It’ll be November soon, the month in which Alice’s Adventures Underground was begun and (two looong years later) finally delivered to its intended recipient, Alice Liddell. It’s one of the most myth-drenched areas of Lewis Carroll’s life. So it does no harm to use the upcoming anniversary to take another look. (By the way, for those who know what I’m talking about, I think of the image on the right as being captioned “trying to engage in rational argument on an e-list.” )
Anyhoo…The creation of Alice’s Adventures has always – until recent times – been presented as something ‘ Lewis Carroll’ did entirely and spontaneously and willingly for the little girl. Indeed, Charles Dodgson himself later defined it that way when, in the Theatre magazine many years after the event, he claimed he wrote the story “for a child I loved”. Though the fact he added the rather odd qualification “I cannot remember any other motive” might alert us that a little bit of creative ‘amnesia’ is going on. Maybe by then, some twenty years after the event, that was how he actually remembered it. But the truth, while not exactly an entire contradiction, was a lot more ambiguous
Let’s begin with a univeral constant though. One thing that is definitely true – Lewis Carroll did begin writing Underground because Alice Liddell asked him to, in fact his diary records her request in July 1862. But this is where the Myth and the Reality tend to part ways. The Mythic version goes on to have him writing down the entire story the very night that Alice asked him to do so, or at least very soon afterwards (chronologies can tend to be vague in these accounts). It has the story finished inside a few weeks/months, and the book lying on a table at the Deanery where it chances to be seen by a family friend, who urges Mrs Liddell to get a shy and reluctant Carroll to publish the book. Hence, the story goes, an unassuming, unwordly Don stumbles into immortality, and all because he loved a child.
It’s a lovely tale, to which, as the glorious Fielding (I never tire of quoting it) says, I have only one objection – namely that it is not true. Or at least it’s not the whole truth. It’s not even nothing but the truth. This is what really happened.
- Summer of 1862. Charles Dodgson is telling the ‘Alice’ story to the three famous sisters, Ina, Alice and Edith Liddell, while on their famous river-trips. Indications are the girls loved the tale and were always begging for new instalments, but that Dodgson was less enthusiastic (on one occasion he calls it the ‘interminable’ Alice’s Adventures, and is peeved because he wants to sing them a new song he just made up instead). At around the same time Alice asks him to write her story down. He promises he will do so.
- July 1862. He writes what he calls the ‘headers’ of the story on a train journey to London with the Liddell family (OT – why is he travelling to London with the Liddells? One of those things he never explains) .
- July-November 1862. He apparently forgets all about the story for about four months.
- Nov 1862. He meets Alice Liddell by chance in the quad at Christ Church, and that evening notes in his diary that he has started writing the story (we can assume it is because she has reminded him of her request).
- Feb 1863. The story is finished, but pictures not done. He gives the MS – not to Alice – but to George MacDonald – best selling children’s author and close friend. He doesn’t say why he does this, but I think we can deduce that, while writing it, he’s begun to think it might have a commercial life and is canvassing opinions from writers and their children.
- May 1863. Mrs GM tells him he should publish the book. Alice Liddell still has not received her MS, 10 months after asking for it. Dodgson is still, intermittently working on the pictures and ticking himself off for taking so long.
- October 1863. He meets Alexander MacMillan. His diary doesn’t say why, but subsequent events make it obvious he is talking to him about a possible publishing contract. Meanwhile Alice still does not have her book, 15 months after asking for it.
- December 1863. He is trying to get an introduction to Tenniel to ask him to do the illustrations for Wonderland. Alice still has not received her book, 17 months after asking for it.
- Sep 1864. Wonderland is being readied for publication. He finally finishes the pics on Underground, 2 years and 2 months after Alice asked for her book. But Alice still doesn’t receive it for another two months.
- November 1864. Alice finally gets her book, mailed to her by Dodgson, even though she only lives across the quad. She has been waiting 28 months to receive it, and for 21 of those months it has been sitting in Dodgson’s study, pictures unfinished, or passed round to the MacDonalds, to Tenniel, to MacMillan, and even to his friends the Ottleys, and, of course, developed and adapted in to Wonderland, which is now itself almost ready and will be published in just six months.
This is the blurry, mundane truth. Dodgson didn’t write it down all at once just to please a child he loved, for all that he conveniently “couldn’t remember” otherwise. He wrote it after a four-month hiatus, and apparently rather reluctantly. And, before it was even finished he had begun thinking about publishing it in some form. The story of the book lying on the table in the Deanery and being accidentally spotted is a piece of charming apocrypha. There’s no record of any such event in Dodgson’s papers, and the fact Alice didn’t receive her book before Nov 1864, by which time Dodgson was already well into publishing Wonderland, makes it highly improbable, if not impossible. But anyhow, Dodgson – the real Dodgson – didn’t need nudging into professional authorship. He was eager for it already. And why not? He deserved that much.
Does all this lessen the meaning of his work? Of course not. ‘Alice’ is much too powerful to need some anemic mythology to prop it up. Does it even mean he didn’t love Alice Liddell? No, of course not. He clearly did love her and her sisters. It just means he was a human being, not an impossible, idealized Saint Lewis. When he made Underground the basis of Wonderland, and when he gave that creative process priority over his gift to the ‘child he loved’, he was, unquestionably being rather selfish, and I think he knew it, which is why he reinvented the creation-story inside his own head, and why – probably – he preferred to mail the belated gift to the child, rather than have to explain why it had taken him so long.
But I think he should have spared himself the self-deception, because he didn’t need it. There was nothing wrong with what he did. Genius requires a little selfishness. And the fact is, if he’d been entirely unselfish at that moment, Alice might have gotten her book on time, but Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland would probably never have been written at all, and that would change the landscape of the modern world more than we can ever want to imagine. His small human selfishness reaped a huge and generous reward. So, I think we can forgive him – though I’m not sure Alice Liddell ever did
But that’s another story isn’t it.
I enjoy visiting this blog for all the original takes on very well known aspects of Carroll. I was surprised by this timeline, even though I thought I was familiar with the facts. Very much commended! Thank you.
October 27, 2010 @ 9:29 pm
This timeline is brilliant, so clear and concise, and so pure in its presentation of simple fact that no-one could possibly gainsay it.
It would be nice to think so anyway.
October 28, 2010 @ 10:09 pm
(My apologies if you’ve read this already. Your message in the Carroll group linked here and my response should properly have been placed here.)
Your statement that “Dodgson was less enthusiastic” about writing out the story may be so, but only in so much as Alice begged him and he finally agreed to it; but it doesn’t mean he lacked any enthusiasm for the project at all.
According to Alice, ALICE’S ADVENTURES UNDERGROUND was “nearly all told on that one afternoon”, but that there had been other adventures told on earlier occasions which went into the making of ALICE IN WONDERLAND, which was twice as
long, and that “much of THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS is made up of them too…” And there were still other adventures. As Alice says, “But even then, I am afraid that many must have perished for ever in his waste-paper basket, for he used to illustrate the meaning of his stories…”
When Carroll called them “interminable fairy-tales” he may have meant just that: that he was often asked to continue them. I don’t see why this entry in his diary should mean that they were “interminable ad nauseam” or that they were driving him nuts.
In any case, Alice asked him to write down the story he told on July 4, 1862: “I think the stories he told us that afternoon must have been better than usual, because I have such a distinct recollection of the expedition, and also, on the next day I started to pester him to write down the story for me, which I had never done before.”
Carroll later wrote on a blank page in his diary “Headings written out (on my way to London) July 5, 1862.” Duckworth also recalled that Dodgson got to work on it right away: “…he afterwards told me that he sat up nearly the whole night, committing to a MS. book his recollections of the drolleries with which he enlivened the afternoon.”
One might infer that when Carroll wrote “M. S. copy begun Nov. 13 (Th.) 1862” he hadn’t been working on the story since July. For me it simply means that he begun work on the actual manuscript that he was to give Alice. He certainly would have written it out in rough first, composing, correcting, revising, and making changes as he went along; otherwise, the copy he gave Alice would have been a mess. I’m willing to bet Carroll had been in the process of writing the story from July to November, and perhaps still hadn’t finished the first draft
when his seeing Alice prompted him to start working on the finished copy, written in his best hand, which would have taken a good while to do.
He finished it “before Feb. 10, 1863” and it wasn’t until September 13, 1864 that he finished the illustrations. That’s a long time, but drawing didn’t come easy to him. The two years from start to finish doesn’t indicate a lack of enthusiasm — quite the opposite! He could have simply put pen to paper and
quickly written a much shorter, inferior version of the story in longhand, without putting much time or effort into it at all, and without illustrations or any of the other great care he put into it, and had it in Alice’s hands a few days later. Instead, Carroll composed the story, illustrated it to the best of his ability (it contains some of his best drawings), and had it professionally bound.
And being a very busy man, he managed it in what little time he could spare. The result was a “manuscript” that was a masterpiece in itself, that was worthy of being presented as a great gift to the girl who was very dear to him. He
immortalised his love for Alice and, in doing so, inadvertently left an excellent artifact to be enjoyed by the rest of the world.
You write: “Alice still doesn’t receive it for another two months” after the illustrations were completed. True, but only because Carroll sent the manuscript to a bookbinder.
I find no reason to doubt that Alice Liddell was Carroll’s muse, that she fired his imagination and inspired him to compose his greatest literary work. Robinson Duckworth later wrote that on the boating expedition of July 4, 1862 the story Carroll told “was actually composed over my shoulder for the benefit
of Alice Liddell” and that he asked Carroll “is this an extempore romance of yours?” I often wonder if Duckworth meant to be ambiguous with that question.
October 29, 2010 @ 11:24 pm
How busy was he? His terms were 8 weeks long a piece. His vacations were 6 weeks, apart from the summer one which was 16! Ample time to get this done and dusted in one summer. He managed to squeeze a lot of photographing, play-visiting and socialising into this hectic schedule, so are you really telling me he couldn’t find the time to do a few drawings?
Your interpretation of “MS begun Nov 13” is rather wishful thinking, isn’t it? On what is it based other than a desire to believe LC was really writing the story much earlier – as legend has it ? I think if he’d begun a rough draft earlier then he’d have probably noted that too don’t you?
Duckworth, sadly, had been brainwashwd by the legend by this time and was talking a lot of nonsense.
The ‘Alice’ you quote was in actuality her son Caryl, who penned a very romanticised memoir at the time of the centenary, and put his mother’s name on it for authenticity. Alice herself never talked about that time publicly. Draw what conlcusion you like from that.
October 30, 2010 @ 2:42 pm
But this stuff is all just special pleading though isn’t it? He’s bored with anyone else, he’s bored, he’s bored with Alice maybe he’s just not as 100% interested as he might have been? Is the idea of the LURVE for Alice Liddell so deeply ingrained that people just cannot employ the usual criteria of commonsense when judging it?
I mean, suppose he’d written in the 80s something about the Hull sisters and an ‘interminable’ outing with them, would everyone be saying he wasn’t really bored, it was just a little joke he was sharing with the no people who were ever going to read his private diary and he didn’t really mean it because he really lurved Agnes Hull despite outward evidence? (There are a whole load more friendly/flirty letters to Agnes Hull than there are to Alice Liddell).
Or Beatrice? Dodgson writes a vomit-inducing poem in 1862 to a five-year-old called Beatrice (please someone, prove Mark Hoffman really wrote it). Roger Lancelyn Green says straight out (for what his opinion is worth), ‘Beatrice was the daughter of Rev. Ellison of Henley’ (or somewhere). No qualification, Beatrice Ellison (5) was the subject of this poem, no subconscious stuff or any of that nonsense.
Yet no-one says, ‘Ah-ha, so the true love of his life was Beatrice Ellison’. Why not? This is far more direct evidence than there ever was for Alice.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a ridiculous idea, but it’s still a whole lot closer to actual evidence than any of the stuff the Alice Lobby build their case on.
I’ve got an article a guy in Contrariwise sent me (I believe it used to be on their site but isn’t any more), which makes a really good point that the more any new idea diverts from the accepted view the harder it is for people to accept – like a lorry turning round, a five-degree turn just needs a touch of the steering wheel but a 180-degree turn takes a lot of getting through. Trouble is, the longer it takes to turn round the more time people have got to forget they were ever wrong in the first place.
October 31, 2010 @ 12:09 am
To sum up – I predict that in twenty years the new scholarship will have become as mainstream as warm-blooded dinosaurs are now.
October 31, 2010 @ 9:55 am