Lewis Carroll and His Identity Shield
Known to the world as Lewis Carroll, Charles L. Dodgson protected his privacy by erecting a wall between his literary identity and his real-world academic existence.
“He was the stillest and shyest full-grown man I ever met,” commented Mark Twain after meeting Lewis Carroll in 1879.
If you’re not inclined to take Twain’s word for it, Carroll’s poem “Solitude,” published in 1856, could not leave you in any doubt: The author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and other classic works for children was an introvert who experienced his best self apart from the cold, bitter world of other human adults.
“Solitude” begins:
“I love the stillness of the wood:
I love the music of the rill:
I love to couch in pensive mood
Upon some silent hill.”
Using romantic language typical of his era, Carroll described solitude as a relief and respite from vexations of the social world and an opportunity to rejoin, temporarily, the innocent mindset of children.
“Lewis Carroll” was actually the pen name of Charles L. Dodgson (1832-1898), a brilliant Oxford University scholar who published several influential works in mathematics and logic apart from the Alice books. Researching his life and personality, I found a few distinctive strategies for managing the pressures of fame as an introvert.
Most fascinating was the man’s insistence on keeping the identities of Dodgson and Carroll firmly separate. He refused to accept letters addressed to Lewis Carroll at his university, begged his little-girl friends who knew him as Dodgson not to tell others that he was the famous author of Alice, and avoided appearing in public to promote his popular books. In an 1891 letter to a friend he explained, “All of that sort of publicity leads to strangers hearing of my real name... and to my being pointed out to and stared at... I hate all of that so intensely that sometimes I almost wish I had never written any books at all.”
Paralleling the protection of his pseudonym was his pioneering involvement in photographic portraiture. A gifted photographer who produced striking portraits of personages like actress Ellen Terry and poet Alfred Lord Tennyson as well as of children in fanciful or risqué costumes, he rarely permitted himself to be photographed. This sideline allowed Carroll to observe and frame others artistically while staying out of the picture himself.
From the standpoint of today’s mores, it’s certainly tempting to give Carroll’s intense interest in little girls a salacious interpretation. However, consider this: When Carroll expressed an interest in photographing young girls naked, their oh-so-respectable and prim Victorian mothers did not object! It seems to me that we can’t easily put our minds into the prevailing perspectives on childhood innocence of that era.
Though he did not cultivate a public persona or give lectures about his work, Carroll kept scrapbooks of reviews and other material written about the Alice books. He even capitalized on their success by arranging for spinoff products such as cookie tins and postage-stamp cases that featured his characters.
He also cared deeply about production quality in his works. For instance, he ordered the first 2,000 copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland shredded because both he and the illustrator John Tenniel felt the printing was sub-par. Overall, this fits a common pattern of introverts whose creative work becomes popular: pride in craftsmanship and in having achieved public recognition of their mental efforts while evading intrusive elements of fame.
The Alice books have been translated into dozens of languages and have continuously remained in print for more than 160 years. Here is how Ethel Arnold, one of the young girls photographed by Lewis Carroll, remembered him in 1929:
“That almost curious simplicity, at times; that real and touching childlikeness that marked him in all fields of thought, appearing in his love of children and in their love for him, in his dread of giving pain to any living creature, in a certain disproportion now and then of the view he took of things — yes, and also in that deepest life, where the pure in heart and those who become as little children see the very truth, and walk in the fear and love of God.”