Retrospective Freudian interpretation has a lot to answer for - particularly when applied to a long-dead individual's life and/ or work. Sensation now overshadows textual scholarship and fact, as many biographers and critics focus on an artist's sexuality. Ambivalence and moral debate continue to surround Nabokov's masterpiece, Lolita, and the examination of the sexuality of Shakespeare or Jane Austen is an outrageous presumption.
Another victim of cavalier Freudianism is Lewis Carroll - the Rev Charles Lutwidge Dodgson - who died 100 years ago today , aged 66. Author of the brilliantly subversive Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1866) and Through The Looking Glass (1871), pioneering master of the absurd, Oxford maths don and inventor who neither married nor took full orders, he was a singular genius. His fascination with little girls - "I am fond of children (except boys)" he once wrote - has been endlessly chronicled, as has his habit of photographing them, at times without their clothes but always with parental consent. Quiet, shy and handsome, Carroll was slightly deaf and had a stammer which left him with a facial tic. His maths lectures were famously boring and he had no facility for preaching. By nature he was gentle, fastidious, prim and contentedly asexual, openly seeking the company of children. Two published volumes of diaries indicate he enjoyed his life.
Central to that life and certainly to the remarkable imagination which created Alice's fabulous escapades is Carroll's adoration of childhood, which is matched by his sadness at its brevity. At the close of Wonderland, Alice's elder sister muses about the little girl in later years "remembering her own child life". The bullrushes Alice desperately tries to gather probably symbolise childhood's fleeting beauty.
If Carroll features in his own work, it is as the White Knight, a dreamy, melancholic character who seems inept and eccentric. It can not be mere coincidence that the Knight - aside from the crazy White Queen - is the only character who is polite and kindly to the little girl. Instead of shouting orders and tricking her with exasperatingly clever illogically logical word games, he notices she is sad and sings to her. "Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The Looking Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again as if it had only been yesterday."
Much has been written about the violence and dark imagery of the Alice books, but this is due as much to Sir John Tenniel's wonderfuly grotesque illustration which reflect many nuances of Victorian society; from the politics of Disraeli and Gladstone, to Darwin, to Queen Victoria herself. Carroll employed his mathematical and linguistic talents in creating a skillfully multi-layered narrative, featuring a cast of misfits in interconnected stories which also stand as comic set pieces. No blacker than the stories of Roald Dahl, Carroll's work was inventive, daring and, in a rigidly puritanical age in which heavy-handed moralising as typified by the hectoring Red Queen dominated, non-didactic in intent. First written down as "Alice's Adventures Under Ground" Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was inspired by young Alice Liddell, the middle daughter of the first three born to the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford. Carroll began his story while boating with them on that "golden afternoon" of July 4th 1862.
An adventurer in the age of exploration, the fictional Alice is not only brave, clever, curious and observant, she is outspoken and ambitious: "I want to be a Queen" she says. Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) was already subverting many Victorian beliefs and Carroll in his careful, respectful way appears to be, if not challenging, at least encouraging doubts as to what is real and what is not: ` "I see Nobody on the road," said Alice. "I only wish I had such eyes," the King remarked in a fretful tone. "To be able to see Nobody! . . . Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people by this light." '
A preoccupation with ageing underlies the work. "One can't help growing older" says Alice to a fatalistic Humpty Dumpty, who retorts "One can't, perhaps but two can." It's a loaded quip worthy of Beckett, into whose plays much of Carroll's dialogue could easily fit. One also wonders had Kafka read him? A century after his death, the Alice books remain hilarious, original, unforgettable and above all, a monument to childhood as the time in our lives when the imagination is at its most magnificently defiant.
