Wednesday, January 26, 2005

The Victorian Mollirama

Originally posted on the Sphere

Biographies can be exciting. From Alexander the Great to Abraham Lincoln to Andy Warhol there's many interesting lives out there to read about.

Biographies of authors on the other hand won't always keep one's attention. How interesting is it to read about someone sitting at their typewriter and answering letters? Of course there are exceptions; Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound for one, but Lewis Carroll? In the hands of a capable storyteller Carroll's life could be interestingly told in 150 pages or less, but Morton N. Cohen's 1995 Lewis Carroll - A Biography is a whopping 542 pages of dates and names and little more.

In his defense, Cohen has had more access to Charles Lutwidge Dodgeson's private papers than anyone else. He is Professor Emeritus at New York's City University and has published numerous works on Carroll. His writing style unfortunately does not flow well which is unfortunate because, even if Carroll's life itself wasn't interesting, the mechanisms of his mind are. He was a brilliant mathematician ahead of his time. He was also a stammerer (an affliction suffered by his siblings as well, possibly due to their parents being first cousins) who was most comfortable in the presence of children. More specifically, young girls.

Carroll was an avid photographer for thirty years, and among his hundreds of pictures were scores of prepubescent girls sans habillement. This, along with the fact that it's commonly believed he proposed, at age 31, to the 11 year old Alice Liddell has many viewing Dodgeson as a filthy pedophile. It's possible that's an accurate description. It should be noted however that in Victorian times it was common for women to be married in their teens, often as young as twelve which was the legal age of consent at the time. It was also common for husbands to be twenty years older or more, as they had already established themselves and their money. As for the pictures, Charles refused to sell or give or even to show them to anyone other than the children's parents, and when he gave up photography in his fifties destroyed all his nude negatives and encouraged the subjects to do the same. Only four have survived: three of them can be argued as being art, with the poses not being remotely sexual. The fourth, of a very young Evelyn Hatch, is a full frontal reclining nude.

Rumors, whisperings and disapprovals about Charles' photography existed during these years but there is no evidence that he did anything (else) inappropriate towards his young friends.

His alleged proposal to Alice Liddell (the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland) caused a rift in the relationship between Dodgeson and the Liddell's that never recovered. It was believed that some pages removed from one of Charles' diaries after his death focused on this event. After the publication of Cohen's biography these pages were found and invalidated the Marriage-Proposal belief. Other papers which came to light proved that Carroll had many courtships with adult women. (He never married and is believed to have died a virgin.)

Regardless of this new evidence it is still fact that Charles had deep feelings for Alice Liddell. He never would have had a chance, Alice's mother Lorina was a social-climber who had her daughters' rise in society mapped out before they were born. Even though Dodgeson was a world famous author and would become exceedingly rich he was just too common. Lorina Liddell succeeded in finding husbands for her girls whose stations suited her well, but not before getting some of it thrown back in her face. Lord Salisbury's son Robert Cecil wrote his Mother once:

Mrs. Liddell has had the impudence to ask me to dinner. I don't know the old hag and don't want to and so have refused rather shortly.

There's enough on Carroll to have an interesting read on, but this biography is too mixed up for me to recommend. Single paragraphs jump from one year to the next, backwards and forwards, and three-fourths of it is excerpts from letters and such. Finishing this book was such an ordeal that I had to take a break from reading anything to keep from going crazy.

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