It is 154 years since the Mathematics don at Oxford, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, set off with ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters on a boat trip up the Thames. He narrated to them the story of the curious girl who fell down a rabbit hole — and created forever a wonderland. On a similar pleasant day, I got into a boat, at the same spot, Salter’s Boatyard near Folly Bridge, and tried to relive that “golden afternoon”. It was just a week after July 4, that historic day when Dodgson made the trip. Oxford was full of celebrations to commemorate the writing of Alice in Wonderland and salute the genius of her creator Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Dodgson. He taught at Christ Church College and his inspiration was Alice, the daughter of the Dean of the college, Henry Liddell.
Kausalya Santhanam The next day I made my way past the Porters’ Lodge at Magdalen College to talk to Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Professor of English Literature, about his recent and highly acclaimed biography of Lewis Carroll, The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland (Harvill Secker). The book takes up the life of a man who spent almost all his life at Christ Church, near Magdalen, creating a magical and enduring wonderland of the imagination. The book unpicks his relationship with the real Alice, tracing her growth from an eight-year-old to a much-feted 82-year-old, catapulted to fame through her literary persona. It also deals with the abiding influence of the Alice books — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass: And What Alice Found There .
A passport to reading “It’s been a year since I wrote the book and I have moved on… The book is not on the top of my mind,” said Douglas-Fairhurst. “But I did archival work, made five drafts and wrote it in 16 months. I wondered what it feels like if real life and fiction overlap, and to make it feel as if the reader could understand these people, including the silences, the uncertainties, and the unknown elements of their lives. The book is full of asterisks, it has moments you can’t put into words… But yes, I did intend it to read like a novel. The real challenge while writing the book was to make the story fresh, a story which everyone thinks he or she knows, the story behind the story which is equally strange, and how each informs the other.”
“For me as everyone else,” he pointed out, “Alice is a passport to reading and a doorway into an imaginary world. It was a favourite book during childhood. Oxford is full of stories, full of ghosts, and being here makes you rethink about the book. Here it is easy to take it for granted, but I wanted to rethink some of the conventions that have grown up like barnacles around it.”
Carroll’s predilection for little girls has always been a subject of scrutiny and debate. He liked to photograph them in the nude. It seems strange to 21st century eyes. How did the parents allow it, I asked Douglas-Fairhurst.
“People who write about Lewis Carroll are either fans or those who want to tear him apart,” he said. “In Victorian England, people did not think children had sexuality. To them it was just like a dog or cat being photographed. Also, many of them saw children as emblems of purity and they idealised childhood. In Victorian times, there are many parallels of grown-ups fixated on little girls as they thought of them as non-sexual beings. That’s very difficult for us to understand.”
Returning to Carroll’s writing, readers have often wondered why he was not able to replicate the success of the Alice books.
“The success of Alice destroyed him as a writer,” said Douglas-Fairhurst. “He hoped that he would entertain and educate at the same time. But the desire to give the readers more destroyed him. The Alice books are full of understated paradoxes. Sylvie and Bruno is not timeless like Alice, but baggy, sentimental and doctrinal.”
Carroll had such a gift for playing with words and he had such a unique mind. How did he write the way he did?
“By keeping a channel of communication open between him and childhood,” replied Douglas-Fairhurst. “Children are ruthless, literal-minded little people and can be quite cruel. To keep that connection — the ruthlessness and the illogicality of children and their playfulness — he needed to keep the point of contact. So he was constantly making friendships with new children to enable the renewal of access to childhood.”
But why was it always with girls, a succession of Alices as well as other little girls?
“Because he was a boy. He knew how boys are; he knew they were not paragons of virtue and purity. Little girls could sustain the illusion he had of their purity and of innocence. They were beautiful, beautiful creatures!”
The uneventful life It must, nonetheless, have been difficult to write interestingly about a man who led such an uneventful life.
“Carroll did not lead an exciting life, it is true,” said Douglas-Fairhurst. “He was a slippery, elusive, mercurial figure taking great care that nothing exciting ever happened to him, maintaining control and order to see life did not surprise him — as if life is an equation in balancing out terms.”
Despite dealing with a creative genius like Carroll and an ordinary person like Alice Hargreaves, née Liddell, he manages to keep a balance...
“I was fortunate to know Alice’s great great granddaughter,” he said. “She lent me letters. They were not earth-shattering revelations but they helped give a rounded, more nuanced picture of Alice. It was difficult to write about the real Alice, to warm up to her. She was a snob, socially detached and financially insulated. It is difficult to know what she thought and felt. It is as if her thinking and feeling had already happened ‘as Alice’. This fictional character became more and more broad and her life became more and more socially narrow.”
So does biography, as a genre, interest him?
“What interests me most is people who write about biography,” he said. “They talk about ‘life writing’. Writing is orderly and so different from the way we experience life. Usually biographers see people as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; they see biography not as a way of reflecting life but redeeming life. But I don’t. That’s why my book has gaps. One has to be honest with the reader. The courage of the lack of conviction is what a biographer has to have.”
Alice in retrospect Alice has had an influence on so many spheres — literature, science, art and culture… “It is possibly because the original work is so ambiguous, so porous, that it encourages other writers to explain it, revise it, and make sense of it, to try to unpick some of its locks,” Douglas-Fairhurst said.
The next day I passed Alice’s Shop in Oxford (Old Sheep Shop in Through the Looking Glass ) where Alice bought her sweets. I picked up a few souvenirs as did some Chinese, Japanese and European tourists. And I recalled what Douglas-Fairhurst said about the commercialisation of Alice and her creator: “It doesn’t do any harm — or good.” I smiled to myself.
Kausalya Santhanam is a Chennai-based writer and critic.
