The haunted wood, p.10
The Haunted Wood, page 10
England was outward-looking. It was powerful. But at the same time, the prosperity was not spread evenly. The poor –not the picturesque rural sort but the rootless and putatively criminal urban poor drawn to the towns by the Industrial Revolution – aroused those good Aristotelian emotions, pity and fear, in the middle and upper classes. Charles Dickens – not a children’s writer, but one whose concern with children and childhood shadows all the children’s writers of the second half of the nineteenth century – had close-up experience of the wretchedness of debt. He was eleven in 1823 when he was consigned to the blacking factory. He never forgot it.
Though Church and state were harmoniously married in the person of the sovereign, the new sciences were starting to chip away at old theological certainties. Is it significant that of the three writers whose work is credited with starting the new era of children’s writing two – Lewis Carroll and Charles Kingsley – were churchmen? Carroll’s radically disruptive Alice in Wonderland stories imagine a world in which religious certainty, indeed any certainty, is unobtainable; Kingsley’s Water-Babies offered a queasily pantheistic attempt to marry religion with his scientific fascinations. Meanwhile the third, Thomas Hughes, in Tom Brown’s School Days, offered a story whose “muscular Christianity” linked body and soul in the trainee servants of Empire.
Curiouser and Curiouser
LEWIS CARROLL · CHARLES KINGSLEY
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland;
Through the Looking-Glass; Sylvie and Bruno;
The Water-Babies
ALL IN THE GOLDEN AFTERNOON / FULL LEISURELY we glide…” The story of the birth of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has itself passed into legend. A stretch of the Thames at Oxford; a golden afternoon; and a young clergyman extemporizing a wild and silly fantasy story over his shoulder to the little girl coxing the boat. It was 4 July 1862. That little girl was ten-year-old Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christchurch. The man was Charles Dodgson, who had taken her and her two sisters out on the water for a day-trip.
The story she was hearing would eventually become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: the story of a little girl who follows a white rabbit into an underground fantasia where nothing behaves as it does in the workaday world above. The creation myth of the Alice books isn’t just an incidental piece of background trivia: it’s part of the story itself.
Alice – which ends with its heroine waking up on the riverbank – is a dream-narrative in a waking-world frame. That frame story is itself given yet another frame story: the story of the creation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s a big part of their place in the culture. “Alice’s Day” is still celebrated in Oxford every July, and Alice Liddell’s place in literary history as the “original” of Alice followed her to her death. By the time she toured the US in 1932 (by then she was Alice Hargreaves, a wife and mother) she could be prevailed on to sign her name “Alice in Wonderland.”
Supplying her recollections for the first full biography of Carroll around the turn of the century, she described that day as a “summer afternoon when the sun was so burning that we had landed in the meadows down the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a new-made hayrick.” The story was already halfway to fiction. The hayrick played no part in an account later provided by the other adult in the boat, Dodgson’s friend Robinson Duckworth, who recalled in 1899 that “the story was actually composed and spoken over my shoulder.”
Carroll himself had already long since mythologized the story behind the story – not only in the prefatory poem from which the words that open this chapter are taken, but in his own journal. It was six months after the fact that he went back and altered his diary entry for that day to insert an account of his composition of the story. If we’re going to be pedantic, even that “golden afternoon” was nothing of the sort: meteorological reports have it that the afternoon of 4 July 1862 was in fact “cool, and rather wet.”
Yet the succession of retellings of that afternoon came to swaddle the actual history of the story’s composition in a layer of fiction. The “dreamy weather” was just that: not literal, but dreamy, part of a dream-narrative that spilled out to encapsulate its own creation. It came to stand in the book, and in its readers, not just for the afternoon the story was born but for the golden weather of childhood itself – the irrecoverable sunshine of a world lost to adults.
So when you’re dealing with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, you need to keep in mind that it isn’t just a fairy story itself: it’s a fairy story within a fairy story. Even its author – that weedy, tweedy young man pulling at the oars and telling a story over his shoulder – is a creation of the imagination.
The flesh-and-blood Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the creator, was born in 1832, the son of a Cheshire clergyman and the oldest of four brothers in a family of eleven children. Charles had a lifelong stammer but an outgoing temperament – his letters home and the jokey magazines he edited for family consumption as a child showed an energetic character and a puckish sense of humor. At Rugby School he won academic prizes and was especially notable for his facility in mathematics. He wasn’t sporty. A contemporary inscribed the words “C.L. Dodgson is a muff” in one of his schoolbooks. When he followed his father to Oxford the direction of his talents became clearer: in his mid-career exams he got a first in mathematics, only a second in classics, and scraped a third in greats.
He seemed destined to follow his father into the priesthood. That was the presumption that accompanied his being given a studentship at Christ Church – a post that came with lifetime tenure and rights of residence at the college. The recipient was expected to join the clergy and to remain unmarried. Yet though Dodgson remained unmarried – he seems to have been largely untroubled by conventional romantic attachments – he was never ordained: he became a deacon but refused, at the risk of expulsion from the college, to take the final step to become a priest.
Does this point to a wavering of faith – as can seemingly be found in the almost nihilistic flavor of parts of the Alice books? Was it, as has also been suggested, that he feared stammering in the pulpit (less likely, given he went on without apparent trouble to deliver lectures)?* Instead he became a tutor in mathematics and, later, a rather pernickety sub-librarian at the college. Meanwhile the less conventional side of his character flourished. He contributed comic squibs to literary magazines and pursued an infatuation with the young art of photography.
Lewis Carroll, the creation, was born in 1856 after the editor of a magazine to which Dodgson contributed asked him to come up with a pseudonym. Carroll was a looking-glass version of his creator, transformed by the strange verbal logic-of-association that was to characterize his books. Charles became (in Latin) Carolus, which became “Carroll”; Lutwidge became Ludovicus, which became Lewis. A shadow-self was born.
The “dry and perfunctory” lecturer in mathematics – the pedant who kept a meticulous “Register of Letters Received and Sent” that at his death ran to nearly 100,000 entries, the productivity-fanatic who mapped out his working day in half-hour increments – acquired a more ebullient alter ego. The doubleness never abated. Queen Victoria, as one story goes, once made it be known she’d enjoyed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland so much that she’d like a copy of the author’s next book. She in due course received a package containing An Elementary Treatise on Determinants: With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraical Geometry.
What that creation in turn created was at once hugely influential and entirely sui generis. It’s almost impossible to overstate what strange books Alice’s Adventures and its sequel are. That they are nonsense, and that they are the account of a dream, or a nested series of dreams, is relevant. From these premises they get their giddy transitions and shifts of scene, their doublings and their longeurs (there can have been few readers, I think, who have wished that the Alice books contained more puns). Their heroine’s progress through Wonderland proceeds more like a string of static tableaux or set-pieces than a continuous narrative.
There’s a strong case to be made that they aren’t really – or aren’t primarily – even children’s books at all. The current of feeling that animates the myth of their creation, and animates the books themselves, is an adult one. They contain mathematical conundrums,* theological echoes and philosophy-of-language jokes, and admit of psychoanalytic and mythological readings, many of which seem quite an unusual bill of fare for what Carroll himself called “a fairy-tale.”
The books are haunted by anxieties about identity, meaning, death, and the passing of time – though they approach those anxieties through jokes and riddles and paradoxes. It takes an adult to really apprehend the ways in which they are frightening. Think of Humpty Dumpty’s demise, for instance, just glimpsed offstage (“a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end. The next moment soldiers came running through the wood, at first in twos and threes, then ten or twenty together…”), or of Tweedledum and Tweedledee’s battle being interrupted (as it is fated to be) by the arrival of the crow, which seems to belong to Ted Hughes as much as to Lewis Carroll: “What a thick black cloud that is! And how fast it comes! Why, I do believe it’s got wings!”
Early in the first book, as she shrinks, Alice worries that the process might end “‘in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?’ And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out.” Shades, perhaps, of a smile without a cat. The image is reprised, in still more alarming form, in Through the Looking-Glass, when Tweedledee points out the sleeping King and tells Alice: “Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!” Tweedledum chimes in: “If that there King was to wake, you’d go out – bang! – just like a candle!” Suddenly, we’re in what’s sometimes called a mise-en-abyme, an infinite corridor of mirrors: Alice’s dream contains a dream-character for whom Alice is herself a dream-character.
But in dreams, as Yeats said, begin responsibilities: here’s nonsense to serious effect; here are real figures and feelings transfigured by what Freud many years later would call the “dream-work.” Explanations get knotted into meaninglessness or break off with another jump-cut. The floor, so to speak, is constantly dropping away. They are full of little loops of frozen time: the Mad Hatter’s constantly rotating tea party; the Queen running at top speed just to stand still. Time, indeed, could be said to be the books’ deep theme. It’s their treatment of time that gives them both the surface fizz of paradox and a strong and very adult undertow of plangency.
The books may be concerned with childhood but their protagonist is an odd, and not very childlike, child. Alice is pragmatic, good-natured, and a little proud – though often also frequently bewildered and frightened or upset. Both books end with violent tantrums. But she doesn’t noticeably develop; such changes as she undergoes are changes of mood (and size). Rather, she’s there as an interlocutor, a foil to the succession of peculiar individuals and situations she meets: a proxy, in some way, for the rational reader wondering what on earth is going on. In most respects, she’s more adult than the characters she meets on her adventures. You could even see Wonderland as an externalization of her childishness.
Her sense of her own identity is unstable, almost fugal. There’s a dismaying episode in the first book, when Alice loses a sense of herself altogether:
Dear, dear! How queer everything is today! 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! And she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them.
‘I’m sure I’m not Ada,’ she said, ‘for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn’t go in ringlets at all; and I’m sure I can’t be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! She knows such a very little! Besides, she’s she and I’m I, and – oh dear, how puzzling it all is!’
It’s silly and funny – we should not lose sight of its declared status as nonsense (the term “nonsense poetry” was minted in 1851, and Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense was published in 1846) – but it’s also alarming and, in a slant way, plausible. A child is a creature in a constant state of change, with a shaky sense of selfhood. Alice’s transformations – as she closes like a telescope or stretches to fill the White Rabbit’s house – are alarming to her and frightening, even dangerous, to some of the creatures in Wonderland. When the caterpillar (another creature, of course, destined for transformation) asks, “Who are you?” Alice confesses: “I – I hardly know, sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”
The passage of writing in which Alice is most vividly evoked as a flesh-and-blood-child, rather than the telescopic foil for a succession of bizarre vaudeville routines, comes right at the end of the first book. Alice leaves Wonderland at a moment of crisis. She’s about to get into a fight with a pack of cards. “Who cares for you?” she exclaims. “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” The pack of cards “rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her.” Before they can exact their revenge, she wakes up to find her head in her sister’s lap and her sister brushing dead leaves from her face.
“Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream,” she says. She recounts her adventures – and then her sister, in turn, starts to dream:
First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers – she could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her head to keep back the wandering hair that would always get into her eyes…
There, as nowhere in the body of the book, is the tender and exact recollection of an authentic mannerism, that head-toss. Though it’s ascribed to Alice’s sister (Alice Liddell’s older sister Lorina was only thirteen) that is surely a Carroll’s-eye, an adult, gaze. A grown man, more than a thirteen-year-old girl, would be struck by “little Alice,” her “tiny hands,” and the eyes “looking up into hers.”
A lot of ink has been spilled over the years considering the question of whether Carroll’s interest in children was sexual; and, if it was, whether he’d even have recognized it as such. Certainly, throughout his life, he cultivated what he called “child-friends” (“they are three-fourths of my life,” he told Isa Bowman, a child actress who played Alice on stage) and did so in a way that looked an awful lot like what we’d now call grooming. He found excuses to talk to them in public places, befriended their parents, beguiled them with toys and tricks,* and sought permission from their parents (some of whom, latterly, would have been impressed by his fame) to meet and photograph them. Some of these photographs depicted the children naked.
It’s hard to come down firmly on one side of this debate, though. Among other things, four volumes of Carroll’s diaries have vanished from the record, and crucial pages from the extant diaries – apparently detailing a falling-out that Dodgson had with the Liddell family – have gone missing. But the conscious idea that children might be sexually aware, or sexually vulnerable, was largely in the future. They were the incarnation, rather, of innocence: the assumption would be that the conjunction of an adult with a naked child would purify the former rather than corrupt the latter. Child nudes were a wholly conventional victorian interest. They even appeared on Christmas cards. At the same time, the question of when children became adult – i.e. sexual beings – was earlier than we are accustomed to thinking of it. Until 1865, the age of consent was twelve, and it didn’t reach sixteen till 1885. It was quite ordinary for sixteen-year-old girls to be engaged, and even married.
The file in which Carroll kept his nude images of children was marked “Honi Soit,” from the Anglo-Norman motto “Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense”: shame on him who thinks evil of it. That at once evinces an anxiety that evil might be thought; and seeks to affirm that the only evil can be in the eye of the beholder. That the naked body of a pre-pubescent child might be seen as a sexual object – decades before the 1903 edition of Krafft-Ebing would introduce “paedophilia” to our vocabulary – was unthinkable. It’d be nearly fifty years before Freud would be around to introduce such sentimentalists to the idea of the Return of the Repressed.
Yet whatever judgments we might make about Carroll’s private feelings, the tenor of the Alice books has a fascination with childhood that is not sexual, or not knowingly so. It rather more smacks of an adult, preoccupied with the passing of time and finding the universe more unstable than he’d like, wanting to preserve an idea of childhood – catching Alice, a specimen child, like a fly in amber. He’s in the position of creating that secret garden and looking at it, as Alice does when she opens a tiny door with a golden key, down a corridor through which he can’t fit, and longing to visit “the loveliest garden you ever saw.”
The flesh-and-blood Alice will grow up and leave Wonderland behind. She’ll get married and bear children of her own, grow portly and knowing: but the Alice of whom she’s an impression will remain frozen in time between the covers of those books. Writing in 1887, Carroll declared that adults “look before and after, and sigh for what is not; a child never does this […] it is only a child that can utter from her heart the words […] ‘I am all happy now!’” Carroll’s interest in photography – another means of capturing a moment out of time – answers the same impulse.
Alice makes the standard folktale journey from the safety of hearth and home into a space where she’s tested before returning. But there’s another journey taking place too: the reader’s, through the portal of the book’s pages, into an idealized moment of carefree childhood bliss. A draft of an article ghostwritten for Alice Hargreaves by her entrepreneurial son Caryl – who managed her US tour and wrung all the profit from the myth that he could – described Dodgson/Carroll as a “fairy godfather.” More even than usually in the genre, this is a book that speaks to adults, childishly, about childhood.
