Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (262 page)

When the boy was eleven, a great change came into his life.
Sir Robert Peel, the famous statesman, presented to his father the Crown living of Croft, a Yorkshire village about three miles from Darlington.
A Crown living is always an exceptionally good one, as it is usually given by royal favor, and accompanied by a comfortable salary.
Mr.
Dodgson was sorry to leave his old parishioners and the little parsonage where he had seen so much quiet happiness, but he was glad at the same time, to get away from the dullness and monotony of Daresbury.
With a growing family of children it was absolutely necessary to come more into contact with people, and Croft was a typical, delightful English town, famous even to-day for its baths and medicinal waters.
Before Mr.
Dodgson’s time it was an important posting-station for the coaches running between London and Edinburgh, and boasted of a fine hotel near the rectory, used later by gentlemen in the hunting season.

Mr.
Dodgson’s parish consisted not only of Croft proper, but included the neighboring hamlets of Halnaby, Dalton and Stapleton, so he was a pretty busy man going from one to the other, and the little Dodgsons were busy, too, making new friends and settling down into their new and commodious quarters.

The village of Croft is on the river Tees, in fact it stands on the dividing line between Yorkshire and Durham.
A bridge divides the two counties, and midway on it is a stone which marks the boundary line.
It was an old custom for certain landholders to stand on this bridge at the coming of each new Bishop of Durham, and to present him with an old sword, with an appropriate address of welcome.
This sword the Bishop returned immediately.

The Tees often overflowed its banks—indeed, floods were not infrequent in these smiling English landscape countries, kept so fertile and green by the tiny streams which intersect them.
Two or three heavy rainfalls will swell the waters, sending them rushing over the country with enormous force.
Jean Ingelow in her poem “High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire” paints a vivid picture of the havoc such a flood may make in a peaceful land:

 “Where the river, winding down,

Onward floweth to the town.”

But the quaint old church at Croft has doubtless weathered more than one overflow from the restless river Tees.

The rectory, a large brick house, with a sloping tile roof and tall chimneys, stood well back in a very beautiful garden, filled with all sorts of rare plants, intersected by winding gravel paths.
As in all English homes, the kitchen garden was a most attractive spot; its high walls were covered with luxuriant fruit trees, and everybody knows that English “wall fruit” is the most delicious kind.
The trees are planted very close to the wall, and the spreading boughs, when they are heavy with the ripening fruit, are not bent with the weight of it, but are thoroughly propped and supported by these walls of solid brick, so the undisturbed fruit comes to a perfect maturity without any of the accidents which occur in the ordinary orchard.
The garden itself was bright with kitchen greens, filled with everything needed for household use.

With so much space the little Dodgsons had room to grow and “multiply” to the full eleven, and fine times they had with plays and games, usually invented by their clever brother.
One of the principal diversions was a toy railroad with “stations” built at various sections of the garden, usually very pretty and rustic looking, planned and built by Charles himself.
He also made a rude train out of a wheelbarrow, a barrel, and a small truck, and was able to convey his passengers comfortably from station to station, exacting fare at each trip.

He was something of a conjurer, too, and in wig and gown, could amaze his audience for hours with his inexhaustible supply of tricks.
He also made some quaint-looking marionettes, and a theater for them to act in, even writing the plays, which were masterpieces in their way.
Once he traced a maze upon the snow-covered lawn of the rectory.

Mazes were often found in the real old-time gardens of England; they consisted of intersecting paths bordered by clipped shrubbery and generally arranged in geometrical designs, very puzzling to the unwary person who got lost in them, unable to discover a way out, until by some happy accident the right path was found.
“Threading the Maze” was a fashionable pastime in the days of the Tudors; the maze at Hampton Court being one of the most remarkable of that period.

Charles’s early knowledge of mathematics made his work on the snow-covered lawn all the more remarkable, for the love of that particular branch of learning certainly grew with his growth.

Meanwhile, it was a very serious, earnest little boy, who looked down the long line of Dodgsons, saying with a choke in his voice: “I must leave you and this lovely rectory, and this fair, smiling countryside, and go to school.”

He was shy, and the thought struck terror; but everybody who is anybody in England goes to some fine public school before becoming an Oxford or a Cambridge student, and for that reason Charles Lutwidge Dodgson buried his regrets beneath a smiling face, bade farewell to his household, and at the mature age of twelve, armed with enough Greek and Latin to have made a dictionary, with a knowledge of mathematics that a college “don” might well have envied, set forth to this alluring world of books and learning.

CHAPTER II.

SCHOOL DAYS AT RICHMOND AND RUGBY.

With the removal to Croft, Mr.
Dodgson was brought more and more into prominence; he was appointed examing chaplain to the Bishop of Ripon, and finally he was made Archdeacon of Richmond and one of the Canons of Ripon Cathedral.

The Grammar School at Richmond was well known in that section of England.
It was under the rule of a certain Mr.
Tate, whose father, Dr.
Tate, had made the school famous some years before, and it was there that our Boy had his first taste of school life.

Holidays in those days were not arranged as they are now, for one of the first letters of Charles, sent home from Richmond, was dated August 5th; so it is probable that the term began in midsummer.
This special letter was written to his two eldest sisters and gives an excellent picture of those first days, when as a “new boy” he suffered at the hands of his schoolmates.
As advanced as he was in Latin and Greek and mathematics, this letter, for a twelve-year-old boy, does not show any remarkable progress in English.
The spelling was precise and correct, but the punctuation was peculiar, to say the least.

Still his description of the school life, when one overcame the presence of commas and the absence of periods, presented a vivid picture to the mind.
He tells of the funny tricks the boys played upon him because he was a “new boy.”
One was called “King of the Cobblers.”
He was told to sit on the ground while the boys gathered around him and to say “Go to work”; immediately they all fell upon him, and kicked and knocked him about pretty roughly.
Another trick was “The Red Lion,” and was played in the churchyard; they made a mark on a tombstone and one of the boys ran toward it with his finger pointed and eyes shut, trying to see how near he could get to the mark.
When
his
turn came, and he walked toward the tombstone, some boy who stood ready beside it, had his mouth open to bite the outstretched finger on its way to the mark.
He closes his letter by stating three uncomfortable things connected with his arrival—the loss of his toothbrush and his failure to clean his teeth for several days in consequence; his inability to find his blotting-paper, and his lack of a shoe-horn.

The games the Richmond boys played—football, wrestling, leapfrog and fighting—he slurred over contemptuously, they held no attraction for him.

A schoolboy or girl of the present day can have no idea of the discomforts of school life in Charles Dodgson’s time, and the boy whose gentle manners were the result of sweet home influence and association with girls, found the rough ways of the English schoolboy a constant trial.
Strong and active as he was, he was always up in arms for those weaker and smaller than himself.
Bullying enraged him, and distasteful as it was, he soon learned the art of using his fists for the protection of himself and others.
These were the school-days of
Nicholas Nickleby
,
David Copperfield
, and
Little Paul Dombey
.
Of course, all schoolmasters were not like
Squeers
or
Creakle
, nor all schoolmasters’ wives like
Mrs.
Squeers
, nor indeed all schools like Dotheboys’ Hall or Salem Hall, or
Dr.
Blimber’s
cramming establishment, but many of the inconveniences were certainly prominent in the best schools.

Flogging was considered the surest road to knowledge; kind, honest, liberal-minded teachers kept a birch-rod and a ferrule within gripping distance, and the average schoolboy thus treated like a little beast, could be pardoned for behaving like one.
In spring or summer the big, bare, comfortless schoolhouses were all very well, but when the days grew chill, the small boy shivered on his hard bench in his draughty corner, and in winter time the scarcity of fires was trying to ordinary flesh and blood.
The poor unfortunate who rose at six, and had to fetch and carry his own water from an outdoor pump, or if he had taken the precaution to draw it the night before, had found it frozen in his pitcher, was not to be blamed if washing was merely a figure of speech.

Mr.
and Mrs.
Tate were most considerate to their boys, and Richmond was a model school of its class.
Charles loved his “kind old schoolmaster” as he called him, and he was not alone in this feeling, for Mr.
Tate’s influence over the boys was maintained through the affection and respect they had for him.
Of course he let them “fight it out” among themselves according to the boy-nature; but the earnest little fellow with the grave face and the eager, questioning eyes, attracted him greatly, and he began to study him in his keen, kind way, finding much to admire and praise in the letters which he wrote to his father, and predicting for him a bright career.
Admitting that he had found young Dodgson superior to other boys, he wisely suggested that he should never know this fact, but should learn to love excellence for its own sake, and not for the sake of excelling.

Charles made quite a name for himself during those first school days.
Mathematics still fascinated him and Latin grew to be second nature; he stood finely in both, and while at Richmond he developed another taste, the love of composition, often contributing to the school magazine.
The special story recorded was called “The Unknown One,” but doubtless many a rhyme and jingle which could be traced to him found its way into this same little magazine, not forgetting odd sketches which he began to do at a very early age.
They were all rough, for the most part grotesque, but full of simple fun and humor, for the quiet studious schoolboy loved a joke.

Charles stayed at the Richmond school for three years; then he took the next step in an English boy’s life, he entered Rugby, one of the great public schools.

In America, a public school is a school for the people, where free instruction is given to all alike; but the English public school is another thing.
It is a school for gentlemen’s sons, where tuition fees are far from small, and “extras” mount up on the yearly bills.

Rugby had become a very celebrated school when the great Dr.
Arnold was Head-Master.
Up to that time it was neither so well known nor so popular as Eton, but Dr.
Arnold had governed it so vigorously that his hand was felt long after his untimely death, which occurred just four years before Charles was ready to enter the school.
The Head-Master at that time was, strangely enough, named Tait, spelt a little differently from the Richmond schoolmaster.
Dr.
Tait, who afterwards became Archbishop of Canterbury, was a most capable man, who governed the school for two of the three years that our Boy was a pupil.
The last year, Dr.
Goulburn was Head-Master.

Charles found Rugby a great change from the quiet of Richmond.
He went up in February of 1846, the beginning of the second term, when football was in full swing.
The teams practiced on the broad open campus known as “Big-side,” and a “new boy” could only look on and applaud the great creatures who led the game.
Rugby was swarming with boys—three hundred at least—from small fourteen-year-olders of the lowest “form,” or class, to those of eighteen or twenty of the fifth and sixth, the highest forms.
They treated little Dodgson in their big, burly, schoolboy fashion, hazed him to their hearts’ content when he first entered, shrugging their shoulders good-naturedly over his love of study, in preference to the great games of cricket and football.

To have a fair glimpse of our Boy’s life at this period, some little idea of Rugby and its surroundings might serve as a guide.
Those who visit the school to-day, with its pile of modern, convenient, and ugly architecture, have no conception of what it was over sixty years ago, and even in 1846 it bore no resemblance to the original school founded by one Lawrence Sheriffe, “citizen and grocer of London” during the reign of Henry VIII.
To begin with, it is situated in Shakespeare’s own country, Warwickshire on the Avon River, and that in itself was enough to rouse the interest of any musing, bookish boy like Charles Dodgson.

From “Tom Brown’s School Days,” that ever popular book by Thomas Hughes, we may perhaps understand the feelings of the “new boy” just passing through the big, imposing school gates, with the oriel window above, and entering historic Rugby.

What first struck his view was the great school field or “close” as they called it, with its famous elms, and next, “the long line of gray buildings, beginning with the chapel and ending with the schoolhouse, the residence of the Head-Master where the great flag was lazily waving from the highest round tower.”

As we follow
Tom Brown
through
his
first day, we can imagine our Boy’s sensations when he found himself in this howling wilderness of boys.
The eye of a boy is as keen as that of a girl regarding dress, and before
Tom Brown
was allowed to enter Rugby gates he was taken into the town and provided with a cat-skin cap, at seven and sixpence.

“‘You see,’ said his friend as they strolled up toward the school gates, in explanation of his conduct, ‘a great deal depends on how a fellow cuts up at first.
If he’s got nothing odd about him and answers straightforward, and holds his head up, he gets on.’”

Having passed the gates,
Tom
was taken first to the matron’s room, to deliver up his trunk key, then on a tour of inspection through the schoolhouse hall which opened into the quadrangle.
This was “a great room, thirty feet long and eighteen high or thereabouts, with two great tables running the whole length, and two large fireplaces at the side with blazing fires in them.”

This hall led into long dark passages with a fire at the end of each, and this was the hallway upon which the studies opened.

Now, to Charles Dodgson as well as to
Tom Brown
, a study conjured up untold luxury; it was in truth a “Rugby boy’s citadel” usually six feet long and four feet broad.
It was rather a gloomy light which came in through the bars and grating of the one window, but these precautions had to be taken with the studies on the ground floor, to keep the small boys from slipping out after “lock-up” time.

Under the window was usually a wooden table covered with green baize, a three-legged stool, a cupboard, and nails for hat and coat.
The rest of the furnishings included “a plain flat-bottom candlestick with iron extinguisher and snuffers, a wooden candle-box, a staff-handle brush, leaden ink-pot, basin and bottle for washing the hands, and a saucer or gallipot for soap.”
There was always a cotton curtain or a blind before the window.
For such a mansion the Rugby schoolboy paid from ten to fifteen shillings a year, and the tenant bought his own furniture.
Tom Brown
had a “hard-seated sofa covered with red stuff,” big enough to hold two in a “tight squeeze,” and he had, besides, a good, stout, wooden chair.
Those boys who had looking-glasses in their rooms were able to comb their own locks, those who were not so fortunate went to what was known as the “combing-house” and had it done for them.

Unfortunately there are recorded very few details of these school-days at Rugby.
We can only conjecture, from our knowledge of the boy and his studious ways, that Charles Dodgson’s study was his castle, his home, and freehold while he was in the school.
He drew around him a circle of friends, for the somewhat sober lad had the gift of talking, and could be jolly and entertaining when he liked.

The chapel at Rugby was an unpretentious Gothic building, very imposing and solemn to little Dodgson, who had been brought up in a most reverential way, but the Rugbeans viewed it in another light.
Tom Brown’s
chosen chum explained it to him in this wise:

“That’s the chapel you see, and there just behind it is the place for fights; it’s most out of the way for masters, who all live on the other side and don’t come by here after first lesson or callings-over.
That’s when the fights come off.”

All this must have shocked the simple, law-abiding son of a clergyman.
It took from four to six years to tame the average Rugby boy, but little Charles needed no discipline; he was not a “goody-goody” boy, he simply had a natural aversion to rough games and sports.
He liked to keep a whole skin, and his mind clear for his studies; he was fond of tramping through the woods, or fishing along the banks of the pretty, winding Avon, or rowing up and down the river, or lying on some grassy slope, still weaving the many odd fancies which grew into clearer shape as the years passed.
The boys at Rugby did not know he was a genius, he did not know it himself, happy little lad, just a bit quiet and old-fashioned, for the noisy, blustering life about him.
In fact, strange as it may seem, Charles Dodgson was never really a little boy until he was quite grown up.