A House of Air. Hermione Lee

inch from her first principles.

      She didn’t believe in charity as such. What she asked for, for everyone, was access to education, employment at a fair wage, and, above all, space ‘for the sight of sky and of things growing.’ She felt strongly that people, and the poor in particular, needed open space, but she also set herself to see that they got it. This is the work for which she is now best remembered, as one of the founders of the National Trust. The campaign, based on the open spaces movement in the United States, began in the late 1880s with a protest against the closing of rights of way and footpaths. The first stretch of land to be presented to the trust was four and a half rocky acres on the coast of Wales. By the time Hill died, in 1912, the trust’s property had expanded beyond all calculations, and some American conservationists had taken to looking to Hill for inspiration.

      Evidently, to achieve so much, Hill had to be an impressive but also an infuriating woman. Tiny, stout, noticeably badly dressed, with a hat like a pen wiper (her lifetime friend John Ruskin couldn’t bear her dowdiness), she was obstinate—no, more than obstinate, absolutely inflexible. She has been called one of the noblest women ever sent upon earth, but it didn’t do to disagree with Octavia Hill.

      New York Times Magazine, 1999

       In the Golden Afternoon

      Lewis Carroll: A Biography, by Morton N. Cohen, and The Red King’s Dream, or Lewis Carroll in Wonderland, by Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone

      In a letter of 1874 the author of Alice described to a child friend how he had been seen off at the railway station by two affectionate friends, Lewis Carroll and Charles Dodgson. Here he is dividing himself not into two, but three. This was never a matter of conflicting selves. It was a game, though one he took seriously, as mathematicians do.

      Morton N. Cohen, after thirty years of faithful research and scholarship, has undertaken a complete biography of the whole man, and finds himself driven to call him ‘Charles.’ In a certain sense, there is little to relate. Dodgson was born in 1832, the eldest child of the parsonage at Dares-bury in Cheshire, where ‘even the passing of a cart was a matter of great interest.’ He was deaf in one ear and stammered. At Rugby, he suffered uncomplainingly for four years. At home, he edited nursery-table magazines, The Rectory Umbrella and others, for his brothers and sisters, and took responsibility for them when the parents died. In 1851, he went up to Christ Church, and spent the rest of his working life there. He was elected to a studentship in mathematics and became a rather contentious member of the very contentious governing body and Curator of the Common Room, laying down some good wine and, in 1884, instituting afternoon tea. He had rooms, first of all in the Library building, and then, when he had more money, in Tom Quad. His study was as full of devices and puzzles as a toyshop, and up and down his stairs came scores of little girl visitors and their mothers. (When speaking to children, he did not stammer.) As a Ruskinian in search of beauty and, at heart, a gadgeteer, he became a notable amateur photographer. His subjects were almost all celebrities—he stalked the Tennyson family, catching them at last in the Lake District—and children. In 1880, perhaps because the new dry-plates made the whole thing too easy, he put away his camera. In 1867, he had made an expedition to Russia with his old friend Henry Liddon; he never went abroad again, never married, and was ordained only as a deacon, never as priest. Meanwhile he worked relentlessly, though sedately, publishing three hundred titles, of one kind or another, in thirty-five years. He also, of course, became famous, and yet perha ps the most dramatic incident of his life was the river expedition to Nuneham when his whole party, including his aunt, two of his sisters, and Alice herself, got wet through and had to be taken to a friend’s house to dry off. In 1898, almost as an afterthought, Dodgson died of a cold and cough.

      Morton Cohen is as heroic as a biographer, in his way, as Dodgson was with his camera. This means going painstakingly into university and college politics, and making a serious attempt to sum up Dodgson’s professional career. ‘A modest, none too successful lecturer of mathematics,’ in Roger Lancelyn Green’s judgement, ‘whose writings on the subject are hardly remembered to-day.’ This, naturally, is not enough for Cohen, who calls in expert opinion, mostly in favour but sometimes against, on every syllabus, textbook and pamphlet. Then there are the puzzles and ciphers, and the almost unplayable games. Even Cohen, perhaps, hasn’t tried ‘Croquet Castles.’ The book is arranged chronologically, but pauses from time to time to consider a subject at greater length. It is a disadvantage, certainly, that the four years from 1858 to 1862 are missing from Dodgson’s diaries. These volumes would cover the beginning of his acquaintance with Liddell, the Dean of Christ Church, the strong-minded Mrs Liddell and their young family. By 1862, Alice was nearly ten. The fourth of July was the ‘golden afternoon’ (although Cohen anxiously points out that the meteorological records show that it was raining) when Alice and her two sisters listened to the earliest version of her adventures underground. Two years later, Dodgson had apparently fallen quite out of favour at the Deanery. He had applied in vain for leave to take the girls out on the river, ‘but Mrs Liddell will not let any come in future: rather superfluous caution…Help me O God, for Christ’s sake, to live more to Thee. Amen!’ What precisely, or even imprecisely, had gone wrong? Dodgson had disagreed with Liddell over college business, but scholars and Heads of Houses were used to arguments on a much grander scale than this, and the Dean would never have let such things interfere with personal mat ters. Perhaps the worst case of all for a biographer, nothing definable happened at all.

      At this point, Cohen gives way to ungainly speculations. Perhaps, he thinks, in 1863, when the newly married Prince and Princess of Wales visited the Deanery, Alice might have impetuously piped up: ‘I’m going to marry Mr Dodgson.’ And if Charles were present, perhaps taking it as a teasing remark, or not, he might have picked up the thread and replied: ‘Well said, and why not!’ Ah, teasing. That might have much to do with the case. Young females can bat their eyes, shake their heads, toss their locks about, feign innocence, and make outrageous suggestions all with intent to shock and call attention to themselves. And the three clever Liddell sisters were probably expert in these arts.

      The biographer’s task, however, isn’t to picture wild scenes at the Deanery, but, as Cohen tells us, ‘to look beyond the writings and into the artist.’ He has set himself to account for Dodgson’s shyness, reserve, and melancholy and the springs of his magical creative power. His conclusion is that Dodgson, as a rector’s eldest son, bore ‘scars of guilt’ because he was a childless bachelor and a mathematician who would never be a priest. The father must, it seems, have been oppressive, although there is very little evidence for this and Cohen has to end the section rather lamely: ‘Had Charles managed to forge a union with Alice or some other object of his desire he would have been a far happier man than he was.’ Alice in Wonderland, he claims, is, in fact, about Dodgson himself, and his adolescent trials and stresses (although Alice could in no circumstances be anything but a little girl, absolutely certain of the rules she has learned and able to put down any amount of nonsense). Through the Looking-Glass is about Alice Liddell, but the game is more advanced. She climbs the social ladder and ‘becomes a woman.’ This doesn’t account for the irresistibility of the stories, which Cohen, in orthodox style, puts down to emotional and sexual repression. He has made a checklist of the prayers entered in the diaries for purity and a new life. There are many more of these, he calculates, when Dodgson was meeting the Liddell children regularly. His diverted sexual energy ‘caused him unspeakable torments,’ but we can consider ourselves fortunate, since it was in all probability the source of his genius. Meanwhile, without ever compromising his conscience or his religious faith, he had to endure his existence as ‘the odd man out, an eccentric, the subject of whispers and wagging tongues.’

      Although Cohen accepts Mavis Batey’s identification (published in 1991) of the stories with their Christ Church background, he seems never quite to realize how well Dodgson was suited to mid-Victorian Oxford. Oxford hostesses were good judges of eccentricity, and the college halls were used to nervous, stammering, opinionated, riddling and joking guests. My grandfather, a tutor at Corpus in 1870, notes, ‘Heard this evening the last new joke of the author of Alice in Wonderland: he (Dodgson) knows a man whose feet are so large that he has to put his trousers on over his head.’ There