Lover of naked nymphs and sponsor of young actresses: The Real Secrets of Lewis Carroll

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

For many generations of children, the adventures of the girl Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were the best, or at least some of the most beloved fairy tales. But childhood passes, and instead of fairy tales, we start reading about the storyteller. For the past few decades, what has been written about Lewis Carroll has been confusing and disappointing. But, perhaps, Carroll's love for girls is a myth behind which a more shameful (by the standards of his time) secret was hidden. And it's not even just possible, but there is all the evidence for that. What was Carroll really to blame?

Brother of his sisters and advocate of women's rights

The fact that Carroll preferred the company of girls to boyish is a fact. He himself grew up surrounded by sisters and was the only son of his parents. When the time came, he was sent to study at a boarding school, whose sports specialization was rugby - not for the sake of sports, of course, but simply the level of education in it was liked by the Carroll family. Nevertheless, he, a book boy, was forced to coexist with a crowd of young rugby players who teased him, fought with him and, in general, gave him a certain opinion about his own field and most of its representatives.

Is it any wonder that after school the young mathematician and deacon preferred to associate with girls and women - all the more since it was considered more natural for a priest (and less suspicious) than going to taverns with young students or looking for boyish companies (both were popular among homosexuals and boylovers of the time). Moreover, Carroll liked to talk about difficult things with girls, kept books of feminists in his personal library, happily taught mathematics in a women's college when the opportunity arose, and before that he tried to push the study of at least censored Shakespeare in schools for girls (yes, Shakespeare in Victorian England was only for men - due to the abundance of dirty jokes and obscene scenes).

In other words, Carroll could have become a favorite of feminists and be inscribed in the history of the struggle for women's education, if not for one thing: a hypothesis that came to be perceived as fact. It was this hypothesis that Carroll was a pedophile and did not love girls at all in a friendly way.

Were there girls?

Carroll was indeed in constant contact with girls of various ages; with him sometimes prim Victorian ladies and gentlemen left their little daughters unattended; he photographed girls half-dressed or unclothed at all. His favorite word - repeated many times in his diaries - was "little friend", which in English sounds very similar to "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" and evokes certain associations.

Enough to alert you. However, it is worth considering a number of details in order to dispel the illusion that Carroll was exclusively obsessed with pre-pubertal babies.

To begin with, although on the network we mainly see from the portraits he made only endless galleries of young ladies, Carroll generally took pictures very actively - not only girls. It's just that the entire archive of his portraits is of little interest to lovers of piquant theories. Girls who communicated with Carroll in childhood, calmly continued, on occasion, communication in adulthood. Photo sessions with girls were usually attended by their mothers. And he actively used the word "little friend" … to young, but very mature women.

All this, without a doubt, does not mean that Carroll could not have a secret attraction to girls. However, the thing is that his sisters for some reason considered it necessary to hide his completely different behavior. They found it much more obscene just to talk Carroll with "little friends" of considerable age.

Erotomaniac, theatergoer and patron of young ladies

Here are the much lesser-known habits of Lewis Carroll, which seem innocent to us, but which, by the standards of Victorian England, were truly inappropriate for a person in clergy: the mathematician loved to visit art galleries (and stopped for a long time near paintings where women had bare breasts), was an inveterate theater-goer and lover of romantic plays (and made acquaintances with actresses) and, finally, constantly assigned benefits from his pocket to young girls from theatrical and musical environment.

It should be understood correctly: there is no evidence that, communicating in short with actresses, Carroll certainly indulged in debauchery with them in the dressing rooms or visiting their homes; there is also no evidence that he demanded intimate services from the girls for the support of talent. But Victorian customs unambiguously linked such a social circle and similar acts with the sexual exploitation of artists, so this behavior was perceived by the British very, very unambiguously.

Probably one of the reasons why Carroll turned to women "my little friend" was an attempt to dissociate himself from suspicions: Carroll tried to show that, as befits a spiritual person, he treats all his numerous female friends exclusively in a fatherly way. In the same way, in a fatherly way, he constantly invited girls from sixteen years and older to live for several months - moreover, he always turned to their parents with a similar proposal, emphasizing that only loneliness and the desire to be the spiritual mentor of their daughters underlies his invitation.

It is known, for example, that the theater actress Iza Bowman, who later became famous, lived with him at home for a rather long time, with whom, by the way, he paid for education in his youth. Interestingly, in her memoirs, she claimed that she was then about eleven - but it is worth checking the dates, and it turns out that she shared a shelter with Carroll, already a sixteen-year-old girl who had already taken shape (and she came to him on vacation until she was twenty). Simply, based on the ideas of her time, according to which friendship with girls did not imply any debauchery, but with girls, on the contrary, the actress brought herself and Carroll out of suspicion.

But surely there was nothing between the mathematician and his guests except spiritual and scientific conversations? Perhaps so, but the same Iza Bowman describes a scene in which the tension of unrequited feelings is felt. She once drew a caricature of Carroll. The drawing threw him, always calm, friendly and slightly mocking, off balance: he blushed, tore the drawing and threw it into the fire. At the very least, he took the way this girl looked at him to heart.

It's hard to say how far Carroll's relationship with the widows he sometimes slept with, the actresses he sponsored, and the guests he hosted all summer went on - but it's clear that by trying to hide this side of his life behind his friendship with girls, his sisters gave birth to a new myth and, perhaps, harmed the image of Carroll much more than his walks through art galleries with naked nymphs on canvases.

The grown-up secrets weren't just for Carroll. Childish passions around a children's writer: the secrets of Moomin's mom Tove Jansson.