All I have to do is dream"

"I do hope its my dream -I don’t like belonging to another persons"

There were two versions of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Both were fakes, skilled imposters and subtle chameleons. The duplicate incarnations of Charles circulated in late Victorian Britain. One of the split selves was Dodgson the masterful author of one of the greatest books of absurdist literature, a dream work of anarchic invention whose power has reverberated through time. The other was Dodgson the stern, pious mathematician, a geometrically ordered stiff collar who shook his head and wrote admonitioning letters to the Times. The two divided selves rarely met, held apart by the rigid partitions of Victorian morality and probity. Like incompatible atoms it was necessary for the two to occupy different planes of existence.

The more publicly known and respectable copy of Charles was born in 1832 in Daresbury, Cheshire. As was customary at the time, he was part of a large family, the third of eleven children and eldest son. Dodgson’s father, as well as being blessed with fertile loins, was also a graduate of Christs Church Oxford. Throughout his life he was consumed with a passion for his twin loves, the church (he practiced as a reverend) and mathematics. The limited details of the young Charles’ youth reveal a childhood wielded to the bonds of a family life, as well as filled with rigorous religious instruction and a devout respect for the authority of logic. Typically for the stereotypical upper class child, Charles had a stammer. Do - do - Dodgson was by all accounts a sensitive, socially awkward child.

Displaying the kind of ingrained brutality, characteristic of upper class Victorian life, do – do - Dodgson was packed off to Rugby Public School; in order to make a man of him. As his diaries in later life hinted at, the stifling conformity and ritualized violence of Rugby, resulted in him experiencing a profound period of unhappiness. Any residue childhood innocence he had preserved was no doubt crushed. This was quickly followed by him appearing to happily tread in the footsteps of his father – he too studied mathematics at Oxford. As with his father, his devotion to mathematical precision was aligned with a burgeoning love of the ‘good book’. On graduating, Dodgson took up a teaching post at the college, spending the next twenty-five years within its comfortable rarefied environment of scholarly enquiry. Later he again followed his father’s path, and became a preacher. For many observers it must have appeared that Dodgson was the epitome of a Victorian gentleman - respectable, conservative and parochial. For his part, Dodgson kept up the masquerade – he wrote prodigiously on mathematics and theology, as well campaigning for such varied causes as electoral reform and an all women’s university. However, shortly before his death in 1898 his veneer of ordinariness and respectability began to slip away. Only near the end of his life did his secret passions and obsessions, and his other self, became worryingly visible for those closest to him.

The other, secret Dodgson existed, like his famous literary heroine in an inverted mirror world. This incarnation delighted in playfully pricking the authority of reason and order, in book after book of highly hallucinogenic prose. This Dodgson delighted in offering a richly comical, frequently grotesque version of Victorian social of life, which appeared to mock everything the other Dodgson publicly, held so dear. While the respectable reverend was a stickler for obsessive tidiness, punctuality, good manners and order, this secret, alternative Dodgson, reveled in parodying the bastions of Victorian life – the monarchy, the law, the education system. Here was a man who was seemingly at war with himself, who was only able to contain his irrational, nonsensical secret self through the release valve of his writing. For the writer Hugh Haughton, Dodgson’s travesties of authority "dramatized the puzzling nature of identity in a world dominated by rules and rulers that remain obstinately unpredictable and indecipherable" . Apparently, Dodgson was a very English, Victorian Kafka.

The diaries of this Oxford scholar and Reverend reveal a man largely devoid of introspection or self-reflexivity, instead it is in his dream books that the irresolvable riddles of his self, are explored vicariously through the trials and tribulations of his heroine. Unfortunately his dreams cathartic power to release him from the shackles of his everyday existence, to protect him from numbing hollowness of his polite Victorian life, were ultimately not enough, and he polluted his fantasies with the real. In this respect arts ability to liberate the self was ultimately insufficient for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was after all, better known by his alias, Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice in Wonderland stories. We now know that something happened between do- do - Dodgson and his real life muse Alice Liddell (the inspiration and it now seems object of Dodgson’s obsessions and passions). Something that was so traumatic that Dodgson’s friendship with the young girl and her family was abruptly severed.

John Beagles 2003.

FOOTNOTES:
1. Hugh Haughton "introduction" to Alice in Wonderland published by Penguin, 1998.
2. As has often been noted the Alice stories are two of the most frequently quoted or appropriated pieces of English literature. Their popularity is unprecedented, and their influence as disparate as ever – from the Matrix to Tom Waits’ recent album Alice – the warped world of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson continues to cast a long shadow