The Looking Glass House (22 page)

Postscript

My story is based on real characters and real events, but I have moved the scenes around and, of course, fictionalized them. I have also compressed the seven years of Alice’s friendship with Mr Dodgson into the space of one year.

But because I have based most of my characters on real people, it may be of interest to recount what did actually happen to them, in the Victorian tradition.

Charles Dodgson was forced to watch from the sidelines as he was replaced by a far more important suitor, Prince Leopold, Victoria’s youngest son. Oxford gossip had it that Lorina was angling for a royal match; she was satirized by Dodgson as a ‘kingfisher’ in one of his pamphlets. Nothing came of the affair, however. Queen Victoria would never have allowed her son to marry a commoner and she put an end to it. But Alice and Leopold’s feelings endured: each named one of their children after the other, and Leopold was godfather to his namesake, Alice’s second son.

In 1880, Alice married Reginald Hargreaves, a well-off country gentleman whose favoured pursuits were dispatching animals in the name of sport. She settled into life as the wife of a county gentleman: village committee meetings, running her household, bringing up her three sons. She does not mention it in her letters but I cannot help thinking she must have been bored: Reggie was not an intellectual match for her, and they were often apart as Reggie embarked on one shooting party after another. It was a far cry from her glamorous childhood.

Alice saw Dodgson very rarely after her marriage. She asked him to be godfather to one of her sons, but he refused when he found out it was a boy.

Dodgson did not forget her, however. The memory of Alice as a seven-year-old girl endured, grew more perfect even, fed by Dodgson’s fondness for melancholy and nostalgia. ‘My mental picture is as vivid as ever,’ he wrote in 1885, ‘of one who was, through so many years, my ideal child-friend. I have had scores of child-friends since your time, but they have been quite a different thing.’

Mary Prickett continued to work for the Liddells for many years. In 1871, at the age of thirty-eight, she married Charles Foster, a prosperous local wine merchant and owner of the Mitre Hotel, one of the best hotels in Oxford. Mary, at last, had a place of her own, and as proprietor, social standing too.

The story of the Alice books, of course, continues to run and run. Alice treasured the handwritten manuscript until she was an old lady, selling it only just before she died to pay her husband’s death duties, for the then astronomical fee of £15,400. It came into the possession of Eldrige R. Johnson, the American phono­graph millionaire; and when he died it was bought by a group of Americans, who presented it to the British people ‘in recogni­tion of Britain’s courage in facing Hitler before America came into the war’. The manuscript now lives in the British Library.
Alice in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking Glass
have entered the public psyche and are said to be the third most quoted works of literature after Shakespeare and the Bible.

A short untangling of fact and fiction. The letters at the end of the book that Mrs Liddell reads are actual letters Dodgson wrote, but to other children. ‘My mother tore up all the letters that Mr Dodgson wrote to me when I was a little girl,’ Alice told her son, my grandfather, Caryl, in ‘Alice’s Recollections of Carrollian Days’ published in the
Cornhill Magazine
. And yes – his name really was Caryl, and although Alice denied that it had anything to do with Lewis Carroll, it seems a pretty big coincidence.

Dodgson’s diaries do not reveal much about his inner life, except for his exhortations to be a better man. My suggestion that he suffered sexual abuse at school is based on a quote, written later: ‘I cannot say .  .  . that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again .  .  . I can honestly say that if I could have been .  .  . secure from annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would have been com­parative trifles to bear.’ Added to which, sexual abuse was common at public schools in those days.

There is no evidence that Dodgson was a paedophile, except for in the classical sense, as a lover of children. After Alice’s time he had many other child friends. He met new children on the beach, where he advanced towards them with pins to save their dresses from the sea; he fell into conversation with them on trains; he approached mothers he knew to have daughters of a suitable age – that age being in Dodgson’s case around seven years old – even, once their mothers’ permission had been gained, photographing them nude. One must not forget that in those days this was more normal than it is now – it was the pursuit of women of one’s own age that was absolutely not allowed.

And yet I find something odd in this quest, even trying to look at it through Victorian eyes. Whilst I believe that he did not actually touch any of these little girls, I think his lens was focused on them to an unusual degree, especially in his later years.

Alice remained silent on the matter, in private and in public, except for a rather anodyne piece written by her son, my grand­father, in the
Cornhill Magazine
in 1932. Dodgson used to tell her stories, she said, and then take her picture. ‘Being pho­tographed was therefore a joy to us and not a penance, as it is to most children. We looked forward to the happy hours in the mathematical tutor’s rooms.’

The gossip at the time in Oxford, and the tradition in my family too, was that Dodgson was too fond of Alice. Some said he wanted to marry her. For my part I cannot imagine him actu­ally proposing, to Alice or anyone else. But that does not mean that he was not in love with her in his own way.

My mother owned a letter written to Alice by Ina when they were both old ladies. Ina had been questioned about the split that occurred between Dodgson and the Liddell family by Florence Becker Lennon who was writing a biography of Dodgson. ‘I don’t suppose you remember when Mr Dodgson ceased coming to the Deanery? I said his manner became too affectionate to you as you grew older and that Mother spoke to him about it and that had offended him so he ceased coming to visit us again as one had to give some reason for all intercourse ceasing. I don’t think you could have been more than 9 or 10 on account of my age! I must put it a bit differently for Mrs B’s book.  .  .  . Mr Dodgson used to take you on his knee .  .  . I did
not
say that!’

This letter can be read in two ways. Either Ina is lying, and the truth is elsewhere, for example, that Mr Dodgson was court­ing Ina. The other explanation is that Ina felt under pressure to come up with a reason for the split to Florence Becker Lennon, and is explaining to Alice why she let the truth slip. The com ­ment about Alice sitting on Mr Dodgson’s knee seems to bear this out.

As far as character goes, I have coloured in interior lives from known facts. Some examples: Mary was called Pricks by the chil­dren, ‘the thorny kind’, as Dodgson put it. As Alice later wrote, she was not ‘the highly educated governess of today’. She came from a relatively lowly family and was ashamed of it: her father was a steward at Trinity College, but she called him a ‘gentle­man’, which he was not, according to the standards of the day. There were rumours around Oxford that Charles Dodgson was courting Mary, and no doubt she would have heard those rumours, although there is no textural evidence that Mary had feelings for him.

For the character of Mrs Liddell I read the letters that she wrote to her husband and children, which were owned by my family, and of course Charles Dodgson’s diaries, which docu­ment the split from the family as well as her various ups and downs. She was a well-known figure around Oxford; the ditty, ‘I am the Dean, this Mrs Liddell,’ was current at the time.

Mr Wilton, Mary’s mother and Mrs Chitterworth are all entirely fictional.

Wherever possible I have relied on existing source materials, which include Lewis Carroll’s diaries;
The Rectory Magazine
and
Mischmash
(ed. Dodgson Dodgson);
Curiosa Mathematica
,
Part II: Pillow Problems
;
The ‘Wonderland’ Postage-Stamp-Case, Invented by Lewis Carroll (Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-writing)
;
The Collected Verse of Lewis Carroll
;
Collected Letters of Lewis Carroll
(ed. Morton Cohen);
Lewis Carroll Interviews and Recollections
(ed. Morton Cohen);
Memoirs of H. G. Liddell
by Henry Thompson; Alice’s recollec­tion of Carrollian days as told to Caryl Hargreaves in the
Cornhill Magazine
; the
Historical Journal
, Vol. 22, Alden’s
Illustrated Family Miscellany
and
Oxford Monthly Record
. Also a number of family letters once owned by my mother; Henry Liddell’s handwritten diary which, although it does not cover the events of
The Looking Glass House
, were good for atmosphere and character. And of course, family recollection.