The Elephant in the Room

So, let’s have a look at that elephant in the room that I mentioned in my last post. The elephant in question being – did Lewis Carroll have an unhealthy relationship with the Liddell girls in particular and children in general?

Bearing in mind the seriousness of the question, we shouldn’t just dismiss it out of hand as nonsense without looking at the reasons that lead people to ask the question in the first place.

As I see it boils down to three things. Firstly, there’s the photographs. Carroll was a keen and successful amateur photographer, and amongst the photographs he took of Alice and her sisters, some showed them partly nude, and he did take photographs of other children in the nude. Pretty damning to our modern way of thinking. Secondly, in the summer of 1863 there appears to have been a break in relations between Lewis Carroll and the Liddell family. Thirdly, 8 pages, one of which seems to have related to the reasons, were removed from Carroll’s diaries, presumably by his niece Violet who was co-guardian of the diaries from the 40s to the 60s.

As I said, the photographic evidence seems pretty damning to us now. But he was not the only photographer at the time who made nude child studies. I’ve seen it written that it was a bit of a fad in the 1860s, part of a cult of the child, and a celebration of childish innocence. Carroll apparently only ever made these pictures with the parents’ permission, and often in their presence. None of which completely absolves Carroll from any accusations. However, it certainly does seem to suggest that we shouldn’t convict him solely on this evidence.

As for the break with the Liddells and the pages cut from the diary, if the pages were cut from the diary in order not to damage Carroll’s reputation, sadly it has probably had the opposite effect. For the fact is we don’t just  don’t know for certain what caused the break. This has left the door open for people to theorise, without necessarily having any conclusive evidence on which to base their claims.

When she was in her 80s, Alice’s older sister Lorina wrote in a private letter that she had been approached by biographer Florence Baker Lennon, whose theory it was that Carroll had broached the subject of marrying Alice, by then 11 years old, which had so offended the Liddells that he was then banned from the Deanery. This isn’t quite so far fetched as it might seem. According to a source I read, Carroll had a younger brother who proposed to a 14 year old, although he postponed the wedding until the bride was 20. Lorina’s letter explained that she felt she had to give Lennon some explanation for the break up, and so confirmed that Carroll’s manner towards Alice had become too affectionate, causing her mother to speak to Carroll about it, at which he became so offended that he ceased visiting from that time on.

During the 1990s, a note emerged, supposedly in the handwriting of Carroll’s niece Violet, summarising the contents of the cut pages. The page referring to the break with the Liddell’s is summarised thus – ““L.C. learns from Mrs Liddell that he is supposed to be using the children as a means of paying court to the governess – he is also supposed [unreadable – ‘soon’/’go on’/’by some’?] to be courting Ina.””

This offers us two possible causes for the break up – firstly, that Carroll was using his friendship with the girls as a pretext for seeing their Governess, Miss Prickett (I’m not making that name up.) It wasn’t the first time this rumour had surfaced apparently, but Carroll always dismissed it as nonsense. The other seems rather more serious. Carroll supposedly was showing romantic interest in Ina – Lorina, the older sister of Alice who was 14 at the time of the break up. It has to be said that nobody has produced any evidence to corroborate this story though.

If we limit ourselves to the known facts, then :-

None of the Liddell family ever commented publically on the reason why their great friendship with Lewis Carroll came to an end, and even though Carroll would visit the Deanery on later occasions it was never on the same degree of friendship as previously.

None of Carroll’s child friends ever made any accusation that Carroll had ever acted in any way improperly towards them.

Carroll did make some photographic nude studies of children.

Letters exist which show that Carroll had friendships with adult women, just as much as he did with young girls.

Carroll never married, and there is no evidence of him ever engaging in any sexual activity with a woman, or anyone else. 

The court of public opinion is much harsher and more judgemental than any court of law. In some people’s mind Carroll has already been tried and found guilty, due to a fad for Freudian analysis of works of literature which began in the 1930s, then an onslaught of sensationalist biographies in the 1990s. It is possible to put an innocent connotation to connotation on all of the actual ‘evidence’ above. I’ve already explained how the photography can be looked at in context of the time and what Carroll’s contemporaries were producing at the same time. The ‘summary’ of the diary page concerning the end of the friendship with the Liddells actually says that Mrs. Liddell told Carroll that ‘supposedly’ he was interested in the Governess or Lorina. This implies that this is what other people were saying, not that it was what she thought herself. Even Lorina’s revelation that the break up with her family came about because her mother believed that Carroll was becoming too affectionate towards Alice is not necessarily conclusive. Lorina was in her 80s. She never actually met Florence Lennon, and in her own letter she gives a kind of written shrug, explaining that she had to tell her something. There’s more than a suggestion that she told Lennon what she wanted to hear to get her off her back.

As for the fact that there is no evidence that Carroll ever engaged in any kind of sexual activity, that’s relatively easy to deal with. When Carroll sought to become a senior student at Christ Church College Oxford in 1850 – the equivalent of what would be called a Fellow nowadays – the requirements were that they would remain celibate, and take ordination as a priest. Carroll actually managed to avoid the priesthood – but there’s no reason to doubt that he stuck to the rule of celibacy.

 Accusations of paedophilia have to be taken seriously. We’ve seen in recent memory the Jimmy Saville case, where an overwhelming body of evidence against a public figure was either ignored or deliberately covered up until after his death. But, from the evidence that is available to us now, I can’t believe that any court of law would convict Carroll. I certainly don’t believe that he acted improperly towards the Liddell girls, or any other child for that matter. Which means that any speculation about what Lewis Carroll’s deep and innermost desires and feelings were remains just that, speculation. And you can apply all the psychoanalytical analysis you wish to everything that Carroll ever wrote – not just the Alice books – and everything that we know he ever did, but you will never know, and never prove anything.