In the shadow of Alice: Lewis Carroll

Q. What's the traditional reading of the relationship between Lewis Carroll and Alice

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Q. Is there any evidence for this

A. Dodgson was a keen - and quite accomplished - amateur photographer and collector of photographic prints, and in his collection were pictures of naked children. Also, after his death his family wanted to foster an image of the now very famous children's author as a sexless, bumbling rather other-worldly figure, who loved his 'child friends' and was all at sea around adults, especially women. On top of that, he never married, nor was he ever engaged.

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The chief culprit in this was Dodgson's nephew and first biographer Stuart Collingwood, but others have been complicit in trying to create a persona for posterity, one which at this remove seems less than wise. By the 1920s, in the first full thrust of Freudian analysis, it was first suggested that Dodgson's interest in his little friends was less than innocent, and, while there was no evidence of him having actually physically molested any child, it was considered that this was probably down to restraint.

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And this, unfortunately, is the man we think we know today.

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Q. So what's the alternative theory

A. It couldn't be more different. According to Karoline Leach in her revisionist biography of Dodgson In the Shadow of the Dreamchild (ISBN 0 7206 1044 3), not only was Dodgson something of a ladies' man - grown-up ladies at that - who hung around with 'actresses' and a rather fast theatre crowd, but that, far from being obsessed with Alice Liddell, he was quite possibly having an affair with her mother - and maybe even fathered a child by her.

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Q. Alice's mother

A. Lorina Liddell was the wife of the Dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, Dodgson's boss. Dodgson became close to all the girls in the family - becoming almost a surrogate father for their own rather distant natural father - and their mother, but the close relationship was abruptly broken off in the early 1860s. Lorina destroyed much of the correspondence between Dodgson and her family and Dodgson's diary is missing for much of this time.

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More significantly - and it was Leach's real coup to find this - pages from his surviving diary have been removed, probably by relatives after his death, but strangely they have left notes as to what was on those pages. These indicate that that the diary entries referred to Dodgson 'courting' both 'Ina' - Lorina Liddell or possibly her daughter, Alice's older sister, who shared her mother's name - and the Liddell children's governess.

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Obviously Dodgson and the Liddells couldn't avoid each other, living as they did in the same claustrophobic college environs, but, whatever had happened between them, the closeness that they had shared was no longer there.

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Q. Any other women

A. It's speculation, of course, but evidence points to relationships of some kind between Dodgson and the actresses Louey Webb, Isa Bowman and Kate Terry Lewis (John Gielgud's mother), as well an Oxford society lady, Constance Burch and many other named and unnamed women.

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Q. So he was a bit of a rogue

A. Not by modern standards, but by the norms of the day - at least the public norms - he sailed pretty close to the wind at times.

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Q. What about the photos

A. Karoline Leach suggests that this kind of collection was not unusual in the late 19th century. The Victorians were obsessed with the child as an image of all that is innocent and unsullied, to an almost cultish degree, and it was quite common in art photography of the day to use children as wood nymphs and the like, very often partly clothed or naked. As for Dodgson, his collection included images of very big girls indeed, though the paedophilia theorists have chosen to ignore this.

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See also the article on Mervyn Peake

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For more on Arts & Literature click here

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By Simon Smith