The Annotated Alice Read online

  In politics he was a Tory, awed by lords and ladies and inclined to be snobbish toward inferiors. He objected strongly to profanity and suggestive dialogue on the stage, and one of his many unfinished projects was to bowdlerize Bowdler by editing an edition of Shakespeare suitable for young girls. He planned to do this by taking out certain passages that even Bowdler had found inoffensive. He was so shy that he could sit for hours at a social gathering and contribute nothing to the conversation, but his shyness and stammering “softly and suddenly vanished away” when he was alone with a child. He was a fussy, prim, fastidious, cranky, kind, gentle bachelor whose life was sexless, uneventful, and happy. “My life is so strangely free from all trial and trouble,” he once wrote, “that I cannot doubt my own happiness is one of the talents entrusted to me to ‘occupy’ with, till the Master shall return, by doing something to make other lives happy.”

  So far so dull. We begin to catch glimpses of a more colorful personality when we turn to Charles Dodgson’s hobbies. As a child he dabbled in puppetry and sleight of hand, and throughout his life enjoyed doing magic tricks, especially for children. He liked to form a mouse with his handkerchief then make it jump mysteriously out of his hand. He taught children how to fold paper boats and paper pistols that popped when swung through the air. He took up photography when the art was just beginning, specializing in portraits of children and famous people, and composing his pictures with remarkable skill and good taste. He enjoyed games of all sorts, especially chess, croquet, backgammon and billiards. He invented a great many mathematical and word puzzles, games, cipher methods, and a system for memorizing numbers (in his diary he mentions using his mnemonic system for memorizing pi to seventy-one decimal places). He was an enthusiastic patron of opera and the theater at a time when this was frowned upon by church officials. The famous actress Ellen Terry was one of his lifelong friends.

  Ellen Terry was an exception. Carroll’s principal hobby—the hobby that aroused his greatest joys—was entertaining little girls. “I am fond of children (except boys),” he once wrote. He professed a horror of little boys, and in later life avoided them as much as possible. Adopting the Roman symbol for a day of good fortune, he would write in his diary, “I mark this day with a white stone” whenever he felt it to be specially memorable. In almost every case his white-stone days were days on which he entertained a child-friend or made the acquaintance of a new one. He thought the naked bodies of little girls (unlike the bodies of boys) extremely beautiful. Upon occasion he sketched or photographed them in the nude, with the mother’s permission, of course. “If I had the loveliest child in the world, to draw or photograph,” he wrote, “and found she had a modest shrinking (however slight, and however easily overcome) from being taken nude, I should feel it was a solemn duty owed to God to drop the request altogether.” Lest these undraped pictures later embarrass the girls, he requested that after his death they be destroyed or returned to the children or their parents. None seems to have survived.

  In Sylvie and Bruno Concluded there is a passage that expresses poignantly Carroll’s fixation upon little girls of all the passion of which he was capable. The narrator of the story, a thinly disguised Charles Dodgson, recalls that only once in his life did he ever see perfection. “…it was in a London exhibition, where, in making my way through a crowd, I suddenly met, face to face, a child of quite unearthly beauty.” Carroll never ceased looking for such a child. He became adept at meeting little girls in railway carriages and on public beaches. A black bag that he always took with him on these seaside trips contained wire puzzles and other unusual gifts to stimulate their interest. He even carried a supply of safety pins for pinning up the skirts of little girls when they wished to wade in the surf. Opening gambits could be amusing. Once when he was sketching near the sea a little girl who had fallen into the water walked by with dripping clothes. Carroll tore a corner from a piece of blotting paper and said, “May I offer you this to blot yourself up?”

  A long procession of charming little girls (we know they were charming from their photographs) skipped through Carroll’s life, but none ever quite took the place of his first love, Alice Liddell. “I have had scores of child-friends since your time,” he wrote to her after her marriage, “but they have been quite a different thing.” Alice was the daughter of Henry George Liddell (the name rhymes with fiddle), the dean of Christ Church. Some notion of how attractive Alice must have been can be gained from a passage in Praeterita, a fragmentary autobiography by John Ruskin. Florence Becker Lennon reprints the passage in her biography of Carroll, and it is from her book that I shall quote.

  Ruskin was at that time teaching at Oxford and he had given Alice drawing lessons. One snowy winter evening when Dean and Mrs. Liddell were dining out, Alice invited Ruskin over for a cup of tea. “I think Alice must have sent me a little note,” he writes, “when the eastern coast of Tom Quad was clear.” Ruskin had settled in an armchair by a roaring fire when the door burst open and “there was a sudden sense of some stars having been blown out by the wind.” Dean and Mrs. Liddell had returned, having found the roads blocked with snow.

  “How sorry you must be to see us, Mr. Ruskin!” said Mrs. Liddell.

  “I was never more so,” Ruskin replied.

  The dean suggested that they go back to their tea. “And so we did,” Ruskin continues, “but we couldn’t keep papa and mamma out of the drawing-room when they had done dinner, and I went back to Corpus, disconsolate.”

  And now for the most significant part of the story. Ruskin thinks that Alice’s sisters, Edith and Rhoda, were also present, but he isn’t sure. “It is all so like a dream now,” he writes. Yes, Alice must have been quite an attractive little girl.

  There has been much argumentation about whether Carroll was in love with Alice Liddell. If this is taken to mean that he wanted to marry her or make love to her, there is not the slightest evidence for it. On the other hand, his attitude toward her was the attitude of a man in love. We do know that Mrs. Liddell sensed something unusual, took steps to discourage Carroll’s attention, and later burned all of his early letters to Alice. There is a cryptic reference in Carroll’s diary on October 28, 1862, to his being out of Mrs. Liddell’s good graces “ever since Lord Newry’s business.” What business Lord Newry has in Carroll’s diary remains to this day a tantalizing mystery.

  There is no indication that Carroll was conscious of anything but the purest innocence in his relations with little girls, nor is there a hint of impropriety in any of the fond recollections that dozens of them later wrote about him. There was a tendency in Victorian England, reflected in the literature of the time, to idealize the beauty and virginal purity of little girls. No doubt this made it easier for Carroll to suppose that his fondness for them was on a high spiritual level, though of course this hardly is a sufficient explanation for that fondness. Of late Carroll has been compared with Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. It is true that both had a passion for little girls, but their goals were exactly opposite. Humbert Humbert’s “nymphets” were creatures to be used carnally. Carroll’s little girls appealed to him precisely because he felt sexually safe with them. The thing that distinguishes Carroll from other writers who lived sexless lives (Thoreau, Henry James…) and from writers who were strongly drawn to little girls (Poe, Ernest Dowson…) was his curious combination, almost unique in literary history, of complete sexual innocence with a passion that can only be described as thoroughly heterosexual.

  Carroll enjoyed kissing his child-friends and closing letters by sending them 10,000,000 kisses, or 4¾, or a two-millionth part of a kiss. He would have been horrified at the suggestion that a sexual element might be involved. There is one amusing record in his diary of his having kissed one little girl, only to discover later that she was seventeen. Carroll promptly wrote a mock apology to her mother, assuring her that it would never happen again, but the mother was not amused.

  On one occasion a pretty fifteen-year-o
ld actress named Irene Barnes (she later played the roles of White Queen and Knave of Hearts in the stage musical of Alice) spent a week with Charles Dodgson at a seaside resort. “As I remember him now,” Irene recalls in her autobiography, To Tell My Story (the passage is quoted by Roger Green in Vol. 2, page 454, of Carroll’s Diary), “he was very slight, a little under six foot, with a fresh, youngish face, white hair, and an impression of extreme cleanliness…He had a deep love for children, though I am inclined to think not such a great understanding of them…His great delight was to teach me his Game of Logic [this was a method of solving syllogisms by placing black and red counters on a diagram of Carroll’s own invention]. Dare I say this made the evening rather long, when the band was playing outside on the parade, and the moon shining on the sea?”

  It is easy to say that Carroll found an outlet for his repressions in the unrestrained, whimsically violent visions of his Alice books. Victorian children no doubt enjoyed similar release. They were delighted to have at last some books without a pious moral, but Carroll grew more and more restive with the thought that he had not yet written a book for youngsters that would convey some sort of evangelistic Christian message. His effort in this direction was Sylvie and Bruno, a long, fantastic novel that appeared in two separately published parts. It contains some splendid comic scenes, and the Gardener’s song, which runs like a demented fugue through the tale, is Carroll at his best. Here is the final verse, sung by the Gardener with tears streaming down his cheeks.

  He thought he saw an Argument

  That proved he was the Pope:

  He looked again, and found it was

  A Bar of Mottled Soap.

  “A fact so dread,” he faintly said,

  “Extinguishes all hope!”

  But the superb nonsense songs were not the features Carroll most admired about this story. He preferred a song sung by the two fairy children, Sylvie and her brother Bruno, the refrain of which went:

  For I think it is Love,

  For I feel it is Love,

  For I’m sure it is nothing but Love!

  Carroll considered this the finest poem he had ever written. Even those who may agree with the sentiment behind it, and behind other portions of the novel that are heavily sugared with piety, find it difficult to read these portions today without embarrassment for the author. They seem to have been written at the bottom of treacle wells. Sadly one must conclude that, on the whole, Sylvie and Bruno is both an artistic and rhetorical failure. Surely few Victorian children, for whom the story was intended, were ever moved, amused, or elevated by it.

  Ironically, it is Carroll’s earlier and pagan nonsense that has, at least for a few modern readers, a more effective religious message than Sylvie and Bruno. For nonsense, as Chesterton liked to tell us, is a way of looking at existence that is akin to religious humility and wonder. The Unicorn thought Alice a fabulous monster. It is part of the philosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves. Occasionally the noses of these creatures are shaken by momentary paroxysms. Kierkegaard once imagined a philosopher sneezing while recording one of his profound sentences. How could such a man, Kierkegaard wondered, take his metaphysics seriously?

  The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity. We all live slapstick lives, under an inexplicable sentence of death, and when we try to find out what the Castle authorities want us to do, we are shifted from one bumbling bureaucrat to another. We are not even sure that Count West-West, the owner of the Castle, really exists. More than one critic has commented on the similarities between Kafka’s Trial and the trial of the Jack of Hearts; between Kafka’s Castle and a chess game in which living pieces are ignorant of the game’s plan and cannot tell if they move of their own wills or are being pushed by invisible fingers.

  This vision of the monstrous mindlessness of the cosmos (“Off with its head!”) can be grim and disturbing, as it is in Kafka and the Book of Job, or lighthearted comedy, as in Alice or Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. When Sunday, the symbol of God in Chesterton’s metaphysical nightmare, flings little messages to his pursuers, they turn out to be nonsense messages. One of them is even signed Snowdrop, the name of Alice’s White Kitten. It is a vision that can lead to despair and suicide, to the laughter that closes Jean Paul Sartre’s story “The Wall,” to the humanist’s resolve to carry on bravely in the face of ultimate darkness. Curiously, it can also suggest the wild hypothesis that there may be a light behind the darkness.

  Laughter, declares Reinhold Niebuhr in one of his finest sermons, is a kind of no man’s land between faith and despair. We preserve our sanity by laughing at life’s surface absurdities, but the laughter turns to bitterness and derision if directed toward the deeper irrationalities of evil and death. “That is why,” he concludes, “there is laughter in the vestibule of the temple, the echo of laughter in the temple itself, but only faith and prayer, and no laughter, in the holy of holies.”

  Lord Dunsany said the same thing this way in The Gods of Pagana. The speaker is Limpang-Tung, the god of mirth and melodious minstrels.

  “I will send jests into the world and a little mirth. And while Death seems to thee as far away as the purple rim of hills, or sorrow as far off as rain in the blue days of summer, then pray to Limpang-Tung. But when thou growest old, or ere thou diest, pray not to Limpang-Tung, for thou becomest part of a scheme that he doth not understand.

  “Go out into the starry night, and Limpang-Tung will dance with thee…Or offer up a jest to Limpang-Tung; only pray not in thy sorrow to Limpang-Tung, for he saith of sorrow: ‘It may be very clever of the gods, but he doth not understand.’”

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are two incomparable jests that the Reverend C. L. Dodgson, on a mental holiday from Christ Church chores, once offered up to Limpang-Tung.

  Introduction to

  More Annotated Alice

  Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was a shy, eccentric bachelor who taught mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. He had a great fondness for playing with mathematics, logic, and words, for writing nonsense, and for the company of attractive little girls. Somehow these passions magically fused to produce two immortal fantasies, written for his most-loved child-friend, Alice Liddell, daughter of the Christ Church dean. No one suspected at the time that those two books would become classics of English literature. And no one could have guessed that Carroll’s fame would eventually surpass that of Alice’s father and of all Carroll’s colleagues at Oxford.

  No other books written for children are more in need of explication than the Alice books. Much of their wit is interwoven with Victorian events and customs unfamiliar to American readers today, and even to readers in England. Many jokes in the books could be appreciated only by Oxford residents, and others were private jokes intended solely for Alice. It was to throw as much light as I could on these obscurities that forty years ago I wrote The Annotated Alice.

  There was little in that volume that could not be found scattered among the pages of books about Carroll. My task then was not to do original research but to take all I could find from the existing literature that would make the Alice books more enjoyable to contemporary readers.

  During the forty years that followed, public and scholarly interest in Lewis Carroll has grown at a remarkable rate. The Lewis Carroll Society was formed in England, and its lively periodical, Jabberwocky (now retitled T
he Carrollian), has appeared quarterly since its first issue in 1969. The Lewis Carroll Society of North America, under the leadership of Stan Marx, came into existence in 1974. New biographies of Carroll—and one of Alice Liddell!—as well as books about special aspects of Carroll’s life and writings have been published. That indispensable guide for collectors, The Lewis Carroll Handbook, was revised and updated in 1962 by the late Roger Green, and updated again in 1979 by Denis Crutch. Papers about Carroll turned up with increasing frequency in academic journals. There were new collections of essays about Carroll, and new bibliographies. The two-volume Letters of Lewis Carroll, edited by Morton H. Cohen, was published in 1979. Michael Hancher’s The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books came out in 1985.

  New editions of Alice, as well as reprintings of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (the original story hand-lettered and illustrated by Carroll as a gift to Alice Liddell), and The Nursery “Alice” (Carroll’s retelling of the story for very young readers) rolled off presses around the world. Several editions of Alice were newly annotated—one by the British philosopher Peter Heath. Other editions were given new illustrations by distinguished graphic artists. Some notion of the vastness of this literature can be gained by leafing through the 253 pages of Edward Guiliano’s Lewis Carroll: An Annotated International Bibliography, 1960–77, already more than two decades behind the times.

  Since 1960 Alice has been the star of endless screen, television, and radio productions around the world. Poems and songs in the Alice books have been given new melodies by modern composers—one of them Steve Allen, for CBS’s 1985 musical. David Del Tredici has been writing his brilliant symphonic works based on Alice themes. Glen Tetley’s “Alice” ballet, featuring Del Tredici’s music, was produced in Manhattan in 1986. Morton Cohen, who knows more about Dodgson than any other living person, published in 1995 his biography Lewis Carroll, which contained many startling revelations.