Lewis Carroll and Alice: The mystery within Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

We live in a time of paranoia. Maybe it has something to do with our society, or our technology, or maybe even pure suspicious human nature – motives are eternally questioned, conspiracies forever assumed. It is unfortunate for those who have passed away who are rabidly popular: everyone likes talking and making speculations about them – and they cannot do anything about it.

The man who went under the name Lewis Carroll and wrote the well-loved book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, died on January 14, 1898 at the age of sixty-five. For around 110 years his life has been subject to much speculation and controversy, which shows no apparent sign of dying away.

Most people believe that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a mere product of a creative mind about the hyperbolic adventures of a young, imaginative girl; however, most critics believe that Alice’s story was a form of release for Carroll’s suppressed love for the young girl whom was said he wrote the book for – Alice Liddell.

Dodgson’s Wonderland
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on January 27, 1832. He studied at Christ Church, Oxford and later taught mathematics there. He never married. He liked the company of female children. He loved taking pictures of female children; most of the time, he had these little girls pose for him nude.

On March 1, 1856, Lewis Carroll was born. The inimitable Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was said to be written for the three daughters of Henry Liddell, Dean of the College. The wonderful afternoons Carroll spent with the Liddell girls – Ina, Alice and Edith – were immortalized in the prose and verses of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

A lot of times, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson made ‘playful’ attempts of disowning his other half, Lewis Carroll – in the way that Daniel Handler, author of A Series of Unfortunate Events, has been doing in the present. Of course, Dodgson did admit at one occasion that Carroll and he were one and the same.

However, beyond these things about him, a lot remain unknown, conflicting and curious.
Carroll/Dodgson enthusiasts and Carroll/ Dodgson critics alike all wonder the same thing (although the Carroll/Dodgson enthusiasts would probably refuse to admit it): was his love for children some form of suppressed sexual desire? An unmarried man who delighted in the company of prepubescent girls is sure to attract frowns and disapproval from most people. In fact, it is rather unimaginable for us to consider a man with a fondness for little girls without wanting to have him castrated – or put in prison or in a psychotic ward.

Feminist critics have implied that Dodgson was a pedophile. They have declared that his fascination in taking photographs of the prepubescent female body was a perverse means of objectifying them. To them, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland became a book full of pedophilic atrocities. But was he really a pedophile? Imagine a pedophile – do we not think of a lustful, sinister man who has perverse thoughts and intentions towards young girls? According to Katie Roiphe, author of Just Good Friends? (an article that discusses Dodgson’s fascination of female children, particularly Alice Liddell), this image of the lustful, sinister man is not Lewis Carroll nor Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

“His love [for little girls] was more delicate and tortured and elusive; his warmth, his strange, terrified passion, more intricate and complicated than anything encompassed by a single word,” Roiphe stated.

It was said that Dodgson lost interest in girls once they turned fourteen – could it be that these prepubescent girls provided him with company so innocent, so pure, that to him, they seemed to have embodied earth-angels that kept him sane? Were they better company than teenagers, who will soon become adults, who lose the ability to imagine magical worlds, as soon as the world finally envelopes them in its realities?

The Unfounded Theory
The friendships that Dodgson created with children, critics say, always seemed to have romantic inclinations, with a hint of longing, of sadness. Dodgson’s relationship with Alice Liddell was said to be like this.Dodgson and the Liddell family had close ties together. However, in the summer of 1863, both parties mysteriously detached from each other. People assumed this had something to do with the Charles Dodgson-Alice Liddell relationship.

Dodgson died in 1898 of pneumonia and although Dodgson’s diaries were later turned over to the British museum by his relatives, there were lots of missing records. It was said that Dodgson’s diaries consisted of thirteen volumes and yet, only nine were turned over. These nine volumes were “carefully and delicately pruned.” Critics have supposed that the missing pages of these diaries contained the reason of Dodgson’s sudden isolation from the Liddell family. Neither Liddell family nor Dodgson family has shed any light into the cause of the sudden break of Dodgson with the Liddell family.

Morton Cohen, a biographer of Dodgson, suggested that the missing pages may have been testimonies of Dodgson “propos[ing] marriage to his eleven-year-old inamorata [Alice Liddell], thus precipitating the displeasure of [Henry Liddell] and incurring a ban on further contact with the family.”

However, a ‘fragment’ of Dodgson’s diary, found in Guildford Muniment Room, is said to suggest otherwise.

The fragment was a summary of the missing pages, titled “Cut Pages in Diary”, written in the hand of Dodgson’s neice, Violet Dodgson, co-guardian of the diaries along with her sister Menella from the early 1940s to the late 1960s. It read:

‘L.C. [Lewis Carroll] learns from Mrs. Liddell that he is supposed to be using the children as a means of paying court to the governess - he is also supposed [unreadable] to be courting Ina.’

This suggests that Dodgson may have been courting the governess – Miss Pricket, employed by the Liddells to educate their daughters – and courting Ina, the eldest of the Liddell girls at the same time. It may be assumed that the Liddell parents decided to see into the rumor of Dodgson doing such, and decided that it was best for Dodgson to stay away for awhile.

Dodgson had recorded in his diaries that the rumors regarding him and Miss Pricket didn’t bother him at all – ‘groundless a rumor’, he said – so it can be said that the governess wasn’t such a big deal. Ina, however, is a different issue. At that time, Ina was fourteen years old and had been allowed far more time with Dodgson than her younger sisters. Back then, girls were legally marriageable at twelve. It can be assumed that the rumor that Dodgson was courting both the governess and Ina had caused the Liddell parents to withdraw their warm acceptance of Dodgson.

Could it be that the fact that Alice’s name has been immortalized by Dodgson’s books lured us into believing that she was the important Liddell girl when in fact he was courting Ina?
However – being that people are fascinated with conspiracy theories and paranoia – could it be that this summary that Violet Dodgson wrote be of suspicious nature? Could it be a move to throw the people off the Charles Dodgson-Alice Liddell relationship? In one of Cohen’s analyses, he said that “Dodgson's moments of greatest torment and insomnia in his diaries […] correlated to the days on which he saw Alice.” And what about the acrostic poem in Through the Looking-Glass (a facsimile of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), wherein when read downwards, taking in every first letter of each line, spells out Alice’s full name, Alice Pleasance Liddell?

What then, remains for the rest of us to deduce? Is there, in fact, no answering the theories that surround the riddle?

Love Unimaginable
It is imaginable that we may never find out the answers to all the questions surrounding the beloved Lewis Carroll and his muse, Alice. Records have been missing, important figures have refused to talk, and the most important character has been dead for 110 years. Was Dodgson a pedophile? Why the fascination with female children? Whom did he “love”, Ina or Alice? Was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a pure product of imagination, or of something more? These questions, unfortunately, seem to not have answers that will remain, forever, irrefutable.
If he did have repressed feelings of love for Alice and he did write the book for her, I believe that there is something moving about a man who fights one of the hardest fights in the world: his desire – that it takes the form of a book full of talking chess pieces, snotty flowers and knitting sheep, rather than focus on the matter at hand.

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July –

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear –

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream –
Lingering in the golden gleam –
Life, what is it but a dream?

And looking at the acrostic poem, there it is – a love suppressed, a love unimaginable for other people, a love that took form in one of the most disturbing, yet best children’s stories in the history of literature.

Alice Pleasance Liddell.
1 Response
  1. Hello,

    I appreciate your article, but I do want to bring to your attention that Lewis Carrol never photographed the girls in the nude, he did photograph them, with some subjects that the modern adult could translate to sexual (such as the little begger girl)

    Thank you,
    An Interested Reader