by worldly lusts whether of body or mind, including the lusts of ambition, social climbing, and self-regard—everything, in short, that he despised in the adult world, and everything he lampooned in his writings...
...Her mother wanted her beauty recorded, and few men were as skilled in the complicated art of nineteenth-century photography as Dodgson...
...Unlike the monstrously hypocritical doctor, Dodgson did not turn his back on his problem...
...He was plagued by a persistent stammer that never relented except when he was in the company of children, the only fellow creatures with whom he could be fully comfortable...
...Today the Alice stories have been translated into over seventy languages, including Swahili and Yiddish...
...The Mad Hatter scolds her for not thinking before she talks, and then proposes riddles for which he has no answers...
...Of course, now with Calvin Klein and child pornography, such wisdom seems a questionable benefit...
...At the risk of committing psychoanalytic heresy, I'd say Dodgson the man was a hero of deliberate repression...
...This is unquestionable in the case of Alice Liddell, his Wonderland girl...
...it contrasts revealingly with those of her at age eight and ten...
...which is to be master — that's all...
...John's University...
...At the time such a proposal would not have been dismissed automatically as untoward or unusual...
...And he liked to photograph them, preferably undressed...
...Dodgson's meager state in the years before his literary success would have seemed dismally unsuitable...
...What happened...
...They represent the kind of adult pretension that always deserves to be laughed out of court...
...But there's little doubt these child relationships had for Dodgson a strong erotic undercurrent...
...By the time she was seven, she had become the emotional center of his life...
...Dodgson was known to wield his camera as a painter does a brush...
...They have no more substance than the oaktag upon which they're printed...
...He was becoming attached to Alice at exactly the same time...
...To their delight his stories subvert adult hypocrisy...
...Clearly he suffered from a parallel quirk...
...All his photographs were taken with parental consent and the sessions were always chaperoned...
...And the dynamics of his own two-faced existence must have propelled his literary mission: the playful unmasking of the world's solemn humbuggery...
...Then the parents suddenly closed the door to him in 1863 when she was ii...
...In any event, he seems to have been dev44 Dodgson's romantic longings somehow became entangled with his nostalgia for lost innocence...
...Spontaneous and direct, children offered him that "something sacred" he missed in his dealings with his peers...
...He probably would never have recorded it but for the request of one of the girls, the ten-year-old Alice Liddell who had won his heart and was to be a cause for grief in the years to come...
...The famous art critic was rendered impotent on his wedding night when, by most accounts, he was shocked to discover his 19-year-old bride sported a V of pubic hair...
...Jekyll and Mr...
...And he took another portrait of Alice herself when she turned 18...
...Dodgson visited Alice and her sisters regularly for over six years...
...Do these pictures show us Alice, or do they reveal Dodgson...
...Dodgson's romantic longings somehow became entangled with his nostalgia for lost innocence...
...Charles Dodgson Through the Looking Glass Lewis Carroll: A Biography Morton N. Cohen Alfred A. Knopf /577 pages /$35 REVIEWED BY George McCartney He was a shy math lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, and a permanent bachelor...
...Instead, he mastered his own Hyde by creatively deflecting his unacceptable longings into his two art forms: photography and fantasy...
...He had in mind an ideal, not a woman, and the sight of female maturity with its intimation of sexual experience completely unnerved him...
...Philosophers have located the answer in the narratives' logical conundrums...
...Cohen suggests Alice's parents may rather have thought the union a social error...
...He had over 250,000 copies of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass in print, an extraordinary number for the time...
...After thirty years of research and eight books on Dodgson, including two collections of his letters and one of his interviews, he knows too much to attempt the folly of summing up...
...We may find this story pathetically absurd, but Dodgson would have understood...
...He explained in a letter to one mother that her daughters' "innocent unconsciousness" while naked was "very beautiful, and [gave] one a feeling of reverence, as at the presence of something sacred...
...Alice receives another kind of education from the ridiculous beings she encounters everywhere she goes...
...Does the difference arise from nature or art...
...Nevertheless he continued to seek contact with girls for both friendship and modeling...
...Even the most imperious deconstructors must find themselves in awe of Humpty Dumpty's claim to linguistic omnipotence...
...Through his camera lens he held the objects of his desire at a distance, prudently rendering them abstract and inviolable...
...Since then the stories have drawn the attention of countless commentators, many of whom claim to have solved the mystery of their appeal...
...Clearly these Victorians were obsessed...
...Dodgson's secret was that he was enough of a child to understand his audience...
...Hyde, which begins, tellingly enough, with the spectacle of Hyde trampling on a young girl who has crossed his path...
...The Queen of Hearts demands an exacting protocol in croquet but screams for the sentence before the verdict in her courtroom...
...Dodgson first came to know Alice, then but four years old, through his camera...
...Dodgson the artist, of course, will always be peerlessly above reproach...
...In this definitive biography he reminds us of Dodgson's avowed intention: to entertain children...
...Instead he hypothesizes that Dodgson approached the Liddells proposing marriage with Alice...
...All his adult life, Dodgson courted — there's no other word for it—little girls, GEORGE MCCARTNEY teaches English at St...
...Another contemporary, Robert Louis Stevenson, offers, I believe, a complementary insight...
...When I use a word...
...To earn that thanks, Dodgson knew he had to make his audience laugh...
...After his marriage was annulled, he would fall in love with his pupil, the ten-year-old Rose La Touche...
...His Mock Turtle unmasks the dreariness of school as a curriculum of "Reeling and Writhing" complemented by the "different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision...
Vol. 29 • May 1996 • No. 5
