This article accompanies
Alice's Mirrors



Oxford and Lewis Carroll

Oxford, the “city of dreaming spires” can lay claim to most of the great writers of English fantasy literature: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, Dr. Seuss (American of course), but also Oscar Wilde and T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), who couldn’t resist a little embellishment.  But the greatest of them all was Lewis Carroll.

Carroll (or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) has been condemned as a pedophile or a eunuch, indecently obsessed with young girls like Alice, and taking photos of them from 1856 onwards.  These absurd charges belong in the eyes of the beholders and they have been properly discredited elsewhere (notably Karoline Leach’s In the Shadow of the Dreamchild).  What impresses me most about Carroll, besides his brilliant writing, is his ability to enter the world of a child, both in photographs like the one below and in his tales, and this is something his constipated critics seem completely unable to do.

The girl in the photo is Irene MacDonald, daughter of the writer George MacDonald, in 1863.  It was the MacDonalds who urged Carroll to publish Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which appeared in 1865.  The book’s settings may be imaginary, but it does seem that they got their start in stories told by Carroll to the Liddell children on picnics and boat trips on the Thames around Oxford, between Godstow to the north and Nuneham Courtenay to the south.  Agatha Christie is buried a little further south in Cholsey.  Below is a photo of Carroll, also from 1863.

Virginia Woolf has been much quoted on the subject:"the two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children." But she's right: I know I didn't enjoy the books as a child.