In accordance with a previously unseen letter that may soon be auctioned author Lewis Carroll despised fame a great deal he wished he had never written the books about Alice’s adventures that made him a legend that is literary
Lewis Carroll’s life changed forever after Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland was published GETTY
In the mid-19th essay help century an obscure mathematician called Charles Lutwidge Dodgson penned a selection of learned works with titles such as for instance A Syllabus Of Plane Algebraic Geometry as well as the Fifth Book Of Euclid Treated Algebraically.
Five years after the latter in 1865 he embarked on a radical change of direction.
Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland was published under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll and his life changed for good.
Queen Victoria loved it, fan mail arrived by the sackful and then he started to be recognised in the pub.
This is sheer hell for a shy and retiring academic who doubled as an Anglican deacon as well as the extent of his torment is revealed the very first time in a previously unseen letter which is likely to fetch more than Ј4,000 when it’s auctioned at Bonhams month that is next.
In the letter written to Anne Symonds, the widow of eminent Oxford surgeon Frederick Symonds, he laments being thrust into the public eye by his success and treated like a zoo animal by admirers.
He even suggests he had never written the classic tales that brought him worldwide fame that he wishes.
“All that sort of publicity contributes to strangers hearing of my name that is real in using the books, and also to my being pointed out to, and stared at by strangers, and treated as a ‘lion’,” he wrote.
“And I hate all that so intensely that sometimes I almost wish that I had never written any books after all.”
The letter, written in November 1891, was penned 26 years following the publication of Alice In Wonderland, as he was 59.
He died six years later and then how his reputation would be tarnished in death he would have been even more horrified if he had known. His fondness for kids along with his practice of photographing and sketching them, sometimes into the nude, resulted in a posthumous lynching in the court of literary opinion.
The creative genius who gave us Humpty Dumpty, the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter was labelled a pervert, paedophile and pornographer as a result.
Alice Liddell inspired him to create the book GETTY
And I hate all that so intensely that sometimes I almost wish that I experienced never written any written books after all
The reality that four regarding the 13 volumes of his diaries mysteriously went missing and therefore seven pages of some other were torn out by an hand that is unknown included with the circumstantial evidence against him.
But while Dodgson never married, there is certainly lots of evidence in his diaries which he had a interest that is keen adult women both married and single and enjoyed an amount of relationships that would have already been considered scandalous by the standards of that time period.
Sympathetic historians also argue his studies of naked children have to be seen in the context of their time.
The “Victorian child cult” perceived nudity as an expression of innocence and such images were mainstream and fashionable in place of emblematic of a sick desire for young flesh.
The speculation over Dodgson’s sexuality has its roots in the little girl to his relationship who had been the inspiration for his fictional Alice. The real-life Alice was the younger daughter of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, where Dodgson plied his trade as a mathematician and served as a deacon.
She was by all accounts a vivacious and pretty 10-year-old as he first got to know her and then he would often take her out together with her sisters for picnics and boat trips on the Thames.
On these days he would entertain them with his stories concerning the Alice that is fictional he had been eventually persuaded to put into book form and send to a publisher.
While his critics have suggested which he grew fixated with Alice Liddell, took photographs of her in inappropriate poses and was devastated when she broke away from him after growing into adolescence, one biographer proposes a tremendously different analysis.
The dodo presenting Alice with a thimble in an illustration by Tenniel GETTY
“There is not any evidence which he was at love together with her,” wrote Karoline Leach in The Shadow of this Dreamchild. “No evidence that her family concerned about her, no evidence which they banned him from her presence.”
She added: “There are no letters or private diary entries to suggest any type of romantic or passionate attachment, or to indicate which he had an unique curiosity about her for almost any however the briefest time.”
It had been not Alice who was the main focus of Dodgson’s attentions, she suggests, but her mother Lorina. Definately not being an easy method of grooming the daughter, their day trips were a cover for a separate and reckless affair with the mother. If the Alice books were written Dodgson was at his early 30s.
Lorina, while five years older, was – within the words of writer William Langley – “a free spirit and a renowned beauty stuck in a dull marriage to Henry, the Dean, who was simply both notoriously boring and reputedly homosexual”.
He added:“Carroll might have been regarded as something of an oddity around Oxford however in contrast to Henry he was handsome, youthful, engaging and witty. And then he managed to spend an astonishing length of time at the Liddells’ house much of it while Henry wasn’t in.”
It absolutely was this liaison, in accordance with Leach, which led family relations to censor his diaries in place of any inappropriate relationship with an underage girl. Her thesis is sustained by the findings of some other author, Jenny Woolf.
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She tracked down Dodgson’s bank records on her 2010 book The Mystery Of Lewis Carroll and discovered that despite often being with debt Dodgson gave away about Ј50 a year (Ј5,500 in today’s money) to various charities while earning an income of Ј300 (Ј33,000 today) teaching mathematics at Christ Church and double that in the shape of royalty payments from Macmillian, his publisher.
Among the charities Dodgson supported was the Society For The Protection Of Women and kids, an organisation that “used to trace down and prosecute men who interfered with children”.
Woolf adds: “He also supported other charities which rehabilitated ladies who was indeed abused and trafficked and a hospital which specialised when you look at the treatment plan for venereal disease. It suggests he had been concerned because of the damage the sex trade inflicted upon women.”
A sceptic might argue that it was the window-dressing of a young child abuser but Woolf makes a telling point in the favour.