02 - Quadrant - ON A JUNE DAY in 1870, Mrs Liddell, the wife of the Dean of Oxford’s Christ College, brought two of her daughters, Lorina, twenty-one, and Alice, eighteen, from the family residence to the rooms in the college occupied by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the mathematics lecturer. She wished Dodgson to photograph each daughter and he duly obliged. The first study shows Lorina sitting stiffly in a chair (the process took forty-two seconds), her elbow resting on one arm of it, the forearm raised so that the forefinger of the hand dimples her right cheek; her expression is glum and slightly disdainful. In the second study Alice sits more naturally with her hands resting on her lap, her head lowered and inclined to the right; her expression is sad and could almost be called reproachful. This is the very last photograph of the dozens that Dodgson took of Alice Pleasance Liddell, his former ideal child-friend.

Mrs Liddell had broken off her children’s friendship with Dodgson seven years before in the summer of 1863. Since then, relations between the Liddells and Dodgson had been formal and distant. At Christmas of 1864 Dodgson had given Alice a hand-scribed and illustrated booklet bound in green leather entitled “Alice’s Adventures Underground”. This was to fulfil a promise he’d made to her long before when in the summer of 1862, during a boating trip on the Isis (Thames) along with his friend Robinson Duckworth, he had told the three Liddell sisters the story of Alice’s adventures down a rabbit hole. He’d told them many stories before but this one seemed so especially good that Alice insisted that it be written down. Now, two and a half years later, she had her wish.

Dodgson had shown his story to a few friends before giving it to Alice and they were unanimous in their verdict that it should be published. A visitor to the Dean’s residence, Henry Kingsley, brother of the famous novelist, was also shown the book and he likewise recommended publication. Dodgson expanded the story to more than double its original length and after some difficult relations with his illustrator, John Tenniel (including the recall of the first print run because of the poor quality of the reproductions of the illustrations), Macmillan published the book in November 1865. It had a new title, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the author’s name was given as Lewis Carroll, based on the Latinised version of Dodgson’s first two names which were also reversed — a pen-name which he’d first used some years earlier.

It got excellent reviews. The public too enjoyed it and sales began to climb. A second impression was issued nine months after the first and Dodgson began to plan a sequel. Six years after the first Alice book, Alice Through the Looking Glass was published in time for Christmas 1871. This was a hit with the public as well and both books have never since been out of print.

Never as popular as the first Alice, nonetheless Through the Looking Glass does have some excellent characters, pre-eminent among whom is Humpty Dumpty. After explaining the advantage of having 364 days on which unbirthday presents could be given (rather than just presents on the day on which your birthday actually is), Humpty Dumpty finishes his argument with the clincher, “There’s glory for you.”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” said Alice. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knockdown argument for you’.”

And in spite of Alice’s objections Humpty Dumpty insists on attaching his own meaning to words. Very much aware of their own superior status in society, Dean Liddell and his family ignored the growing literary fame of Lewis Carroll, seeing only the shy, stammering Dodgson, the mathematics lecturer. Mrs Liddell continued to plan splendid marriages for her daughters and eventually Alice was married to the son of a wealthy manufacturer and landowner, Reginald Hargreaves, in 1880. From then on she was to enjoy wealth and a great household full of servants.

As for Dodgson himself, he was kept busy in the college with his professional duties and also more literary projects. He also kept up a lively correspondence with the many child-friends he made through his photographic studies. These studies ended in 1880 when with the introduction of the dry plate process he deemed photography to be no longer worthy of artistic endeavour.

THE NOTED Carrollian scholar Morton N. Cohen, in his biography of Dodgson, deals sympathetically with his subject’s fascination with young girls, pointing to the Victorian ideal of childhood innocence and purity; that small children were embodied souls straight from the lap of God. This motif was constant throughout Dodgson’s adult life and it was from contact with these innocent souls that he sought his own redemption. (There is evidence from a remark of Dodgson’s — though Cohen doesn’t mention this — that he was sexually abused when at Rugby and that there this practice was frequently inflicted upon younger by older boys at night.)

Professor Cohen makes the excellent point (yet he does make disparaging remarks about that wise and witty egotist, Humpty Dumpty) that although the second Alice book was written from the standpoint of Alice Liddell, this was not so with the first. In that volume Dodgson took upon himself the role of “Alice” and imagined himself as a little maid going through a bewildering Wonderland. Indeed, once the reader adopts this viewpoint the book does make more sense — or rather, better nonsense.

Cohen remarks appreciatively about the scene between the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, yet later points out its “absurd lethargic silliness”. This is sheer mischievousness on the part of the good professor, for this may be the impression the author intended for his young readers. An older reader might well suppose that the Mock Turtle (who symbolises the constancy of love) unites such disparate pairs of contraries, mirth and sorrow, earnestness and absurdity, that this figure could only have been wrought successfully by one counselled by the Paraclete.

Dodgson was a lover of Shakespeare and a great defender of the theatre against narrow-minded clerics, so it is surprising that that he wanted to outdo Bowdler and for the benefit of girls remove still more vulgarities from the work of the Bard. Even worse, he wished to alter the end of The Merchant of Venice because “the idea of forcing a man to abjure his religion, whatever his religion may be, is simply horrible”.

Very true, of course, but that a man as intelligent as Dodgson, a master contriver of logic games and word puzzles, could have so misunderstood the crux of the play is amazing. There were plenty of critics (including Goethe) who had noted the self-revelatory nature of Shakespeare’s plays, and whose articles and commentaries could easily have set him right. Only loyalty to his clerical profession could have so blinded Dodgson, and shows that in his residence (unlike that of the unfortunate Shylock) at least one back window was kept firmly shuttered. Seeing this, one suffers disappointment, like a student when an admired teacher is shown not to be quite as wise as one had thought. Yet Dodgson’s faith and suffering gave his mind an elevation which can astonish.

Although clerics — long before the days of Freud — have sought continency by conscious suppression (moral restraint), this self-discipline is rarely maintained if some compensatory item from within their own psyches tries to broach into consciousness and modify dogmatic ideas. Often when their religious beliefs are at risk of being challenged then an unconscious resistance, or even a rejecting and forgetting (repression) occurs.

Those human drives and passions which have manifested themselves in all peoples, at all times and places, we regard as instinctual: since it easily satisfies this principle of ubiquity, the religious passion, too, must have an instinctual base. But how to define, or explain, an instinct that takes such varied cultural forms? The traditional answer is to ascribe it to the soul’s passionate search for union with God: but since to accept this, we must also accept a Supreme Being, on grounds of logic alone, any simpler explanation which can cover the same facts is to be preferred.

Jung provided one such possible explanation, defining religious passion as the most basic of all human instincts because it is the means whereby the psyche seeks its own growth and development; and that this is by the integration of unconscious contents with consciousness. (This necessarily posits an organising centre within the unconscious and this Jung called the Self.) But some emerging contents — which may not necessarily be new but formerly within consciousness — are unwelcome and if they disturb the Ego-complex (one’s sense of identity), they are desperately resisted unless their integration is seen as an ethical imperative. And — paradoxically — in such a case, even when the process of integration is successful, the Ego is left with the feeling that it has suffered a moral defeat. Jung never formally gave a name to this instinct; “religious instinct” sounds a little ridiculous, suggesting the inheritance of creed and ritual via the genes; “integrative instinct” is, perhaps, better.

The act of prayer, therefore, can be regarded, psychologically, as a conversation directed at the inner Self — perhaps the supreme form of the dialectic (if one is prepared to pay attention to dreams, musings, and slight hunches), for the interlocutor has such a complete knowledge of the other party. The figure of Humpty Dumpty goes some way to conceptualising this dialectic between Ego and Self, but dogma set strict limits to Dodgson’s speculations. Yet literary work became his saving grace, for in this, led by inner prompting, he could discover answers to some of the questions with which he was beseeching the adamantine walls of Heaven.

When he became Student (junior tutor) in 1852 — an honour conferred on Dodgson before he’d achieved his BA — a condition imposed on his acceptance was that he, like his colleagues, must remain single and that he would also at some future time take holy orders. If, as a member of the college, he did marry he would be obliged to resign (indeed, this latter course was the one that Dodgson’s own father, a gifted scholar, had chosen). In 1861, after some hesitation, he was ordained deacon in the Anglican Church but never chose to advance to full priesthood. In such circumstances, it was only to be expected that Christ College in the nineteenth century had a certain reputation for dissoluteness among its staff.

DODGSON KEPT a diary throughout his adult life and although four years are missing — from April 1858 to May 1862 — of those important early years of his friendship with the Liddell children, the rest of the volumes to the very end of his life are fairly complete. Cohen has tabulated the anguished prayers for help and forgiveness from God as noted by the diarist and these numbers reached a peak of twenty-four in 1863, with the previous year (with only eight months of record available) having fourteen. During the next three years these prayers averaged about sixteen per year and then began a gradual decline till a minor peak of eleven occurred in 1871. After that year — the year of the publication of Through the Looking Glass — the number of anguished supplications sharply declined.

There was never any suggestion that Dodgson behaved improperly with a child-friend during the course of his long life. Mrs Liddell’s action in ending Dodgson’s close relations with her family in 1863 was almost certainly caused by her alarm that Alice’s affection for him might grow into a romantic attachment when she became a young woman. Even then, because of the twenty-year disparity in their ages, one might sympathise with Mrs Liddell’s decision except that Alice much later in her life did remark to her son, Caryl; “Who would have thought that this shy tutor would have become an author known worldwide?” There had been something of Mrs Bennet in Mrs Liddell’s ambition for her children.

Yet there is the evidence of the prayers to show that a great disharmony existed between Dodgson’s display of propriety and something within himself — that his inner life was plagued by private demons. The traditional Christian way of achieving inner peace is through prayer and love of God, and this Dodgson certainly tried as his record of private anguish reveals, but since nothing in the psyche is unbalanced (for nature speaks in binary), Love is always opposed by its contrary — Power.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates compares the embodied soul to that of a charioteer with two winged horses; always one unruly steed will drag him back to earth whenever he wishes to follow the gods and their chariots into the heavens. The like happens to the modern soul who earnestly wishes to follow the Christian way to perfection, for not only does the enlargement of human consciousness makes this goal now seem ever more distant, but because Christianity itself is divided into squabbling power groups, the unwise seeker is easily drawn away from his purpose.

Reason suggests that the charioteer should tame his unruly steed before setting out, and how to achieve this would be a knotty problem were it not that art has already supplied one answer. In the opening act of the Ring , Alberich, in order to steal the Rhinegold and further his plan to obtain mastery of the world, accomplishes in an instant an opus which can take even a religious person many years of effort to perform; moreover, the Nibelung does it more completely. Thus he tamed his unruly steed; yet by then not using it to control the other in its turn, he never gained total command; for each winged horse is not only aided but also restrained by its yoke-fellow. The Christian commits a like error by believing Power to be evil.

Yet even if Dodgson had travelled to Munich in 1868 for the first performance of Das Rheingold it is doubtful that he would have derived any profit from the opera, its philosophical core being so contrary to accepted Christian precepts. The developments in psychology which could have afforded him a bridge to understanding and accepting such an alien ethos were still to come in the next century. But already he was well embarked on his own unique course and if he’d been deprived of the chance, in a maturing relationship, of taking the hand of his beloved in holy matrimony, he had still derived exceptional benefits from his friendship with Alice, though these did come at the cost of much suffering.

In our modern secular world the adoption of female identity by a male is becoming ever more prevalent (or more obvious); yet if someone suggested the idea of a male temporarily adopting a female role for a religious (psychotherapeutic) purpose this would seem strange and slightly ridiculous; still, among the myriad of world religions this is not unknown.

Anciently, the most famous use of female role-playing by males was that employed at the classical world’s cultural heart, the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore (Maiden) at Eleusis. Every autumn those who wished to be initiated into the Greater Mystery first spent several days occupied with religious rites and fasting in Athens. They departed the city on the nineteenth day of Boedromion (September) and in the evening approached the Sanctuary after a daylong procession. It was during this long walk they enacted — men as well as women — the mourning of Demeter for her missing daughter, Persephone. These rites culminated in the evening of the same day, Mystery Night. Not all the pilgrims however, now underwent full initiation, only those who had earlier fasted and performed special sacrifices.

After spending some time about the pool where it was believed Demeter had once sat sorrowing for her daughter, those seeking full initiation then entered the inner courtyard. Here stood the Telesterion, the great hall of the Mysteries, wherein, once the eager seekers had assembled, the ceremonies began. In the darkness the Hierophant called for the Kore to appear; then amidst a thunderous crash from a great gong (the Greeks thought that thunder came from the Underworld) and a brilliant flash of light which could be seen even from across the nearby bay of Salamis as it issued forth through an opening in the roof, he proclaimed, “The Mistress has given birth to a holy boy!”

What then was seen in that dazzling light within the Telesterion has not come down to us. It was the ancient world’s most famous sacred secret. We know that many of the greatest men of Athens were initiates (including Plato) as well as were slaves; and later, senators and emperors of Rome. The destruction of the Sanctuary of Eleusis — ending an existence of nearly 2000 years — by Alaric and his Goths late in the fourth century AD was the real end of the classical world; for this, rather than the later sack of Rome by the same marauding leader and his tribes, destroyed its cultural heart. Byzantium was to carry on the civilising work of ancient Rome but with a new religion.

THERE IS A KIND of parallelism between the Alice books and the religious practices of those ancient Mysteries. In the first book Dodgson sought his own healing; by becoming a little child: “Except you become as little children ...”; his unique twist to this old precept was that he adopted the nature of a small girl. In the second book, he sought to restore the nineteen-year-old Alice to her state of childhood innocence:

“Seven years and six months!” Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully. “An uncomfortable sort of age. Now, if you’d asked my advice, I’d have said, ‘Leave off at seven’; but it’s too late now.”

The tone of Through the Looking Glass is renunciatory and it can be regarded as Dodgson’s farewell to his beloved, a hope and guidance for her future good fortune:

“The song is called ‘Ways And Means’: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!”

“Well, what is the song, then?” said Alice, who by this time was becoming completely bewildered.

“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting on a Gate’: and the tune’s my own invention.” [The White Knight begins his
song.]

“But the tune isn’t his own invention,” she said to herself: “it’s ‘I give thee all, I can no more.’”

Both Alice books are redemptive, the first of a male spirit, the second of a female; their purpose corresponds to the aspirations of those men and women on that ancient pilgrimage, who, when initiated, became epopts: “those who have seen”; the women finding their lost innocence, the men their lost souls.

There is no evidence that Dodgson was familiar with the Mysteries of Demeter and, even if he were, it is unlikely that he would have given much regard to archaic religious practices, since all religions had long been superseded by a new revelation. Failing any evidence to the contrary, it can be assumed that this parallelism was not imitative, and that the Alice books came into existence through the same need for a healing of the spirit. The difference being that Dodgson found what he thought was a Christian way.

A few decades ago the head from a statue of Eubouleus (Good Counsel) was recovered during archaeological excavations within the Sanctuary of Eleusis. One of the sacred heralds who led the procession from Athens bore this name and it is he who is thought to have played a central role in the events of Mystery Night. This representation (attributed to Praxiteles) does have an eerie resemblance to the younger Dodgson. If there does exist a real similarity between these Mysteries, ancient and modern, in that both deal with the same psychological factors underlying human consciousness, we can even begin to guess something of the nature of the sacred secret which was revealed to awed and hushed initiates for nearly two thousand years.

Speaking to Phaedrus, Socrates says, “then we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery which may be truly called most blessed”. And a little later: “we were admitted to the sight of apparitions innocent and simple and pure and happy, which we beheld shining in a pure light ...”

BUT WHAT of Alice Pleasance Hargreaves, nee Liddell? She and her husband engaged in a busy social whirl for many years, but by 1910, twelve years after the death of Dodgson, they found it necessary to dispose of some lands in order to continue with their lavish lifestyle. They had three sons, all of whom fought in the First World War, where the two eldest died, leaving only Caryl (pronounced “Carol”).

Her husband died in 1925, and Alice, now largely alone in a big house except for a few servants, tried to keep the same strict regime within the household that she had maintained over the years, using the old precepts in which she had been so carefully schooled by her mother. By 1930, in need of funds for her son, she disposed of the first editions that Dodgson had given her and the hand-scribed book of Alice’s Adventures Underground. This last was bought by an American, Dr Rosenbach, for over fifteen thousand pounds, a huge sum in those days.

The name of Lewis Carroll and the Alice books were becoming increasingly famous worldwide and suddenly Alice Hargreaves began to accept some of the invitations to appear at functions which she had been steadily refusing over the years. This activity culminated in a decision to accept an invitation to sail to New York in 1932 for the centenary celebrations of Dodgson’s birth, which were being arranged by Columbia University. With her on this all-expenses-paid trip went Caryl and his sister Rhoda.

It became a kind of apotheosis. News of the eighty-year-old Alice’s arrival in New York swept the country and was headlined by major newspapers. Photographs of her, looking slightly uncomfortable and bemused before disembarking, achieved equal prominence. Over the next few days she blossomed as she was treated as a literary immortal and feted around the city. She received an honorary doctorate of letters from Columbia and gave a gracious radio interview recalling those far-off summer days of her childhood. She appeared on news film and was paid for an interview by the New York Times.

Once more back in England she appeared at the London centenary celebrations of Dodgson’s birthday but after that she began to desire her quiet life again. She confided to her son that she was “tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is — but I do get tired!”

She died in November 1934 at the age of eighty-two, just too late to completely escape Uglification, for in the previous year a Balliol undergraduate, Antony Goldschmidt, had written a Freudian analysis of Dodgson’s relationship with his child-friends and adduced repressed paedophilia. No longer could Dodgson’s apotropaic ending to his dedicatory poem at the start of Through the Looking Glass protect her: “It shall not touch, with breath of bale, / The pleasance of our fairy tale.”

Although a friend later asserted that Goldschmidt had written this piece tongue in cheek, the floodgates were open and the subject began to appear in print. It had been time for her to leave.

If we entertain for a brief moment the notion that there is a Hereafter and try to imagine where the spirit of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson would have been when his former chief child-friend completed her long pilgrimage and departed from this world of nights and days, we can only guess that he must have been at the very Gate of Heaven as the soul of his (and now the world’s) beloved Kore ascended — even if it had been impossible. Yet no matter how grand the reception he’d laid on for her — even if it equalled the one in Through the Looking Glass — surely Alice must have found this anticlimactic. After all, she’d already made it in New York.

Errol D. Kaighin wrote on Long John Silver in the January-February 2002 issue.