🐇 WHITE RABBIT TALES: THE ORIGINS OF A CLASSIC STORY: THE SECRET WORLD OF LEWIS CARROLL

150 years ago, this book was published. It would become one of the greatest
children's stories ever. And it all began here. One summer's day, the Reverend
Charles Dodgson took ten year old Alice Little and her sisters on a boat trip along
the River Thames. The girls were absolutely enchanted by his stories, and the power
of Carol's imagination has enthralled millions of readers, from John Lennon to
James Joyce.
Alice, hands down, for me, is number one. Always has been. It's absolutely a
magical ride in terms of children's literature, a revolutionary book, and it's
unlike, of course, anything that had ever been written for children before. The
book is fantastic and brilliant. I would give it five stars.
It's good. They say that after the Bible in Shakespeare, louis Carroll is the most
voted author on earth. These are the foreign language editions of Alice. We have
aboriginely here French, German, Japanese. Only a handful of people would have
known at the time that Charles Dodson, a math stone at Christchurch, Oxford, was
also Louis Carroll, and that the inspiration for the book was a real Alice, alice
Little, the Dean's daughter.
For years, the relationship between Carol and Alice Little has been the subject of
speculation. I think he was in love with her, but I don't think he would have
admitted that to himself. Carol's reputation has also been dogged by questions
about his child friends and the photographs he took of them. That is quite
disturbing. It is, isn't it?
That's a little girl in a very adult pose. And in the course of our research, we've
uncovered new material that adds to this controversy. My gut instinct is it's by
Lewis Carroll. What was really going on? Who knows?
So what was it that led to the creation of Carol's masterpiece, alice's Adventures
In Wonderland? And what are we to make of the controversies surrounding him? You
probably recognise Christchurch as the dining hall at Hogwarts. And in fact, Louis
Carroll, who taught here, created the Harry Potter of his day. So how did this
rather dry mathematics lecturer manage to create such a fantastical world?
And what was the nature of his relationship with the real Alice day in Oxford?
Every 4 July, they celebrate the day in 1862 when Louis Carroll told Alice and her
sisters the story of Alice in Wonderland.
I'm clearly Alice. And I'm the Mad Hatter. Mad Hatter, March Hare and Alice.
Everyone in here likes Alice. Yes, we all know the story, don't we?
Alice is getting very tired of sitting by her sister on a riverbank when suddenly a
white rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. Either she falls asleep or she
follows a white rabbit who leads her down a hole. It's ambiguous. She finds herself
in an underground chamber with a tiny little door and the key was on the table and
she couldn't reach it. She sees a bottle with the words Drink me on it.
And she goes through all sorts of nasty experiences. That's when she met the
Cheshire Cats. Alice goes to a tea party. Tea party? Yes.
She meets this strange character that'd be me, who's a bit deluded. Alice got a
bit stressed because they're being so mad. Then there is a weird game of croquet.
The cards were like painting the roses red.
Eventually, Alice loses her temper and she comes out at the end saying, you're
nothing but a pack of cards. Well, don't ask me about Alice in Wonderland. I'm
just here for fun. I love this book. I always have.
I was just captivated by Louis Carroll's completely surreal imagination and
transported off to Wonderland. I even played Alice when I was a young girl in the
Village play. This is where I grew up, ditchling in Sussex. When I was eleven, the
Village put on a version of Alice Through The Looking Glass and I'm on my way back
for a reunion.
I thought I might not. But that's your recording of the production. This is
Ditchling players performance of Alice Through the Looking Glass, January 1969.
Across the field since the next course. Well, here I am.
I'm getting very tired. Where is Humpty Dumpty? Sweet pear.
I like listening to my own voice back nowadays, let alone when I was eleven. It
feels great. But what is what is really charming is hearing the audience laughing.
Yeah. And really enjoying it.
Yes, they certainly loved it.
I had no idea I was acting in such a psychedelic production. No.
Alice broke box office records in Ditchling. There was a general praise for ten
year old Martha Carney, who plays Alice. This was a performance that will be
remembered in Ditchling for some time. And yes, this is the one that was used a
lot, wasn't it? Yes.
Playing there. That's why it's a very stiff card. Very much kind of Lewis Carroll's
amazing imagination to have a game as the center of it all. He does that in Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland as well. It's playing cards there.
Yes. He loved that idea of playing games. I'm 57 and I first read the book when I
was seven years old, and I have read it every year at least once since then, so
I've read it a minimum 50 times. It's possible that my character, Lyra, is a sort
of descendant of Alice in that she's a matter of fact child in a world of large and
strange things she doesn't fully understand. So probably I stole that.
Yes. So why has this book captivated children and adults, actually, for 150 years?
Alice in Wonderland endures because it is universal literature. It captures
brilliantly how a child responds to the world at a time when some of the
categories that, unfortunately we start to take for granted when we're a bit older
are yet fluid. So the barriers between dream and reality, all of these remain
porous in Alice.
And he grasps beautifully what the psychology of that situation is like it was in
the corner of this famous quad at Christchurch, right over there, that Lewis
Carroll wrote down his story Alice in Wonderland. It's now actually an internet
cafe for students and over here was where Alice Little lives. She was the Dean's
daughter and the inspiration for the book. Little did Alice know that the story
would come to dominate her life. In 1932, as an old lady, she visited New York,
where she was captured on film for the first time.
It is a great honour and a great pleasure to come over here and I think now my
adventures overseas will be almost as interesting as my adventures underground.
Well, so how did those adventures come to be created? It really began here in
Oxford when Lewis Carroll first met Alice Little. She was around four at the time,
he was 24, a newly qualified math stone. It was a relationship which seems unusual,
to say the least, to modernise.
He was dry, methodical, a punctilious. Alice Little said that he looked as if he
had a poker stuck up was, you know, so upright. Everything was neat, thick,
orderly. I mean, it's hard not to think of him as someone who had a mild form of
OCD. In those days, dons at Christchurch had to take holy orders and they had to
be celibate.
So Charles Dodson became the Reverend Dodson. Though he never converted to full
priesthood. If he had become a full priest, he may be encouraged to take on a
parish and he would have found that pretty daunting. He had a speech impediment
and so reading a service was not easy for him. His mouth would open but the words
wouldn't come out.
Carroll spent almost his entire adult life a bachelor don behind the cloistered
walls of Christchurch. And even though he wrote both the Alice books here, he kept
his identity secret. He instructed the porters at Christchurch to return to sender
any letters that came to Louis Carroll. He also, though he was a very keen
photographer, he didn't like being photographed himself and that probably was
because he didn't want people to recognise him in the street. He didn't want fans
coming up to him.
Carroll was more than a keen photographer. He was a pioneer of a new art form. He
took hundreds of photographs of writers, friends, artists and celebrities. But one
person stands out above all others.
There is no photographic image of Alice which is not arresting startling, like, you
know, the people who nowadays become supermodels, who the camera is in love with.
It was when Lewis Carroll was working in the library at Christchurch that he first
spotted Alice playing with her sisters in the deanery next door. So this is his
office when he was a sub librarian. As you can see, book lined. Quite impressive.
But even more, even better than that, look, this is the view. That's a beautiful
walled garden. So that is where he would almost certainly have first seen Alice,
alice Little, for the very first time, because that's where the Littles lived,
that's where they lived and that's where the girls were playing. Alice's father was
appointed Dean of Christchurch, which at the time was the place to go. They were a
glamorous family.
They had parties, they had musical evenings, they were friends with royalty. Louis
Carroll was really drawn to all three little girls initially because they were all
photogenic, charismatic and upper class. He had just got his first camera and
the friendship developed, really, with him trying to get them to sit for
photographs.
As you might expect for such a meticulous man. Lewis Carroll kept very detailed
diaries. And here's an interesting entry for April 25, he was on a visit to the
deanery. The three little girls were in the garden most of the time and we became
excellent friends. We tried to group them in the foreground of the picture, but
they were not patient.
Sitters. I mark this day with a white stone and that's what Carol always does
when it's a particularly special day. They became tremendous friends, all three
girls, even though Alice was obviously singled out as the special one. She was
pushy, imperious, shaking her hair, he always used to say, shaking the fringe out
of her face and sort of bossing everyone around.
Under here is one of the original plates shot by Louis Carroll. I'm going to be
allowed to have a look, but obviously it's incredibly valuable and very delicate
when I put on the light, so I'm able to see it. Oh, my goodness, this is
fantastic. What I'm looking at is a negative. And here she is at around six years
old.
You get the sense of a rather strong personality, a self possessed little girl.
She was a beautiful child. She had an assurance that her sisters didn't, and her
older sister in particular didn't like being photographed. She found it really self
conscious making, but you can imagine Alice loving it. He would go over to the
deanery and entertain the children and he would be in the nursery.
The governess was probably there and he would teach them magic tricks and he would
read stories to them. He would go almost every day and of course, he would have
the girls to his rooms as well. Well, he got really quite involved in their lives
and they went out on outings, it seems, an almost continuous round of being with
them. And then as they got to an age where they could leave the confines of
Christchurch, he organised boat trips. And so began one of the most famous boat
trips in literary history, as Carol and his friend Robinson Duckworth took Alice,
Edith and Lorena Little up the River Thames to Godstow.
Hi. Hi, Martha. Hi, Mark. Hi, Mark. Good to see you.
This is Tom, who's going to hi, Tom. You're doing all the hard work, aren't you?
Well, I'm very much looking forward to retracing the steps. And is this the same
boatyard? It is, yeah.
It's the same family run company. Here we go. Well, I've managed the first stage. I
haven't fallen in. Well, indeed, you're setting a very good precedent.
It wasn't the first time that Carol told them stories, by any means. But the
crucial difference that day was that Alice, for whatever reason, pleaded with it to
write the stories down. Alice asked him, Tell me a story. Tell me a story. And he
would lean on his oars and go, no, not this time.
Next time. And the girls would say, It is next time. Now, tell me a story. So he
unwillingly began on the story of Alice in Wonderland.
He clearly was making it up as he went along. He had no notes. He hadn't planned
it. He just started the story of Alice following a white rabbit down a rabbit hole.
And we have her own account, don't we, of what happened that day here in the first
biography of Louis Carroll.
And she says, I believe the story of Alice was told one summer afternoon when the
sun was so burning that we'd landed in the meadows down the river, deserting the
boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a new
maid hayric.
The story Carol told them wasn't all make believe. It was also full of in jokes and
references to real places like this. The famous Treaclewell, not far from the
river.
Exactly. Here it is. They must have loved it, because it's the scene, isn't it,
from the Mad Tea Party? And when he says, once upon a time, there were three little
girls. This is the doormat.
And their names were Elsie, Lacey and Tilly, and they lived at the bottom of the
well. That's cook, isn't it? Indeed. Lacey is anagram for Alice herself. And Elsie.
If you break that to the two capital letters LC, you get Lorena Charlote, the older
sister. Exactly. And then Tilly was the family nickname for the younger daughter,
Edith. So all three of them are dead.
The journey ended 4 miles upstream with a picnic on the riverbank at Godstow.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank.
Precisely. And here we are on the bank. And I think the reality of that day is
reflected probably in that first line, and even what happens next.
Alice seeing the rabbit, the white rabbit, go down the rabbit hole, and then
following, there are still rabbits to be seen on this part of the Thames Bank.
Here we have Lewis Carroll's own account of that famous golden afternoon. On July
4, 1862, duckworth and I made an expedition up the river to Godstow with the three
littles. Now, on the other page, he writes later, and he says, on which occasion, I
told them the fairy tale of Alice's adventures. Underground, which it undertook to
write out for Alice. She was the one who nagged him to tell the story, so in that
sense, she was the crucial one.
It took him, I think, a year or so. But eventually he did write it down for her and
he presented it to her as a Christmas present. He had written it out by hand
himself and then drawn all the pictures.
And this is it, the original version of the children's masterpiece, alice's
Adventures Underground. Just look at the detail in this. I mean, it's like an
illuminated manuscript. It's so lovingly done.
Over here we have the large Alice. She's grown so big, and next to her, the White
Rabbit. And I think it's intriguing the way that Louis Carraff has drawn this
picture himself, because it's almost like the White Rabbit is a kind of suitor to
the much bigger, the more formidable Alice. And he's ended it with a photograph
which he's taken of Alice in the very last page. But in fact, what was discovered
later on, underneath that, there's a drawing that he made himself in keeping with
his obsessive perfectionism.
There are no mistakes in this manuscript, no crossings out, no blotches. Carroll
practiced his layout and his drawings in advance. Here you've got a real rabbit
that he drew from a naturalist handbook. As he develops it, he gradually
metamorphoses into a fairy tale rabbit, but with a rather sad face. He's hunched
over something kind of mournful, characteristic.
What do we have here? So this is the number of faces. So this is Carol's version of
Alice. She's looking slightly dreamy, slightly distracted, slightly distant. Yeah,
slightly plaintiff.
Here. Almost all the characters seem to be slightly mournful. And that might just
be he's not very good as an artist. Or it might be that there's something about
Wonderland in which the characters seem to be trapped there as if for them, it's
like an open prison. Because it's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
They're just there as extras. After encouragement from friends and making the most
of his connections to the publisher Alexander Macmillan, carol decided that Alice
should go into print. He'd already been thinking of a new name for his book. I
love this bit. He's playing around with which title to have Alice's Hour in
Elfland.
Question Mark. The masterpiece could have been called that. And then he has Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland question mark. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was
published in 1865. The timing couldn't have been better.
David Copperfield, Great Expectations, the Water Babies. All published in the same
era. This is the moment when Victorian literature finds the child, so the child is
becoming really into focus, which is the moment where Carol produces this
astonishing dream book.
And here it is, the final published version of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland.
You can just see the amount of trouble that Louis Carroll has taken in his whole
involvement in this book. For example, the colour here this is The Water Babies,
also published by Macmillan, but in a fairly standard dark green cover. Lewis
Carroll was adamant that he wanted red. Red was the colour that was going to appeal
to children.
But what's particularly interesting is the fact that there are stories in here that
aren't in his original manuscript, the gift that he made to Alice Little. So the
most famous episode of all, really, the Mad Tea Party. That wasn't in the original
version, but it is here. And best of all, we have illustrations by John Teniel. He
was the famous Punch illustrator who Lewis Cowell persuaded to illustrate his book.
We mustn't underestimate the importance of Teniel in the success of these books.
They are sensationally good illustrations and he was very particular and he sent
them back again and again. I think Teniel must have got a bit fed up with him at
the end. The other thing is, they're in the middle of a lot of text, like this
one, for example. The story flows around the illustration.
It does make a huge difference to have the illustrations as part of the part of the
page, rather than a separate little page on their own. And then something which
must have seemed so innovative at the time is that famous bit of the story, which
is the mouse's tail. And here we have the original copper plates that were then
used to print the drawings. So you can see the difficulty the typesetter must have
had in getting it going right down the page, just like a mouse's tail. And here's
the plate with the Cheshire cat illustration.
And you can really see the kind of detail that John Teniel used in order to produce
one of the most famous images from Alice.
Alice the first female lead in children's literature, and the most memorable.
She's very self confident, isn't she? She's wonderfully untroubled by the bizarre
circumstances in which she finds herself. Alice is the voice of common sense. If
you had a crazy character as the protagonist in a crazy world, where's the
difference?
Where's the story? She's quite feisty, she's quite funny. She challenges the
creature she challenges and she challenges everything that she's expected to obey
in real life in some other way. She keeps her composure and that makes her a very
unusual heroine. What other child heroine from the 19th century is like that?
Jane Eyre? Not many. It's hard to appreciate just how revolutionary a book Alice
in Wonderland was, completely. This is an example of the sort of thing that was
popular before. This is the history of the Fairchild family.
No pictures. There are some conversations, but mostly of the finger wagging
variety. And there's one episode near the beginning which is notorious. The father
notices the children have been quarrelling and to show them they shouldn't quarrel,
what does he do? Take their toys away?
No. Send them to bed without any supper? No. He takes them to a gallows to see an
executed criminal who's rotting in his chains. One of the things I really like
about Carol's book is the way that it's rather subversive about those sort of
preachy books.
So there's a fantastic bit here where Alice is trying to decide whether to drink
that famous bottle, and she says she also see whether it's mark poison or not. But
she had read several nice little histories about children who got burned and eaten
up by wild beasts and many other unpleasant things, all because they would not
remember the simple rules their friends had taught them, such as a red hot poker
will burn you if you touch it. And yet she goes ahead and drinks it anyway. Yes,
she's a rebel. She is a rebel.
The irony, of course, is that this rebel was created by a man who positively
embraced order. It's the mark of someone who loves rules and he loves smashing
them up. The croquis game breaks all the rules. The hoops move, the Mallets are
flamingos. The Caucus race would be another example.
All have won and all shall have prizes. And somebody that rule bound seems to be
very excited about when the rules can be broken. I think it's very interesting,
the original circumstances in which he started telling the story. I mean, in the
boat going up the river, carol wasn't the only person rowing. His academic
colleague from Trinity College, Robinson Duckworth, was rowing strokes, so he had
to speak to Robinson Duckworth as well as to Lorena and Alice and Edith.
And therefore a lot of the jokes appeal to a fellow mean. They're jokes about
philosophy and logic and mathematics. There's some wonderful pieces of logic in
this book, but I don't want to go among mad people, Alice remarked. Oh, you can't
help that, said the cat. We're all mad here.
I'm mad, you're mad? How do you know I'm mad? Said Alice. You must be, said the
cat, or you wouldn't have come here.
The other thing is, it's pretty frightening. It's a strange, almost nightmarish
world. I remember Alice growing her necks very tall. Really freaked me out,
because they are freaky. That terror that you have of falling down a hole and you
don't know whether you're ever going to reach the bottom of it, that's something
that is very, very strong in a child's memory.
Alice's encounters with the weird creatures of Wonderland are actually a much more
literal account of what adults look like to children than we, as adults, like to
think. And the fact that they shout things you don't understand, like off with his
head, which isn't that different to go to your bed. I think it was Virginia Woolf
who said that Carroll could remember much more vividly what childhood felt like
than most of us can once we've ceased to be children.
So are there clues in Carol's own childhood that help us to understand this special
empathy with children? He was born near Warrington in 1832, his father was a
clergyman in the village of Darsbury. Carol was the eldest son and he was
surrounded by well, by little girls. There were two brothers, but lots and lots of
sisters. When Carol was eleven, the family moved to a large rectory near
Darlington.
He kept his siblings entertained with homemade magazines full of stories and
cartoons. He became their leader and entertainer. He had a natural talent in
storytelling. Over 100 years later, an amazing discovery was found under the
floorboards of what was then the nursery. We have little handkerchief.
This is a letter from his mother, that is his mother's handwriting. So he kept
that. And I suppose that's one of the real clues to show that this really did
belong. Exactly. That's a little teapot lid.
Well, a teapot lid, of course. Mad Hatter's Tea Party, just like the glove, not
with the white rabbit, kept losing the symbol, which we know this, don't we, from
the Alice story, from the Caucus range. Yes. Here we have three little glimpses
of some of the stories that were yet to come, haven't we? We've got the Mad
Hatter's Tea Party, the symbol from the Caucus race and a glass glove.
We don't know exactly when these treasures were planted or by whom, but whenever
it was, it's as though Carol was telling us something, not just about Alice's
adventures in Wonderland, but also about himself. By the time he arrived at
Christchurch, he may have left his childhood behind, but he carried the idea of it
with him and from then on children and child friends would remain at the centre of
his life. Well, he's supposed to have said that they were three quarters of his
life and I do think they were very important to him and I think he saw them partly
as a sort of refuge from the adult world. When Carol wrote to his child friends,
he wrote as one of them. His letters are mini works of art, like this letter with
pictures instead of words.
Or this one written in the shape of a spiral. Or this, where he's pretending to be
afraid. This was a man who came alive in a different sense with children.
But what exactly was going on with Carol's relationship with children? And what was
the nature of the relationship with Alice Little? Despite the wonder of his books,
these are the questions that always hang over Carol. And this is where the
arguments begin amongst Carol experts. He once asked Alice for a lock of her hair.
Was that a lover's token? Today we may well think that a lock of hair is a love
token. I mean, what did it mean then? I mean, she was just a young girl, so I think
it's very difficult to describe. I mean the character of the man is one that
enjoyed the friendship of children, but there is no sense of a love interest in
this at all, he was emotionally involved, there's just no question about that.
And that's why I can't bear these critics who say that he only had a paternal
interest in the girl. So that won't do. I think he was in love with her, but I
don't think he would have admitted that to himself. What makes Alice In
Wonderland, I would argue such a powerful book, is the very fact of Carol's
repressed attraction to Alice. Among the photographs Carol took of Alice in the
Daenery Garden is this one, still controversial to this day.
It shows Alice dressed as a beggarmaid with her ragged dress falling off her
shoulder. It's quite a challenging look, isn't it? It's a very challenging look.
And the fact that you can just see one of her nipples is something that a lot of
viewers find slightly disturbing, as if there is a little flash of sexuality there.
It looks a little as if it's a kind of come on gesture.
But the fact that she's holding her hand to her body is because in photography, if
she was outstretched, that would shake and that would blur the picture. No other
reason would it have been as disturbing to a Victorian audience. No. Taking
photographs of middle class children dressed up. This was an absolutely standard
piece of acting out, but it's the most famous one because, as you say, the gaze
pins us and we don't know how to read her.
The picture may be ambiguous, but one thing is certain the special friendship
between Carol and Alice Little resulted in one of the greatest children's books
ever written. And yet, by the time Alice's Adventures In Wonderland was published,
that friendship had come to an abrupt end. Why? A year or so after the boat trip
to Godstow in June 1863, something happened and Lou Carroll was exiled from the
Dean Mary to find out what happened. The obvious place to come would be here, to
his diaries.
But when you look inside, pages are missing. Just looking along here, you can see
where there's been a razor cut.
When his nieces inherited his diaries, they cut out a number of pages and we have
to put bits and pieces together to try to think of what might have happened in the
Deanery for five months following this apparent rift. There's no mention of the
little girls in the diaries at all until we come to December the fifth. And there's
a theatrical evening. At the very end of that day, lewis Carroll writes, mrs Little
and the children were there, but I held aloof from them, as I have been all this
term. Held aloof.
Such an interesting phrase. What was really going on? It's my theory that Alice's
mother was the cause of the split. Carol's manner grew too affectionate to Alice.
Alice's mother was a dreadful snob.
She was known as the Kingfisher in Oxford and she wanted kings, princes, earl,
dukes for her daughters. So she stamped on. It and she burnt all the letters that
Alice had received from Dodgam in the waste paper basket in the deanery. Is there
evidence of that? My grandfather mentions that it happened.
Yep. It's a story in my family. So was Carol's attachment to Alice the cause of
the rift? It's possible that there may be other explanations. In this archive in
Woking, where the Carroll family papers are kept, an intriguing piece of evidence.
A scrap of paper points in two other directions. Alice's sister Lorena, or Ena, as
she was known, and the governess, Mary Prickett. This is a note written by the
niece who cut out the pages. And it's actually called Cut pages. In diary, she
writes, Elsie Lewis Carroll learns from Mrs Liddell that he's supposed to be using
the children as a means of paying court to the governess.
He's also supposed to be courting ena. That's Alice's older sister. So what this
suggests is that the rift wasn't anything to do with his relationship with Alice,
but in fact was about the governess or her sister. It's true that there were
rumours at the time about Carol and Lorena and also about the governess, and that's
what this scrap of paper is referring to. However, there is another document, a
letter written by Lorena to Alice when they were both in their 80s.
In it, Lorena informs Alice that she's just been interviewed by a biographer and
she's worried about the explanation she's given for the rift. I said his manner
became too affectionate to you as you grew older and that Mother spoke to him about
it and that offended him. So he ceased coming to visit us again, as one had to give
some reason for all intercourse. Ceasing, this letter appears to point things back
to Alice, although it can be read two ways. But we don't know which word we're
supposed to stress.
Is it I said his manner became too affectionate to you? In other words, he paid
badly, he maybe tried to kiss her? Or is it I said his manner became too
affectionate to you because actually it was me that he was after and I had to give
some excuse to throw her off the scent again. We simply don't know. But why would
it have been worse for him to be affectionate towards Lorena than to Alice?
Lorena was the eldest daughter. She was above the age of consent. The age of
consent was twelve. So for Carol to kiss her would have meant something different
in everyone's eyes than him kissing a very little girl like Alice. Because to us it
seems so much worse.
The suggestion that Mother had banned Carol from the house for being too
affectionate towards a little girl. Yeah, exactly. It's tempting, of course, to
think of Carol as a Victorian Jimmy Savile, but in fact we have dozens and dozens
and dozens of records from girls who he befriended, who made it clear that there's
a kind of ritual to their friendship. It involved kissing them chastely, and that
was it. But for him, it was almost a way of proving that his intentions were pure,
or possibly as a very repressed man, this was as far as he felt he could safely go.
We have various bits of evidence which can be twisted and turned and shaped in
different ways, but ultimately it comes down to, what do we think was going on
inside his head? So the mystery of the rift remains unsolved. All we know for sure
is that in June 1863, carol was exiled from the Deanery. And when he was eventually
invited back in December that year, his relationship with the family had become
formal and distant. He was asked back for tea, but then everything changed.
Everything changed. They grew apart. There's a rather sad last final picture he
took of her. She looks sad and the mood is sad.
She looks rather wistful in a way there. I think it mirrors the portrait that
Carol, the last one that he took of her. I think she looked sad. I mean, her
beloved sister Edith had died by then. I think you can see that etched into her
face, because the kind of wonderful brio that she had as a little girl has gone,
hasn't it?
Alice had grown up on the surface, she'd forgotten Carol, her childhood friend. She
married a man called Reginald Hargreaves, but chose a revealing name for one of her
sons. Well, she gave my grandfather the name of Carol, which she always denied,
incredibly had any resonance at all. But you can't help think, come on.
For Carol, the real Alice may have left his life, but the fictional Alice lived on.
He couldn't stop recreating her first in the famous sequel, Through The Looking
Glass. And what Alice found there then in merchandise and spin offs. For him, it's
not about the money, it's more about trying to maintain contact with his dream
child. The part it also, I think, goes back to his own childhood, being safe in
this little paradise.
She was a strange, distorted version of him. So little Alice will never grow up.
And even though Carol himself had, it meant he could always go back to it again and
again. It's as if he wanted to be that ideal dream child.
Did he simply want to be her? Or was there something else as well? Over his
lifetime, Carol accumulated hundreds of child friends. He'd meet them on railway
journeys and at the seaside, his pockets brimming with puzzles and games. He
basically picks them up.
He picks them up in trains, he picks them up at friends houses. And of course,
they're not alone. They're always accompanied by their parents, their nurses, their
governesses. That kind of collecting of children became an astonishing way of
life. What was really going on?
Who knows? It certainly would raise eyebrows these days from social services and
parents. And it did raise some eyebrows, then. Well, I think people are quite often
very quick to criticize, thinking about things as they are in this day and age. I
think one always has to put oneself back to the period in which these events took
place.
And, I mean, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that things were improper
or anything like that. Was there ever any complaints about his behavior towards
children, either from the children themselves or their parents? I don't know of any
at all. And I've studied this man for over 40 years, so I think if there had been
any, I would have found them by now. The interesting thing here is that his first
biographer, Dodgy and Collingwood, he does seem to have distorted the record in
order to suggest that the child friends were younger than they actually were.
Because when he was writing this biography at the end of the 19th century, it
seemed fine for a bachelor to spend his time with little girls but very
questionable for him to spend his time with sexually adult young women. And so he
slightly twisted the evidence to make them younger, with very OD consequences, of
course, for Carol's subsequent reputation, since we now take precisely the opposite
view. The picture, though, gets complicated because Carroll not only collected
children, he photographed them in his studio. And in some of those images, the
children are naked. To modernise, this certainly seems questionable.
This isn't an interesting one, because if you think about Alice going up the river
for the story to be told, going to Wonderland through the riverbank here you've got
another girl who is naked on the riverbank. But it's not just a photograph. What
he's done is he's taken a photograph of her and then he sent it away to an artist
to be professionally hand colored, and a whole background has been painted in. And
what it's done is it's turned her into a little Eve before the fall. It stops it
being a photograph of a naked girl, and it turns it into an artistic nude.
He did have a sort of obsession with innocence and childhood and innocence. And
these days we would not have considered it possible for a photographer to
photograph young children in the nude. It was absolutely inconceivable. They'd be
bundled off to prison as quick as you. But in those days, he could do that.
And it was sort of, yes, that's all right. He's an artist, he's a photographer, and
the children are perfectly innocent, but there's nothing wrong going on at all. And
there wasn't XP, probably. I think Carol thought of childhood as innocent. Like
many people, he thought the human body was a supremely beautiful thing.
And he thought the most supremely beautiful form of human body was the female body
before puberty. That is quite disturbing. It is that's a little girl in a very
adult pose, either you could think of this as the little girl whose body naturally
and unselfconsciously falls into this kind of posture. Or it could be putting
little girl in an overtly sexual post. Well, this is the problem we've got, isn't
it?
That all we've got is the image. Dodson himself, I think, was a heavily
repressed paedophile. Without doubt, many of the suggestions about his
relationship with children being unhealthy is totally unfounded and, in my view,
totally false. There are many people who misunderstand Lewis Cowell because they
haven't done their homework. There are people who will strongly contest that,
won't they?
They'll say, actually, what he was interested in was the innocence of childhood,
which was like a cult in Victorian times. I think that's what paedophiles are
interested in is the apparent innocence of children. It's a problem, isn't it?
It's a problem when somebody writes a great book and they're not a great person.
These days, naked photographs of children are really not acceptable in our own
culture.
I think it was different in those days because there are so many Victorian
pictures showing naked children. I mean, if you look at Julia Margaret Cameron, for
example, who was his contemporary, she had pictures of naked children. So what
are we to make of Louis Carroll's relationship with his child friends, and in
particular the nude photographs? I'll be honest, I'm such a big fan of his work
that I'm quite resistant to the idea of exploring any possible dark side. And it's
certainly true that in the Victorian period, images of naked children were more
widespread.
But there's no doubt that some of the images are really quite disturbing. So are we
imposing the sensibility of the 21st century back into the Victorian era, or simply
trying to protect an author whose work we love? Carol's photographs of young naked
children are undoubtedly controversial. But towards the very end of filming and
after completing our interviews with the Carol experts in this program, we stumbled
across this. If authentic, it would completely change our ideas about Carol.
Our researcher found this photograph in a French museum. It's attributed to Louis
Carroll and it's labelled Lorena Lidl. Now, Carol took lots of photographs of
Lorena, but this one is shockingly different. It's a full frontal picture of a
naked young teenager, a picture which no parent would ever have consented to. So is
it genuine?
Well, here are some photographs we know Carol took of Lorena at Christchurch. Is
this the same girl? Whoever the young girl is, she certainly doesn't look at ease.
So was this taken by Louis Carroll? It certainly needs investigating.
I didn't really expect that my Adventures In Search Of Louis Carroll would take me
through a doormarked French Riviera and look, there may be no real way of
discovering who took this photograph, or even if it really is of Lorena Lidl, but
the image isn't allowed out of the country. So coming here to Marseille and
subjecting it to expert tests may be the best way of discovering more clues this
isn't the first time the image has been examined. In 1993, the Carol expert Edward
Wakeling judged it to be inauthentic when he compared it to known Carol
photographs, but would subjecting the original to forensic tests suggest something
different? Nicholas Burnett is a picture conservationist with specialist knowledge
of 19th century photography. There is something quite strange, isn't it, about the
pair of us looking back into the eyes of this girl?
And it's a young girl, isn't it? A naked picture of a young girl? Yeah, absolutely.
We've brought Nicholas here to the Mousse Cantini in Marseille to examine the
photograph. It says Lorena Vidal l Carol Coal, M C.
So I think that's a dealer's inscription saying what it is and where it came from.
Cole probably is short for collection. The Mousse Cantini don't use the letters MC
on their photographs, so we don't know what MC stands for. We do know that the
photograph used to be held by the gallery Tex Braun in Paris after the death of the
owners in 1986. It was donated here.
But is it dated from the early 1860s, when Carol was photographing the little
girls? There's a lot of damage on the surface. There's a big crease up here,
corners been torn off. There's some scratches. You can see the little brown spots
on her face.
It's a very slow growing mold, very difficult to fake convincingly. It looks like
it's got a very thin albumin coating. Album, of course, is egg white. So let's have
a little peek there. Yep, that's very thin.
That's what you'd expect from the 1850s, 1860s, so we can rule out a modern fake.
So we've established that the photograph was taken around the same time that Carol
was seeing the littles what about the kind of camera being used for this? Well, he
used an Otoegals folding camera. It's the sort of camera that it would have been
taken with two wooden boxes, one slightly smaller than the other, just sliding into
each other. Was the photograph developed using the same method that Carol used?
This was called the wet collodion process, in which chemicals are poured over a
glass negative a little bit earlier than this, and it would have been from a paper
negative and then it wouldn't have been quite so crisp. This print has been
printed from a wet colloidium negative. So can you just, given what you've been
looking at so far, can you sum up for us what we know and what we don't know about
this photograph? Well, it's taken using a negative process that Carol used. It's
printed on the sort of paper that he used about the right date.
So, so far everything fits. We have an inscription on the old mount saying Lorena
Lidl and Elle Carroll. But is there anything on the back of the print itself? The
way to find out is by thinning down the corners. Carol began using his studio in
1863.
He typically numbered his pictures. Although some of the records for the early
1860s are missing, one would expect each print to be numbered. But this print has
been cropped. The negative is larger than the photograph. Right.
So it's possible that it was there and it's been snipped off. Doesn't look like
there's anything there. What does that mean, do you think, for the absence of one?
Doesn't really prove anything because, as I say, it might have been trimmed off.
Overall. We've put this photograph through a number of different tests and you've
given us your scientific opinion about it all. What's your gut instinct? My gut
instinct? Is it's by Lewis Carroll?
Yeah. Why is that? Just everything about it, really, you know, that was so
interesting because I'd half expected our expert to say, no, this couldn't possibly
have been taken by Lewis Carroll, it was from the wrong period, or was actually an
out and out fake. But in fact, even though we didn't find an inscription by Lewis
Carroll himself, we now know that was developed using the same process as Carol
would have been used, a similar camera and actually that it dates from the period
when Lorena Little herself would have been a young teenager. Back in London, I'm
on my way to see forensic imagery analyst David Anly.
He works as an expert witness in court cases and he's going to compare the
characteristics in known photographs of Lorena at different ages with a photograph
that we found. If we start with the eyebrows now, the image at the top here is of
the older Lorena as an adult. The image in the middle is the younger Lorena and the
one at the bottom is the girl in your photograph. There are certain similarities.
The line of the eyebrows is consistent and there is a further consistency in their
depth at various points.
If we then go on to the eyes, you can see that there is a fairly hooded appearance
and this feature appears consistent both with the girl in the photograph and of
Lorena. If we look at the nose again in terms of the width of the nose at the
nasian here, the point between the eyes, the bridge and the width of the ailee,
the fleshy pads on the side of the nose there, those are all broadly consistent, as
is the apparent form of the nostrils. To my inexpert eye, they do look remarkably
similar. They are similar and there are certainly no indications there of a
significant difference. And then the upper and lower lips, these, to me, are most
interesting of the features that we see here.
All three images appear to show a cupid's bow in the upper lip, but most
interestingly, the lower lip is fairly prominent and protruding in the center and
on the right hand side, but over on the left it fades away. And that's evident
here in the girl on the photograph here on the younger arena and still evident to a
degree here in the older arena overall, what are you able to tell us about this
photograph? Well, if I was doing a comparison such as this for a court case, I
would say, forensically speaking, we would say that there is moderate support for
the contention that the girl in the photograph is Lorena, as shown in the other
images. As this is not for a court case, I'm prepared to get off the fence a
little bit and say that, in my opinion, I would say it's her. We can't say for
certain that this is a photograph of Lorena Little, but we have established that
it's not a fake, it's a genuine photograph, and it's from the exact period when
Lorena Little herself would have been a young teenager.
If true, this casts a further troubling light on the life of Louis Carroll and also
offers a possible explanation for that mysterious rift between him and the Little
family.
So this is where our investigations have taken us. Now, of course, we've got no
provenance directly linking Carol with this photograph, but why would someone
bother to label it as Lorena middle? She was a pretty obscure figure at the time.
The questions which hang over this photograph mirror the larger controversies about
Louis Carroll's life. Ideas which are strongly resisted by his many admirers, who
say that we're trying to impose modern values on a very different age.
Perhaps we'll never find out the real truth about Louis Carroll, however much we
delve. But as we come to celebrate the 150th anniversary of this book, we can
marvel at the way this pedantic cloistered mathematics don has managed to capture
the imagination of children throughout the world. The man, however flawed, has
written a work of genius that's been rediscovered generation after generation.
In a new series of a good read, maureen Lippman and Frankie Boyle talk about their
favorite books. That's Tuesday afternoon at 430 on Radio Four, a powerful coming of
age tale about a pair of teenage girls. Here on BBC Two tonight, Ginger and Rosa is
a film later, 1030. That's after a selection of Qi moments worth watching again.
Next.