On Lewis Carroll’s birthday, revisit Adam Gopnik on how the controversial author of “Alice in Wonderland” inspired the British modernists.
Contemporary people, it seems, like split personalities just as much as their Romantic predecessors did, though for a different reason. The old cult of the divided self was, at its secret heart, optimistic and expansive, implying that every quality included its opposite, and that anyone could be anything: a tender aesthete might lead the Arabs in revolt; a novelist by day might be a rake by night.
The new picture of Dodgson is achieved honestly—by the slow accumulation of detail rather than by a willful “rereading.” Cohen, a professor emeritus at, has devoted most of his life to studying Dodgson, and done it with a real scholar’s modesty and diligence. He sometimes sounds more Victorian than his subject, but he is a genuine authority on Dodgson, and we are unlikely to need another. Cohen’s will remain the indispensable book on the subject.
—otherwise you know, they are not humble enough. So I sit at the further end of the room; outside the door sits the scout; outside the outer door sits the sub-scout; halfway down stairs sits the sub-sub-scout; and down in the yard sits theChrist Church may have been a glamorous place, but, like every other Victorian institution, it was thought, in some vague way, to be in need of reform.
That he was in love with her no one disputes, and that she was intrinsically lovable no one should dispute. But what, exactly, did that mean? “If this is taken to mean that he wanted to marry her or make love to her, there is not the slightest evidence for it,” Martin Gardner wrote a generation ago. Cohen thinks that he wanted to do both.
Two things about these events matter for lovers of the “Alice” books. The first is that the peculiar strength of Alice’s character in the books—and she is one of the few completely sane, self-assertive, and undamaged female characters in English fiction created between Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf—comes, out of the strength of a particular person. Alice is a portrait, not a projection.
This must have been—in its breathlessness and slightly unhinged detail , and even in its inevitable reference to “artistic” needs—a creepy letter for a parent to get. Surprisingly, the Mayhews reacted mildly, granting Dodgson permission to do the pictures on condition that Mrs.
The Alice of the John Tenniel woodcuts looks nothing like her original. We have become so accustomed to Tenniel’s illustrations as dry counterpoint to Carroll’s genius that it is hard to remember that Tenniel was incomparably the more famous of the two men when they first collaborated.
One process, which Cohen describes but whose significance he doesn’t elaborate on, is the growth of the university and, with it, the birth of modern intellectual life. Dodgson’s forty-eight years at Christ Church saw the transformation of Oxford from what was essentially a theological seminary with a finishing school for the wealthy attached into something like a modern university—a place where people go to talk about ideas.
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