Ambiguities of Innocence

...After winning the chess game through the looking-glass, Alice reemerges into our world, knowledgeable, yet still innocent...

...Alice's outstanding quality is innocence, in a complex sense of the word...

...The inventor of so many intricate mathematical puzzles and subtle conundrums was anything but simple, however, and we can only guess what his contemporaries meant when they acknowledged that he "loved" children, much less what his carefully guarded feelings may have been...

...Having learned to solve problems through play, she is secure enough in her intellectual integrity to contemplate questions of existence with the humor and courage of her creator...

...He is largely indebted to previous works on the subject, and his own theories lack the scope or insight of a recent revisionary study by Jean Gattegno —Lewis Carroll: Fragments of a Looking-Glass...

...William Empson points out) nor why all the creatures are anxious to prevent her doing so, she thinks, "It doesn't matter a bit," (and speaks for the author...

...He arranged ingenious games in his rooms of his own invention (those girls who were not adept were, alas, soon dropped), dates at the theater and sittings for photographs...

...The question for an adult reader of Lewis Carroll," wrote W. H. Auden, "is not the author's psychological peculiarities, but the validity of his heroine...

...Alice rejects sentimental love from the White Knight, the timid adoration of a gnat (both Dodgson self-parodies) and the more demanding affection of the Duchess, not out of cruelty, but because their emotion seems "nonsense" to her young mind...

...To wonder is to be curious (Alice's favorite epithet), to query is to be puzzled or in a state of uncertainty...

...When she observes that "Manners are not taught in lessons," the implication is that they are learned by example—a rebuke to the Queens who are as savagely temperamental as she is oivilized...

...Unable to understand the trial of the knave of hearts (the thief of love...

...It is an interesting fact of literary history that women novelists have been less convinced of the sexless-ness of little girls than have their male counterparts...

...Dodgson eventually had misgivings about this that may have contributed to his renunciation of the camera altogether in 1880...

...It appeared as the work of "Lewis Carroll," a pseudonym created for the humorous verse Dodgson sometimes submitted to magazines...

...Finally, her innocence does not mean that she is redemptive in the sense of Dickens' Little Nell or Carroll's later Sylvie, who bring love to those around them...

...Dodgson himself used mental arithmetic, and later logical paradoxes, against "unholy thoughts, which torture with their hateful presence the fancy that would fain be pure...

...Because the book and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, were best-sellers, the author (who refused to publicly acknowledge his pen name) became a celebrity...

...Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell On July 4, 1862, a young mathematics don at Oxford, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, took three little girls on a boating excursion...

...his photographs and mathematical treatises were scrutinized for any possible relation to the fantasies...

...In the realm of biography Pudney is less successful...

...views of 19th-century Oxford, still very much a medieval cloister in appearance and spirit...

...Dodgson's Alice, by contrast, combines a mathematician's dream of perfection with the ideal of the Romantic Artist: to know oneself without being self-conscious...

...And her proper behavior is obviously as much due to breeding as to natural goodness...

...Occasionally, if the mothers consented, these last might be sans habilement, as his diary coyly notes (Victorians adored nude photographs of children...

...In any event, when one of his friends put her hair up and "came out," his interest in her usually ended...

...His love life was as simple as that...

...Most revealing is Alice herself—not at all the wooden-looking blonde we are accustomed to, but dark, with rather dreamy eyes, obviously imaginative and able to captivate the imaginations of others...

...His behavior toward his small guests was scrupulously proper, albeit eccentric...

...Such was the genesis of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...

...Alice's attitude toward others stems from a charmingly prim sense of right and wrong that permits her to be "in the world, but not of it...

...Mathematical certainty had for him "a peculiar charm...

...Jean Gattegno believes that the libido channeled into child friendships was ultimately transferred to innovations in logic, and that this creative fulfillment led to the equilibrium achieved in Alice...

...Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver, and even Jane Austen's quiet Fanny Price are all introduced as children capable of intense, impetuous feelings that ripen into an adult capacity for love...

...Unfortunately, Pudney has chosen to portray his don as a sentimental bachelor-uncle (the Mock Turtle, perhaps...

...By failing to appreciate Dodgson's love for pure mathematics he misunderstands the man who, in Euclid and His Modern Rivals, extolled the Pythagorian theorem as "dazzlingly beautiful...

...Delighted, she requested it be written down, and admiring adults soon persuaded him to expand and publish the manuscript...

...Better to be a child whose imagination does not yet need pruning because it knows nothing of passion, and whose judgment is clear because it is untainted with desire...

...On this particular afternoon his favorite, Alice Pleasance Liddell, demanded a story, so he began inventing one about her dream adventures...

...The important aspect of his fixation on childhood was that it allowed him a double perspective: In Alice we watch a child's discovery of the world through grown-up eyes, and are simultaneously shown ourselves as she sees us...

...Is Alice, that is to say, an adequate symbol for what every human being should try to be like...

...it was "so fruitful in delightful surprises" that it offered solutions "beyond all mental treasures the human intellect craves for...

...Lewis Carroll and His World ignores these enlightening metaphors—a mathematician's Song of Songs—to concentrate on the schizophrenic chimera of Carroll escaping from the Reverend Dodgson into a girlish wonderland...

...and a bevy of beautiful little girls captured by Dodgson, the outstanding childrens' portrait photographer of his day...

...Indeed, the photographs he has chosen are particularly valuable: Here we can see a Flemish painting called The Ugly Duchess, used by Sir John Tenniel, the illustrator of Alice, as a model for her intemperate counterpart in Wonderland...

...If this has been a dream, it is surely one that begets responsibility...

...Thus John Pudney's Lewis Carroll and His World, a picture book with extensive commentary, benefits from depicting the society this enigmatic don lived in, as well as the darker side that he ignored—the victimization of children who were less fortunate than Alice Liddell by inhuman working conditions...

...to curb them, as one must, is to risk becoming ill-tempered, cruel, intemperate, and possibly mad...

...Although Dodgson's life has been no less carefully studied, it was unexceptional by the standards of his time and would seem pathetically unfulfilling today...

...Pudney's prurient interest in Dodgson's feelings about his young friends, though common among modern biographers, is more mawkish than usual, too: "Alice was the first and greatest of these love affairs with maidens, unformed women, little girls of nursery age, creatures in whose presence he lost his stammer, smelled the breeze across the cornfields . . . and found the reality of Wonderland...

...Pudney is a poet, but his sensitivity must be stirred more by pictures than words...

...She is a vision of the innocence we all long for...

...To be passionate, in Carroll's scheme, is to be slave to one's feelings...

...This shy bachelor often made friends with children through his hobby of photography, and lightened the tedium of long sittings with amusing nonsense tales...

...She is worldly enough to be shocked by the white rabbit's mistaking her for a servant, and to realize that if Wonderland has transformed her into lower-middle-class "Mable" she might just as well not return home...