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LEWIS CARROLL
IN WONDERLAND AND AT HOME
[Illustration: LEWIS CARROLL.]
LEWIS CARROLL IN WONDERLAND AND AT HOME
_THE STORY OF HIS LIFE_
BY BELLE MOSES
AUTHOR OF "LOUISA MAY ALCOTT"
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1910
COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_Published October, 1910_
Printed in the United States of America
TO E. M. M. and M. J. M.
INTRODUCTION.
Lewis Carroll discovered a new country, simply by rowing up and down the
river, and telling a story to the accompaniment of dipping oars and
rippling waters, as the boat glided through. It is not everyone who can
discover a country, people it with marvelous, fanciful shapes, and give it
a place in our mental geography. But Lewis Carroll was not "everyone"--in
fact he was like no one else to the many who called him friend. He had the
magic power of creating something out of nothing, and gave to the eager
children who had tired of "Aunt Louisa's Picture Books," and "Garlands of
Poetry," something to think about, to guess about, and to talk about.
If he had written nothing else but "Alice in Wonderland," that one book
would have been quite enough to make him famous, but his pen was never
idle, and the world of children has much for which to thank him. How much,
and for what, the following pages will strive to tell, and if they succeed
in conveying to their readers half the charm that lay in the life of this
man, who did so much for others, they will not have been written in vain.
In telling the story of his life I am indebted to many, for courtesy and
assistance. I wish specially to thank my brother, Montrose J. Moses.
Columbia Library, Astor Library, St. Agnes Branch of the Public Library,
and Miss Brown, of the Traveling Library, have all been exceedingly kind
and helpful. To Messrs. E. P. Dutton and Company I extend my thanks for
permission to quote from Miss Isa Bowman's interesting reminiscences, and
to the American and English editors of _The Strand_ I am also indebted for
a similar courtesy.
BELLE MOSES.
NEW YORK, _October, 1910_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--THERE WAS ONCE A LITTLE BOY 1
II.--SCHOOL DAYS AT RICHMOND AND RUGBY 15
III.--HOME LIFE DURING THE HOLIDAYS 30
IV.--OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP AND HONORS 42
V.--A MANY-SIDED GENIUS 60
VI.--UP AND DOWN THE RIVER WITH THE REAL ALICE 80
VII.--ALICE IN WONDERLAND AND WHAT SHE DID THERE 98
VIII.--LEWIS CARROLL AT HOME AND ABROAD 125
IX.--MORE OF "ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS" 146
X.--"HUNTING OF THE SNARK" AND OTHER POEMS 176
XI.--GAMES, RIDDLES AND PUZZLES 202
XII.--A FAIRY RING OF GIRLS 221
XIII.--"ALICE" ON THE STAGE AND OFF 242
XIV.--A TRIP WITH SYLVIE AND BRUNO 272
XV.--LEWIS CARROLL--MAN AND CHILD 287
LEWIS CARROLL.
CHAPTER I.
THERE WAS ONCE A LITTLE BOY.
There was once a little boy whose name was _not_ Lewis Carroll. He was
christened Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, in the parish church of Daresbury,
England, where he was born, on January 27, 1832. A little out-of-the-way
village was Daresbury, a name derived from a word meaning oak, and
Daresbury was certainly famous for its beautiful oaks.
The christening of Baby Charles must have been a very happy occasion. To
begin with, the tiny boy was the first child of what proved to be a
"numerous family," and the officiating clergyman was the proud papa. The
name of Charles had been bestowed upon the eldest son for generations of
Dodgsons, who had carried it honorably through the line, handing it down
untarnished to this latest Charles, in the parish church at Daresbury.
The Dodgsons could doubtless trace their descent much further back than a
great-great-grandfather, being a race of gentlemen and scholars, but the
Rev. Christopher Dodgson, who lived quite a century before Baby Charles
saw the light, is the earliest ancestor we hear of, and he held a living
in Yorkshire. In those days, a clergyman was dependent upon some noble
patron for his living, a living meaning the parish of which he had charge
and the salary he received for his work, and so when the Rev.
Christopher's eldest son Charles also took holy orders, he had for _his_
patron the Duke of Northumberland, who gave him the living of Elsden in
Northumberland, a cold, bleak, barren country. The Rev. Charles took what
fell to his lot with much philosophy and a saving sense of humor.
He suffered terribly from the cold despite the fact that he snuggled down
between two feather beds in the big parlor, which was no doubt the best
room in a most uncomfortable house. It was all he could do to keep from
freezing, for the doors were rarely closed against the winds that howled
around them. The good clergyman was firmly convinced that the end of the
world would come by frost instead of fire. Even when safely in bed, he
never felt _quite_ comfortable unless his head was wrapped in three
nightcaps, while he twisted a pair of stockings, like a cravat, around his
suffering throat. He generally wore two shirts at a time, as washing was
cheap, and rarely took off his coat and his boots.
This uncomplaining, jovial clergyman finally received his reward. King
George III bestowed upon him the See of Elphin, which means that he was
made bishop, and had no more hardships to bear. This gentleman, who was
the great-grandfather of our Charles, had four children; Elizabeth Anne,
the only daughter, married a certain Charles Lutwidge of Holmrook in
Cumberland. There were two sons who died quite young, and Charles, the
eldest, entered the army and rose to the rank of captain in the 4th
Dragoon Guards. He lost his life in the performance of a perilous duty,
leaving behind him two sons; Charles, the elder, turned back into the ways
of his ancestors and became a clergyman, and Hassard, who studied law, had
a brilliant career.
This last Charles, in 1830, married his cousin, Frances Jane Lutwidge, and
in 1832 we find him baptizing another little Charles, in the parish church
at Daresbury, his eldest son, and consequently his pride and hope.
The living at Daresbury was the beginning of a long life of service to the
Church. The father of our Charles rose to be one of the foremost clergymen
of his time, a man of wide learning, of deep piety, and of great charity,
beloved by rich and poor. Though of somewhat sober nature, in moments of
recreation he could throw off his cares like a boy, delighting his friends
by his wit and humor, and the rare gift of telling anecdotes, a gift his
son inherited in full measure, long before he took the name of "Lewis
Carroll," some twenty years after he was received into the fold of the
parish church at Daresbury.
Little Charles headed the list of eleven young Dodgsons, and the mother
of this infant brigade was a woman in a thousand. We all know what mothers
are; then we can imagine this one, so kind and gentle that never a harsh
word was known to pass her lips, and may be able to trace her quiet,
helpful influence on the character of our Boy, just as we see her delicate
features reproduced in many of his later pictures.
A boy must be a poor specimen, indeed, if such a father and mother could
not bring out the best in him. Saddled as he was, with the responsibility
of being the oldest of eleven, and consequently an example held up to
younger brothers and sisters, Charles was grave and serious beyond his
years. Only an eldest child can appreciate what a responsibility this
really is. You mustn't do "so and so" for fear one of the younger ones
might do likewise! If his parents had not been very remarkable people,
this same Charles might have developed into a virtuous little prig. "Good
Brother Charles who never does wrong" might have grown into a terrible
bugbear to the other small Dodgsons, had he not been brimful of fun and
humor himself. As it was he soon became their leader in all their games
and plays, and the quiet parsonage on the glebe farm, full a mile and a
half from even the small traffic of the village, rang at least with the
echoes of laughter and chatter from these youngsters with strong healthy
lungs.
We cannot be quite sure whether they were good children or bad children,
for time somehow throws a halo around childhood, but let us hope they were
"jes' middlin'." We cannot bear to think of all those prim little saints,
with ramrods down their backs, sitting sedately of a Sunday in the family
pew--perhaps it took two family pews to hold them--with folded hands and
pious expressions. We can't believe these Dodgsons were so silly; they
were reverent little souls doubtless, and probably were not bad in church,
but oh! let us hope they got into mischief sometimes. There was plenty of
room for it in the big farm parsonage.
"An island farm 'mid seas of corn,
Swayed by the wand'ring breath of morn.
The happy spot where I was born,"
wrote Lewis Carroll many years after, when "Alice in Wonderland" had made
him famous.
Glebe farms were very common in England; they consisted of large tracts of
land surrounding the parsonage, which the pastor was at liberty to
cultivate for his own use, or to eke out his often scanty income, and as
the parsonage at Daresbury was comparatively small, and the glebe or farm
lands fairly large, we can be sure these boys and girls loved to be out of
doors, and little Charlie at a very early age began to number some queer
companions among his intimate friends. His small hands burrowing in the
soft, damp earth, brought up squirming, wriggling things--earthworms,
snails, and the like. He made pets of them, studying their habits in his
"small boy" way, and having long, serious talks with them, lying on the
ground beside them as they crawled around him. An ant-hill was to him a
tiny town, and many a long hour the child must have spent busying himself
in their small affairs, settling imaginary disputes, helping the workers,
supplying provisions in the way of crumbs, and thus early beginning to
understand the ways of the woodland things about which he loved to write
in after years. He had, for boon companions, certain toads, with whom he
held animated conversations, and it is said that he really taught
earthworms the art of warfare by supplying them with small pieces of pipe
with which to fight.
He did not, like Hiawatha in the legend, "Learn of ev'ry bird its
language," but he invented a language of his own, in which no doubt he
discoursed wisely to the toads and snails who had time to listen; he
learned to speak this language quite fluently, so that in later years when
eager children clustered about him, and with wide eyes and peals of
laughter listened to his nonsense verses, full of the queerest words they
ever heard, they could still understand from the very tones of his voice
exactly what he meant. Indeed, when little Charles Lutwidge Dodgson grew
up to be Lewis Carroll, he worked this funny language of his by equally
funny rules, so that, as he said, "a perfectly balanced mind could
understand it."
Of course, there were other companions for the Dodgson children--cats and
dogs, and horses and cows, and in the village of Warrington, seven miles
away, there were children to be found of their own size and age, but
Daresbury itself was very lonely. A canal ran through the far end of the
parish, and here bargemen used to ply to and fro, carrying produce and
fodder to the near-by towns. Mr. Dodgson took a keen interest in these men
who seemed to have no settled place of worship.
In a quiet, persuasive way he suggested to Sir Francis Egerton, a large
landholder of the country, that it would be nice to turn one of the barges
into a chapel, describing how it could be done for a hundred pounds, well
knowing, clever man, that he was talking to a most interested listener;
for a few weeks later he received a letter from Sir Francis telling him
that the chapel was ready. In this odd little church, the first of its
kind, Mr. Dodgson preached every Sunday evening.
But at Daresbury itself life was very monotonous; even the passing of a
cart was a great event, and going away was a great adventure. There was
one never-to-be-forgotten occasion when the family went off on a holiday
jaunt to Beaumaris. Railroads were then very rare things, so they made the
journey in three days by coach, allowing also three days for the return
trip.
It was great fun traveling in one of those old-time coaches with all the
luggage strapped behind, and all the bright young faces atop, and four
fast-trotting horses dashing over the ground, and a nice long holiday with
fine summer weather to look forward to. But in winter, in those days,
traveling was a serious matter; only a favored few could squeeze into the
body of the coach; the others still sat atop, muffled to the chin, yet
numb with the cold, as the horses went faster and faster, and the wind
whistled by, and one's breath froze on the way. Let us hope the little
Dodgsons went in the summer time.
Daresbury must have been a beautiful place, with its pleasant walks, its
fine meadows, its deep secluded woods, and best of all, those wonderful
oak trees which the boy loved to climb, and under whose shade he would lie
by the hour, filling his head with all those quaint fancies which he has
since given to the world. He was a clever little fellow, eager to learn,
and from the first his father superintended his education, being himself a
scholar of very high order. He had the English idea of sending his eldest
son along the path he himself had trod; first to a public school, then to
Oxford, and finally into the Church, if the boy had any leaning that way.
Education in those days began early, and not by way of the kindergarten;
the small boy had scarcely lost his baby lisp before he was put to the
study of Latin and Greek, and Charles, besides, developed a passion for
mathematics. It is told that when a very small boy he showed his father a
book of logarithms, asking him to explain it, but Mr. Dodgson mildly
though firmly refused.
"You are too young to understand such a difficult subject," he replied; "a
few years later you will enjoy the study--wait a while."
"_But_," persisted the boy, his mind firmly bent on obtaining information,
"please explain." Whether the father complied with his request is not
recorded, but we rather believe that explanations were set aside for the
time. Certain it is, they were demanded again and again, for the boy soon
developed a wonderful head for figures and signs, a knowledge which grew
with the years, as we shall see later.
When he was still quite a little boy, his mother and father went to Hull
to visit Mrs. Dodgson's father who had been ill. The children, some five
or six in number--the entire eleven had not yet arrived--were left in the
care of an accommodating aunt, but Charles, being the eldest, received a
letter from his mother in which he took much pride, his one idea being to
keep it out of the clutches of his little sisters, whose hands were always
ready for mischief. He wrote upon the back of the note, forbidding them to
touch his property, explaining cunningly that it was covered with slimy
pitch, a most uncomfortable warning, but it was "the ounce of prevention,"
for the letter has been handed down to us, and a sweet, cheery letter it
was, so full of mother-love and care, and tender pride in the little brood
at home. No wonder he prized it!
This is probably the first letter he ever received, and it takes very
little imagination to picture the important air with which he carried it
about, and the care with which he hoarded it through all the years.
There is a dear little picture of our Boy taken when he was eight years
old. Photography was not yet in use, so this black print of him is the
copy of a silhouette which was the way people had their "pictures taken"
in those days. It was always a profile picture, and little Charles's
finely shaped head, with its slightly bulging forehead and delicate
features, stands sharply outlined. We have also a silhouette of Mrs.
Dodgson, and the resemblance between the two is very marked.
When the boy was eleven, a great change came into his life. Sir Robert
Peel, the famous statesman, presented to his father the Crown living of
Croft, a Yorkshire village about three miles from Darlington. A Crown
living is always an exceptionally good one, as it is usually given by
royal favor, and accompanied by a comfortable salary. Mr. Dodgson was
sorry to leave his old parishioners and the little parsonage where he had
seen so much quiet happiness, but he was glad at the same time, to get
away from the dullness and monotony of Daresbury. With a growing family of
children it was absolutely necessary to come more into contact with
people, and Croft was a typical, delightful English town, famous even
to-day for its baths and medicinal waters. Before Mr. Dodgson's time it
was an important posting-station for the coaches running between London
and Edinburgh, and boasted of a fine hotel near the rectory, used later by
gentlemen in the hunting season.
Mr. Dodgson's parish consisted not only of Croft proper, but included the
neighboring hamlets of Halnaby, Dalton and Stapleton, so he was a pretty
busy man going from one to the other, and the little Dodgsons were busy,
too, making new friends and settling down into their new and commodious
quarters.
The village of Croft is on the river Tees, in fact it stands on the
dividing line between Yorkshire and Durham. A bridge divides the two
counties, and midway on it is a stone which marks the boundary line. It
was an old custom for certain landholders to stand on this bridge at the
coming of each new Bishop of Durham, and to present him with an old sword,
with an appropriate address of welcome. This sword the Bishop returned
immediately.
The Tees often overflowed its banks--indeed, floods were not infrequent in
these smiling English landscape countries, kept so fertile and green by
the tiny streams which intersect them. Two or three heavy rainfalls will
swell the waters, sending them rushing over the country with enormous
force. Jean Ingelow in her poem "High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire"
paints a vivid picture of the havoc such a flood may make in a peaceful
land:
"Where the river, winding down,
Onward floweth to the town."
But the quaint old church at Croft has doubtless weathered more than one
overflow from the restless river Tees.
The rectory, a large brick house, with a sloping tile roof and tall
chimneys, stood well back in a very beautiful garden, filled with all
sorts of rare plants, intersected by winding gravel paths. As in all
English homes, the kitchen garden was a most attractive spot; its high
walls were covered with luxuriant fruit trees, and everybody knows that
English "wall fruit" is the most delicious kind. The trees are planted
very close to the wall, and the spreading boughs, when they are heavy with
the ripening fruit, are not bent with the weight of it, but are thoroughly
propped and supported by these walls of solid brick, so the undisturbed
fruit comes to a perfect maturity without any of the accidents which occur
in the ordinary orchard. The garden itself was bright with kitchen greens,
filled with everything needed for household use.
With so much space the little Dodgsons had room to grow and "multiply" to
the full eleven, and fine times they had with plays and games, usually
invented by their clever brother. One of the principal diversions was a
toy railroad with "stations" built at various sections of the garden,
usually very pretty and rustic looking, planned and built by Charles
himself. He also made a rude train out of a wheelbarrow, a barrel, and a
small truck, and was able to convey his passengers comfortably from
station to station, exacting fare at each trip.
He was something of a conjurer, too, and in wig and gown, could amaze his
audience for hours with his inexhaustible supply of tricks. He also made
some quaint-looking marionettes, and a theater for them to act in, even
writing the plays, which were masterpieces in their way. Once he traced a
maze upon the snow-covered lawn of the rectory.
Mazes were often found in the real old-time gardens of England; they
consisted of intersecting paths bordered by clipped shrubbery and
generally arranged in geometrical designs, very puzzling to the unwary
person who got lost in them, unable to discover a way out, until by some
happy accident the right path was found. "Threading the Maze" was a
fashionable pastime in the days of the Tudors; the maze at Hampton Court
being one of the most remarkable of that period.
Charles's early knowledge of mathematics made his work on the snow-covered
lawn all the more remarkable, for the love of that particular branch of
learning certainly grew with his growth.
Meanwhile, it was a very serious, earnest little boy, who looked down the
long line of Dodgsons, saying with a choke in his voice: "I must leave you
and this lovely rectory, and this fair, smiling countryside, and go to
school."
He was shy, and the thought struck terror; but everybody who is anybody in
England goes to some fine public school before becoming an Oxford or a
Cambridge student, and for that reason Charles Lutwidge Dodgson buried his
regrets beneath a smiling face, bade farewell to his household, and at the
mature age of twelve, armed with enough Greek and Latin to have made a
dictionary, with a knowledge of mathematics that a college "don" might
well have envied, set forth to this alluring world of books and learning.