Biography, like any form of character study, is a post-mortem; the autopsy of the literary world. A good biographer, like a good pathologist, will bring the right tools to the table, know where to dig and how to identify what he finds, how to weigh it and give it its proper consequence. The writer, at best, need be an objective observer – though none of us is truly objective.

We bring our own bruised hearts to the scene. We pass on our own, more contemporary, values and cultural mores, and no matter what we may say, we judge, and a true biographer – that is, one in search of the truth – will analyze, but will not attempt to impose his own values, his own life and experience, but will study and analyze his subject; walk, perhaps, in his shoes, and try to pass fair and informed judgment. But to judge our subject accurately, we need know something of the time – the structure under which he operated. If we are lucky, the dead will leave us good clues, the cipher we need to decode their inner-mechanism - because that’s what we’re getting at; what’s inside, what was the motor behind the subject’s loves and hates, his work, his triumphs and failures, and the true engine of motivation and desire.

Any writer trying to decipher Lewis Carroll is surely grateful that he was such a promiscuous writer, note-taker, organizer, diarist, correspondent, and photographer. Yet remarkably, for as many books there have been written about Carroll since his death in 1898, none seem to capture him completely, which seems astounding considering the breadth of raw material and clues he left for us, clues that suggest he perhaps knew that we could not but help write about him. After all, with the exception of the Bible and Shakespeare, no other writer is quoted frequently than Lewis Carroll, with language and words from his books that have become part of our every day speech (Mad as a hatter, grinning like a Cheshire Cat, and so on) and others that have passed into such common usage they are now part of the dictionary.

Carroll is the ultimate trickster, still playing pranks from the grave, the man who brought us Alice and her Wonderland and sent us, without warning, down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass. No other books have seen as many editions and in so many languages. Not bad for an off-the-cuff project written by a mathematics Don at and Deacon at Christ Church, Oxford – a world far different from Alice’s Wonderland.

Carroll, or his real name which is less known but perhaps more appropriate, because we are, after all, speaking of accuracy here – The Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson – left us a wealth of material, anticipating our quivering pens, ready to slice and size him up; at least he’d give us the information to do it, or so he thought. He left numerous large green boxes of organized glass-plate negatives, numbered and dated, bound diaries and photo-albums with some of his most famous photographs with images of well-known friends like the Tennyson’s and Rossetti’s, boxes of correspondence, and, most impressively, a card-catalogue of 98,721 letters indicating the date, addressee, and subject of the letter, all laid out for us in his neat, exacting script.

These index cards are meticulously cross-referenced. Like the photographs and negatives, Dodgson would spend weeks at a time “photo writing”, and letter organizing. He made long and careful lists of subjects whose photograph he wished to take, and like any good lion hunter, for the most part, was able to cross out the names on the list as he went along. His notes are there for us, in their meticulous hand-writing and in their particular hue of violet ink, which he is said to have used only on creative projects, saving his blue pen for his mathematics and tutorial work.

So many interesting people die without leaving us clues; Hooray, we want to shout, for Dodgson for being so considerate, for organizing all the papers for us. This material is what we would call primary reference; it goes to the source himself, and while we know as writers that we cannot trust the source alone, for they will try to impose their personality on us (in Carroll’s case, lead us properly down the garden path), revealing only what they wish and hiding the rest, it is an awfully good base to work from. His letters to his child-friends speak to his wicked and clever sense of humor, his sense of play. Even when he wasn’t working on nonsense and books, his letters were, as we would say, ‘too clever by half.’

His notes are quick, smart, and sharp, much like the man himself and the manner in which he dressed, always in a crisp white shirt and often with a bowtie, razor-sharp parted hair that fell to the collar line, and his neat, delicate features and gentle grey eyes. He is said to have been Stoic in the extreme, though some interpret this as stiff. He was a man of great discipline, but then, he had to be to accomplish all that he did.

Who else but Carroll could carry on a successful mathematics career, penning many books under his Christian name (Dodgson), serve as a tutor at Oxford, be the author of the Alice books, and one of the most important photographers of both his and our time, with photographs that are still widely exhibited and highly valued (not to mention controversial) to this day. When writing about Carroll, even though we are writing about one man, he is a man who lived many lives, all of them at the same time. Some biographers have labeled him ‘schizophrenic’, others ‘multiple personality disorder,’ and many more diagnoses, yet none seem to fit and none, for the record, were ever diagnosed during his day. It seems many biographers have had a difficult time reconciling the many parts of Dodgson’s personality, and, unable to reconcile them, they simple create a split and hence, the misdiagnoses (mis-diagnonsense?). It may sound good; it may explain how he could be so different as Carroll the writer and Dodgson the Deacon, but this doesn’t make it the truth.

The answer to Dodgson’s personality quirks is likely to be found in the one condition he was very clearly diagnosed with during his lifetime; temporal lobe epilepsy, an interesting fact for myriad reasons, but especially for the fact that epilepsy has a proven link to creativity and artistic expression as well as religious fervor and hypergraphia. One wonders why biographers have given it such little ink when it could be the very key to understanding not only Wonderland, but also Dodgson’s personality; he fits the epileptic personality – a very particular group of personality traits known as Geschwind’s syndrome-all of which would encompass his moral and religious beliefs, love of organization, love of music boxes and clocks, and his hypergraphia. That Dodgson also had a fascination with epilepsy should tell biographers something; that much of his written work is focused on ‘fits’, altered states of consciousness, and other such ‘eerie states’ or what he coined, ‘the waking dream’, are all clues to his inner-mechanism. To say he was simply epileptic would be too reductive; but to not factor it into the equation at all (and it does not get its due in really any biography to date), is an oversight. Dodgson's diaries clearly record his diagnoses of "epileptiform" activity and seizures, and while the Victorian understanding of epilepsy may be different from our knowledge today, one would be remiss not to mention this fact at all for it goes straight to the original source material in the Diaries themselves.

Dodgson doesn’t tell us how to interpret his work, his life – he just leaves it there for us, nicely organized like the library he oversaw at Oxford (he was sub-librarian at Christ Church for many years, the windows of which overlooked the Deanery garden, from where he likely caught his first glimpse of the Liddell sisters and young Alice). It is all there for us to peruse at our leisure. The work he has left behind, his famous nonsense, the Alice books, The Hunting of the Snark, remain the most popular, despite the fact that Dodgson was a mathematician by trade and penned many books under his own name, it is the nonsense of his life that interests us most, a curious fact.

Andre Breton noted in his Anthology of Black Humor, “Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.” Carroll flings open the gates to that magical garden of our childhood, our heroine Alice, shoots down the rabbit hole where, after some trials and struggles, she finds the key to an enchanted garden, and by reading, we too are granted entry. What she finds there is certainly not all fun, and some of it is downright frightening. 

Dodgson’s work was revolutionary in many ways; as a Deacon, he was not a big fan of the Tractarians at the time and, despite his conservative, High Church upbringing, did not believe in Original Sin or Eternal Damnation, and even accepted, or managed to make his peace with, Darwin’s theories of evolution – all of which would have made him radical for his time. He was, no doubt, more like his friend Tennyson who believed in a more magical and mysterious world with a Universal Creator who was benevolent and forgiving, much like the God of Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau.

While Dodgson may have indeed been perceived as uptight and conservative, a simple reading of his thoughts on religion can quickly settle the matter, and what is important here is that in reading this, one sees something of Lewis Carroll – his other half, the one who sets us free from ‘should’ and ‘ought’, who teases and jokes. On further examination, Dodgson and Carroll are not as different as many biographers have thought. We see glimpses of one in the other, like communicating mirrors, flashing their signals back and forth.

That said, it is true that any subject a biographer encounters must be wary just as much of what is left unsaid, and in Carroll’s case, this includes the infamous missing diaries. It is believed that his family destroyed four years worth of diaries after Dodgson’s death in 1898, and in another diary, razored out several pages. Why these diaries were destroyed, if indeed they were, and what matter they contained, we can only speculate. After his death, Carroll’s diaries were stored in a cardboard box in the cellar of his family home at Guildford, and found, on the cellar floor when the box had broken. The Dodgson family was not a wealthy family, as Lancelyn Green points out, and there was no “ancestral mansion in which to store several dozen papers of doubtful value.” While most biographers posit that the diaries were ‘destroyed’, it is equally conceivable that they were simply lost, though this holds far less commercial value. “Destroyed” has implications, implying secrets held within and protected by the family. In truth, there is no way to know what happened to the diaries, though it is an assumption to posit absolute destruction instead of unfortunate accident. There are now a complete set of Dodgson's diaries thanks to Edward Wakeling of the Lewis Carroll Society in Great Britain. (*Wakeling has just completed Volume 10, available through the Lewis Carroll Society of the UK).

Unfortunately, the story that everyone is selling is that these diaries tell the true tale of Dodgson’s love and lust for Alice Liddell (and, perhaps, other little girls). There is nothing to suggest they did say that; but then, there is nothing to suggest they didn’t. The surviving diaries contain no such information, so it does seem strange to think that suddenly his diaries would be full of lustful thoughts – wouldn’t we have seen some evidence of this earlier, we think. This is our job as biographers, and part of it is speculating, but it doesn’t make sense that Dodgson would be a letch for many years and suddenly stop, or that there wouldn’t be surviving evidence, or more, that Alice herself would not have said something about it when she grew up and became Mrs. Alice Hargreaves. Instead, all of her, and his other child friends, memories of Dodgson are pleasant. Their time with him remembered as ‘magical,' including those of Alice who became Mrs. Alice Hargreaves and still fondly remembered Dodgson in her later years. (Collingwood)

In short, it may be titillating to think the Deacon was a pedophile – it may have more commercial value, sell more books, the fairytale behind the fairy tale, and indeed, interesting to many a biographer to speculate about the missing diaries and their contents, but this does not make their conclusions true or factual. They are suppositions based on so much rumor and gossip, and that is all. Books like Katie Roiphe's Still She Haunts Me are based largely on the many misconceptions that surround Carroll, based on some fact, but mostly fiction, we are seduced by Roiphe into believing that perhaps - perhaps - there is some truth to the matter, but here again, this is speculation with no evidence to support the facts.

As scholars, writers, academics, we bring to our interpretation of these materials our own experience. As we look into his heart, we can not help but involve our own heart. Our childhood, our schooling, our belief systems, the sum total of our life can not help but be overlaid as a grid onto the life of another as we attempt to interpret them. Try to remain objective as possible, we say, knowing that in the final account, rarely, if ever, does such a thing as pure objectivity exist. Yes, we are pathologists, forensic scientists perhaps, and we bring our own tools; so it becomes a question of who is best at using those tools, who knows how to measure and analyze. This is the best we can do for the dead.

In Carroll’s case the answers – or many of them anyway – appear to lay coiled in the labyrinths of the brain. As writers, we want to get into his head. And this could nowhere be more relevant or more literal than in Carroll’s case, for he was a man whose mind was, at times, governed by sudden storms, synapses misfiring and overfiring, causing him to suffer from epilepsy, with petit mal ‘waking dreams’ and grand mal seizures, the first of which, happened in the Cathedral at Christ Church. That night, Dodgson was so mortified; that he hid in the upper pews under the cathedral was empty, and then made his way home through the dark night, his nose bloodied from the fall, keeping his epilepsy or fainting spell a secret from others at Christ Church (noted by Morton Cohen in his biography).

Today, that Carroll was an epileptic is no secret, and no biographer need dig too far to find this information. It is easily found in journals and personal correspondence and in the notes of his doctors, two of whom diagnosed him. One contemporary doctor at a prestigious Boston hospital noted that Alice in Wonderland is ‘no more than seizure states fictionalized.’ (Seized, by Eve La Plante). First recognized by British Neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, psychic seizures seem to command “hallucinations, the flow of involuntary ‘reminiscence’, the sense of revelation, and the strange, half-mystical ‘dreamy state.’ , what Tennyson, Dodgson’s friend and also epileptic, called “the waking trance.” Without even fully realizing it, Dodgson faithfully recorded the world of a temporal lobe epileptic when he penned Alice in Wonderland and other books, including Sylvie & Bruno.

Almost all of the things that happen in Wonderland correlate directly to various seizure states. One neurologist wrote of a patient who experienced “the sensation of being in a ‘deep dark tunnel’ ” – like fated hole that Alice falls into. There is also the sensation of “micropsia” (things shrinking) and “macropsia” (things growing). Why then, is it that most biographers have tended to analyze this shrinking and growing in a Freudian way, scanning the Alice books for phallic symbols, her long neck evidence of a phallus, one writer suggests, the key to the door of Wonderland that fits into the lock is representative of sexual intercourse, and need we say anything about the hole.

The fact that these are common feelings and observations during seizure states, and more, that Alice is not comfortable with all of this shrinking and growing, would indicate apprehension rather than arousal. Alice never quite knows what is going to happen next, expressing the same concerns voiced by epileptics for centuries, the sense of the unknown and the disturbing loss of control; the proverbial fall down the rabbit hole.

In Through the Looking Glass, Alice notes of this strange, new world, things are just the same…only things go the other way. It is a fantastical world, like Wonderland, and various states of being are expressed, showing Carroll’s fascination with altered states of consciousness: sleepiness, anxiety, nervousness, and what is central to almost every state is that it is put upon the subject and is not a chosen way of being, indicating a loss of self-control. This speaks to Dodgson’s issues of self-control and discipline, of which he was acutely aware. Primarily, this lends itself to living with an illness like epilepsy that is unpredictable and sudden. The book is full of such references, as are many of Dodgson/Carroll’s other works, like Sylvie and Bruno, which deal directly with Bruno’s all too common ‘eerie states’ and different levels of consciousness.
That epilepsy affected Dodgson’s work is clear; both his photographs and his books seem fixed on a theme that deals with altered states of consciousness. Like Alice, epileptics may feel “sleepy” just before a seizure (and certainly afterward). And, like Alice, they arrive in a world much like this world, but, as Dodgson once said, “Exactly the opposite”, in a place where things aren’t quite right. It is a world that, no doubt, Dodgson himself would have trouble reconciling. As Alice begins to shrink, she says, “What a curious feeling! I must be shutting up like a telescope.” “Down, down, down” she falls, in what feels like “a tunnel for some way.” She wonders “What Longitude and Latitude shall I be in?” The world of the epileptic experiencing a seizure is curious indeed, disorienting - a journey through a private wonderland.

Why is it then, that such an important and integral part of Carroll’s life should go largely unnoted? Biographer Morton Cohen gives the matter only a slight mention, and other biographers, no mention at all, though some note Dodgson’s ‘curious fascination with fits.” That so central a fact that would impact upon a person so greatly, affect their very personality in fact, would be given such little ink, that it makes one wonder if the stigma – our own social prejudices – don’t persist to this day. Why not write about epilepsy and the effect it would likely have? To deny such a large personality effect is ignorant, and to be reductionist and chalk everything up to epilepsy is equally blind. But without this important fact given due consideration, the fact remains, we do not, to this date, have a complete portrait of Carroll.

It is our job, if we are to do it well, to find any underlying pathology or disease that may have impacted the individual, and any biographer who would have taken the time to research temporal lobe epilepsy, would find impressive volumes that speak to the relation between the condition and artistic expression, personality quirks, and even the speech hesitation (as Edward Wakeling more aptly termed it) from which Dodgson, and seven of his sisters, suffered (it is also notable that there was epilepsy in Dodgson’s family bloodline, and epilepsy can be a heritable condition.) They would read of fugue and seizure states and see the similarities between Wonderland and the world of the epileptic; a world of auras and pro-dromal warnings, a world that comes apart at the seams. A world like Wonderland, where things are distorted and time stretches before you; a world in which you are not quite yourself, and indeed, if you didn’t know you had epilepsy, you just might believe the Cheshire Cat when he says, “You must be mad, or you wouldn’t have come here.”

As noted earlier, the dead speak. They speak through the works they leave us, and it is up to us to sift through the material and interpret it with the correct cipher. The parallels are there (between nonsense and seizure experiences), we know Dodgson had temporal lobe epilepsy, then it seems a matter of using this information, or in the very least, factoring it into our equation, before the final summation. Yet in Carroll studies, there has been an almost willful dismissal of what is recorded in Dodgson's diaries – but again, it would seem this may be due in large part to how little most writers understand of temporal lobe epilepsy. But remember, this is the post-mortem, you are the pathologist; Victorians may have been ignorant about the condition, but time has made us wiser. Or not, for we have been handed the key that will help unlock our subject’s mind, yet still, we search elsewhere. As our subject would say, “Curiouser and curiouser.”

It’s important to understand that in the Victorian era, epilepsy was a disease of ‘idiots’ and ‘madmen’. It was highly stigmatized, and doubtless, a man like Dodgson, so aware of social standing and stature, would dare risk telling of his seizure states in any way other than as fiction or nonsense. That his friend Tennyson also suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, which he called “the waking trance”, is also notable, for though he too knew of his condition, it appears only in his poetry, and like Carroll, is thinly veiled.

The grids that we overlay that I spoke of earlier are most apparent in the psychoanalytic interpretations of Carroll’s work. The Freudian biographers, as we shall call them, began with a young man named Tony Goldschmidt who wrote a paper entitled “Alice in Wonderland Psychoanalyzed.” The four page paper was published in The New Oxford Outlook in 1933. It was a paper that found Freudian evidence of phallic symbols and intercourse all throughout the text of Alice. It was the first paper to intone that Carroll had some ‘other’ interest in children and in Alice in particular.

That there was no evidence to support Goldschmidt’s concepts didn’t seem to matter. Writers like Florence Becker Lennon and Phyllis Greenacre, all eager to try out the still relatively new Freudian theories carried Goldschmidt’s torch and so it was passed; Lewis Carroll, Sainted Friend of Children, as Karoline Leach said he had been painted, was in fact, a pedophile. Case closed. Perhaps they hadn’t heard of Goldschmidt’s friend and fellow Carroll scholar, Derek Hudson, who noted that when Goldschmidt wrote the piece, “His tongue was halfway up his cheek.” A joke that would last more than a lifetime and one that would affect Carroll scholarship for years to come, including the present.

While many features of epilepsy may initially resemble schizophrenia (a common misdiagnosis and one that was applied to Dodgson in death by such noted Carroll scholars as Phyllis Greenacre and Florence Becker Lennon), the cause of the disturbance is entirely different. Further, even well into the twentieth century, these authors demonstrate that the epileptic, even in death, cannot escape the stigma of the condition. Phyllis Greenacre, author of Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of Two Lives, demonstrates how as recently as 1955, when her book was published, this stigma of epilepsy persisted.

As Greenacre’s book has become a primary reference in the scholarship of Carroll, the inaccuracy and ignorance of her statements requires further examination. More disconcerting, is that Greenacre, Lennon, Gernsheim, and others, all cross-reference each other, further confounding myth and speculation. This has been the process for so long, and so few have looked beyond the ‘looking glass’, that speculation has been accepted as fact. As more books are written about Dodgson, even today (the interest seems never to wane; in 2002 alone, at least three major books are about him or make some serious mention of his relationship with Alice), one sees the same misdiagnoses and speculation reinforced, once again preventing a true and accurate understanding of who he really was, removing us further and further away from the truth.

A great deal of the trouble can be traced back to a young student named Helmut Gernsheim who published his monograph Lewis Carroll: Photographer in 1949, the first book to mark Carroll’s work as a photographer in a scholarly sense. Gernsheim was an historian of photography and his book was an effort to bring a more contemporary understanding of Carroll’s work. He said of Carroll “(He) had no ambition; his art springs from delight in the beautiful; he is feminine and light-hearted in his approach to photography.” Overall, though Gernsheim considered Carroll a portraitist, and in his monograph, he ranks him alongside contemporaries Julia Margaret Cameron and Oscar Gustav Rejlander. No doubt, Gernsheim admired Carroll’s work and felt that in many ways, his work, at least in terms of composition and technique, was superior to many of his contemporaries, including Ms. Cameron. Still, although Carroll had photographed many famous men and women, more than half of the photographs selected for the book were of young girls. Gernsheim wrote “Beautiful little girls had a strange fascination for Lewis Carroll,” . He saw the photographs as reflective of Carroll’s temperament. The problem, however, was that Gernsheim’s version and interpretation of Carroll’s work became, as San Francisco MOMA Curator Doug Nickel notes, “a breeding ground for future misinterpretation.” Unfortunately, this misinterpretation as Nichol calls it, continues to this day.

It’s also important to note that much of Gernsheim’s information came from the recently published book by Florence Becker Lennon, Victoria through the Looking Glass, published in 1945, and the two authors – Lennon and Gernsheim – seemed to feed off each other’s interpretation of the facts. Lennon, for her part, compounding the problem and clearly not relying on original sources, quotes extensively from Phyllis Greenacre’s Swift and Carroll: a Psychoanalytic Study. At least Greenacre makes no secret of her slant.

While all of these books are valuable contributions to the field in many ways, in the final analysis, the picture they present is not only incomplete, but conclusions drawn are incorrect and based on limited notions of epilepsy, or, in most cases, a complete failure to discuss temporal lobe epilepsy at all and instead, return to psychiatric diagnoses of which, in reality, there is no evidence, and on the infamous marriage proposal to Alice Liddell, that rumor has it occurred when Dodgson was thirty-one and Alice eleven, yet again, there is no evidence of this.

Of course, at the time the Freudians were busy churning out their story there were other books written about Carroll. There was the alternate, but equally untrue myth, of Lewis Carroll, a veritable saint, presented in the first biography by Carroll’s nephew Stuart Collingwood, and again by Langford Reed and even the conflicted Florence Becker Lennon who called Carroll “the last saint of this irreverent world.” (Lennon)

So there are two stories being sold, and you can buy either one, but both are myth: Carroll as repressed pedophile (recorded in many biographies), Carroll as saint (Collingwood, Lennon). Rare, if anywhere, is there a truly balanced portrait of Carroll that includes even his epilepsy (a fact, which no doubt, any good biographer who has done his research knows yet, chooses to ignore.)

Let's at least try and cut through the mythology and get to the truth. It’s no surprise that the man who wrote the best-selling children’s book of all time should be mythologized or even that a deacon who liked to photograph little girls would be suspect and raise a few eye-brows. And Carroll himself played into his own myth-making, on the one hand loving the attention of Lewis Carroll and on the other doing everything he could to separate himself from his pen-name (except when it suited his purposes).

Carroll sought out great men and their company. Used his camera to maneuver between social levels, like a lion hunter whose sole purpose was to capture the image of the famous on collodian for a place of pride in his album. It’s not that it was an unusual practice to have photographs of famous people in photograph albums in Victorian England. In fact, the common Morocco album was set up with cartes-de-visite of the Royal family, then came the great men (sometimes women) the owner admired, like John Ruskin, Disreali, Newman, and other great men of the day. Followed, were photographs of family, and finally friends.

Frenchman Disderi had patented the carte-de visite in 1854, making small size prints affordable to the general public and thus their popularity practically exploded. But Dodgson was no ordinary man purchasing cartes for a few shillings. He would have looked on this practice with disdain, for to him, photography was indeed a fine art and a science and he wanted his photographs to have a certain sharpness and thus, he stuck with the messy collodian process. Cartes were cheap reproductions did away with the necessity for exactness and balance. More, Dagguerrotypes could not be reproduced. It was a one shot image. 

He was the photographer himself and he sought these men out, often traveling out of his way to see them (he did this several times with Tennyson, traveling to the Isle of Wight and ‘just happening’ to run into him as he walked by his house when the Poet Laureate was mowing the lawn, and no doubt, put himself in the path of many other famous men and women). He was a relentless pursuer and highly ambitious, and to some extent, any person of such determination and force is bound to be mythologized, like Rimbaud, Plath, and others who have similarly been mythologized. That on the one hand he was highly social – social for his photography purposes, mostly – and on the other, an extreme introvert who seemed most comfortable in the company of children all feed into the speculation and confusion surrouding Carroll and lead to the two opposing schools of thought: Carroll who could do no wrong; Carroll who did wrong.

It is widely believed that Alice Liddell was Carroll’s true love. The sole inspiration for his book. That he loved her his whole life long and never recovered. It is a fairy tale about a fairy tale. In truth, Alice was one of his first child friends, but certainly not his favorite, at least if we are to judge by the fact of his photography in which Alice appears in a few pictures and is easily surpassed by a young girl named Alexandra “Xie” Kitchen, the daughter of a friend, whom Carroll photographed for a period of over eleven years – longer than he had photographed any girl. Yet little is heard of Xie, perhaps because we don’t have a book with her name in the title. In reality, the fictional Alice bears little resemblance to in either personality or image to the real Alice Liddell. It was Xie Kitchen who was photographed by Carroll more than sixty times and sat for his camera from a very young age all the way through her later teen years.

There are arguments that Tenniel had his own model, but then why is it that she bears no resemblance to Alice Liddell in the original Alice’s Adventures Underground, illustrated by Dodgson himself? He was not an illustrator by trade, by there is no attempt to make the fictional Alice look like the real Alice – and he was talented enough to get certain details right. No doubt, she is indeed the child to whom he told the story of Alice’s adventures on that legendary day on July 4th, 1862, and perhaps he used her name for her amusement. Later in life, Alice Hargreaves (nee Liddell) said that she had begged “Mr. Dodgson to write it down,” crediting herself with the entire process, when in fact, it was through the encouragement of other friends (George MacDonald and his son) that Carroll decided to send the book to Macmillan.

Most recently the Alice as Dodgson's one true love story continues in Francine Prose’s book, The Lives of the Muses, published in 2002, a section of which deals with Dodgson’s relationship to Alice Liddell and in Harold Bloom’s book Genius. Never mind that genius and whether or not he proposed to Alice Liddell do not in any way relate, The myth-machine still turns, and even Bloom is not immune. Not surprisingly, Prose does what so many have done before her; she uses for her references Lennon, Greenacre, Gernsheim, and Cohen. Once again we find a book that is full of insinuation based on so much gossip.

In the final account, however sympathetically Dodgson is portrayed, his motivation is called into question, and even his frequent appeals to God are used as ‘evidence’ against him. As Douglas Nichol notes, “The monographs [by Gernsheim] essay need not have belabored a fixation on little girls, the portfolio of photographs provided sufficient fuel for the fire revealing…an aspect of Carroll’s life that seemed to confirm biographer’s speculations.” Carroll’s photographs become “dusty charades” that underline his “pathology” and since then, for over half a century, scholarship on his art has remained fixed.”

Even Nabokov, who much admired Dodgson and was the first to translate Alice in Wonderland into Russian in 1923, accuses him of “Nympholepsy”, adding almost jealously, “he got away with it.” In a 1966 interview with Vogue, Nabokov says, “Have you seen those photographs of little girls? He would make arrangements with aunts and mothers to take the children out. He was never caught, except by one girl….” Which girl? The gaping mouth of speculation seems never to close and out of this grows and has grown the Carrollian mythology.

But Dodgson, ever conscious of appearances, always sought the express approval of the parent or a chaperone to be present at all sittings. Indeed, it is Dodgson’s own delicacy, if anything, which makes him seem more suspect. He often seemed ashamed when asking permission to photograph a child, and in the few nude studies he took, he preferred to ask permission of the parents ‘sans habililement’ or the children in ‘their usual dress,” all of which meant nude, but given Dodgson’s legendary shyness, this is hardly unexpected.

Biographers of earlier years may have the excuse of following Freudian trends, or not having ample primary reference material, but biographers today, Carroll scholar Edward Wakeling through the help of the UK Lewis Carroll Society has undertaken the task of organizing the publication of the Carroll diaries in their complete, unedited editions, and they are becoming available. We now know much more about temporal lobe epilepsy – when we found out van Gogh had it, we wrote books, we analyzed. And other famous epileptics – their epilepsy is mentioned, and in some cases, even cited as part of their creative inspiration. Whatever the case, the information is there, yet writers seem comfortable with the double-faced Carroll myth. Should these be the diaries of any other great man, one would imagine a complete revaluation of his life, though the publication of the diaries has, so far, received very little press.

We like to believe that the suggestive turn of a leg in a photograph, the direct and yes, sometimes sexual or sensual glance of the child staring at the lens is all contrived or thrust upon the subject by the photographer. It’s just too uncomfortable for us to believe that our children have any raw or sexual nature. We are far more comfortable with the prints of Rejlander where children where fairy wings and halos, or Julia Margaret Cameron’s sainted, long-suffering martyrs. God help the man who should succeed in getting an accurate and true likeness of a child, depicting real ‘child nature’ without contriving to hide it through elaborate tableaux and retouching (practices Carroll distained.). What made Carroll exceptional for his time, among many other things, were his abilities as a portraitist.

During the Victorian era the portrait process itself was artificial. For one, because of the length of time it took for the exposure of the collodian process and the fact that one had to remain absolutely still for about 45 seconds. Second, many photographers were, as was the fashion of the day, equipped with all sorts of scenery and props which they would often use to accessorize the portrait. As Gernsheim notes, “Middle-aged men appear to spend their lives leaning against a Corinthian pillar as if needing support, with a heavy curtain flapping about their legs.” Little attempt was made at actually capturing the true nature of the subject; what Cameron noted, “the greatness of the inner, as well as the features of the outer man.” There was less of an emphasis on capturing the subject as there was on creating tableaux or a scene, or simply a pretty picture, which may or may not have any real correlation to the sitter. Facial expression and character became secondary, if important at all. Further, not everyone wanted a ‘true’ likeness, and the camera could be unforgiving.

Real portraitists were faced with a dilemma – they had to both satisfy their own notions of art and a true portrait and an idealized portrait that would pander to the sitter’s vanity. It was a common practice, then, that photographs were retouched or over-painted, a process patented in daguerreotypist Richard Beard in 1842. There were even guidelines for achieving a ‘successful’ portrait, and further, articles that outlined ideals of beauty, such as one piece in the June 3rd 1859 edition of Photographic News. The goal, then, of the Victorian photographer, was to contrive through lighting and props, through developing and retouching, by whatever means necessary, to come as close to these ideals as possible.
Carroll was different from these photographers.

He sought more Platonic ideals through his photography; Beauty, Grace, Innocence, but above all, what he cherished was what he often called ‘the divinity” of child-nature, which was raw, savage, untamed and still free from the rigid confines of ‘should’ and ‘ought’ of Victorian England when the ‘coming of age’ for a young girl was but twelve. This is not difficult information to find out; it can be easily found through any historical census. Why should it surprise so many biographers then, that an ordained deacon, as Dodgson was, that he should ‘prefer’ his subjects younger than twelve? It seems the one thing he thought might keep him safe from such gossip of intentions – for surely hanging around with a young girl of age could be interpreted as amorous, or certainly, having amorous intentions, Dodgson naturally thought that younger girls would be considered safer. He could not have been more wrong, though at the time, few eyebrows were raised and Dodgson was cautious to a fault with new subjects, writing many letters to their parents and doing whatever necessary to set the sitter-child at ease.

It is only through backward thinking – in more contemporary times when the coming of age is years later (biographers seem to forget that childhood was a lot shorter in the 1800s than it is today, lasting until the late age of eighteen, and in some matters, twenty-one.) Further, he made little attempt to disguise the wild nature of children; they liked to play barefoot on the grass, then he would shoot them that way; they look at the lens directly, dare we say even provocatively, then he would shoot them that way too. That none of his subjects ever complained or made note of any wrong-doing is evidence in itself that nothing untoward happened during these sittings. Yet biographers are fixed. If they can’t find proof, they’ll find ‘evidence.’

The evidence they find are Dodgson’s own diary reproaches, even his insomnia for which he devised a series of complex mathematical and logic equations to pass the time (this was later published until the title Pillow Problems.) Pillow Problems, writes biographer Donald Thomas [1996] were Dodgson’s “antidote to erotic images” of little girls. Does it matter that we know Dodgson was, after all, a mathematics don? That such equations would occur naturally, and further, that insomnia may well have been a symptom of his underlying seizure disorder?  That for an insomniac, a book of "pillow problems" would be nothing more than a pastime and an aid to help one fall asleep. All of this information is out there – answers that make sense and that should please any biographer. Perhaps they are not the answers we are looking for though. Perhaps biographers began a myth that the reading public gobbled up so readily that it sells.

Titillation sells. The well-spun fantasy of a life-long unrequited love between an eccentric, stuttering deacon and a nine-year-old girl who does not return his affections and turns down his offer of marriage (let’s dispense with the fact that he was a deacon and had taken vows of chastity), who spends the rest of his life seeking poor substitutes in other young girls, who writes a book about the real Alice Liddell, who never recovers from her marriage to Reginald Hargreaves and shuns her – it’s all so dramatic, more like a Victorian romance novel than contemporary biography. The story, by now, in the retelling, has gathered such power, such force, that few dare question its validity.

None of this is to say that the real Alice didn’t play her role in his life or have a place in his heart, but there is great evidence of child-friends who, heaven help us, may have meant more, whom he held in higher esteem, who are noted more frequently in diary than Alice ever was, photographed more. One finds a preponderance of evidence that says the opposite of what most biographical studies of Carroll would have us believe. Nabokov can accuse all he wants, he even claimed he somewhat based his famous character Hubert Humbert on Dodgson, but his accusations sound curiously jealous, if anything; jealous of what he imagined happened, not what actually happened.

One of the first things one learns about temporal lobe epilepsy is that it is not at all uncommon for patients to be hyposexual – that is, have very little interest or no interest in sex. How can a key characteristic of a condition Dodgson had be so over-looked. If other writers had taken the time to learn about the kind of epilepsy that Dodgson had, then no doubt, their understanding and interpretation of him may have been deeper. Instead, most note his preoccupation with ‘fits’ and other altered states of being, and note that he ‘seemed like two people’, but without a thorough medical understanding of the condition, they are left unable to explain these facts or worse, mis-interpret them.

Knowing that many with temporal lobe epilepsy have little or no sex-drive, is it, in light of this, so hard to believe that the man was indeed, along with his fellow Students at Christ Church, sincerely not interested and remained celibate. That he took his vows of celibacy seriously and that his insomnia could, quite possibly, be attributed to something else. Indeed, more than plausible, it is likely that understanding his epilepsy offers the explanation for many of the questions about Lewis Carroll that remain unanswered and keep him such a mystery. It seems that the authors want him to be interested. We are somehow vested in making him a pedophile, perpetuating the myth, recycling so much gossip. After all, perhaps the truth isn’t quite as delicious gossip as the rumor. That he was not in love with our heroine, Alice, is somehow less romantic and thus, the book may hold less appeal for some readers.

Lennon hints at a “split personality” and says, “Behind every man stands his Platonic shadow, usually much larger than himself…” No doubt, she is right, and there were two sides of Dodgson, but in the final account, the etiology of her account is incorrect for it fails to address the matter of epilepsy. Either she didn’t know, which one finds hard to believe, or she didn’t know enough about it to use it as a lens with which we can bring our character into sharper and more accurate focus.

Langford Reed, Florence Becker Lennon, Phyllis Greenacre, and Francine Prose, tell that Dodgson was ‘in love’ with Alice Liddell. But where is the evidence? That he told the child a story and named the heroine after her? Surely, one thinks, there must be more than this. The answer emerges, ironically, from Dodgson himself, slowly appearing on the horizon as the smiling face of the Cheshire Cat. Biographer Morton Cohen asks What sin did he commit that he had to atone for? a provocative and leading question, for he is ready to provide the answer, and once again, we are pointed back to the break with the Liddell family, surely evidence of some wrong doing. Perhaps Florence Becker Lennon’s most important contribution to Lewis Carroll research may well be her summation; his “was the sin of thinking for himself about religion.”

Yet in reading the diaries, one can find very little that Dodgson would have had, by our standard, to reproach himself for. There are no illicit fantasies of schoolgirls, no evidence of Nabokov’s “nympholepsy” (perhaps there was some projection there?), no evidence of pedophilia. Nothing.

In fact, the diaries, when they are not full of self-reproach, record the most mundane of events. There are, dream states, as noted earlier, that run through all of Dodgson’s work, and themes of sleep and self are especially prevalent in Sylvie and Bruno, which, while he was writing, he was diagnosed with epilepsy. The ‘Other Professor’ wakes from ‘a deep reverie.’ The first thing he says to Bruno is ‘They might be asleep you know.” He continues, “Boys don’t all go to sleep at once, you know.” It’s an interesting comment; ‘at once’ could mean several things; suddenly, or all together. ‘At once’ would be sudden, like a seizure, a sudden loss of consciousness. Bruno’s reply is brilliant, and he triumphantly says to the professor, “Supposing I was two or three boys.” Here he seems to be telling us that it is possible to be more than one. He is a stronger character than Alice – unafraid, bold. Bruno implies that the self is made of several selves.

For Dodgson, being diagnosed with epileptiform seizures at around this time would have been a breakthrough moment – for the first time, perhaps, he could accept his inter-ictal/seizure self with who is when not in fugue states. All of the things that were illogical and irreconcilable in Wonderland suddenly make sense. Bruno’s bold remark, “supposing I was two or three boys” is one of triumph over the illogical. What sweet relief for Dodgson, who by then had his own ‘eerie states’ when he suffered from, and was officially diagnosed, with epilepsy.

Stuart Dodgson Collingwood in his Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, tells us of his uncle’s fondness for children, a fact well known by the time of Dodgson’s death, for he was famous for his child-friends. He often chose to spend the summers, The Long Vacation as they called it, at the seaside so that he could be in the company of children, and he delighted in telling them tales, though rarely revealed his true identity as that of Lewis Carroll, the already famed children’s book author in his own time, a fact quite unanticipated by him.

Vladimir Nabokov, who reportedly held a profound dislike of Freud and his theories as they were applied to his work, may be of some use in helping us achieve some definition of ‘dream child.’ Let’s take his own creation, the ‘nymphet’. As defined in Lolita, she is, “Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic…and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as ‘nymphets’… A normal man given a group photograph of schoolgirls…and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy… in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs – the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, the other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate – the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”

There are many instances in which Dodgson spells out for us that ineffable quality that makes one a dream child. As to Alice Liddell, he notes in a letter dated 1885, “Permit me to offer you my sincere thanks for the very sweet verses you have written about my dream-child (named after a real Alice, but none the less a dream child)….” To broaden our understanding, he responds to ‘the Why?’ of the success of the Alice books, ,“Those for whom a child’s mind is a sealed book, and who see no divinity in a child’s smile, would read such words in vain; while for any one who has ever loved one true child, no words are needed. For he will have known the presence of a spirit fresh from GOD’s hands…for I think a child’s first attitude to the world is a simple love of all living things.” The child is pure, straight from God, unsoiled by this world, unladed and uncorrupt.

The truth is Carroll was neither saint nor sinner, nor was he a ‘split personality’. No doubt, he had aspects of his personality that derived from his seizure disorder, and these can be observed relatively easily, and they stand apart from Dodgson when not experiencing fugue states. He was a man of many talents, who indeed preferred the company of children, which seems appropriate to a deacon that he would prefer to be with young girls, for surely older girls – girls of age – would have raised a few eyebrows. But he did have male friends, contemporaries, including John Ruskin and Tennyson and Dante Rossetti. How odd that the focus is not on these friendships. So far, though there may indeed be many fine contributions to the biography of Carroll, none has reconciled the man and his myriad and often contradictory qualities.

As Harold Bloom recently noted, “psychosexual reductions of Carroll’s books are tiresomely superfluous,” and Bloom notes biographer Morton Cohen’s conjecture that Dodgson proposed marriage to Alice Liddell by way of her parents, thus causing a rift between himself and the family (though the rift did not last for long – only a few months, it would seem from Dodgson’s own diary entries.)

We learn to treat the dead with respect; to give them their proper due. Isn’t it time we did the same for Carroll? Myth, as interesting as it may be, and for as much as Dodgson himself surely played a role in the myth-making with his playful behavior, his constant denial that he was the Lewis Carroll (save for a few friends), his unusual behavior, and the adult Alice’s words that only feed into our belief that she was the child-friend above all others, only help feed that myth. No doubt, Alice may have over-estimated her own value to Dodgson, for he moved on from her and went on to have other child-friends, many of them longer lasting and perhaps more intense that lasted into adulthood.

To be a child and have a book that became an almost instant hit with your name on it would no doubt feed into an already privileged child’s sense of importance in the universe. The grown Alice flatters herself, and the media kow-towed to it, and she was honored at Columbia near the end of her life – but for what? That the title bears her name is in some ways, rather arbitrary. Indeed, she was the child to whom he told the story to, but in no way does she resemble herself.
Like the characters he created who appear in the Alice books, Dodgson himself was “madly eccentric,” writes Bloom. Dodgson had always been considered somewhat of an eccentric and outside – particularly at Oxford – and loners are always suspect. In life, they are to be avoided, they are social outcasts. In death, they become mythologized, like the way singers Kurt Cobain and Nick Drake have become mythologized in death, unpopular in life. Or epileptic loner van Gogh, who never saw a dime in his life, but whose paintings are now worth a fortune. The truth is, loners make us uncomfortable, though we worship them as superheroes like Batman, Spiderman, and Superman, in their more ordinary life they are Bruce Wayne and the oh-so-ordinary Peter Parker and shy Clark Kent.

Loners will always be scrutinized; we wonder, what are they hiding? There are loners, much like Dodgson, who seem to go good to be true. While Dodgson had many friends outside of Oxford, including the Rossetti’s, Sir Arthur Hughes (whose daughters he would photograph), sculptor Alexander Munro, William Morris, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and John Everett Millais, but at Oxford, he was more often than not alone. When not in London and not tending to his teaching duties, Dodgson would take to his rooms at Tom Quad for days where he would work on his books and subsist on a spare diet of fruit and tea. He could be seen, most days, taking one of his long and brisk walks, wearing his black jacket or clerics and neat, white shirt and bowtie, black hat and gloves, but no matter what the weather, never an overcoat, taking broad strides, walking miles at a time through the countryside surrounding Christ Church.

In 1879, Dodgson had dinner in London with the Rossetti’s and some other friends including Mark Twain. Twain reported of Dodgson (whom he knew to be Lewis Carroll), “He was the stillest and shyest full-grown man I have met except ‘Uncle Remus’…” While he may not have entertained other adults, Dodgson was, as any good loner is, well adept at entertaining himself, at creating visions that he could write down in such a way they would captivate the world; his stimulation, his vision, came from within, not from outside as it does with most people. He was Stoic, with no need for the rules and regulations of others, he had his own rules, and certainly, they were far stricter than any that could be imposed on him by others. Even his membership in the Anglican Church was not exempt from his personal philosophy, for as conservative as Dodgson may be perceived by contemporary biographers, he was truly separatist for his time and thought for himself about religion, dispensing with some of the church’s strongest held beliefs; Original Sin and Eternal Damnation, neither of which Dodgson believed in.

One only need read his journals for evidence of Dodgson’s constant self-recriminations and reproaches for not succeeding enough, not doing enough. No matter how much he achieved, even if he had crossed off everything off the list of things to do, the bar was always raised higher. There was always that one last thing that he had not done, and that one thing counted ten times more than the things he had accomplished. His was a discipline that only a true loner could relate to; the same way no-one needs to tell Batman what to do or the right thing to do. For loners, the rules are almost always self-imposed and they are almost always impossibly high standards, which is what makes them superheroes.

I do not mean to suggest that Dodgson himself was a superhero, only that in personality, he bears some similarity of character and behavior. Among his peers he was awkward, a ‘geek’ we would call him. It was with children that he could be the hero, taking them to lands adults simply couldn’t access. It is often said that it was in the company of children that he lost his stutter, only to have it return when he was with fellow adults. Unlike Batman, he did not set out to save the world, though in some smaller way, perhaps, he did change the world, and certainly changed the face of children’s literature forever.

That the Alice books are available on virtually every continent and in every language and is loved by children worldwide does change the world even a little bit, for it shows us that cultural walls can be transversed.. It took a one man who stood outside of society in many ways, to show us our commonality, our cross-cultural links. Perhaps being on the outside allows you to see the bigger picture. As in Inuit culture the epileptic is the village Shaman, serving as the conduit to the divine, to the primal, Dodgson/Carroll serves as our conduit to another world, one that is at its very root primal and cross-cultural. The concerns of Alice and the atrocities and niceties of Wonderland are indeed universal, and this is why virtually anyone can relate to the Alice books on some level.

So much of Dodgson’s personality quirks and ability to access what I noted earlier as ‘primal’ are easily explained by the fact of his temporal lobe epilepsy, which was diagnosed when he was writing Sylvie and Bruno, a book full of imagery of altered states and a time when his lens was focused squarely on capturing the interior mind on film, but it is only through time that we have learned more about the condition itself, and little of it was known during Dodgson’s lifetime. His fascination with altered states of consciousness is clear; one only need look at his pictures of Xie Kitchin to see what he was attempting; if he couldn’t have the camera he had dreamed of – the one in which a man would simply lie under a machine on which a wet glass plate negative would be placed; his thoughts, whatever they were, would be recorded, and then the plate could be developed much like any negative. If he was thinking nothing, then the plate would remain unchanged.

It was a brilliant idea, and later we would see the development of a machine that could in effect do this – the EEG machine that records brainwaves that tell us not what a person is thinking perhaps, not as a the kind of picture Dodgson had imagined, but a whether a person has a seizure disorder, for example. Dodgson had imagined such a machine years prior, noting that the brain and thoughts were really electrical impulses that one day, could somehow be captured. Would it have helped him to know that so many with his particular brand of epilepsy are drawn to the church with a zeal that is hard to match, that a low sex-drive is often part of the condition, that fugue states in which things appear distorted and shrink and grow and time seems to stand still as it does in Wonderland (where it is perpetually six o’ clock,) would he have felt more comfortable? Perhaps. But it was a time when being epileptic could land you in a mental institution, and no one knew this better than he.

Like our Batman and other superheroes who have their ‘real life’ identities, Dodgson had his: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Deacon and Mathematics Don; the serious, rigid, inflexible creature of habit who could be seen around Oxford in his starched and formal clothes. But on the river Thames, or Isis, as it is called at Oxford, gone were the black clerics, in their place his white flannels and straw boater hat, as he rowed his child-friends to a shady spot where they would picnic on the riverbank listening to tales of a world where anything was possible and where he became Lewis Carroll. To these particular children, he was no doubt, their hero, freeing them from the drudgery of lessons, poking fun at the Red Queen and at Victorian society and its rules and conventions. How freeing this must have been for children; to them, indeed, he was a hero, giving them a free pass to Wonderland and sometimes, access to his mysterious and magical darkroom in the early days of photography when it was known as ‘the black art’ for the stains the chemicals would leave on the practioner’s hands.

While we search for the true Charles Dodgson, the man behind the myth, perhaps the thing to keep in mind is that like all loners, a certain amount of myth is inevitable in this case. That we can’t reconcile Peter Parker the geek and Spiderman, though they are one and the same and if we look long enough, we can catch glimpses of one in the other. And so it is with Charles Dodgson and Lewis Carroll; that beneath the black clerics and white or black gloves, beneath the shy expression and gentle grey eyes, lies the hero of children (and some adults) worldwide. Who would have guessed that this man of God, this mathematics don, could lead us down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass.

In our topsy-turvy world we have misinterpreted our subject time and time again. For Dodgson, nothing short of a complete revaluation is called for, a book that dispenses with myth, that cuts through the costume and reconciles Charles Dodgson and Lewis Carroll as one fully integrated person. For now, we spend what little time we have in this short world as writers, trying to understand, as he noted, ‘all in a golden afternoon, full leisurely we glide.’ Let us go back one more time, down the rabbit hole, and take another look at one of the greatest writers of our time. How little we really know of him, despite the fact that he left so much. We’ve interpreted it all wrong. Let’s learn from his words and apply them to our analysis of him, for surely somewhere lays the key to his private Wonderland. He wrote;

“Don’t state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things
With a sort of mental squint.”
- From “Poeta Fit, non Nascitur,” by Lewis Carroll

author's note: this article was originally published in Biography and Source Studies, ed. Fred Carl pub. Columbia. The concepts and ideas herein are strictly copyrighted by the author and cannot be reproduced without explicit permission from the author. To contact the author, please us the Contact link on this site. - s.r.p.

Sources:

In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, Karoline Leach

Dreaming in Pictures; The Photography of Lewis Carroll, Douglas Nickel

The Life of Lewis Carroll, Florence Becker Lennon

Lewis Carroll, Morton Cohen