The Truth About Alice in Wonderland

In this episode, we're well and truly going down a rabbit hole. To unpick the controversies surrounding the author of Alice in Wonderland, Kate is joined by author and Professor of Film and Cultural Studies, Will Brooker. Will introduces us to Charles Dodgson, pseudonym Lewis Carroll, and his life, relationships and photography. Will is a professor at Kingston University and author of 'Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture'. This episode was edited by Tomos Delargy and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. If you'd like to get in touch with the show you can contact us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 2:18Kate Lister?

  Hello my lovely Betwixters, it's me Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixtersheets. But before we can go any further, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and adulty way of covering adult subjects and you should be an adult too. Now, you know I normally mess around with what we call a fair do's warning, because fair do's, we did warn ya. But this is actually quite a serious fair do's warning. This episode is covering allegations of child abuse and indecent images of children. So you might just not want to listen to that today. And in which case, do feel free to scroll back through our back catalogue and we will catch you next time.

• 3:03Kate Lister?

  A golden afternoon in 1862. A rowing boat meanders steadily upriver, making its way through the bells and chatter of Oxford. Aboard, there are two grown men and three young girls fidgeting in the warm sun. Heavy picnic baskets are weighing the boat down in the water and the girls' small hands regularly slip from the oars. One of the men in the boat is reclined, eyes closed as he conjures up a new world for his young companions. With frequent interruptions and the odd childish squeal of delight, the world of Underground, later to be known as Wonderland, is formed and young Alice is placed squarely in the middle of it.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  What are you calling him, Anne?

• 3:51Speaker 05

  Oh, money, of course.

• 3:53Speaker 06

  You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 3:55Speaker 05

  I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning him up and pushing the button.

• 4:07Speaker 06

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 4:10Speaker 07

  Goodness, what beautiful time! Goodness has nothing to do with it, Darren.

• 4:18Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. It's rare to find somebody who has never met Alice. Whether they met her in Tim Burton's 2010 movie, the 1951 Disney classic, or in the books themselves, it's almost certain that you would have met Alice somewhere. Long blonde hair held back with an Alice band, big eyes and rosy cheeks, a blue dress with puffed sleeves and a white pin affore, she could often be found chasing anthropomorphic white rabbits down rabbit holes and having tea parties with mad hatters. But where did she come from? In this episode of Betwixt the Sheets, we are going back to that boat in Oxford to find out more about the author Lewis Carroll,

• 5:03Kate Lister?

  whose real name was Charles Ludwigs Dodson, and in particular, his relationship with the real life Alice. Joining me today to tease apart this very complex story is Will Brooker, professor of Film and Cultural Studies at Kingston University. So let's crack on.

• 5:24Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Will Brooker. How are you doing?

• 5:30Speaker 08

  I'm doing so well, thank you, Kate. Very nice of you to have me on.

• 5:34Kate Lister?

  Oh, I mean, how could we not have had you on for this particular subject? Are you ready to ruin a few childhoods?

• 5:40Speaker 08

  I hope to preserve and cherish a few childhoods, actually. I think we'll come out of it well. I don't want to spoil the thing.

• 5:48Kate Lister?

  Right, this is interesting. We are in controversial territory with... Well, whenever you've got an author that is as cherished as Lewis Carroll is, and especially if it's to do with childhood stuff, they become quite sacred. But can I ask you, before we even get into discussing who this man was and what the controversy may or may not have been? Do you remember when you first read or saw Alice in Wonderland? What your first contact with it was?

• 6:14Speaker 08

  I sure do, and it's quite precious to me. So, I mean, we have to accept I might be biased. My mum gave me her copy of it. In fact, I think she first gave me her copy of Through the Looking Glass, rather than Alice in Wonderland. It was when I was seven, which is the approximate age of Alice in the books. And it said, William Brooker, your turn now. And as my mum has now passed, it's even more special to me, you know, in her handwriting on the frontispiece, yeah. So she was, she was handing it on like a, well, she's handing on her own childhood copies. So yeah, really special for me.

• 6:46Kate Lister?

  Why do you think that text is as precious as it is in, in the whole canon of children's literature?

• 6:54Speaker 08

  Well, I mean, we must know, I read the sequel first, which is kind of odd. That's my mum's fault. It's kind of funny to give someone the sequel first. So Through Looking Glass has always been my favourite of the two. And I think it's quite a lot of critics' favourite because it's more considered and intentional. And it's kind of more sophisticated, it's more planned, basically. I do wonder sometimes how important Alice in Wonderland is still to kids and to modern culture. I've got a six-year-old, I don't think he knows who she is. And I wonder if most people would know her through Disney or Tim Burton. But for a long time, during Carol's lifetime, the book was certainly cherished as a kind of a childhood favourite.

• 7:34Speaker 08

  After he died and between the, in, in World War One, it became sort of symbolic of a lost childhood, a lost period, a period of lost innocence. And between the wars, it still symbolised something which was recently passed and now lost. And then, not each decade, but each sort of major cultural period, I think, has had its own Alice, like Freudian Alice, psychedelic Alice. The two thousands, which is what I, well, the nineties actually and two thousands, which was what I was writing about when I last significantly wrote on Alice. That was when these discourses around protecting children and paedophiles came into play.

• 8:10Kate Lister?

  I think one of the reasons why it did become such a big text is, if you like, try and place it within the context of Victorian literature, it was sort of one of the first, if not the first, children's texts to just be of an explosion of imagination and nonsense. Up to then, children's literature had been very much, sit down, sit up straight and say your prayers.

• 8:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, it was irreverent. Very irreverent, which is funny because he was a Reverend Dodson Carroll, but it was irreverent. So maybe Dodson was a Reverend and Carroll was irreverent. It's got, you know, these parodic sermons and moral rhymes in it. So it was actively subverting what children are normally told to do. Yeah, and I think part of the lasting appeal, I think, is that it's about a child's perspective on adult life and adult society. Whatever other interpretations we put on it, it's about how strange, sometimes oppressive and complicated and unfair adult society with its rules seem to a kid. And if kids do connect with it now, then I think that could be the meaning they're taking from it.

• 9:19Kate Lister?

  Let's talk about the man himself. So Lewis Carroll is a pen name. What is his real name and what's his origin story?

• 9:26Speaker 08

  His name is Charles Ludwig Dodson. Now, I've learned from all my friends in the Carolian societies that it's not Dodson, but Dodson.

• 9:36Kate Lister?

  Dodson, okay.

• 9:37Speaker 08

  Yeah, and Charles Ludwig became sort of reversed and I think de-Latinized into Lewis Carroll. So Charles Ludwig was sort of reversed and then adapted and translated a little bit. So that's a sort of rather laboured joke. I was going to say, but all accounts and then try and summarise them, but actually all accounts are so different. And I think that's part of the trouble with Carroll. There's lots of different sides to him and there's not a lot that's really known about him personally. We know the facts of his life. He grew up with several sisters, he was producing sort of jokey pamphlets for the family from a young age. Pretty much lived his life Oxford in the same rooms there, lecturing mathematics, wrote books about logic.

• 10:22Speaker 08

  And also wrote these two incredible Alice books. And the hunting of the snark, which happens in what we would now call the same sort of universe. You know, the Alice universe or whatever. I quite like the fact that you've got sort of crossover monsters between the two. They're clearly in the same environment. And then later works, which are supposedly for children, I've never liked them. Um, Sylvie and Bruno, two massive volumes of that, for me, sort of turgid. Sentimental, twee, just don't work at all. Some people like them more than I do. To me, he never really produced anything as good as the Alice books and the hunting of the snarkers and interesting sort of. It's a long poem about what the title says, hunting a mythical beast.

• 11:04Kate Lister?

  Very unusual for this man to have done it as well, because I remember reading all of these essays and I've endlessly heard people say, oh god, he was off his tits on LSD, he must have been. Because Alice became really important to the psychedelic sixties movement as well. But from what I know of him, he was really quite dull and awkward. He was a mathematician, he was in the church, he didn't really like talking to people. Most of the descriptions I've heard of him was that he was awkward.

• 11:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, about the psychedelic thing, I think that's an example of people sort of having the Alice and the Carol that they want for their own period.

• 11:39Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 11:40Speaker 08

  Because from inner culture in the 1960s where people are doing LSD and mushrooms. A book with a chapter where there's a caterpillar telling you to eat this bit of the mushroom and you'll grow big and small. It's in the Gray Slick song White Rabbit and also stoners would project the Disney movie on campus. And, you know, do their thing with it, their substances. And they were absolutely convinced that it was a stoner movie, but, you know, not necessarily. That's like seeing it through the framework of the time, isn't it? I think it's pretty definite he didn't do any LSD, although the whole culture around drugs was different then, wasn't it? Opium was more widely available. I'm pretty convinced he didn't. He was a pretty abstemious even drinker, you know, he'd have like a glass of sherry.

• 12:23Speaker 08

  Actually, I personally think, I think it's a little bit limiting to think that he must have been on drugs to imagine all this stuff. Because I think it is also just possible to have that imagination without being stoned, you know? And also, a lot of people get stoned and never write incredible works of literature, so.

• 12:40Speaker 08

  I think it was him rather than anything he was imbibing and ingesting. Some people say that this whole image of him as being dull is also another myth. And he was socially active, socially confident.

• 12:52Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 12:53Speaker 08

  Big in the world of theatre, liked to hang around people of higher ranks. Like he liked to get access to royalty and to actors. And that he was a bit of a social mover. So it's funny, isn't it? There's all these myths around him.

• 13:06Kate Lister?

  Really contradictory stuff as well. What's your thoughts from someone that's researched him? Do you think that he was quiet and bookish and into his maths? Or was like, what do you think about him?

• 13:18Speaker 08

  I tell you what, I think people contain multitudes, you know? And I think someone could probably look at you or me in different lights, asking different people and say, well, you know, I knew the person like this. I think it's quite possible that someone could be all those things at different times, in different company, with different groups, actually. Because, you know, the way you might act with a child you meet on the beach, which he did. And this is partly what, you know, while we now have problems with him, he was very friendly with children that he'd only just met, is bound to be different from talking to actors backstage at a theatre. And the way you lecture to a class is going to be different to the way you have a laugh with your friends. So I think we might just have to accept that some things escape easy definitions, especially

• 14:03Speaker 08

  because we're not really held by the fact his diaries, firstly, they're really boring. And secondly, some have been destroyed and some have been tampered with, which is partly what leads to this controversy that they're missing bits. And so that helps with the mystery of Lewis Carroll. Why would his relatives have destroyed anything?

• 14:22Kate Lister?

  How did the Alice books come about then? We should talk about that. We've got this man who, he's in the church, I can't remember, he wasn't very high up in the church, but he was also a mathematician at Oxford, is that right?

• 14:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, mathematician, yeah.

• 14:35Kate Lister?

  Where the hell does Alice come from?

• 14:37Speaker 08

  Well, there's sort of myths around that as well. And we can't know for sure what the facts were of the actual original occasion, because it's been kind of retroactively made into the origin story of Alice in Wonderland, this so-called golden afternoon. But basically what happened is. He and his friend Reverend Duckworth used to socialise with, to take the daughters of the Liddell family, the nearby Liddell family, out on trips and everything, and they had many such trips, nothing much else to do, I suppose, play in the meadows, go up the Isis, which apparently is what the Thames is called when it goes through Oxford, go up the Isis on a boat and so on. And on one of these trips,

• 15:18Speaker 08

  as he often did, he would tell the girls stories off the top of his head. And supposedly, the story he told on this particular day was an especially good one, and the girls clamoured for him to write it down. So he went home and in his quarters, you know, he wrote this one down. And Alice was his favourite of the Liddell sisters, Alice. So it starts off as being kind of a story about a girl, you know, just like you might have a kid and make up stories about them and then it, you know, you develop that into a, you know, Henry and the Monsters or something, whatever. And then, when he shows it to other people and they say, oh, you know, Charles, you know, my dear Dodson, there's something in this, this could be a success. Then he elaborates it, makes it clever and makes it much longer.

• 15:58Speaker 08

  Originally had his own illustrations, which clearly shows someone who looks a bit like Alice Liddell, who's like a brunette with a bob. He expands it and he gets John Teniel, a really good artist who drew for Punch Magazine, to illustrate it. And I think by the time it's published in eighteen sixty-five, a few years later, it's kind of gone quite a long way from the original Alice, because partly because Teniel draws her with long blonde hair. I think that's quite key somehow, that Dodson never said, Carol Dodson, never said, no, no, you've got to make her look like this girl. I think he was actually quite concerned there with commercial success. He was a pretty canny guy. He,

• 16:37Speaker 08

  he was in charge of like merchandising for Alice in Wonderland. He was pretty possessive with the whole sort of what we would now call the brand. I think by the time it was published, actually. It wasn't really about the little girl so much anymore, partly because years had passed and as girls grew older, it was less possible to kind of socialise with them because, you know, as they enter their teens, it wouldn't have been proper. So it starts out, I would say, a story about his favourite little girl from this family, told to her and her sisters on what supposedly is like an idyllic golden afternoon, this mythical boat ride. There's been lots of debate about whether it was actually raining that day and what really happened and so on, but you know, it's important to sort of myth that it's this perfect, perfect afternoon.

• 17:20Speaker 08

  And then, you know, and it's important that this one story was the best story which he then wrote down. But I think we should remember that the original story isn't the one that was published. That one, you can get it, is called Alice's Adventures Underground. You can see it in his handwriting with his pictures, but that's not the story that's actually published.

• 17:36Kate Lister?

  There is a lot about Alice and her sisters in the finished text, so isn't it like their cat really was called Dinah and isn't there a poem on the final page that if you read through the first letter of each line, it spells out Alice's name?

• 17:51Speaker 08

  Alice Pleasant Little, yeah, a nice name.

• 17:54Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 17:54Speaker 08

  Yeah, the sisters do crop up in it, in disguised form. In the, I believe it's the Dormouse, who tells a story about three girls who lived in a treacle well, Elsie, Lacey and Tilly, and those are clearly the sisters. The Lory bird is like based on, well, based on, you know, it's kind of inspired by Lorena, Alice's older sister. So there's these, there's these little sort of in-jokes, but they're quite hidden now. It's not really about Alice and her sisters. You know, really it's about this character called Alice, who then appears again in a sequel. And by the time she appears in the sequel, that's eighteen seventy-one, and Lewis Carroll was not really in touch with Alice Little anymore. And there's one key fact that I think is quite interesting.

• 18:39Speaker 08

  Whatever we think about whether John Tenille drew a blonde girl, because this blonde girl that he drew as Alice, he had appeared in some other of his pictures for Punch. It was like one of his kind of characters, you know, this sort of little miss, prim little miss. In through the looking glass, I like this because it can't really be argued, in through the looking glass, Alice leans out of a boat in a river again, and her hair touches the water, and the original Alice's hair would not have touched the water. So to me, that strongly suggests that at that point, he was thinking about the girl in the pictures, not the actual girl. I think she had evolved from as his character, his kind of brand, his considerable literary success by that point.

• 19:23Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Will and Alice after this short break.

• 19:40Kate Lister?

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• 22:53Kate Lister?

  So there's this mythical story that may or may not have happened, where he tells this story and they're all punting down the River Thames, but it's not the Thames because it's in Oxford. And Alice was seven and she has two sisters, right?

• 23:04Speaker 08

  Yes, Edith and Lorena, the younger Edith and the older Lorena.

• 23:10Kate Lister?

  So we're gonna have to talk about the Liddell family then, because this is where some of the controversy starts to come in. What was Carol's relationship with the Liddell family? Why was he taking these children out boating? Which is a very nice thing to do, but they must have been pretty close.

• 23:26Speaker 08

  Henry Liddell was the dean of the college, and so he's Carol's senior manager, you know, he's kind of boss.

• 23:34Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 23:34Speaker 08

  Lived nearby. I suppose, you know, Carol is a gentle nearby bachelor. It was just a nice, nice thing to do, you know. And conventions were quite different then. I don't think it was so unusual that two clerical gentlemen would take out someone else's daughters for day trips. It was considered to be quite an innocent friendship.

• 23:55Kate Lister?

  Okay, but there is, there's more here to be unpicked, I think, is just the accusations haven't kind of come around because they went boating. It seems that Carol, the words have been used, anything from obsessive or fascination or overly interested or just, just an affinity for, he liked spending time with children.

• 24:15Speaker 08

  Yeah, he did. And it's, it's not quite true either, although it's mostly true that he liked hanging out with young girls. And it's really hard to say these things without them sounding awful, actually. It's really hard to say things which were factual and okay in the 1860s without them automatically making me feel, well, how can this be defended? He did mostly like hanging out with girls, yeah. And there was some controversy about it, which stems from the fact that, again, a mystery is created by the fact that four diaries are missing and several pages are cut out of one diary. And that is when there was a rift with the Liddell family.

• 24:53Kate Lister?

  Do we know what that was about?

• 24:55Speaker 08

  We don't know for sure, but there's a lot of interesting rumours and interesting stories. The stories might be more interesting than the truth. I have seen these cut pages during my research and it is.

• 25:05Kate Lister?

  Have you?

• 25:06Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, you can see them in the British Library.

• 25:08Kate Lister?

  I hadn't realised they actually survived.

• 25:10Speaker 08

  I saw the pages, the remaining pages with the cuts in them, not the pages. I saw the bit where the pages were cut.

• 25:16Kate Lister?

  Oh, I see. I was gonna go, we've solved it. Wow.

• 25:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, okay, there's a lot to this. I saw the bits where the pages were cut and they've been cut with nail scissors by Carol's nieces, it is thought, Violet and F. Minella Dodson after his death. The mystery is, and it is an interesting mystery, that there also exists a piece of note paper which I saw in the Dodson family collection at the Surrey History Centre in Glamourous Woking, which summarises those pages, okay? And the note is kind of in shorthand, so it could be interpreted in different ways. And it says that Carol is supposed by some to be courting Ina, okay? And so different critics have surmised that this could mean that Carol is thought to be

• 26:03Speaker 08

  courting the mother, who's also called Lorena, or Alice's older sister, Lorena. I think the daughter is far more likely because you're not gonna call Mrs. Little Ina in that familiar way. So he's thought by some to be courting Lorena Little, but that's just rumour, isn't it? But rumour would have been enough for a family to distance itself from Carol and it would have been enough, I should say Dodson at this point probably, it would have been enough for Dodson to feel kind of both insulted and shocked and that he must do the right thing and for him to hold himself distant. And it's also rumoured that he might have been courting the governess, Miss Prickett. So basically, there's a couple of rumours around that him hanging around the house, he must have had another reason.

• 26:47Speaker 08

  And I think it could be that in those times with those people, that rumour would have been enough for what seemed like a rift because you had to do the right thing and so, okay, well, no questions asked, I'll stay away then because we can't have that kind of gossip.

• 27:03Kate Lister?

  I can see that. I mean, I'm not sure how old the daughter would have been at this point when this argument rift.

• 27:09Speaker 08

  The rift began in June 1863 and Lorena would have been 14. It is supposed by some, and this is one of those things that like someone proposed once, and because there's no more information, it gets repeated in other biographies until it becomes like a thing everyone knows. It's guessed that he may have proposed honourable marriage to Alice. And then some people say, well, if he proposed marriage, it would have been, he went to her mother and father and said, um, could we have an idea in the future if this connection is still there, when it's appropriate, perhaps we could move forward with a view towards marriage. He wouldn't have actually proposed marriage, but even we don't even know that, that's just guesswork.

• 27:51Kate Lister?

  No, we don't, we don't know anything at all.

• 27:53Speaker 08

  No, it's just filling in the blanks.

• 27:54Kate Lister?

  Okay, but he would have been in his early thirties.

• 27:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, he would have been thirty one, I think.

• 27:58Kate Lister?

  I'm not sure that people getting married at fourteen would have been the, the normal state of affairs, even in eighteen sixty five. But we are just filling in the gaps here. We don't know what the rift was, it's all rumour and supposition. It, they might have just fallen out over, over, over what they were binge watching on Netflix. You have no idea at all.

• 28:17Speaker 08

  We have nowhere knowing. It could have been Netflix. I mean, who can really say? But this kind of, any kind of shadow of a doubt would have been enough for people who were about respectability to back off. It didn't really need anything at all. The idea that Carol was courting the governess, Miss Prickett, would have been enough, because I think that would have insulted him in terms of class. He would have been, well, of course I'm not.

• 28:38Kate Lister?

  Would this have been widely known at the time? I mean, I completely get that. If there's any kind of whiff of impropriety, that there's people with these rumours and they're not true. Yeah, you would, you'd distance yourself. Does that mean that people were gossiping at the time?

• 28:51Speaker 08

  I think there would have been Oxford gossip within, within those circles.

• 28:55Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 08

  Yeah, within those circles. This is before Alice in Wonderland was actually published, though. So a lot of this is really retrospective. My overall view is that people try and find stories about this guy because there isn't really all that much to find. And perhaps there is a lot of complexity. It's just that, it's just that we don't know it. So we've got these absences that we, that various biographers have, over the years, tried to fill. A lot of it is referring to each other's work. And then sometimes there's like a new document comes up, or some new letters, or a new interpretation or something. But the evidence is really very scant. One thing that does interest to me is that in terms of his photography of children, which is another thing we've got to consider, as well as hanging out with them, we like to take pictures of them. And as well as taking pictures of them, he liked to take pictures of them without much clothes on.

• 29:39Kate Lister?

  He did.

• 29:40Speaker 08

  And as well as that, sometimes they didn't have any clothes on.

• 29:42Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Speaker 08

  And again, when you say this sort of thing, I kind of expect people to go, well, how can you possibly still defend Carol? And one of the things I find interesting about that is there was some controversy among Otter's families about him taking the photographs. It wasn't just that Victorians had a different idea of childhood and that nude photographs were far more common as like symbols of innocence and cherubs and everything. There was a little bit of pushback from families.

• 30:09Kate Lister?

  I imagine so.

• 30:11Speaker 08

  Well, but the thing is, what we imagine would be very, very different from what it was in, you know, the eighteen seventies, eighteen eighties. Because now if someone came around to take pictures of our children, I mean, I don't even want to go there because it's so.

• 30:23Kate Lister?

  I mean, now you'd find, you'd find the police, wouldn't you? There'd be.

• 30:25Speaker 08

  It's so obvious.

• 30:26Kate Lister?

  You wouldn't even feel comfortable saying, well, yes, obviously go and have a little river trip with this person, would you? But.

• 30:31Speaker 08

  I don't even feel comfortable having it cross my mind.

• 30:34Kate Lister?

  Photography was a really new medium at this point, or at least it was new in the fact that amateurs like Carol was could experiment with it. So there, there's a newness to it. I have heard it argued that it was all right for him to be photographing nude children because he kind of recreates it in this sort of classical Greek way that they look like cherubs. I've never been quite convinced by that because I've not found other examples of children being photographed nude. To make the argument that this is completely within the standards of the time.

• 31:06Speaker 08

  I have heard comparison with Carol's contemporary Julia Margaret Cameron, um, who also took photographs of children. And I've also heard comparison with like greeting cards at the time, which would feature ostensibly nude babies. You wouldn't see anything because, you know, they're cherubs. So there was a kind of different culture around the innocence of, of, of youth there, that there wasn't so much to be. Protected and we should never see it, but there was no shame in looking at it because it was so inherently innocent. But then to our eyes now, some of the pictures look suggestive. There's a picture of Alice Liddour. There's two, I think, in fact. Alice is a beggar girl.

• 31:40Kate Lister?

  Yep, that quite a famous picture, that one.

• 31:42Speaker 08

  Part of her chest is uncovered, yeah. And no one would take that now. And yeah, he dresses them up in different ways, in sort of imaginative poses. He puts them as part of tableaus. The nudes, I think there are four extant nudes and others. The nudes were always in a vast minority. He took pictures of all sorts of other things like, you know, one is of a fish skeleton, for instance. So as you say, he was a pioneer in relatively new technology and art. And I suppose technology and art together would have particularly fascinated him. This guy who's on one level really logical and on one level really imaginative. So he would have been like, you know, one of the few people practicing photography. And it

• 32:23Speaker 08

  was novel in that way. And he was an expert in something which is far more complicated than, you know, now we all carry a camera. But this involved, you know, chemicals and the putting a canopy over my head and, you know, telling people to stand still for 30 seconds. So it's a very complicated process. His pictures are, as you say, sort of tableaus in costume, a lot of them. The nudes, which I think still exist, they're pretty twee and sentimental and sort of mawkish. They're coloured and they're like nymphs on a beach sort of idea. You know, they're in situations, you know, stranded on a rock somewhere, like The Lost Boys or.

• 32:58Kate Lister?

  I know that the argument is that, you know, it was a different time. But I think we'd need to like look at the context of the time. I had a student who did that once for a master's research project. They looked into this to try and see what was the context of the time. And they made a really strong argument. There was actually a fetishisation of young girls and virgins at this time. If you look through erotica and pornography, not that we've got any evidence that's what Carol was doing, but there's also quite a strong narrative that young girls at this time were highly sexualised. But we don't know if that's what Carol was doing.

• 33:33Speaker 08

  If that was like, I would like to call, you know, an active discourse, if that was a dominant discourse at the time, then I would be persuaded by that. You know, I go where the evidence goes, basically. If someone could show me, and no doubt they could, that there was this kind of culture of fetishising young girls, then Carol wouldn't have been unaware of that at all. He was really culturally. Aware. I mean, we can't rule out the possibility. He genuinely did have a.

• 33:56Kate Lister?

  Predilection, yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think what we can be sure about is I don't think he had reacted on it. Unless we count taking photos of action, which which nowadays we absolutely would. Taking photos of children is absolutely an abusive action. We obviously can't know what was in his head. I don't think he thought what he was doing was wrong. I think the pushback from families was mostly because the girls were like fourteen, fifteen. And it was no longer appropriate because now they were young women rather than girls and they were entering a different sort of social category. Again, you know, wouldn't it be interesting to know what he was thinking?

• 34:27Kate Lister?

  Or what his relationship with with the children were. I mean, do we have anything? Like when when Alice Little grew up, for example, because I know that we don't have, there's no smoking gun, nobody. Who had any, because he had lots of these child friendships. And none of them have accused him of anything improper. Nobody has said. Anything. This is all us looking back at what's there and trying to work it out. What was his relationship with these? Who were they, the the girls in the pictures? Or like his child friends?

• 34:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, you're absolutely right. For what it's worth, all these girls who grew up into the early twentieth century speak so highly of him. But then, on the other hand, these days, we wouldn't necessarily count matters. Proving anyone was innocent because it could be a trauma response or. Whatever, or false memories. So. By contemporary standards, that doesn't mean too much. But you're absolutely right. There's no one who says, oh, that Lewis Carroll, you know. Um, I always felt really uncomfortable with him. They say the opposite, and yet I don't know. Um, who were the girls? They were like children of friends. Sometimes they were people he met on the beach. He used to go to Eastbourne a lot, hang out there. And, you know, it sounds awful now, but he used to go down to the beach. With things like toys and safety pins to pin up their skirts and so on and drawing stuff.

• 35:39Speaker 08

  Stuff that almost seems grooming by today's standards, but but maybe it was perfectly innocent. And so he used to make these child friends. And um, their guardians and parents would let them come around his his house. In Eastbourne and then, and this is something we have as evidence, he would write letters to them. And so we do have the letters. And a lot of those letters are. Actually, like mini masterpieces like the Alice Brooks, they're really charming and clever. They're sort of, you know, now come now, can you do this puzzle? I'm sure even a baby could do this puzzle. So please tax your brain over this. There are all sorts of games and pictures in these letters, which seem absolutely, you know, not just, not just fine, but really, really nice. So we do have that.

• 36:24Speaker 08

  And we have his diaries, which sort of say, you know, met a wonderful little girl today. I place a white stone by this day, meaning it was a special day. At the same time, and this, because we have so little evidence to go on, some people have seized on the fact that also in his diaries, there are these desperate prayers for forgiveness and absolution of sin. And so people have argued about what that could be about. Some people say it's just him being too hard on himself because he was so saintly. Any divergence from a perfect life would have tormented him. Some people say it was masturbation or nocturnal emissions, wet dreams, which obviously even a man like him would have had. We can't know. So again, it's like guesswork, you know, is it, he felt really guilty about something he'd done?

• 37:06Speaker 08

  Or did he feel guilty about any kind of desires that troubled him in the middle of the night as they would any person, pretty much? Any kind of dreams? Or was he just being really harsh on himself because he hadn't, you know, done as much work that year as he told himself? But in the diaries, there are these tormented dreams like, dear Lord, please save your kind of forsaken servant and purge me of this and let me start the new year afresh. He had a troubled conscience, but we can't know why, can we?

• 37:33Kate Lister?

  No, we can't.

• 37:40Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Will and Alice after this short break.

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• 39:14Kate Lister?

  It's so difficult because if this happened today, it would be a crime. There are laws against it. You can't do that at all. So you have to constantly try and contextualize it. And then also, you are filling in the gaps. Very difficult because, from a modern point of view, a crime has been committed, but we can't know what was going on inside his head. We should remember as well that this is a very controversial topic within Carolian studies, and it has been for a very, very long time and will be viciously debated by lots and lots of different people. When did this even start to come to light?

• 39:54Speaker 08

  Well, actually, it's not very much debated because among Carolians, the strictly agreed consensus is he did nothing wrong under any insinuations or poisonous.

• 40:06Speaker 08

  Because I'm a bit more distant from that circle now, I feel a bit more kind of removed from it. But at the time, when I was hanging around in those circles, the only thing you could possibly say was, this is judging a man unfairly by contemporary standards. Yeah, yeah. When did it come to light? Well, his nephew, very short, Stuart Dodson, Stuart Collingwood Dodson, very shortly after Carol's death, wrote the first biography. And it was basically, the sky was the same on earth. How much we're gonna miss the wonderful Lewis Carroll? And how wonderful he's left these gifts behind for generations. It's the kind of book you'd expect your nephew to write. And pretty much at the same time, I suppose, his nieces were pretty much at the same time, burning the diaries and cutting the pages out. So if we join these things up, it does look like a sort of cover up job, doesn't it?

• 40:49Speaker 08

  Then, as I say, I think we have the Carol, you know, that we deserve and that we create. It was the rise of Freudianism into popular culture and understanding. So you're talking about the 40s, really, when, just like in, you know, in cinema, you get kind of psychological film noir around that time. That's when people start to use a version of psychoanalysis to think, well, what was the unconscious, what was going on there? And that's when the story about his obsession with Alice really emerges. He was haunted by Alice all his life. It doesn't help that he wrote a poem about Alice, still she haunts me phantom wise. I think it says, Alice moving under skies never seen by waking eyes, which almost seems to be saying the quiet bit out loud.

• 41:32Speaker 08

  But that's when it's like, you know, what was the unconscious motivation? He must have been obsessed with this girl, Alice, all his life. And then various biographers, as I say, just trying to sort of come up the slightly different version of what they've got. But it really says more, I think, about the frameworks of we use at the time than it does anything about Lewis Carroll. It's so complicated, really. It's a bigger picture to me about, you know, how do we talk about stuff in the past? Do we apply our own views and knowledge to it? Or is that completely anachronistic? Like, the same way, could we talk about Oscar Wilde in terms of LGBT culture and rights and everything? I have these sort of discussions in class, you know. Is it right to say Oscar Wilde was gay?

• 42:13Speaker 08

  Well, in a sense, no, because term gay didn't enter into popular culture until the 20th century, so. But then what should we call Oscar Wilde? I wouldn't want to call them the terms which were used at the time, and even homosexual sounds a bit over-formal.

• 42:26Kate Lister?

  No.

• 42:27Speaker 08

  Now, do you see what I mean? Can we use contemporary terms to describe the Victorians? It's a big discussion for me.

• 42:33Kate Lister?

  It's made so much harder by the fact that we just don't know. We don't have a smoking gun, there was no accusations made, no one was put on trial, no evidence was tested. This is us looking back and feeling intensely uncomfortable. And I'm sure everyone is listening, we've made feel intensely uncomfortable as well, but...

• 42:50Speaker 08

  It's hard not to, isn't it?

• 42:51Kate Lister?

  It's just what happened, isn't it? It's really hard not to.

• 42:54Speaker 08

  To be more generous, I think it's also our type of celebrity culture which we're now applying back and thinking, well, there must be a smoking gun. It can't be everything that it seems. But what if it can? With all celebrities now, if someone's like really well behaved, we're looking for the scandal. What if there isn't a scandal? Well, like, what if he was just this kind of unusual guy, like the company of kids, also hang out with adults, really good at logic, not a very good teacher, liked maths, also had an amazing imagination? Like, what if he was just this incredibly a unique guy? And to be fair, we've never seen a guy like that again, really. But, you know, it's just an incredibly individual creator, and we should be kind of glad he's got these books. But I think it does say something about our view of celebrity, that we're thinking, well, what's the hidden story

• 43:39Speaker 08

  here? It's possible that there isn't one.

• 43:41Kate Lister?

  As a final question, do you think that this information about Carol would shape how we read and understand Alice? This is the question about separating the art from the artist, I suppose.

• 43:53Speaker 08

  I'm really glad you asked that. Such a massive contemporary issue. Even this year, maybe no names, we've had authors who are much beloved and have been very important to people for decades, who now are involved in accusations of terrible crimes and abuse. So this is absolutely ongoing at the moment on social media. Can we separate the art from the artist? Should we give away our books by a favourite artist who's turned out to be disappointing? Well, I think it's got to be down to the individual. I mean, personally, you know, and I hope I can be forgiven for thinking that my Alice book is precious because my mum gave it to me and it serves an important part of my my life. Would I read Alice to

• 44:38Speaker 08

  my son? That becomes another question, doesn't it? I mean, you know, he likes Minecraft and Mario, so he's not exactly saying, you know, Daddy, what's that book? Please, can I read that Victorian book? Um, you know, if he did, would I try and contextualize it a little bit? Quite probably I would. People are still, you know, Tim Burton made his Alice films quite recently. Alice is still big at Disneyland.

• 45:04Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 45:05Speaker 08

  So it's almost like Alice has kind of become almost slightly separated. Even in my own book, like twenty five years ago, I said, it seems that people still cherish Alice, but they wouldn't want Lewis Carroll to be the one who reads it to their children. I think we're still in in that place. Well, we might have to either forget Lewis Carroll or we just think of him as the saintly figure because I don't think we can hold both ideas in our mind at the same time that we love Alice in Wonderland as his innocent book. And yet, this guy was really problematic. I don't think we can do it. Perhaps we should be able to entertain contradictions, but I mean, it's difficult.

• 45:40Kate Lister?

  Well, you have been fascinating and challenging to talk to. You've been marvelous. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 45:49Speaker 08

  Uh, I work at Kingston University. So if anyone wants to contact me, they can find me on the Kingston University website, I think, and they'd be very welcome to to drop me an email. And you've been so fascinating and challenging as well. Thank you so much. I feel we went beyond Carol into some really huge issues of like history there.

• 46:06Kate Lister?

  Well, thank you very much. You've been a pleasure.

• 46:09Speaker 08

  Thank you very much.

• 46:15Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Will for joining me. If you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. We've got episodes on everything from more real wives of dictators, to the horrible, awful history of gonorrhea, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

• 47:03Speaker 11

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