In memory of the White Knight

The 27th of January 2022 was the 190th anniversary or the birth of one of the most remarkable writers I’ve come across, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

I have to admit that I’ve never really got to know the impressive works on logic of this fine Victorian mathematician. On the other hand, throughout my teens, and into young adulthood, I made a point of reading each year the two books he wrote under his far better known pseudonym, Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are right up there with some of the finest novels ever.

One of John Tenniel's original illustrations for Alice
She's with the White Knight, who’s falling off his horse. Again
The knight is the projection of Carroll into the novel

At each re-reading, I made surprising new discoveries that I’d missed before. I found myself enchanted, amused and intrigued by his way with words and his words of wit. And it did no harm to the humour that it was often underpinned by his skill in the field of mathematics he made his own, logic. To say nothing of his wisdom.

Here’s Alice talking to the Cheshire Cat:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. 

“I don't much care where –” said Alice. 

“Then it doesn't matter which way you go,” said the Cat. 

“– so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation. 

“Oh, you're sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

Over nearly forty years in business, I gave up counting how many times people felt that hard work was the answer to any problem. After all, do enough hard work and you’ll certainly achieve something. Whether it might be better to achieve something different is a much tougher question, and it’s far easier just to keep working harder and harder than to stop and ask it.

But Carroll also addresses issues more central to logic itself. The problem of ‘null classes’ for instance, a question that was very much a subject of study and controversy in Carroll’s time. A null class is a set that contains nothing. You know, like the set of all cigarette brands that are good for your health. Or the set of all Boris Johnson statements you can trust.

Putting it another way, it’s treating ‘nothing’ as though it was a positive thing. You know the rhyme by William Hughes Mearnes?

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there!
He wasn't there again today,
Oh how I wish he'd go away

It’s that kind of thing. 

There are numerous examples in the Alice books. One comes when the White King asks Alice if she can see either of his messengers on the road.

“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! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”

It astonishes me that Carroll could have written books with so much to puzzle and amuse the minds of adults, and still make it a work of charm and magic for children. The kind of children, in fact, to whom he first told the story. 

Ah, children, children. That’s the problem with Carroll. Because, living in the early days of photography, he became an excellent and enthusiastic photographer. It’s been calculated that he took some 3000 photos in his life, about a third of which survive. A few dozen of them are of children, and a small number show them in a state of some undress.

Carroll’s photo of Alice as the beggar maid

In the twentieth century, that led to people asking whether Carroll was, perhaps a paedophile? Was he attracted in a sick way to kids? After all, there’s far less evidence of his attraction to adult women.

Well, there’s little real evidence of paedophilia on his part. The lack of traces of his attraction to women may well be down to his family’s having destroyed a lot of material on his death to defend what they saw as his reputation. It has also emerged that parents gave their permission for him to take pictures of their daughters and were present during the shoots.

Besides, one of the most famous of those pictures is of the real Alice, the inspiration for the books. She was the daughter of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christchurch College, Oxford where Carroll (or more accurately, Dodgson) worked. Her family and Carroll decided that the photo should show her dressed in rags because, in a very Victorian way, they wanted her presented as a character from literature, the girl beggar from The Beggar Maid, a poem by the eminently Victorian poet Tenyson.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Young Astyanax

This was something of a fashions in photography at the time. One of the most significant early photographers in Britain was Julia Margaret Cameron. Compare Carroll’s photo of Alice with Cameron’s ‘the young Astyanax’, which shows a barely dressed boy representing the son of Hector, the Trojan killed by Achilles in Homer’s Iliad. I don’t think anyone has ever accused Cameron of deviant attitudes towards children. Perhaps both were simply serving the conventions of their time.

Still, I can see that there will be some who still feel convinced that Carroll was a paedophile. After all, if they can’t prove beyond doubt that he was, I can’t prove he wasn’t. I can imagine that some may feel he needs to be cancelled.

On the other hand, it’s beyond to me to see how that does anyone any good. After all, it will change nothing in him. The only people it can harm are ourselves, by cutting us off from a source of pleasure and charm. Even a certain sad wistfulness, that other quality of Carroll’s, the quality that marks the White Knight in the books, the character into which he wrote himself. 

To wrap up, and show you that wistfulness, I’m going to give in full the poem with which he closes Through the Looking Glass, the second and final book. Read it or skip it as you like. It recalls a boat outing on a river (and what a metaphor for life that is!), during which Carroll first told the story to Alice and her two sisters. It’s a delicate expression of longing for a life slipping by, leaving a past that can’t be recaptured, but only recalled in fading memory.

At the same time, it's another bit of cleverness from him. It’s an acrostic. The first letter of each line spells the name Alice Pleasance Liddell, the Alice of the photograph, the Alice of the books.

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July —

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear —

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?

And this is a character who deserves cancelling? Really?