Alice, Lewis Carroll, and those “ambiguous photographs”…

Fancy a party? You could join the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse and March Hare – who no doubt will offer you wine, then tell you there isn’t any – just as they did to poor sweet Alice…

“Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,” she says to them, prior to an argument about whose behaviour is worse!

Ah, I was going to write something about Lewis Carroll on the anniversary of his birthday (at the end of January) but forgot, or was doing something else – impossibly intoxicated, probably, who can now say? Anyway, having seen this cool but very disturbing picture (see HERE) I thought straight away of Alice, you know? With the Queen angrily shouting: “Off with her head!”

I first encountered Alice at five years of age. I have a particularly vivid memory of that time. I was ill, with a soaring temperature, and a bed had been made up for me in the living room, for ease of access during the day. The doctors wanted me in hospital, but then decided the risk of moving me was too great. I would live or die in that living room. And as a concession to the seriousness of the situation, my father would read to me (an event almost unheard of under normal circumstances) from “Treasure Island” or “Coral Island”, both books I loved; and then, one evening, he commenced reading Alice in Wonderland to me…

What can I say about it? Already afflicted by high temperatures, I was feverish to say the least, at times delirious, and Carroll’s prose was confining…yes, confining: claustrophobic, a trap in which there was little or no room to move. The story was like the worse possible nightmare you could have.

One night after listening to Alice’s adventures down the rabbit hole I had a dream where, confronted by an eighteenth century footman in full panoply (I mean, of course, livery), I declined to surrender my brand new grey overcoat to his care. I did not trust him. Something about the eyes, and that powdered wig was deeply disturbing to me. That same night, apparently, I tiptoed to my parents bedroom where I opened the wardrobe and tried to hang-up my glass of water on a coat hanger – my mother’s dresses were soaked by the resulting spillage, of course. Totally oblivious, I was bundled up and rushed back to bed – and all the while, I’d believed I was secreting my overcoat in a place where that damned footman would never find it!

Needless to add, that for many years after, Carroll’s Alice filled me with unaccountable dread. Not until my early teens and the chance discovery of the HUNTING OF THE SNARK, did I find courage enough to return and finally face Alice and her claustrophobic wonderland.

Enough of these personal anecdotes. Let’s get back to Carroll, a.k.a Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, one of the first post modernists – his influence on James Joyce is all too apparent: FINEGANS WAKE is literally awash with allusions to Carroll’s works. And Nabokov – yes, certainly, there are a number of references to Carroll/Dodgson’s work in LOLITA, despite Nabokov’s claim: “some odd scruple prevented me from alluding in LOLITA to his wretched perversion and to those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms. He got away with it, as so many other Victorians got away with pederasty and nympholepsy. His were sad scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-undressed, or rather semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade.”

Well, to give but one example, look at chapter 29: the line “A breeze from wonderland” is most obviously a reference to Alice, and there are many others. Nabokov, for whatever reason, wasn’t being honest with us.

He translated Alice into Russian while in Berlin (1923). With his usual modesty he recalled “it wasn’t the first translation, but it was the best…”

References to Alice also occur in other Nabokov works: THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT and in ADA, for example. In fact, Sebastian Knight’s book shelf contains copies of ALICE IN WONDERLAND, side-by-side with ULYSSES. Certainly no coincidence.

One might also argue that allusion to Carroll in LOLITA continues through photography: it’s Quilty’s hobby, after all; he makes those unspeakable films, too, of nymphets.

Tim Burton’s film of Alice reminds us of the continuing life in Carroll’s creations (though I’m not sure if people still give Alice books as gifts to children – I’d have thought not?).

For my part I remember well the 1966 television adaptation directed by Jonathan Miller which cast Leo McKern as the Ugly Duchess, Michael Redgrave as the Caterpillar and, unforgettably, Malcolm Muggeridge and John Gielgud as the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle. Delightful. I seem to recall viewing a film adaptation, too, Czech I believe it was, which showed off Alice’s black cotton knickers at every possible opportunity…not quite the thing, really. Too Freudian, too blatant. My Victorian Granny would have had apoplexy at sight of it…and I feel certain Dodgson would have been very disapproving, too.

Returning to his books, are they really for children? They are complicated books, aren’t they? Full of “abstruse philosophical ideas and learned vocabulary”. For sure, the ideas and logic (or non-logic) in the books, as well as many of the allusions, “sail right over children’s heads. Probably not one reader in 10,000 now recognises what any of the many poems are parodying.” The appeal to kids, I’d guess, is the totally “disrespectful attitude to anything resembling authority”. Alice, for her time, was a child with attitude. A Victorian punk.

But what of Dodgson? Was he a “wretched” pervert? Did he get away with it?

We can never know with full certainty. I’m sure that in our world he’d be on a sex offenders register by now – especially after photographing so many of his young “friends” in the nude, even if he did have their parents’ permission to do so. Obviously, he must have had doubts about his actions. If not, why did he destroy all the “nude” studies and their negatives? The three or four nude photographs (all hand coloured) that have survived (copies given to the parents of the young models) are totally sexless, not particularly notable as photographs or works of art, yet disturbing just the same. That Dodgson was in “love” with Alice Liddell, I feel is a certainty. The modern argument that his affection for Alice was a cover for his affair with her mother is, for me, unconvincing. I’m not even sure if Dodgson was capable of a “sexual” relationship, in the modern sense of the world. Other than the questionable photographs, his behaviour with his young “friends” was always beyond reproach; they in their turn regarded him with nothing but respect and admiration.

So, living as we do in the age of Guantánamo Bay, of widespread use of CCTV, of identity cards and bludgeoning police powers, with a corresponding decline in individual rights and freedoms, the Queen of Hearts’ instruction: “Sentence first – verdict afterwards” perhaps seems less evidently nonsensical today in comparison to 100 years ago? It may be these books still have something to teach us…?