[In the following essay, Cohen addresses critical speculation about Carroll's sex life.]

A few years ago a well-known writer came to talk with me about Lewis Carroll. He was writing a biography of Carroll, and, as I was then editing Carroll's letters, he thought that I might be able to help him. Most of all, he wanted to know about Carroll's sex life. He asked me a long string of pointed questions, and he wanted specific, factual answers. I could not, in all honesty, supply them, and I fear he was disappointed. I did not know whether Carroll had sexual dreams; I could not speculate about Carroll's sexual fantasies or even say if he had any.

And yet, in spite of those negative and uninformative replies, I believe that I know Carroll as well as anyone else does and that, on the basis of twenty years' work with the man's published writings, his diaries, and his letters, I can be fairly sure about his likes and dislikes, his political and religious views, his social outlook, and the general pattern of his relationships. It follows, too, that I can venture some reasoned views about his attitude to sex as it emerges from a careful examination of his personal writings.

One uncontrovertible fact is that Lewis Carroll was a model Victorian. He was born in 1832, five years before Victoria ascended the throne; he died in 1898, three years before the Queen herself. But Carroll was a model Victorian in more than chronology; he was particularly Victorian in his voluminous record keeping. The Victorian age was an age of record, perhaps the last in the conventional sense, the last age of paper record. With the telephone not yet in common use, people still wrote letters to one another. But besides that, the Victorians were obsessed with the need to write things down, as if to keep score, to justify themselves to themselves.

Lewis Carroll himself was a record keeper of mind-boggling proportions. One wonders, indeed, how he managed to perform his duties as Mathematical Lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, to carry out his clerical tasks, to write twenty or so books, to take hundreds of photographs, and to do all the other things he did, indeed, to live so full a life and still maintain his voluminous records. The detailed diaries that he kept for half of the nineteenth century must have taken an inordinate amount of his time. And then there is the myriad of letters he wrote. But even they offer no reasonable explanation of how he managed to do all that he did.

We all write letters, and certainly the Victorians wrote more of them than we do, but Carroll was one of the most formidable letter writers who ever lived. When he was nearing his twenty-ninth birthday, in 1861, he began keeping a letter register, where he assigned a number to every letter he wrote and received and entered beside the number a précis of the letter's contents. He kept the register until he died, thirty-seven years later. The last entry in that register, which accounts for his letters for just over half his life, numbered 98,721.

By examining Carroll's diaries and letters, we get a fairly comprehensive view of this Victorian, and we learn a good deal about his milieu, the age in which he lived, and, in particular, Victorian Oxford. But most of all, we get to know the man who created the Alice books. We learn how he thinks, what he believes in, and we become acquainted with his opinions, his manner of living, and, perhaps most important for our purpose here, with his emotional responses.

One obstacle that stands in the way of seeing Lewis Carroll plain is, ironically, the critical attention he has received. Sad to say, most literary critics who write on Carroll, like my visitor, bring to their work a good many preconceptions, if not misconceptions. And many of them appear less interested in knowing Carroll than they are in grinding away at some theory they have, whether based on fact or not. Everyone who has read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland knows that it contains levels of feeling and meaning that are not readily accessible. Critics have been working overtime trying to get at that inaccessible substructure of the books, most particularly critics with a psychoanalytical bent. But the fact is that the more one reads of these critics' work, the more confused one grows. If we take them seriously, we enter a world of chaos.

One critic has conclusively proved that Alice was not written by Lewis Carroll at all and that the real author was Queen Victoria. An earlier writer toys with the notion that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an allegory of the Oxford Movement, another an allegory of Darwinian evolution. Still another tells us that the story of Alice represents Charles Dodgson's own birth trauma in the isolated Cheshire rectory where he was born. Other psychoanalysts tell us that the book is about a woman in labor, that falling down the rabbit hole is a hidden expression of Dodgson's secret wish for coitus, that Alice is a phallus (that one, at least, rhymes), or that she's a fetus. Or, if we prefer, we can take the view that she is a transvestite Christ. A more recent essay claims that Dodgson was the first “acidhead,” while Kenneth Burke tells us that the story is about toilet training and bowel movements.¹ It's almost as though these analysts are competing to advance the most unusual, some would say the most outrageous or fantastic, interpretation of Dodgson the man and his brainchild Alice in Wonderland. I listened not long ago to a paper on Alice as a symbol of the fallen woman. Well, after all, she does fall down the rabbit hole.

There is no consensus; nowhere do we find even the hope of agreement on what the story really means. Certainly the day will come when we shall have better techniques for understanding the real meaning of the book and what Dodgson's subconscious was getting at here. But our tools and techniques are not yet sufficiently refined for that exercise; we do not yet know how to interpret Dodgson's psychological pyrotechnics in the story.

We are all products of our own time, and I confess that when I first began to work on Carroll, I thought that some of these critics might be right. After all, Dodgson did prefer the company of little girls to adults, and perhaps we could learn about that preference through psychoanalytical speculation. I half expected to find suspicious, or at least ambiguous, evidence about his relationships with his child friends in the letters that he wrote to them. Actually, at first my expectations seemed to be working out when photocopies of the letters started pouring in. A huge proportion of the letters were addressed to little girls, and some of the girls were saluted as “Darling,” “My own Agnes,” and the like. But with closer acquaintance, I had to abandon my earlier suspicions.

In fact the psychologists and the psychoanalysists have not helped me to understand Carroll. My understanding has come from my work with original material, Carroll's diaries, his letters, and the reminiscences that the little girls themselves have left behind. For one thing, I have grown convinced in the process that we have more to learn about Carroll and his fellow-Victorians by seeing them in their day-to-day dealings with one another, that is by examining their conscious lives, than we can from symbol hunting and psychological theorizing. Most of these intelligent Victorians were exceptionally self-conscious, and they constantly sought to assess their own worth, to justify their behavior. Lewis Carroll is a good case in point: he is most revealing when he appraises himself to himself, to the society in which he lived, and to God.

I don't mean to suggest that we should look at these people in a vacuum; indeed the surroundings they grew up in are extremely important. Oddly enough, some of Dodgson's biographers have failed to examine his environment carefully and have not dealt sufficiently with two powerful influences that helped to shape him.

The first important influence was the Yorkshire rectory where Charles Dodgson spent his childhood. Dodgson's father was the curate of a Yorkshire congregation (later he became Archdeacon of Richmond and Canon of Ripon). Dodgson père had come from a long line of clergymen, among them a sprinkling of bishops, and it seemed quite natural that three of his four sons should go into the church. The family in the rectory was a large one of eleven children; Lewis Carroll was the third child, the eldest son. It was a “good” family on both sides, with family trees going back for centuries. It was conservative, steeped in tradition, pious, devoted to social service—and morning, noon, and night the family prayed together. Although we know that Carroll's father could be witty on occasion and display a good sense of fun, the essential picture we get of him is of a strong, solid, authoritarian, rather gloomy high and dry churchman.

We know less about Carroll's mother. She died before he was nineteen. She must have been a gentle creature, and, what with eleven children, a very busy one. In the few allusions that Carroll makes to her, he shows genuine affection. But it is clear from the evidence that Carroll's relationship with his father was one of the powerful facts of his life. The two developed close mutual sympathies and understanding early, and the father soon became a model for the son to emulate. The father died in 1868, when Carroll was thirty-six, but even years later, when Carroll himself was an older man, he characterized the loss of his father as “the greatest sorrow of my life.”

Dodgson certainly had pleasant memories of childhood. After all he had a good number of sisters and brothers to play with, and we know that he enjoyed walks and rambles in the Yorkshire countryside. He was adept at mechanical things, and he built a miniature railway in the back garden and a puppet theater for which he wrote original plays. We know, too, that he was a constant reader, had a good memory, liked to sketch and to write poetry and short stories. But perhaps most of all, he had learned, early, under his father's guidance, to live a purposeful life. It was a life of prayer and charity and duty and love. Selflessness and hard work were part of the code by which he lived. Today we would say that Charles Dodgson and a large number of his contemporaries never really had any childhood—they had to study too long, they had to pray too much and too often, they had to perform too many rituals, and they had to work too hard. But they did not object: this was the only way to live. They enjoyed reading the Bible (it was, after all, the best of all storybooks), and they even looked forward to the Sunday sermon almost as much as children in our time look forward to Sesame Street on television. They believed in Christ as a real phenomenon; He was, in a sense, a member of the family. And they genuinely strove to do good deeds and to think noble thoughts.

When we teach about the Victorian age, some of us tend to characterize it as a time when all the traditional values, and especially traditional religious faith, came under severe attack. The new science, the developmental theory, Benthamism, Darwinism, Agnosticism, the new geology, Higher Criticism—these new movements called everything into doubt. And indeed they did, but the truth is that they called everything into doubt for only a handful of top-drawer intellectuals like Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and a few others. For most people, the traditional faith endured, and when the onslaught from all the 'isms began, they turned, in panic, back to the old verities. They had earlier been shocked by the outrages of the Regency, and they had already barricaded themselves against the sins of the world. Now it only remained for them to reinforce the barricades against the new threats.

The Victorians' faith reached back to the Puritans, beyond the moral looseness of the eighteenth century, and the Puritan scenario was what it had always been. The protagonists were a jealous God and an omnipresent Devil who fought for the human soul. One's conduct here on earth ultimately earned a reward in Heaven or punishment in Hell. The old faith was based on authority: God, parents, elders, betters, upper classes. It had nothing to do with any modern notions of democracy or equality. Most Victorians were not taught to cultivate open minds, to consider all sides of a question. The flexible, searching mind was truly exceptional; most minds were rigid, dogmatic. They feared new ideas; they sensed danger and evil in change and innovation.

Earnestness was an essential Victorian characteristic, transcending the limits of specific religions, and it underscored everyone's behavior, regardless of his or her religious convictions. Kingsley, Newman, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Tennyson, Browning—even they, while they cultivated different spiritual vineyards, all emerged with a central concern for the way one must behave. They all endorsed the same quality of living, the same moral code. And the ordinary Victorians as well as the great thinkers all agreed on an uncompromisingly Christian ethic that required self-discipline and good habits, that demanded that all action conform to a Christian conscience and all behavior be characterized by honesty, good manners, and generosity. You might not believe in God, but you behaved according to His Commandments anyway.

Lewis Carroll embraced this ethic at an early age, in the family circle in Yorkshire, with his father setting the tone and spirit of his faith. He was, to begin with, a bright lad, but he must have worked unremittingly, for when he left home to go to Richmond School at the age of twelve, he was already proficient in higher mathematics and could read and write Latin easily. He entered his school with more in his head than most young people today have in theirs when they enter—some would say leave—college.

But what about the whimsey that was to make him famous? Where does that come in? Well, that is there as well, or the roots of it are. The youthful jottings that survive are delightful, the compositions, the stories, the verse, the drawings are all inventive, clever, spellbinding. Yes, the moral tone is always present too.

The Dodgsons, like other good Victorian families, produced family magazines. The earliest one is appropriately entitled Useful and Instructive Poetry, and it was composed entirely by the young Lewis Carroll, aged thirteen, especially for a younger brother and sister. It contains a string of humorous verses and some pencil sketches. Three of the verses are entitled “Punctuality,” “Charity,” and “Rules and Regulations.” While the verses are often clever and witty, some of the titles and the accompanying moral tags couch the fun in an earnest context. The first verse in the magazine is entitled “My Fairy”:

I have a fairy by my side
          Which says I must not sleep,
When once in pain I loudly cried
          It said, “You must not weep.”
If, full of mirth, I smile and grin,
          It says, “You must not laugh,”
When once I wished to drink some gin,
          It said “You must not quaff.”
When once a meal I wished to taste
          It said “You must not bite,”
When to the wars I went in haste,
          It said “You must not fight.”
“What may I do?” At length I cried,
          Tired of the painful task,
The fairy quietly replied,
          And said “You must not ask.”
Moral: “You mustn't.”

This playful rhyme is an apt comment on Victorian childhood and, by implication, on Victorian parenthood and adulthood. After all, these children who were taught that they mustn't did in time go on to become adults, and they carried the lesson of mustn't to the four corners of the earth. Certainly mustn't becomes one of the strongest themes of Charles Dodgson's mature life.

Carroll remained at the Richmond Grammar School for only a year and a half, boarding with the headmaster and his huge family in what was surely a close replica of his own home. When he left Richmond, the headmaster wrote to Carroll's father: “I shall always feel a peculiar interest in the gentle, intelligent, and well-conducted boy who is now leaving us.”² The emphasis on good behavior was not perfunctory.

Carroll spent the next three years at Rugby. Those years did much to convince him that all he had learned in his family circle was absolutely and irrevocably true. Biographers have missed much in not examining more carefully the influences that must have impinged upon Carroll at Rugby: they offer us some of the more important insights into Carroll's personality and indeed into the shaping of Victorian character generally.

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Rugby was enjoying the result of the reforms initiated by Dr. Thomas Arnold. Arnold came to Rugby in 1828 determined to turn the school, which had been labeled a “nursery for vice,” into a training ground for Christian gentlemen. In Arnold's view the school's chapel was as important as its classrooms: Christian faith and Christian learning would, if blended well, produce a superior breed of man, a new brand of Englishman. To achieve his goal, Arnold made changes: he instituted the preceptor system, he selected his staff carefully, and he instilled in them and in the boys they taught a missionary zeal. His Sunday sermons in chapel—he was Rugby's chaplain as well as its headmaster—bore a distinct, martial tone, and the boys later recorded that they often felt that the headmaster was speaking to each one of them personally. Arnold told the boys that this life on earth was no fool's paradise: it was a battlefield where everyone must fight and where the stakes were enormous.

The boys listened, they were mesmerized, they quaked. They well knew Arnold's list of six supreme evils, which included sensual wickedness and evil companionship. They learned, too, that Arnold placed religious and moral behavior ahead of gentlemanly conduct, and gentlemanly conduct ahead of intellectual achievement. Arnold also taught a kind of spiritual introspection: he believed that all sinners must look for help within themselves even as they must constantly vindicate themselves to themselves. He sought to build strong individual temples in his boys. He believed that if they cultivated strong wills, strong minds and strong bodies would follow automatically. Truthfulness was one of Arnold's special values, and no one came in for so much reproof and punishment as a boy caught lying. It is no secret that Arnold's army of private soldiers went forth to become the eminent Victorians and that Rugby became the model for all good schools, not only in England but in the entire English-speaking world.

Lewis Carroll never actually heard Dr. Arnold preach. He arrived at Rugby in 1846, three years after Arnold's death, and his headmaster was A. C. Tait, who, if he did not possess Arnold's fiery personality, certainly matched Arnold's dedication to high ideals. Tait, too, made the chapel the heart of the school and in his eight years there did much to reinforce Arnold's missionary spirit. No mean preacher himself, Tait soon went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was he whom Lewis Carroll heard preach at Sunday chapel. But we can be sure that Carroll also read Arnold's sermons, published in 1848, while Carroll was a Rugby boy.

Certainly not all Rugby boys emerged in their headmaster's image, but Lewis Carroll needed no prodding in his conduct or his studies. He had formed his habits earlier, in Yorkshire. What is especially interesting, in reading the Dodgson diaries and the letters, is that one finds echoing in these pages the very principles that Dr. Arnold had laid down before Dodgson ever arrived at Rugby. By some quirk of descent, Dodgson becomes, in some respects, a reflection, at least spiritually, of the headmaster he never knew. Life for Dodgson is indeed an armed battle against the Devil, and one wins that battle by being ever vigilant, by exercising a strong will, by practicing merciless self-denial, by engaging in constant and unremitting labor, and by living in perpetual communion with God in thought and in prayer.

We have no diary for the years Dodgson was at Rugby, but we do have one for his early years as a mathematical lecturer at Christ Church, beginning in 1855. On one occasion he writes: “With God's help I desire to begin (1) daily reading and meditation of the Bible (best before chapel), (2) cleaning off arrears of lecture-work before doing anything else, (3) denying myself indulgence in sleep in the evenings, (4) methodically preparing outlines of sermons. Oh God,” he concludes, “I repent of my past life: I long to do better … for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen.”³ Similar resolutions appear regularly in the diaries, and they are accompanied by hasty, modest entries about his accomplishments: his working at mathematical problems, the proofs he has readied for the printer, and, here and there, an account of the number of hours he has worked that day, on some days as many as fourteen.

Here is another entry from the diary: “I here record my intention of beginning, next term, a habit of evening work, and also of trying the experiment of taking regular Sunday duty” (January 24, 1865). Another entry: “Term begins tomorrow. I must try to get into regular habits, and a life of more direct preparation for the Ministry. Oh God, purify me, and help me to live ever as in thy sight, for thy dear Son's sake” (October 17, 1862). On the last day of 1863: “Here, at the close of another year, how much of neglect, carelessness, and sin have I to remember! I had hoped, during the year, to have made a beginning in parochial work, to have thrown off habits of evil, to have advanced in my work at Christ Church—how little, next to nothing, has been done of all this! Now I have a fresh year before me: once more let me set myself to do some thing worthy of life ‘before I go hence, and be no more seen.’ Oh God, grant me grace to consecrate to Thee, during this new year, my life and powers, my days and nights, myself. Take me, vile and worthless as I am: use me as Thou seest fit, help me to be Thy servant, for Christ's sake. Amen” (D, I, 208). The humility, the deep and genuine religious feeling and devotion was his to the end. Less than six years before he died, he writes, after preaching in church on Sunday: “Once more I have to thank my heavenly Father for the great blessing and privilege of being allowed to speak for Him! May He bless my words and help some soul on its heavenward way” (April 3, 1892).

By most standards, Dodgson's life was one of considerable accomplishment. Most people know his two children's classics and some know that he wrote some works on mathematics and logic. But few realize that his bibliography contains some three hundred separately published items. Apart from his writing, he taught mathematics diligently and, although he never had his own curacy, he took his clerical duties seriously and often preached in church. On a number of occasions, in fact, he filled St. Mary's, Oxford, to capacity with a university congregation. He served for almost ten years as Curator of Christ Church Common Room, and he made a name for himself as one of the earliest art photographers and certainly the finest photographer of children in the nineteenth century.

Dodgson constantly befriended the poor and visited the sick, and, we are told, when he realized that his children's books would bring in a modest income for the rest of his life, he actually asked Oxford University to reduce his salary. All his life he lived simply in college rooms, allowed himself pleasures but no extravagant indulgences, ate little when he ate at all, and usually dressed in black. Only once in his life did he travel abroad. For most of his life he helped support his six unmarried sisters and a good many other people—relatives, friends, even strangers. He always took on new students to teach and was ready, however modestly, to offer young and old alike religious or spiritual instruction. In Dodgson, Dr. Arnold's lofty Victorian standards were incarnate: we never find an allusion to anything sensual, and he holds truthfulness to be as noble a virtue as Arnold did.

Dodgson's faith, like Arnold's, had been worked out logically: if his faith could not stand the test of logic, it was not worth having, and there was no place for compromise or exceptions. He knew precisely what he believed in and why. “I believe, first and before all,” he wrote a friend, “that there is an absolute, self-existent, external, distinction between Right and Wrong. … By ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong,’ I mean what we ought to do, and ought not to do, without any reference to rewards or punishments. … Secondly, I believe I am responsible to a Personal Being for what I do. … Thirdly, I believe that Being to be perfectly good. And I call that perfectly good Being ‘God.’”⁴

And so what have we here in this selfless, hard-working, devout Victorian—a saint? Hardly. Although he is charitable and understanding, he is not flawless. As good a man as he is, he is equally beset by foibles and shortcomings. His own exceptional abilities make him impatient with those of lesser gifts. His uncompromising standards frequently turn him into a prig. His determined honesty leads him sometimes to deal with others brusquely. He is a snob. Occasionally he writes testy, disagreeable letters to tradespeople, to the Steward of Christ Church, to Oxford colleagues, to hosts and hostesses, to fellow-clerics (once to a bishop) complaining about their behavior.

Even for Victorian England, when formality reigned, Carroll's social stance is stiff and unbending. Imagine, never, not once in his life, did he address an adult outside his family by a first name. No friend, no colleague ever got called John or Fred or Harry. In spite of his multifarious interests—in the theater, in photography, in medicine, in art—he lived a carefully ordered life. He not only regulated his outer behavior but imposed strict rules upon his inner life as well. He kept his emotions in check, harnessed, and while this uncompromising rigor turned him into a thoroughly repressed human being, that was the only possible way for Carroll to live. “God has implanted sexual desires [in us all],” he wrote in an essay, “[and] … God forbids us to arouse or encourage these desires except for the object for which He gave them, marriage.”⁵ Carroll's repression was probably good for his art, but it could not have added to his happiness as a human being. We have no evidence anywhere that he ever lost control or that his defenses ever crumbled.

When we discuss Carroll's emotional life, we at once encounter the little girls. If Dodgson's posture was so stern, his principles so uncompromising, how do these little girls fit into the life? Some part of the answer is to be found in the Victorian man's attitude toward women and children generally.

Never since the Middle Ages had woman been worshipped for her innocence and for her goodness as she was in Victorian times. After all, she and her sisters composed a breed of humanity closer to angels than men; they were models of virtue. They had no sexual appetites to plague them, and their instincts were unsullied. They could even draw men heavenwards and help them achieve salvation. And so men nurtured and admired these blessed beings; they shielded their sisters, their wives, and their daughters from the gross and brutish world; they protected and cherished their natural piety.

Along with this cult of feminine purity came the cult of childhood innocence which the Victorians inherited from the Romantics. They read their Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and they knew that the child, and especially the female child, was a sprite living an idyllic existence. She had recently come from God and she still possessed a modicum of divine knowledge. And so the Victorian male devoted himself to the child's needs, thought himself privileged to witness the visionary gleam inherent in these creatures, and encouraged the expanding heart and mind. Men valued the prerogatives of helping to mold the child's mind, of loving those beautifully natural beings, of being loved by them, of devoting one's energies to educating them, to amusing them, and to making them laugh.

When Dodgson first discovered his deep affinity for the child, we do not know, but it was probably in the Yorkshire rectory where he grew up with his younger brothers and sister. It must have been a remarkable event, for he went on to devote much of his life to children. Over and over again, one is astonished at his patience and his willingness to endure the rebuffs, the impetuous outbursts, and the thoughtlessness both of the children he knew and of their mothers. But all the while, he reveals an almost magical insight into the hearts and minds of the children. He built his friendships with them carefully, always aware that they could come tumbling to the ground like a house of cards. “It takes some time to understand a child's nature,” he wrote to the mother of a young girl, “—particularly when one only sees them all together, and in the presence of their elders. I don't think anybody, who has only seen children so, has any idea of the loveliness of a child's mind. I have been largely privileged in tête-à-tête intercourse with children. It is very healthy and helpful to one's own spiritual life: and humbling too, to come into contact with souls so much purer, and nearer to God, than one feels oneself to be” (L, II, 980).

But there is another side to Dodgson's friendships with these little girls, a less earnest side, that appears when he meets with them or when he writes them letters or stories from afar. Say that Dodgson was an arrested child himself, if you wish, or, like Kipling and Barrie, a permanent adolescent. But what is more important is that these children sparked his creative fire. The little girls were natural, honest creatures: they laughed easily, and he enjoyed making them laugh. What is more, he felt thoroughly relaxed and at ease with them: in their presence his stammer often disappeared. I shudder to think how many original Lewis Carroll stories have been lost—the dozens, perhaps hundreds, that he invented for these little girls on the spur of the moment, as he did Alice in Wonderland, but which he never wrote down. But I suppose we must not be greedy; at least we have a great many of his letters to the little girls, overflowing as they do with fantasy upon fantasy that he created for them.

How serious was he really about these child friends? Enormously serious. He pursued these youngsters, he negotiated with their parents for visits with them, and he took them on railway journeys, on outings to the theater, to art galleries, for long walks. He fed them, he gave them inscribed copies of his books, he sent them presents, he paid for some of their French lessons, art lessons, singing lessons, and he even paid some dentist bills. He made sketches of them; he photographed them. He entertained them in his rooms at Christ Church; he wrote them amusing and loving letters; he cuddled them; he kissed them.

Certainly eyebrows were raised, there was gossip, and some mothers complained. But Dodgson was no fool. In face of the criticism, he defended himself. He had committed no sin; his friendships with little girls gave them and him only pleasure; why should he deny his friends or himself that pleasure?

Dodgson's married sister, Mary Collingwood, learned that he was having child friends to stay with him at the seaside (he rented rooms in the home of a proper Victorian landlady in Eastbourne, and this landlady's maid looked after all the needs of his young guests), and when his sister wrote to inquire about these guests of his, Dodgson replied directly:

I do like getting such letters as yours. I think all you say about my girl-guests is most kind and sisterly, and most entirely proper for you to write to your brother. But I don't think it at all advisable to enter into any controversy about it. There is no reasonable probability that it would modify the views either of you or of me. I will say a few words to explain my views: but I have no wish whatever to have “the last word”: so please say anything you like afterwards.

You and your husband have, I think, been very fortunate to know so little, by experience, in your own case or in that of your friends, of the wicked recklessness with which people repeat things to the disadvantage of others, without a thought as to whether they have grounds for asserting what they say. I have met with a good deal of utter misrepresentation of that kind. And another result of my experience is the conviction that the opinion of “people” in general is absolutely worthless as a test of right and wrong. The only two tests I now apply to such a question as the having some particular girl-friend as a guest are, first, my own conscience, to settle whether I feel it to be entirely innocent and right, in the sight of God; secondly, the parents of my friend, to settle whether I have their full approval for what I do. You need not be shocked at my being spoken against. Anybody, who is spoken about at all, is sure to be spoken against by somebody: and any action, however innocent in itself, is liable, and not at all unlikely, to be blamed by somebody. If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much!

(L, II, 977-78)

In spite of the gossip and in spite of his sister's concern, Dodgson simply went on entertaining child guests and making new child friends. After all, he had no misgivings about the friendships: he never forced them upon anyone; he kept them alive only when both parties enjoyed them and only when he had approval from the parents in every detail. If he happened to talk to a pretty child in the charge of her governess, on the beach, in a railway carriage, or wherever, he immediately wrote a note to the child's mother reporting the incident and requesting permission to see the child again. Then, depending on how the friendship ripened, he asked permission to write to the child, or he sent a letter to the child by way of the mother, requesting that the mother hand the letter to the child if she wanted the friendship to continue. If all went well, he invited the child to his rooms for tea or dinner, to look at photograph albums. Later, he asked to “borrow” the child for a day's outing in London. If he thought the child beautiful, he asked permission to photograph her, and on some occasions to photograph her “without drapery,” that is, nude. But in this delicate circumstance, he preferred always to have the mother or someone else present “to arrange the dress,” by which he means to undress the child.

He knew, of course, that photographing children in the nude, and in his college rooms to boot, would cause tongues to wag. But here, too, he defended himself eloquently. Here is an explanation he wrote to the mother of a group of sisters he hoped to photograph:

Here am I, an amateur-photographer, with a deep sense of admiration for form, especially the human form, and one who believes it to be the most beautiful thing God has made on this earth—and who hardly ever gets a chance of photographing it! … and now at last I seem to have a chance of it. I could no doubt hire professional models in town: but, first, they would be ugly, and, secondly, they would not be pleasant to deal with: so my only hope is with friends. Now your Ethel is beautiful, both in face and form; and is also a perfectly simple-minded child of Nature, who would have no sort of objection to serving as model for a friend she knows as well as she does me. So my humble petition is, that you will bring the 3 girls, and that you will allow me to try some groupings of Ethel and Janet … without any drapery or suggestion of it. … I need hardly say that the pictures should be such as you might if you liked frame and hang up in your drawing-room. On no account would I do a picture which I should be unwilling to show to all the world—or at least all the artistic world. … If I did not believe I could take such pictures without any lower motive than a pure love of Art, I would not ask it: and if I thought there was any fear of its lessening their beautiful simplicity of character, I would not ask it.

… I fear you will reply that the one insuperable objection is “Mrs. Grundy”—that people will be sure to hear that such pictures have been done, and that they will talk. As to their hearing of it, I say “of course. All the world are welcome to hear of it, and I would not on any account suggest to the children not to mention it—which would at once introduce an objectionable element”—but as to people talking about it, I will only quote the grand old monkish … legend: They say: Quhat do they say? Lat them say!

It only remains for me to add that, though my theories are so out-of-the-way (as you may perhaps think them), my practice shall be strictly in accordance with whatever rules you like to lay down—so you may at any time send the children by themselves, in perfect confidence that I will try no experiments you have not previously sanctioned.

(L, I, 338-39)

Seen in the historical context, Dodgson's sketching and photographing undressed children is not all that exceptional. Anyone who works with Victorian illustrated books is accustomed to encountering frequently drawings and paintings of unclothed, sexless children. It is simply another offshoot of the cult of worshipping childhood innocence. After one of his photographic sessions, Dodgson wrote to the mother of the girls who sat for him: “Their innocent unconsciousness is very beautiful, and gives one a feeling of reverence, as at the presence of something sacred” (L, I, 381).

In the pre-Freudian air of Victorian England, cuddling and kissing children was accepted behavior, and it is not surprising that Dodgson sat children on his knees and kissed some of his young friends. “Being entrusted with the care of Ethel for a day is such a great advance on mere acquaintanceship,” Dodgson wrote to the child's mother, “that I venture to ask if I may regard myself as on ‘kissing’ terms with her, as I am with many a girl-friend a great deal older than she is. … Nevertheless, if I find you think it wiser that we should only shake hands, I shall not be in the least hurt. Of course I shall, unless I hear to the contrary, continue to shake hands only” (L, II, 1062-63). Here is a much earlier entry in the diary: “I promised a [copy of The Hunting of the Snark] to a quite new little friend, Lily Alice Godfrey, from New York, aged 8, but talked like a girl of 15 or 16, and declined to be kissed on saying goodbye, on the ground that she ‘never kissed gentlemen.’ It is rather painful to see the lovely simplicity of childhood so soon rubbed off: but I fear it is true that there are no children in America” (D, II, 390).

Whatever one chooses to think about Lewis Carroll's subconscious, one must conclude from the evidence that he followed some perfectly clear precepts in ordering his life and that these precepts governed both his inner responses as well as his outer behavior. Love was a strong force in his life, love of innocence and purity. But this innocence and purity were strongly tied to his personal God. Beauty to him is the beauty of nature, and nature is a creation of God. When innocence and beauty exist together, then for him a supreme, even divine, joy results.

What about marriage? And what about sex? Indeed Carroll thought much about marriage. He recorded some of those thoughts in his diaries. For instance, on July 31, 1857, when he was twenty-five, he consulted his father on the subject of taking out life insurance: should he and, if so, when? Both being accomplished mathematicians, they had no difficulty in deciding that it would be best for Carroll to “save at present, and only insure when the prospect [of marriage] becomes a certainty” (D, I, 117).

Carroll wrote an essay entitled “Marriage Service,”⁶ in which he considered carefully the problem of who might and who might not marry for a second time and which conditions, in the eyes of God, permitted remarriage and which did not. He set down some remarkably sensible guidelines.

In Carroll's works and, perhaps more significantly, in his diaries and in his letters, he uses the language and the imagery of marriage both seriously and whimsically. Two examples from the letters will suffice here. In a letter to a friend aged twenty-three, Carroll wrote: “Dear Miss Dora Abdy, May I have the pleasure of fetching you, for a tête-à-tête dinner some day soon? And if so, will you name the day?” In a postscript, he adds: “Now please don't go and tell all your friends, in the strictest confidence, ‘I've just had a letter from a gentleman, and he asks me to name the day!’” (L, II, 1058). In another letter, one that Carroll wrote in 1889 to an earlier child friend who was by this time a grown woman, he reports to her on a visit paid him at Eastbourne, in his summer lodgings by the sea, by Isa Bowman, a child actress he had befriended: “Isa is one of my chiefest of child-friends,” he wrote. “I had her with me at Eastbourne last summer … for a week's visit, nominally: but we got on so well together, that I kept writing to Mrs. Bowman for leave to keep her longer, till the week had extended to five! When we got near the end of four, I thought ‘At any rate I'll keep her over the normal honey-moon period!” (L, II, 730). Carroll was, by his own confession, at the time he wrote these two letters, “a very old fogey,” and all hopes of real marriage and honeymoons had fled. But marriage and honeymoons were nonetheless the language of thought, perhaps of dreams, for him still.

I would contend that, although Dodgson never married, he was a family man, a marrying man, and he remained a bachelor only because his efforts to marry were thwarted, because he never won the hand of someone he wished to marry. I recently tried to show that he may very well have expressed an interest in a possible alliance with Alice Liddell, but that Dean and Mrs. Liddell, related to the aristocracy and being extremely ambitious for their daughters, would have rejected a mere Oxford mathematics don with no important family connections and, what is more, hampered by a stammer and a deaf right ear.⁷ I believe he may also have proposed marriage to one or possibly two other friends.

Carroll was denied marriage and, given his standards, denied sexual experience as well. That meant that he had to retain a strict hold upon his outer behavior and his inner instincts. A letter he wrote to a young friend in 1893 is illuminating. He first assures her that he has remembered his promise to pray for her. “I have done so ever since, morning and evening,” he writes, and then goes on to another subject:

Absence of temptation is no doubt sometimes a blessing: and it is one I often thank God for. But one has to remember that it is only a short breathing-space. The temptation is sure to come again: and the very freedom from it brings its own special danger—of laying down the weapons of defence, and ceasing to “watch and pray”: and then comes the sudden surprise, finding us all unprepared, and ready to yield again.

(L, II, 952)

Lewis Carroll fought his battles with the Devil—and, as we know, for the Victorians, sex was often the Devil. I am convinced that Carroll won his battles. Search as one may through the nine volumes of the diaries, through the thousands of letters, and through the mound of reminiscences that his young friends later added to the record, absolutely nothing indicates that he ever lost a single skirmish. He had exiled the Devil early, when a boy, and there was no place for him in Carroll's life thereafter. It had to be that way. Somewhere deep down inside, Carroll knew that, given his preference for the friendship of children, if he once succumbed to any temptation, he would never be able to befriend them again. His own uncompromising standards, his forthright, pious nature would not permit it. Besides he loved innocence so, how could he ever violate it? He was not, as James Joyce would have him be, Lewd Carroll. He was a sort of Victorian Catcher in the Rye, but he was not a Humbert Humbert. In him came together the stern Puritan godliness of home and the lofty spirit of militant Christianity of Rugby. These Victorian forces produced a man so thoroughly controlled that we find it difficult to believe in him as he really was. But the fault, as someone once said, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves. The evidence is there, in the written record, and in Carroll's case, the written record brings us closer to the object than do the surviving papers of most luminaries. Dodgson kept his diaries as a way of accounting to God for what he did in His service and as a way of prodding himself on to greater work in the service of his Savior. They tell the truth, for Dodgson knew as well as anyone that you could not lie to God.

The truth is that he loved much and many, and his love helped a succession of young people find their footing in life and grow up happier and more self-confident than they might have done had he not trod this earth. He also left two great children's classics, which, in their way, try to do for all children of all places and all times what Charles Dodgson was able to do for the relatively few that he knew personally. Perhaps he would have been happier had he married and given expression to his sexual promptings. But that was not to be. As a celibate, he left behind a greater and kinder legacy than most men are able to do who lead what we think of as more conventional lives.

Notes

1. Most of the writings by critics alluded to are anthologized in Aspects of Alice, ed. Robert Phillips (London: Penguin, 1974), including Burke's essay, “From ‘The Thinking of the Body.’”

2. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), p. 26.

3. Nine of Dodgson's thirteen diary volumes survive and are now in the British Library. Almost three-fourths of the text appears in The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green, 2 vols. (London: Cassell, 1953). Dodgson wrote this entry on February 6, 1863, and it appears almost entirely in the published edition (I, 191). The quotations from the Diaries (D) that appear below carry citations in the text. When the text in fact includes material from the manuscript diaries only, merely the date of the entry appears after the entry. When the quotation in the text includes material not in the published version, that material comes directly from the manuscript diaries.

4. This letter, dated June 28, 1889, appears in full in The Letters of Lewis Carroll, ed. Morton N. Cohen (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), II, 746-47. In subsequent quotations from the Letters (L), the volume and page numbers appear at the end of the quotation.

5. “Theatre Dress,” Lewis Carroll Circular, no. 2 (1974), 10-11.

6. Ibid., 12-13.

7. “Who Censored Lewis Carroll?” The Times, Jan. 23, 1982, p. 9.

I owe a special debt to two books that do not appear in the notes below: Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1957), and David Newsome, Godliness & Good Learning (London: John Murray, 1961). Lewis Carroll's diaries and letters are the private property of the C. L. Dodgson Estate; the excerpts here may not be reproduced without permission.