After his sisters and their jigsaw puzzles, teenage Charles was now maturing among mid-Victorian youth and higher mathematics, a precociously brilliant logician on course for Oxford and the ministry. He arrived at Christ Church in , and would never really leave. Christ Church was the Vatican of an academic and social establishment, a hothouse of eccentricity where Dodgson would be utterly at home.
The craft suited Dodgson, and the art inspired Carroll. He could prolong his fascination with childhood by photographing little girls, ideally in the nude. Perhaps only in Oxford would this not seem unusual. The dean of Christ Church, the classical scholar Henry George Liddell, and his bossy wife had three ideal subjects for the amateur photographer. They were Alice Liddell and her sisters, who played in the deanery garden outside the college library where Dodgson worked at his linear equations.
Mid-Victorian Oxford revelled in the discreet charm of little girls. Pretty eight-year-old Alice, especially, captivated the young man. Dodgson photographed her obsessively. One extraordinary window on to their relationship is The Beggar Maid, in which a barefoot Alice wears a tattered white dress in a pose of off-the-shoulder flirtation.
He was evidently in love. This was the mood in which he and a friend named Duckworth took a boat trip with the three Liddell girls up the Thames to Godstow on the afternoon of 4 July Previous river trips had been full of adventure.
A few weeks before, they had been caught in a thunderstorm and had to dry off in a bankside cottage. In June , there was a crisis whose true meaning has never been fully clarified. In , Florence Becker Lennon advanced the case that Dodgson had had an unhealthy attraction to Alice with Victoria Through the Looking Glass , the first modern critical biography of him. He loved little girls, but, like Peter Pan, he had no intention of marrying them.
Alice was 11 then—too young, even by Victorian mores. Alice did not talk to Lennon because, her sister said, she was ill. The idea that Dodgson had an unhealthy involvement with Alice has persisted, although there is no evidence to support it. Three major biographies published in the s, by Donald Thomas, Michael Bakewell and Morton Cohen, suggested that he had pedophilic urges but never acted on them.
But even they are an imperfect source. Four of the 13 volumes are missing—as are the pages covering late June , when his break with the Liddells occurred. A Dodgson descendant apparently cut them out after the writer died. Liddell that he is supposed to be using the children as a means of paying court to the governess—he is also supposed Grundy, and come down to spend the day with me at Oxford?
She concluded that he was attracted to adult women including Mrs. Liddell after all. The reaction among Dodgson scholars was seismic. We see him through the prism of contemporary culture—one that sexualizes youth, especially female youth, even as it is repulsed by pedophilia.
Legend has it that one afternoon Alice, her sisters and Charles were on a boat ride when Alice, who usually got bored, wanted to hear a funny story. The story that Charles made up that afternoon was so good that Alice begged him to write it down. Later, his friend George MacDonald read it and with his encouragement Charles took it to a publisher who liked it immediately.
Charles denied that any of his publications were based on a real child, but there are hints hidden within the books. The Jabberwocky. Charles was famous for literary nonsense and included logical and mathematical riddles in his work.
A gifted photographer, Charles loved taking pictures and took many of the Liddell family. He took a lot of pictures of Alice who liked to dress up for the photographs.
Alice dressed as a beggar maid, photo by Lewis Carroll. As Alice got older she began to spend less time with Charles.
A note in his journal says that when he met her again when she was older, he was delighted to see her but felt that she had changed, and not for the better. She married and had three sons, two of whom perished in the First World War.
Charles remained unmarried and died at the age of
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