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C. L. DODGSON: THE POET LOGICIAN
IF THE LEWIS CARROLL centenary has produced any-
thing of special interest, I have failed to see it. C. L.
Dodgson was a most interesting man and deserves better
of his admirers, who revel in his delightfulness and cute-
ness but do not give him any serious attention. "Frankly
this is to be the book of Lewis Carroll/' wrote John
Francis McDermott in his introduction to Dodgson's
collected verse, published three years ago, "and I have no
intention here of allowing Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,
a dull and uninteresting person, to intrude in it any more
than is absolutely necessary." Richard Herrick, the editor
of The Lewis Carroll Book, is so determined that we shall
see in Dodgson nothing but an exponent of pure non-
sense that he does not hesitate to mutilate his work. He
reprints, out of Rhyme? and Reason?, only the poems
that happen to please him; he suppresses, with the excep-
tion of a few stanzas, the long and elaborate Phantas-
magoria, for the extraordinary reason that he believes it
to have been spoiled by "Carroll's serious interest in
psychic matters"; and he lops off the charming and sig-
nificant epilogue to Through the Looking Glass, without
which the book is incomplete:
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
540
c. L. DODGSON: THE POET LOGICIAN 541
On the other hand, he includes some very amusing
letters and a mathematical fantasia called A Tangled
Tale. The whole book seems thrown together as a hasty
publisher's job there is not even a table of contents
and is typical of the careless handling that Lewis Carroll
ordinarily gets.
The truth is that, if Dodgson and his work were shown
as an organic whole, his "nonsense" would not seem the
anomaly which it is usually represented as being. It is true
that on one of his sides he was a pompous and priggish
don. He used to write letters to friends the next morning
after he had been having dinner with them and beg them
never again in his presence to speak so irreverently of
Our Lord as they had the evening before, because it
gave him infinite pain; and he wrote to the papers in a
tone of indignation worthy of Mr. Podsnap protesting
against the impiety of W. S. Gilbert in being whimsical
about curates on the stage. But even this side of Dodgson
should not be kept out of the picture: the Alice in Won-
derland side has an intimate relation with it. Under the
crust of the pious professor was a mind both rebellious
and skeptical. The mathematician who invented Alice
was one of those semi-monastic types like Walter Pater
and A. E. Housman that the English universities breed:
vowed to an academic discipline but cherishing an in-
tense originality, painfully repressed and incomplete but
in the narrow field of their art somehow both sound and
bold. A good deal of the piquancy of the Alice books is
due to their merciless irreverence: in Alice's dreaming
mind, the bottoms dismayingly drop out of the didactic
little poems by Dr. Watts and Jane Taylor which Vic-
torian children were made to learn, and their simple
and trite images are replaced by grotesque and silly ones,
which have rushed in like goblins to take possession. And
in the White Knight's song about the aged man a-sitting
THE SHORES OF LIGHT
on a gate, a parody of Wordsworth's Leech-Gatherer,
Lewis Carroll, in his subterranean fashion, ridiculed the
stuffed-shirt side of Wordsworth as savagely as Byron
had ever done. Wordsworth was a great admiration of
Dodgson's; yet as soon as he enters his world of dreams,
Lewis Carroll is moved to stick pins in him. This poem in
its original form, before it had been rewritten to adapt
it to Alice's dream, had been even more subversive of
Victorian conventions:
I met an aged, aged man
Upon the lonely moor:
I knew I was a gentleman,
And he was but a boor.
So I stopped and roughly questioned him,
"Come, tell me how you live 1 /'
But his word impressed my ear no more
Than if it were a sieve.
It is curious what ordination as a clergyman of the
Church of England can do to an original mind. The
case of Dodgson is somewhat similar to those of Donne
and Swift though Dodgson was shy and stammered
and never took priest's orders; and he was closer, perhaps,
to Swift and Donne than to the merely whimsical writer
like Barrie or A. A. Milne, for Dodgson had a first-rate
mind of a very unusual sort: he was a logician who was
also a poet.
The poetry and the logic in Dodgson were closely
bound up together. It has often been pointed out that
only a mind primarily logical could have invented the
jokes of the Alice books, of which the author is always
conscious that they are examples of faulty syllogisms. But
it also worked the other way: his eccentric imagination
invaded his scholarly work. His Symbolic Logic (which
had nothing to do with the subject called by the same
C. L. DODGSON : THE POET LOGICIAN 543
name of which A. N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell
laid the foundation in their Principia Mathematical con-
tains syllogisms with terms as absurd as any in the Alice
books :
A prudent man shuns hyenas;
No banker is imprudent.
No banker fails to shun hyenas,
Dodgson's Euclid and His Modern Rivals had nothing
to do with non-Euclidean geometry, but in the section
called A New Theory of Parallels of his Curiosa Mathe-
matica he grazed one of the conceptions of relativist
theory; and is there not a touch of Einstein in the scenes
in which the Red Queen has to keep running in order
to remain in the same place and in which the White
Queen gives a scream of pain before she has pricked her
finger?
In literature, Lewis Carroll went deeper than his
contemporaries realized and than he usually gets credit
for even today. As studies in dream psychology, the
Alice books are most remarkable: they do not suffer by
comparison with the best serious performances in this
field with Strindberg or Joyce or Flaubert's Tentation
de Saint Antoine. One of Alice's recent editors says that
the heroine's personality is kept simple in order to throw
into relief the eccentrics and monsters she meets. But
the creatures that she meets, the whole dream, are Alice's
personality and her waking life. They are the world of
teachers, family and pets, as it appears to a little girl,
and also the little girl who is looking at this world. The
creatures are always snapping at her and chiding her,
saying brusque and rude and blighting things (as if their
creator himself were snapping back at the authorities and
pieties he served); and she in turn has a child's primitive
cruelty: she cannot help mentioning cats when she is
544 THE SHORES OF LIGHT
swimming around with the mouse, and later on, with
the birds all around her, she comes out, as if naively,
with, "Dinah's our cat. And she's such a capital one for
catching mice, you can't think! And oh, I wish you could
see her after the birds! Why, shell eat a little bird as
soon as look at it!" But though Alice is sometimes brutal,
she is always well-bred; and, though she wanders in a
world full of mysteries and of sometimes disagreeable
surprises, she is always a sensible and self-possessed little
upper-class English girl, who never fails in the last resort
to face down the outlandish creatures that plague her:
she can always bring the dream to an end by telling the
King and Queen and the Court that they're nothing
but a pack of cards or by picking up the Red Queen and
shaking her. She can also be sympathetic and sometimes
for example, with the White Knight exhibits a mater-
nal instinct, but always in a sensible and practical way.
Lewis Carroll is never sentimental about Alice, though
he is later on to become so, in the messiest Victorian
way, in the Sylvie and Bruno books. Yet Sylvie and
Bruno, too, has considerable psychological interest, with
its alternations of dream and reality and the elusive rela-
tionships between them. The opening railway journey,
in which the narrator is dozing and mixes with the images
of his dream his awareness of the lady sitting opposite
him, is of an almost Joycean complexity and quite inap-
propriate for reading to children.
I do not, however, agree with Mr. Herrick, in the case
of the Alice books, that the Alice that grown-ups read
is really a different work from the Alice that is read by
children. The grown-ups understand it better, but the
prime source of the interest is the same. Why is it that
very young children listen so attentively to Alice, re-
member it all so well and ask to hear it again, when
many other stories seem to leave little impression? It is
c. L. DODGSON: THE POET LOGICIAN 545
surely the psychological truth of these books that lays
its hold on us all. Lewis Carroll is in touch with the real
mind of childhood and hence with the more primitive
elements of the mind of maturity, too unlike certain
other writers who merely exploit for grown-ups an arti-
ficial child-mind of convention which is in reality
neither child-like nor adult. The shiftings and the trans-
formations, the mishaps and the triumphs of Alice's
dream, the mysteries and the riddles, the gibberish that
conveys unmistakable meanings, are all based upon
relationships that contradict the assumptions of our con-
scious lives but that are lurking not far behind them.
In the "straight'' parts of Sylvie and Bruno, Lewis Carroll
was mawkishly Victorian to the point of unintentional
parody (having produced in The Two Voices a master-
piece of intentional parody!), but in the Alice books he
quite got away from the upholstery and the gloomy insti-
tutions of the nineteenth-century world. I believe that
they are likely to survive when a good deal of the more
monumental work of that world the productions of the
Carlyles and the Ruskins, the Spencers and the George
Eliots shall have sunk with the middle-class ideals of
which they were the champions as well as the critics.
Charles Dodgson who, in morals and religion, in his
attitude toward social institutions, was professedly and as
he himself believed, more conventional than any of
these, had over them the curious advantage of working
at once with the abstract materials of mathematical and
logical conceptions and with the irrationalities of dreams.
His art has a purity that is almost unique in a period so
cluttered and cumbered, in which even the preachers of
doom to the reign of materialism bore the stamp and the
stain of the industrial system in the hard insistence of
their sentences and in the turbidity of their belchings of
rhetoric. They have shrunk now, but Alice still stands.
546 THE SHORES OF LIGHT
I suggest to the Nonesuch Press that it would do well
to get out a definitive and comprehensive one-volume
edition of Dodgson, like their admirable editions of Blake
and Donne. The trouble about such collections as that
which Mr. Herrick has edited is that they are intended
primarily for children. There is no Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson for grown-ups. Sylvie and Bruno, which is
never reprinted, ought to be made available; and there
ought to be at least as many readers for the Curiosa
Mathematica and the Dynamics of a Parti-cle as for
Donne's sermons or Blake's prophetic books. Dodgson's
letters should be included, his articles on local events at
Oxford and his journal of his trip to Russia; and there
ought to be a good memoir. The only biography of
Dodgson is a conventional life by a relative published in
1899. No writer, so far as I know, has ever done a serious
portrait of him or made a real study of his work,
May 1 8, 1932
The needs pointed out in this article were very
promptly supplied. In 1935, Mr. J. F. McDermott
brought out a volume of the miscellaneous writings of
Dodgson: The Russian Journal and Other Selections
from the Works of Lewis Carroll; and in 1937 the None-
such Press did publish, as I had suggested, a well-pro-
duced omnibus volume, The Complete Works of Lewis
Carroll, containing almost everything of Dodgson's (the
Russian Journal is not included) that a non-scholarly per-
son could read. Some Aspects of Pastoral by William
Empson (American edition called English Pastoral
Poetry), published in 1935, includes an interesting study
of the Alice books, which treats the cataclysmic finale of
the dinner at the end of Through the Looking-Glass as
the eruption of a repressed don, exasperated by dining
with his colleagues.
C. L. DODGSON : THE POET LOGICIAN 547
The first full-length biography since The Life and
Letters of Lewis Carroll by his nephew S. D. Colling-
wood appeared in 1945: Victoria Through the Looking-
Glass: The Life of Lewis Carroll, by Florence Becker
Lennon. This book has its unsatisfactory features. Mrs.
Lennon presents her material in rather an untidy way:
she nowhere, so far as I can find, for example, gives the
date of Dodgson's birth certainly not in the proper
place; and the filling-in of the background, done from
this side of the Atlantic, is synthetic and not easily assim-
ilable. But this study is, nevertheless, the best thing that
has yet been written about Lewis Carroll. The literary
criticism is excellent; the psychological insight sometimes
brilliant; and Mrs. Lennon has brought together, from
the most scattered and various sources, a good deal of
information. The impression that she actually conveys
of what Dodgson's existence was like is more convincing
than some of her theories. Mrs. Lennon believes that
Charles Dodgson was intimidated by his clergyman
father, so that he felt himself obliged to take orders and
never dared question the creed of the Church. She seems
to believe that he might otherwise have developed as an
important original thinker. She also worries about what
she regards as his frustrated sexual life: if he had only,
she sighs, been capable of a mature attachment for a
woman which would have freed him from his passion
for little girls! (a penchant with which his position as
elder brother of seven motherless sisters as well as the
strong feminine streak in him noted by Mrs. Lennon
must have a good deal to do). What she does not under-
stand, I think, is that Dodgson, in terms of his age and
place, was remarkably "well-adjusted/' His enjoyment
of the Oxford "Studentship," with its relatively agreeable
work and exceptionally comfortable quarters, which he
won on his graduation was dependent on his acceptance
548 THE SHORES OF LIGHT
of celibacy; and there is nothing to show that this irked
him much. His admiration and affection for his father
seem to have been complete; the rectory in which he
grew up was obviously as little as possible like that
described by Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh;
and with the Dodgsons the church tradition was strong:
Charles's father and mother, who were cousins, had had
the same Archbishop for a grandfather. Since reading
this biography and Collingwood's memoir, I am less dis-
posed than I was when I wrote the above article to assume
that Charles Dodgson was seriously cramped by his role.
Mrs. Lennon insists that, in his photographs, he has the
look of one "crucified," but she does not produce any
evidence that he actually suffered much. There is mock-
ery of course in Alice, who finds herself at odds with the
"creatures"; there are, as both Mrs. Lennon and Mr.
Empson suggest, outbreaks of contemptuous violence at
the ends of the Alice books and Sylvie and Bruno; but
the forces of benevolence and common sense always
triumph in what is not merely the conventional Victorian
happy ending, as they certainly did in Dodgson's life.
The conditions of teaching in an English university in
the middle of the nineteenth century may seem to us
today unnatural, but all social and professional situations
involve their special disabilities, and in the position that
Dodgson had chosen he seems to have functioned well.
If a part of his intelligence lived underground, if a
part of his personality was screened, it is plain that
Mrs. Lennon admits this Alice would never have gone
down the rabbit-hole, would never have walked through
the mirror, if this had not been the case. Dodgson's work
in mathematics and logic was somewhat eccentric, too,
and he sometimes, we are told, proposed problems, just as
his stories do, that probed into the depths of their sub-
jects; but in these scientific fields as in fiction he seems to
c. L. DODGSON: THE POET LOGICIAN 549
have given the world all that he was capable of. The
author of Sylvie and Bruno was trying already for more
than he could manage. Mrs. Lennon, has, I believe, been
the first to point out the exact and complicated parallels
between the dreams and the actualities that make this
book psychologically interesting (my own references to
these above have been added for the sake of completeness
since the article was first written), but the novel for
grown-ups is otherwise childish; and in mathematics and
logic, according to the expert opinions cited by Mrs.
Lennon, he either ignored or had never discovered the
more advanced work in these fields, and did not perhaps
get even so far as in his exploration of dreams.
It is one of the pioneering merits of Victoria Through
the Looking-Glass that Mrs. Lennon has looked up these
authoritative estimates of Dodgson's mathematical and
logical work; and, a poet, she is able herself to provide an
expert opinion on his poetry. The only aspect of his
varied activity to which she does not seem quite to do
justice is his achievement as an artist-photographer; but
this subject has been dealt with since in a book called
Lewis Carroll Photographer by Helmut Gernsheim
(1950). Mr. Gernsheim considers Dodgson "the most
outstanding photographer of children of the nineteenth
century" and, after Julia Margaret Cameron, "probably
the most distinguished amateur portraitist of the mid-
Victorian era/' In this field he was eccentric and per-
fectionist as he was in everything else. He showed the
real reckless artist's passion in his pursuit of his two
favorite kinds of subjects: celebrities and little girls.
The former he besieged unabashedly, undaunted by
occasional snubs and not afraid to arrive before break-
fast, with all his apparatus in a cab, so that his prospects
would not have a chance to escape. In his search for
attractive little girls, he attended such incongruous func-
550 THE SHORES OF LIGHT
tions as archery meetings and Freemason's ftes, and
spent part of his vacations at the seaside, supplied always
with safety-pins in case he should find "a little girl
hesitating to paddle in the sea for fear of spoiling her
frock." His trophies repaid him for his risks and ordeals.
A few of his portraits were reproduced in the Colling-
wood Life and Letters, but these do not give an adequate
idea of the interest and scope of these plates. There was,
it seems, an enormous body of work, of which twelve
albums are known to survive. The sixty-four plates from
three of them that Mr. Gernsheim includes in his book
show a dramatic sense of personality in the posing, the
arrangement of the backgrounds and the feeling for
facial expression that one would not have suspected in
Dodgson from his letters and his literary work and that
reminds one of his love of the theater (which, in taking
Holy Orders at Oxford, he made sure that he would not
be expected to renounce). Here, humanly appealing and
vivid, you have the troubled Elizabethanism of Tennyson;
the jaunty, almost rakish bohemianism of Tom Taylor,
the editor of Punch; the contemptuous independence of
Rossetti; the serious and challenging young-womanhood
of the eighteen-year-old Ellen Terry; the healthy Vic-
torian attractiveness of Alexander Munro and his wife;
and the morbid Victorian intensity of "Mrs. Franklin
and her daughter Rose," There is a liveliness and a
humor in these pictures that sometimes suggest Max
Beerbohm. It is, one supposes, unlikely that Max could
have seen these albums at the time he did his drawings
of Rossetti and His Circle, but the photographs of the
Millais's and the Rossettis seem to anticipate these. As
for the pictures of children, they, too, are extremely
varied and provide a new revelation of Lewis Carroll's
special genius for depicting little English girls that is as
brilliant in its way as Alice.
IF THE LEWIS CARROLL centenary has produced any-
thing of special interest, I have failed to see it. C. L.
Dodgson was a most interesting man and deserves better
of his admirers, who revel in his delightfulness and cute-
ness but do not give him any serious attention. "Frankly
this is to be the book of Lewis Carroll/' wrote John
Francis McDermott in his introduction to Dodgson's
collected verse, published three years ago, "and I have no
intention here of allowing Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,
a dull and uninteresting person, to intrude in it any more
than is absolutely necessary." Richard Herrick, the editor
of The Lewis Carroll Book, is so determined that we shall
see in Dodgson nothing but an exponent of pure non-
sense that he does not hesitate to mutilate his work. He
reprints, out of Rhyme? and Reason?, only the poems
that happen to please him; he suppresses, with the excep-
tion of a few stanzas, the long and elaborate Phantas-
magoria, for the extraordinary reason that he believes it
to have been spoiled by "Carroll's serious interest in
psychic matters"; and he lops off the charming and sig-
nificant epilogue to Through the Looking Glass, without
which the book is incomplete:
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
540
c. L. DODGSON: THE POET LOGICIAN 541
On the other hand, he includes some very amusing
letters and a mathematical fantasia called A Tangled
Tale. The whole book seems thrown together as a hasty
publisher's job there is not even a table of contents
and is typical of the careless handling that Lewis Carroll
ordinarily gets.
The truth is that, if Dodgson and his work were shown
as an organic whole, his "nonsense" would not seem the
anomaly which it is usually represented as being. It is true
that on one of his sides he was a pompous and priggish
don. He used to write letters to friends the next morning
after he had been having dinner with them and beg them
never again in his presence to speak so irreverently of
Our Lord as they had the evening before, because it
gave him infinite pain; and he wrote to the papers in a
tone of indignation worthy of Mr. Podsnap protesting
against the impiety of W. S. Gilbert in being whimsical
about curates on the stage. But even this side of Dodgson
should not be kept out of the picture: the Alice in Won-
derland side has an intimate relation with it. Under the
crust of the pious professor was a mind both rebellious
and skeptical. The mathematician who invented Alice
was one of those semi-monastic types like Walter Pater
and A. E. Housman that the English universities breed:
vowed to an academic discipline but cherishing an in-
tense originality, painfully repressed and incomplete but
in the narrow field of their art somehow both sound and
bold. A good deal of the piquancy of the Alice books is
due to their merciless irreverence: in Alice's dreaming
mind, the bottoms dismayingly drop out of the didactic
little poems by Dr. Watts and Jane Taylor which Vic-
torian children were made to learn, and their simple
and trite images are replaced by grotesque and silly ones,
which have rushed in like goblins to take possession. And
in the White Knight's song about the aged man a-sitting
THE SHORES OF LIGHT
on a gate, a parody of Wordsworth's Leech-Gatherer,
Lewis Carroll, in his subterranean fashion, ridiculed the
stuffed-shirt side of Wordsworth as savagely as Byron
had ever done. Wordsworth was a great admiration of
Dodgson's; yet as soon as he enters his world of dreams,
Lewis Carroll is moved to stick pins in him. This poem in
its original form, before it had been rewritten to adapt
it to Alice's dream, had been even more subversive of
Victorian conventions:
I met an aged, aged man
Upon the lonely moor:
I knew I was a gentleman,
And he was but a boor.
So I stopped and roughly questioned him,
"Come, tell me how you live 1 /'
But his word impressed my ear no more
Than if it were a sieve.
It is curious what ordination as a clergyman of the
Church of England can do to an original mind. The
case of Dodgson is somewhat similar to those of Donne
and Swift though Dodgson was shy and stammered
and never took priest's orders; and he was closer, perhaps,
to Swift and Donne than to the merely whimsical writer
like Barrie or A. A. Milne, for Dodgson had a first-rate
mind of a very unusual sort: he was a logician who was
also a poet.
The poetry and the logic in Dodgson were closely
bound up together. It has often been pointed out that
only a mind primarily logical could have invented the
jokes of the Alice books, of which the author is always
conscious that they are examples of faulty syllogisms. But
it also worked the other way: his eccentric imagination
invaded his scholarly work. His Symbolic Logic (which
had nothing to do with the subject called by the same
C. L. DODGSON : THE POET LOGICIAN 543
name of which A. N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell
laid the foundation in their Principia Mathematical con-
tains syllogisms with terms as absurd as any in the Alice
books :
A prudent man shuns hyenas;
No banker is imprudent.
No banker fails to shun hyenas,
Dodgson's Euclid and His Modern Rivals had nothing
to do with non-Euclidean geometry, but in the section
called A New Theory of Parallels of his Curiosa Mathe-
matica he grazed one of the conceptions of relativist
theory; and is there not a touch of Einstein in the scenes
in which the Red Queen has to keep running in order
to remain in the same place and in which the White
Queen gives a scream of pain before she has pricked her
finger?
In literature, Lewis Carroll went deeper than his
contemporaries realized and than he usually gets credit
for even today. As studies in dream psychology, the
Alice books are most remarkable: they do not suffer by
comparison with the best serious performances in this
field with Strindberg or Joyce or Flaubert's Tentation
de Saint Antoine. One of Alice's recent editors says that
the heroine's personality is kept simple in order to throw
into relief the eccentrics and monsters she meets. But
the creatures that she meets, the whole dream, are Alice's
personality and her waking life. They are the world of
teachers, family and pets, as it appears to a little girl,
and also the little girl who is looking at this world. The
creatures are always snapping at her and chiding her,
saying brusque and rude and blighting things (as if their
creator himself were snapping back at the authorities and
pieties he served); and she in turn has a child's primitive
cruelty: she cannot help mentioning cats when she is
544 THE SHORES OF LIGHT
swimming around with the mouse, and later on, with
the birds all around her, she comes out, as if naively,
with, "Dinah's our cat. And she's such a capital one for
catching mice, you can't think! And oh, I wish you could
see her after the birds! Why, shell eat a little bird as
soon as look at it!" But though Alice is sometimes brutal,
she is always well-bred; and, though she wanders in a
world full of mysteries and of sometimes disagreeable
surprises, she is always a sensible and self-possessed little
upper-class English girl, who never fails in the last resort
to face down the outlandish creatures that plague her:
she can always bring the dream to an end by telling the
King and Queen and the Court that they're nothing
but a pack of cards or by picking up the Red Queen and
shaking her. She can also be sympathetic and sometimes
for example, with the White Knight exhibits a mater-
nal instinct, but always in a sensible and practical way.
Lewis Carroll is never sentimental about Alice, though
he is later on to become so, in the messiest Victorian
way, in the Sylvie and Bruno books. Yet Sylvie and
Bruno, too, has considerable psychological interest, with
its alternations of dream and reality and the elusive rela-
tionships between them. The opening railway journey,
in which the narrator is dozing and mixes with the images
of his dream his awareness of the lady sitting opposite
him, is of an almost Joycean complexity and quite inap-
propriate for reading to children.
I do not, however, agree with Mr. Herrick, in the case
of the Alice books, that the Alice that grown-ups read
is really a different work from the Alice that is read by
children. The grown-ups understand it better, but the
prime source of the interest is the same. Why is it that
very young children listen so attentively to Alice, re-
member it all so well and ask to hear it again, when
many other stories seem to leave little impression? It is
c. L. DODGSON: THE POET LOGICIAN 545
surely the psychological truth of these books that lays
its hold on us all. Lewis Carroll is in touch with the real
mind of childhood and hence with the more primitive
elements of the mind of maturity, too unlike certain
other writers who merely exploit for grown-ups an arti-
ficial child-mind of convention which is in reality
neither child-like nor adult. The shiftings and the trans-
formations, the mishaps and the triumphs of Alice's
dream, the mysteries and the riddles, the gibberish that
conveys unmistakable meanings, are all based upon
relationships that contradict the assumptions of our con-
scious lives but that are lurking not far behind them.
In the "straight'' parts of Sylvie and Bruno, Lewis Carroll
was mawkishly Victorian to the point of unintentional
parody (having produced in The Two Voices a master-
piece of intentional parody!), but in the Alice books he
quite got away from the upholstery and the gloomy insti-
tutions of the nineteenth-century world. I believe that
they are likely to survive when a good deal of the more
monumental work of that world the productions of the
Carlyles and the Ruskins, the Spencers and the George
Eliots shall have sunk with the middle-class ideals of
which they were the champions as well as the critics.
Charles Dodgson who, in morals and religion, in his
attitude toward social institutions, was professedly and as
he himself believed, more conventional than any of
these, had over them the curious advantage of working
at once with the abstract materials of mathematical and
logical conceptions and with the irrationalities of dreams.
His art has a purity that is almost unique in a period so
cluttered and cumbered, in which even the preachers of
doom to the reign of materialism bore the stamp and the
stain of the industrial system in the hard insistence of
their sentences and in the turbidity of their belchings of
rhetoric. They have shrunk now, but Alice still stands.
546 THE SHORES OF LIGHT
I suggest to the Nonesuch Press that it would do well
to get out a definitive and comprehensive one-volume
edition of Dodgson, like their admirable editions of Blake
and Donne. The trouble about such collections as that
which Mr. Herrick has edited is that they are intended
primarily for children. There is no Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson for grown-ups. Sylvie and Bruno, which is
never reprinted, ought to be made available; and there
ought to be at least as many readers for the Curiosa
Mathematica and the Dynamics of a Parti-cle as for
Donne's sermons or Blake's prophetic books. Dodgson's
letters should be included, his articles on local events at
Oxford and his journal of his trip to Russia; and there
ought to be a good memoir. The only biography of
Dodgson is a conventional life by a relative published in
1899. No writer, so far as I know, has ever done a serious
portrait of him or made a real study of his work,
May 1 8, 1932
The needs pointed out in this article were very
promptly supplied. In 1935, Mr. J. F. McDermott
brought out a volume of the miscellaneous writings of
Dodgson: The Russian Journal and Other Selections
from the Works of Lewis Carroll; and in 1937 the None-
such Press did publish, as I had suggested, a well-pro-
duced omnibus volume, The Complete Works of Lewis
Carroll, containing almost everything of Dodgson's (the
Russian Journal is not included) that a non-scholarly per-
son could read. Some Aspects of Pastoral by William
Empson (American edition called English Pastoral
Poetry), published in 1935, includes an interesting study
of the Alice books, which treats the cataclysmic finale of
the dinner at the end of Through the Looking-Glass as
the eruption of a repressed don, exasperated by dining
with his colleagues.
C. L. DODGSON : THE POET LOGICIAN 547
The first full-length biography since The Life and
Letters of Lewis Carroll by his nephew S. D. Colling-
wood appeared in 1945: Victoria Through the Looking-
Glass: The Life of Lewis Carroll, by Florence Becker
Lennon. This book has its unsatisfactory features. Mrs.
Lennon presents her material in rather an untidy way:
she nowhere, so far as I can find, for example, gives the
date of Dodgson's birth certainly not in the proper
place; and the filling-in of the background, done from
this side of the Atlantic, is synthetic and not easily assim-
ilable. But this study is, nevertheless, the best thing that
has yet been written about Lewis Carroll. The literary
criticism is excellent; the psychological insight sometimes
brilliant; and Mrs. Lennon has brought together, from
the most scattered and various sources, a good deal of
information. The impression that she actually conveys
of what Dodgson's existence was like is more convincing
than some of her theories. Mrs. Lennon believes that
Charles Dodgson was intimidated by his clergyman
father, so that he felt himself obliged to take orders and
never dared question the creed of the Church. She seems
to believe that he might otherwise have developed as an
important original thinker. She also worries about what
she regards as his frustrated sexual life: if he had only,
she sighs, been capable of a mature attachment for a
woman which would have freed him from his passion
for little girls! (a penchant with which his position as
elder brother of seven motherless sisters as well as the
strong feminine streak in him noted by Mrs. Lennon
must have a good deal to do). What she does not under-
stand, I think, is that Dodgson, in terms of his age and
place, was remarkably "well-adjusted/' His enjoyment
of the Oxford "Studentship," with its relatively agreeable
work and exceptionally comfortable quarters, which he
won on his graduation was dependent on his acceptance
548 THE SHORES OF LIGHT
of celibacy; and there is nothing to show that this irked
him much. His admiration and affection for his father
seem to have been complete; the rectory in which he
grew up was obviously as little as possible like that
described by Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh;
and with the Dodgsons the church tradition was strong:
Charles's father and mother, who were cousins, had had
the same Archbishop for a grandfather. Since reading
this biography and Collingwood's memoir, I am less dis-
posed than I was when I wrote the above article to assume
that Charles Dodgson was seriously cramped by his role.
Mrs. Lennon insists that, in his photographs, he has the
look of one "crucified," but she does not produce any
evidence that he actually suffered much. There is mock-
ery of course in Alice, who finds herself at odds with the
"creatures"; there are, as both Mrs. Lennon and Mr.
Empson suggest, outbreaks of contemptuous violence at
the ends of the Alice books and Sylvie and Bruno; but
the forces of benevolence and common sense always
triumph in what is not merely the conventional Victorian
happy ending, as they certainly did in Dodgson's life.
The conditions of teaching in an English university in
the middle of the nineteenth century may seem to us
today unnatural, but all social and professional situations
involve their special disabilities, and in the position that
Dodgson had chosen he seems to have functioned well.
If a part of his intelligence lived underground, if a
part of his personality was screened, it is plain that
Mrs. Lennon admits this Alice would never have gone
down the rabbit-hole, would never have walked through
the mirror, if this had not been the case. Dodgson's work
in mathematics and logic was somewhat eccentric, too,
and he sometimes, we are told, proposed problems, just as
his stories do, that probed into the depths of their sub-
jects; but in these scientific fields as in fiction he seems to
c. L. DODGSON: THE POET LOGICIAN 549
have given the world all that he was capable of. The
author of Sylvie and Bruno was trying already for more
than he could manage. Mrs. Lennon, has, I believe, been
the first to point out the exact and complicated parallels
between the dreams and the actualities that make this
book psychologically interesting (my own references to
these above have been added for the sake of completeness
since the article was first written), but the novel for
grown-ups is otherwise childish; and in mathematics and
logic, according to the expert opinions cited by Mrs.
Lennon, he either ignored or had never discovered the
more advanced work in these fields, and did not perhaps
get even so far as in his exploration of dreams.
It is one of the pioneering merits of Victoria Through
the Looking-Glass that Mrs. Lennon has looked up these
authoritative estimates of Dodgson's mathematical and
logical work; and, a poet, she is able herself to provide an
expert opinion on his poetry. The only aspect of his
varied activity to which she does not seem quite to do
justice is his achievement as an artist-photographer; but
this subject has been dealt with since in a book called
Lewis Carroll Photographer by Helmut Gernsheim
(1950). Mr. Gernsheim considers Dodgson "the most
outstanding photographer of children of the nineteenth
century" and, after Julia Margaret Cameron, "probably
the most distinguished amateur portraitist of the mid-
Victorian era/' In this field he was eccentric and per-
fectionist as he was in everything else. He showed the
real reckless artist's passion in his pursuit of his two
favorite kinds of subjects: celebrities and little girls.
The former he besieged unabashedly, undaunted by
occasional snubs and not afraid to arrive before break-
fast, with all his apparatus in a cab, so that his prospects
would not have a chance to escape. In his search for
attractive little girls, he attended such incongruous func-
550 THE SHORES OF LIGHT
tions as archery meetings and Freemason's ftes, and
spent part of his vacations at the seaside, supplied always
with safety-pins in case he should find "a little girl
hesitating to paddle in the sea for fear of spoiling her
frock." His trophies repaid him for his risks and ordeals.
A few of his portraits were reproduced in the Colling-
wood Life and Letters, but these do not give an adequate
idea of the interest and scope of these plates. There was,
it seems, an enormous body of work, of which twelve
albums are known to survive. The sixty-four plates from
three of them that Mr. Gernsheim includes in his book
show a dramatic sense of personality in the posing, the
arrangement of the backgrounds and the feeling for
facial expression that one would not have suspected in
Dodgson from his letters and his literary work and that
reminds one of his love of the theater (which, in taking
Holy Orders at Oxford, he made sure that he would not
be expected to renounce). Here, humanly appealing and
vivid, you have the troubled Elizabethanism of Tennyson;
the jaunty, almost rakish bohemianism of Tom Taylor,
the editor of Punch; the contemptuous independence of
Rossetti; the serious and challenging young-womanhood
of the eighteen-year-old Ellen Terry; the healthy Vic-
torian attractiveness of Alexander Munro and his wife;
and the morbid Victorian intensity of "Mrs. Franklin
and her daughter Rose," There is a liveliness and a
humor in these pictures that sometimes suggest Max
Beerbohm. It is, one supposes, unlikely that Max could
have seen these albums at the time he did his drawings
of Rossetti and His Circle, but the photographs of the
Millais's and the Rossettis seem to anticipate these. As
for the pictures of children, they, too, are extremely
varied and provide a new revelation of Lewis Carroll's
special genius for depicting little English girls that is as
brilliant in its way as Alice.