CHAPTER II

THE VICTORIAN PERIOD OR THE GOLDEN AGE OF CHILDREN’S

LITERATURE

2.1 Lewis Carroll or the Rise of Children’s Literature

2.1. a Lewis Carroll – Life and Work

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898) , better known by the pen name Lewis
Carroll,
was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His
most famous writings are are “ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and its sequel “
Through the Looking- Glass” as well as the poems “ The Hunting of the Snark” and “
Jabberwocky”, all examples of the genre of literary nonsense. He is noted for his facility
at word play, logic, and fantasy, and there are societies dedicated to the enjoyment and
promotion of his works and the investigation of his life in many parts of the world.
Dodgson’s family was predominantly northern English, with Irish connections.
Conservative and High Church Anglican, most of Dodgson’s ancestors were army
officers or Church of England clergymen. Carroll’s father was mathematically gifted and
won a double first degree, which could have been the prelude to a brilliant academic
career. Instead, he married his first cousin and became a country parson.
Charles Dodgson was born in the little parsonage of Daresbury in Cheshire, the
oldest boy but already the third child of the four- and- a half year old marriage. Eight
more were to follow. When Charles was 11, the family moved in North Yorkshire. During
the earlier times in his life, young Dodgson was educated at home. His “reading lists”
preserved in the family testify to a precocious intellect. He also suffered from a stammer-
a condition shared by his siblings- that often influenced his social life throughout his
years. At twelve he was sent away to a small private school at nearby Richmond w.
Where he appears to have been happy and settled. But in 1846, young Dodgson moved
on to Rugby School, where he was less happy... In 1851, he went to Oxford, attending his
father’s old college, Christ Church. His early academic career veered between high
promise and irresistible distraction. He may not always have worked hard, but he was
exceptionally gifted and achievement came easily to him.
The young adult Charles Dodgson was about six feet tall, slender and deemed
attractive, with curling brown hair and blue or grey eyes. As a very young child, he
suffered a fever that left him dead in one ear .Another defect he carried into adulthood
was what he referred to as his “hesitation”, a stammer he acquired in early childhood and
which plagued him throughout his life. The stammer has always been a potent part of the
conceptions of Dodgson; it is part of the belief that he stammered only in adult company
and was free and fluent with children, but there is no evidence to support this idea. Many
children of his acquaintance remembered the stammer while many adults failed to notice
it. Dodgson himself seems to have been far more acutely aware of it than most people he
met; it is said he caricatured himself as the Dodo in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
referring to his difficulty in pronouncing his last name, but this is one of the many “facts”
often-repeated, for which no firsthand evidence remains.
Although Dodgson’s stammer troubled him, it did not prevent him from applying
his other personal qualities to do well in society. At a time when people commonly
devised their own amusements, young Dodgson was well –equipped to be an engaging
entertainer. He could sing tolerably well and was not afraid to do so before an audience.
He was adeptwas adept at mimicry and storytelling and was, reputedly, quite good at
charades.
Dodgson was also quite socially ambitious and anxious to make his mark on the
world as a writer or an artist. He began to move in the Pre-Raphaelite social circle. He
met John Ruskin in 1857 and became friendly with him. He developed a close
relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his family, and also knew William Holman
Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Arthur Hughes among other artists. He also knew the
fairy –tale author George Mac Donald well and it was the enthusiastic reception of ‘
Alice” by the young Mac Donald children that convinced him to submit the work for
publication.
From a young age, Dodgson wrote poetry and short stories .In 1856 he published
his first piece of work under the name that would make him famous. A romantic poem
called “Solitude” appeared under the authorship of “Lewis Carroll.” This pseudonym was
a play on his real name; Lewis was the anglicized form of Ludovicus, which was the
Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll - an Irish surname similar to the Latin name Carolus,
from which the name Charles comes.
In the same year, 1856, a new Dean, Henry Liddell, arrived at Christ Church,
bringing withbringing with him his young family, all of whom would figure largely in
Dodgson’s life and, over the following years, greatly influence his writing career.
Dodgson became close friends with Liddell’s wife, Lorina, and their children, particularly
the three sisters: Lorina, Edith and Alice Liddell. He was for many years widely assumed
to have derived his own “Alice” from Alice Liddell. This was given some apparent
substance by the fact the acrostic poem at the end of” Through the Looking Glass” spells
out her name, and that there are many superficial references to her hidden in the text of
both books. Dodgson himself, however, repeatedly denied in later life that his “little
heroine” was based on any real child and frequently dedicated his works to girls of his
acquaintance, adding their names in acrostic poems at the beginning of the text.
 Though information is scarce, it does seem clear that his friendship with the Liddell
family was an important part of his life in the late 1850s, and he grew into the habit of
taking the children(first the boy ,Harry, and later the three girls) on rowing trips nearby. It
was on one such expedition that Dodgson invented the outline of the story that eventually
became his first and largest commercial success. Having told the story and been begged
by Alice Liddell to write it down, Dodgson eventually presented her with a handwritten,
illustrated manuscript entitled “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground” in November 1864.
Before this, the family of friend and mentor George Mac Donald read Dodgson’s
incomplete manuscript, and the enthusiasm of the Mac Donald children encouraged
Dodgson to seek publication. In 1863, he had taken the unfinished manuscript to
Macmillan the publisher, who liked it immediately. After the possible alternative titles
“Alice Among the Fairies” and” Alice’s Golden Hour “were rejected ,rejected, the work
was finally published as “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” in 1865 under the Lewis
Carroll pen name. The illustrations this time were by Sir John Tenniel; Dodgson evidently
thought that a published book would need the skills of a professional artist.
The overwhelming commercial success of the first Alice book changed Dodgson’s
life in many ways. The fame of his alter ego “Lewis Carroll” soon spread around the
world. He was inundated with fan mail and with sometimes unwanted attention. Indeed,
according to one popular story that Dodgson denied decades later, Queen Victoria herself
enjoyed “Alice in Wonderland” so much that she suggested he dedicate his next book to
her, and was accordingly presented with his next work, a scholarly volume entitled “An
Elementary Treatise on Determinants.” He also began earning quite substantial sums of
money. However, he continued with his seemingly disliked post at Christ Church. Late in
1871, a sequel- Through the Looking Glass And What Alice Found There- was published
In 1876, Dodgson produced his last great work, “The Hunting of the Snark”, a fantastical
“nonsense” poem.
In 1856, Dodgson took up the new art form of photography .He soon excelled at
the art and became a well-known gentleman- photographer. A recent study by Roger
Taylor and Edward Wakeling exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor
calculates that just over fifty percent of his surviving work depicts young girls, though
this may be a highly distorted figure as approximately 60% of his original photographic
portfolio is now missing. Dodgson also made many studies of men, women, male
children and landscapes. His studies of nude children were long presumed lost, but six
have since surfaced ,surfaced, five of which have been published.
Dodgson abruptly ceased photography in 1880. He also made a few inventions.
Over the remaining twenty years of his life, throughout his growing wealth and fame, his
existence remained little changed. He continued to teach at Christ Church and remained
in residence there until his death. He died on 14 January 1898 at his sisters ’home of
pneumonia following influenza.

2.1 b “ Inventing Childhood “

 The Victorians are sometimes credited with 'inventing childhood', partly via their
efforts to stop child labour and the introduction of compulsory education. As children
began to be able to read, literature for young people became a growth industry, with not
only established writers producing works for children (such as Dickens' A Child's History
of England) but also a new group of dedicated children's authors. Writers like Lewis
Carroll, R. M. Ballantyne and Anna Sewell wrote mainly for children,. Other authors
such as Anthony Hope and Robert Louis Stevenson wrote mainly for adults, but their
adventure novels are now generally classified as for children. Other genres include
nonsense verse, poetry which required a child-like interest (e.g. Lewis Carroll). School
stories flourished: Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays and Kipling's Stalky and
Co. are classics.
Historians of children's literature universally agree that the publication of Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland marks the liberation of children's books from the restraining
hand of the moralists.The Alice books mockbooks mock the children's literature of the
day. In keeping with the character of the time, children's literature was full of simplistic
morals and heavy-handed attempts to educate the young. Some of the books supposedly
for children were quite dry, and at the least suffered from a lack of imagination The initial
paragraph of the book illustrates the vision Carroll had about children's literature:

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having
nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it
had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice,
“without pictures or conversations?”” (ch. I, pg. 9)

In the very first words, Lewis Carroll is making a clear statement on the feeling of
the children when reading a book in Victorian times, and makes clear that this kind of
literature has to be based on entertainment to avoid boredom. Carroll was skilful and
clever enough as to see that the setting of the new story, and furthermore its protagonist,
had to supply a new vision of the world
Molly Hite in her book The Other Side of the Story, 1989, talks about otherness and
about the other side as contributions of the women's writing to literature, which is
gratefully enriching. Carroll could have thought of some other side by setting the story
beneath the ground the stories that were written at that time were set. The words “Down,
down, down” repeated twice in the first chapter are a symbol of distance from the real
world.
Didacticism could not be entirely banished. Dodgson himself descended to the
sentimental bathos of the Moral Tale in parts of Sylvie and Bruno--but the two Alice
books showed what could be achieved without it, and completed the reinstatement of the
imagination, so long disapproved of by the opponents of Fairy Stories, to its proper
place.
Lewis Carroll introduced children’s literature structured as a game, thus catching
better the attention of the addressees ( a card game in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and a chess game in Through the Looking Glass Following this idea, Molly Hite
considers that children’s literature structured as game is not only entertainment but
literature with a purpose: a didactic purpose. Jan B. Gordon goes on saying that Alice
seems not to progress in maturity since she repeats the same mistakes throughout the
novel due to her innocence. Probably this is one of the first didactic purposes Carroll
wanted to present and resumed by Jan B. Gordon: learning from mistakes and to see
punishment only as the logical consequence of misleading actions, not the consequence
of being a child:

““I wish I hadn't cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way
out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose by being drowned in my own tears! Ch. 2,
pg. 20 ).

Also he seems to reinforce the idea of the child as an autonomous human being, with
its own status. Someone that lets imagination fly, that makes mistakes but also someone
that has to learn, that has to be taught. Lewis Carroll's novel seems to follow this pattern,
and claims for the identity of the children
The book is refreshingly complex, refusing to patronize its young audience with
simplistic morals or perspectives. A point of comparison is Antoine de St. Exupery’s The
Little Prince: while Thewhile The Little Prince sets up a rather simplistic binary between
children (who are good, wise and innocent) and "the big people" (who are mean, shallow,
and foolish), the Alice books satirize the absurdities of adults while avoiding pat
conclusions about the difference between adults and children. Childhood is seen as a state
of danger, and although Carroll has an evident fondness for children he never idealizes
them. Alice's challenge is to grow into a strong and compassionate person despite the
idiosyncrasies of the creatures she meets (the creatures symbolizing the adult world). She
has to learn the rules of each new encounter, but in the end she must also retain a sense of
justice and develop a sense of herself. Rather than set childhood and adulthood as simple
opposites, valorizing the former and disparaging the latter, Carroll shows the process by
which a good child can become a strong adult .adult.
. Dodgson's achievement was recognized in his own day. Shortly after his death this
tribute was paid in a letter by Sir Walter Besant, accompanying a contribution towards the
establishment of a Lewis Carroll Cot in Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital:

It is now thirty years since I first made the acquaintance of Alice and I should not like to
count the number of copies of that incomparable work which I have given to little
girls of my acquaintance since that time. It is the only children's book, perhaps, which
can be read with equal pleasure by old and young. I should frequently read it still, but for
the fact that I know it by heart. It is also the only child's book of nonsense which is never
childish though it always appeals to a child; where there is no writing down to the
understanding of a child, though it can always be understood by a child. It is, in a word,
a book of that extremely rare kind which will belong to all the generations to come until
the language becomes obsolete.
2.2 The Cult of the Little Girl

Dodgson began to keep a diary in 1855, and sometimes recorded in it his admiration
for the beauty of children, especially girls, sentiments which stand out all the more
because there is no hint in the diary ( or elsewhere ) that he felt any attraction to women.
The Liddell family moved into the Deanery at Christ Church early in 1856, and on 25
April Dodgson, who had been given permission to help a friend photograph Christ
Church Cathedral from the Dean’s garden, met the children :children:

“ The“The three little girls were in the garden most of the time, and we became
excellent friends : we tried to group them in the foreground of the picture, but they were
not patient sitters. I mark this day with a white stone “

Lorina Liddell was aged six; Dodgson had already made friends with her at a musical
party at the Deanery the previous month. Alice was nearly four, and Edith two. The ‘
white‘white stone ‘ was Dodgson’s indication of a memorable occasion. The girls’
brother Harry, aged eight or nine, quickly became friends with Dodgson and this
encouraged Dodgson to make frequent visits to the Deanery, armed with his camera. By
the autumn of 1856, he had begun to spend time in the Deanery schoolroom with the
children and their governess The girls' brother Harry,
aged eight or nine, quickly became friends with Dodgson, and this encouraged Dodgson
to make frequent visits to the Deanery, armed with his camera. By the autumn of 1856 he
had begun to spend time in the Deanery schoolroom with the children and their
governess, Miss Prickett. Occasionally he would observe something in Mrs Liddell's
behaviour which he took as a sign that his visits were too frequent or in some way
objectionable, and he would respond by keeping his distance from the children for a few
days or weeks. But if Mrs Liddell felt any doubts about Dodgson, they cannot yet have
been very strong, for he was often asked to dine at the Deanery, and sometimes received
direct invitations to spend time with the children.
During the summer of 1857 Dodgson met and photographed Tennyson, whose poetry he
much admired (though he sometimes parodied it). Two years later he was introduced--by
a man who was attempting to cure his stammer--to George Mac Donald, whose children
soon became friends with him.
The volumes of Dodgson's diary for the period from April 1858 to April 1862 have
disappeared, but it is clear that during this time his friendship with the Liddell children
flourished. He began to have a particular interest in the second daughter, Alice, taking a
number of photographs of her, as well as making her pose in groups with her sisters.
Many years later, Alice described these photographing sessions:

“We used to go to his rooms, escorted by our nurse. When we got there, we used to sit on
the big sofa on each side of him, while he told us stories, illustrating them by pencil or
ink drawings as he went along. When we were thoroughly happy or amused at his stories,
he used to pose us and expose the plates before the right mood had passed. He seemed to
have an endless store of these fantastical tales, which he made up as he told them,
drawing busily on a large sheet of paper all the time. They were not always entirely new.
Sometimes they were new versions of old stories: sometimes they started on the old basis,
but grew into new tales owing to the frequent interruptions which opened up fresh and
undreamed of possibilities. In this way the stories, slowly enunciated in his quiet voice
with its curious stutter, were perfected”

The results of these photographing sessions were often remarkable; Tennyson reputedly
said of Dodgson's portrait of Alice, aged about eight, dressed as a beggar-girl, that it was
'the most beautiful photograph he had ever known' Dodgson, though previously attracted
by Lorina, had obviously begun to feel deeply attached to Alice. Many years later, in
1885, he wrote to her

“I am getting to feel what an old man's failing memory is . . . but my mental picture is
as vivid as ever, of one who was, through so many years, my ideal child-friend. I have
had scores of child-friends since your time: but they have been quite a different thing.”
Dodgson's close friendship with the Liddell children did not survive until the story had
appeared in print. It has often been suggested that his friendship with Alice and her sisters
cooled simply because they were growing up, and that Dodgson found the company of
young ladies (rather than children) undesirable. But it is clear that there was a definite
break between him and the Liddells, which happened between 25 and 30 June 1863, a
break that Dodgson himself presumably did not initiate and which he obviously deeply
regretted. It is hard to resist the speculation that Dodgson may have been suddenly cold-
shouldered by Mrs. Liddell because she believed that he now hoped, one day, to marry
Alice.
There is some slight evidence to support
the belief that Dodgson contemplated such a step, and that it was this which caused the
breach with her family. Moreover it is possible that his later child-friendships were not so
much an indication that he was unable to involve himself in adult love-affairs as that he
was trying to re-create his relationship with Alice, a relationship that perhaps could itself
have matured and led to marriage had circumstances allowed. Certainly, though he had
many later child-friends, he does not seem to have been in love with any of them. On the
other hand he did apparently fall in love for a time with the actress Ellen Terry when she
was about 17. Even Dodgson's normally discreet first biographer, his nephew S. D.
Collingwood, could not resist remarking in print that there had been 'the shadow of some
disappointment' over his subject's life; and when many years later he was asked to
explain this statement, he speculated (in a letter to a cousin) that Dodgson's
disappointment was either his failure to marry Ellen Terry- - who was already Mrs G. F.
Watts when he met her -- or Alice's marriage in 1880 to Reginald Hargreaves, which,
suggested Collingwood, “may have seemed to him the greatest tragedy in his life”.

2.3 OF POWER, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, AND PEDOPHILIA

 Perhaps no author is more identified with the rise of children’s literature than
Lewis Carroll, whose Alice books inspired a generation of readers and writers. Lewis
Carroll’sLewis Carroll’s Alice Adventures in Wonderland at a moment of cultural unrest
when England “saw the recasting of British life” as the old order ostensibly gave way to
the new. According to one social historian, “A distinctive English world view was being
formed in the crucible of the mid-Victorian ferment of social ideas…. The central
institution of the consolidation, the public school, came into its own in this period…. By
Victoria’s death, her nation possessed a remarkablyremarkably homogeneous and
cohesive an elite, sharing to a high degree a common education and a common outlook
and set of values.”
Even though only one in twentyin twenty Englishmen passed through the English public
school, the public school nevertheless “became an archetypal national institution.” Those
who could afford it sent their sons to be molded into gentlemen; and those who could not
afford the elite public schools sent their children to schools modeled after them. The
public school and the dominant culture’s ideology of class and power offered a way in
which to inculcate “homogenous” ideological values, so much so that a cohesive elite—
an educated, gentleman’s class—would represent by their very existence the obvious
rightness of the preexisting hierarchy inherent in the English class structure that came
before the public school. The public school institutionalized the process of education
more than it revolutionized it, for the public school reproduced the status quo and
consolidated ideological and cultural power. The basic ideological assumptions from
which the dominant culture, its institutions, and its enactments of the stories its institution
teaches remained intact and were ,in fact, intensified as a result of the public school’s
homogenizing ideological effects.
The class structure and the violence that reproduced it in the elitethe elite public schools
of England were nothing new to those who attended them. Rather, the public school and
its pedagogies of hierarchy and violence confirmed what the child always already
understood about the world, for the child upon entering the public school would have
already experienced years of domination and subjugation through child-rearing
experiences at home while hearing ideological confirmation of the rightness of such a
hierarchy from Sunday services at church. The public school consolidated the dominant
ideology of hierarchy and violence through enactments of hierarchy and violence in the
name of education, cultural progress, and, ultimately, moral superiority.
Common among the child’s early lessons at home and at school was, according to
Richard Wallace’s study of Lewis Carroll, “that of self-control, more correctly emotional
control to the point of constriction.” Wallace notes that “psychological studies often refer
to the Victorian period as “the Age of Anality,” referring to a common Victorian “attitude
of rigidity” and “self-control” that manifested itself in relationships of power and the
need to control as the primary way of relating to others. Control also manifested itself as
a desire to possess another, or to substitute objects that represent another and possess
them. As a result, the pursuit, possession, and consumption of material things appeared as
an obvious rightness in an age dominated by capitalism, a system that “rewards acquiring
and having at the expense of giving and sharing.” The chronic emotional anxiety and
insecurity that informed the individual’s need to control are, Alice Miller argues in For
Your Own Good, learned as a result of the child’s experience of emotional deprivation in
childhood along with the attendant adult requirement for the child to repress emotional
need as a sign of obedience, strength, and maturity. Chronic, unconscious anxiety is the
common emotional and psychological legacy of the child raised according to repressive,
controlling child-rearing pedagogies. Hierarchy and the violence that justified and
maintained hierarchy were common not only between adults and young children, but also
between teachers and students. Corporal punishment was the unquestioned manner in
which adults maintained order in the public school, along with an unquestioned
acceptance of the hierarchical imbalance of power between teachers and students.
Students—especially young students—were degraded and incomplete “savages” who
could be used as the senior classman or adult in authority saw fit. This included,
apparently, sexual abuse, rape, and other forms of regular, ritualized violence. The
hierarchy of Victorian culture, Victorian civilization, and Victorian moral superiority
found its expression in the culture of the public school. One reformer of the period writes
that the public school was “a life in which licensed barbarism was mingled with the daily
and hourly study of the niceties of Ovidian verse. It was a life of freedom and terror, or
prosody and rebellion or interminable floggings and appalling practical jokes.” Public
school was, in short, a life in whichin which the students-as-siblings practiced a style of
human relationship defined by the adults in “moral” authority over them and who
maintained their moral authority through violence, domination, subjugation, and
humiliation.
Charles Dodgson came from just such an educational experience, first experienced at
Richmond Grammar School and later at Rugby public school. The rigid hierarchies of
domination and obedience between adults and students at these institutions represented
almost exactly the hierarchical structure of human relationships he experienced as a child
growing up. Dodgson was born in Daresbury, England, on January 27, 1832. His father’s
side of the family was dominated by churchmen, going back five generations. Dodgson
was invented by his family even before birth, for if he was born a boy, he would be
named Charles just as all the first-born men in the Dodgson family had been named for
five generations. “Founded on the religious grounds, the Church of their time and
Charles’ parents believed that children arrived in a state of Original Sin, a concept their
son would question later…and were therefore beasts to be tamed, formed into the
approved Christian and societal molds.” 12 The result of the emotional and physical
molding of the child by the parent in the early Victorian home of the Dodgson family
was the child’s early mastery of “self-control,” treasured as it was by the dominant
culture. The senior Charles Dodgson exerted his control
over his son in a manner consistent with his beliefs in the hierarchy of the church, the
child’s state of Original Sin, and the need to “reform” the child from birth so that he
might enter into the dominant social order as a true Englishman. That the bourgeois adult
culture believed they understood the most effective manner in which to rear the child
reveals that the colonialist ideology is at one and the same time the dominant ideology of
Victorian culture. The child was savage, the adult civilized. Fathering meant the exercise
of godlike authority followed by the child’s slavelike obedience.
Dodgson-as-Lewis Carroll-as-pedophiliac thus meant not merely a sexual desire for
prepubescent girls. Rather, Dodgson’s pedophilia is an expression of his felt sense of
powerlessness as an adult, which he learned as a child in those relationships that required
him to remain powerless and in which, as a result, he was frequently victimized by those
who claimed adult authority over him.
 The
child’s victimization came in the most ordinary of circumstances. Because the child-
rearing pedagogies of Victorian England stressed that the child must exert “self-control”
of his emotional outbursts of any kind, be they exuberance, sadness, or anger, the child
repressed his emotional energy as a life-saving defense mechanism against the threatened
humiliation, rejection, or physical “correction.” One early symptom of Dodgson’s
repression was his well-documented stammering (a characteristic shared by his siblings).
Pedophilia wasPedophilia was another. As an adult, the repressed and largely
unconscious sense of powerlessness and rage Dodgson had internalized was transferred
onto children who could serve as a mirror for his own narcissistic gratification. For
Dodgson, prepubescent girls served this role exclusively. The prepubescent Alice Liddle
—among others—attracted Dodgson because she represented a tabula rasa upon which he
could write a story of his own desexualized idealization of his own sexuality, free from
the problematic issues of homosexual longing, male masturbatory fantasy, and other
disallowed sexual and emotional experiences Charles Dodgson experienced or was forced
to experience while in public school. As an adult in pedophilic relationship with
prepubescent girls, Dodgson has a “painless” relationship with a desexualized self that is
highly charged with sexual energy despite the scrupulous—and public—manner in
which Dodgson conducted his relationships with his victims.
Above all, Dodgson’s concern in hisin his relationships with girls and in his Alice books
is one of power. The pedophile—like Dodgson the children’s author—takes power over
the child’s body and especially her prepubescent sexuality in order to transfer onto her
his need to consciously experience his adult sexuality, which for Dodgson required his
absolute domination of the child. In the process of experiencing his own sexuality at the
child’s expense, Dodgson unconsciously acted out that part of his own emotional being
that the authority figure shamed, denied, or abused when he was a child. Dodgson used
young girls to feel his own power and take his own pleasure, and by doing so he
inadvertently reproduced the very same relational hierarchy of power and domination that
he experienced at home as a boy and at school as a student and satirized in Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland. Yet even this book is an unconscious act of cultural
reproduction, for in attempting to recover his own lost power through his manipulation
of Alice’s body Dodgson inadvertently produced and intensified the dominant culture’s
ideology of the child-as-fetish-object.
Dodgson’s
pedophilia as it manifested itself in his photography and his Alice books represents an
ambiguous textual and cultural moment that defines pedophilia and sexual predation not
as a sexual act, or as an act of overt violence, but rather, as a relationship of power of a
very subtle kind. Coercion is a factor for the pedophile only inasmuch as he never
appears to be coercing the child, but rather, he appears to be “loving” the child; he
appears to be “relating” to the child; he appears to be “child-like” himself. The pedophile
creates an atmospheric event in whichin which his need for power and control over the
child might be practiced, celebrated, and denied all at once. Dodgson’s relationships with
prepubescent girls—and his need to photograph them in the nude are infamous.
Defenders of Dodgson have noted that the nude child’s parent or guardian often observed
the photography sessions without noting any inappropriate behavior on Dodgson’s part.
Nevertheless, Dodgson and the adults who witnessed his photography sessions were all
members of a Victorian culture that, according to James Kincaid, accepted pedophilic
practices as a matter of course, providing first that these pedophilic practices adhered to
culturally sanctioned standards. Given the ideological climate of Dodgson’s England, his
behavior may have seemed to some to be odd, but certainly not criminal. He was simply a
man who enjoyed photographing children, naked children, whenever he had the
opportunity. Dodgson writes in ain a letter about his interest in photographing naked
girls that he was simply “a great collector of those works of art,” that is, of his own
photographs of naked children. In other words, Dodsgon explains that he likes to
photograph nude children because he likes to look at photographs of nude children. 13
Dodgson had little trouble finding young girls to pose for him. Apparently, his behavior
did not seem unusual to those adults Dodgson had to work with in order to gain access to
their children. Dodgson undoubtedly appeared as the upright Oxford don in good
standing with the intelligentsia of his culture, and so he was. He was the dominant
culture, with its public schools, its church, its black regalia, its ancient universities.
Dodgson represented the best and brightest of Victorian England and it was his culture
that imperialism took to the four corners of the globe. And this is troubling.
Skeptics might argue that, if child-rearing techniques were as subtly violent as I have
argued thus far, why was there only one Lewis Carroll, assuming of course that Charles
Dodgson did in fact project his own pain and powerlessness into his Alice books? The
point here is this: Dodgson was not alone. He was one manifestation of a cultural tapestry
that told virtually the same story about the relationship between the adult and the child
wherever one cared to look, at home or abroad. Hierarchy, power, domination, and
subjugation were the order of the day.
For Dodgson, the idealized portrait of the child represented a symbol of
an unrecoverable yet desirable childish innocence, fetishized by the author as the docile,
prepubescent girl-child who would be used by the adult without realizing it and, most
importantly, without ever resisting. She seems, in factin fact, to invite the “nonsense” the
author constructs for her Alice is the child Dodgson never was yet longs to be, an
idealization of innocence that he desires and that he resents all at once; Alice is the
idealized child that he releases into the world of Wonderland , into a chaotic, terrifying
freedom from “sense,” and yet, at the same time, the gamesmaster-and-wordsmith
Dodgson retains ruthless control over all of the proceedings. Like his photography of
nude little girls, then, Alice’s adventures are a not-so-subtle power play of the adult at
work in (and as) the mind of the child. Dodgson needs to exercise control, for the man
who experiences himself as utterly out of control inadvertently finds himself playing the
only game in town: hierarchical domination of the other in a culturally sanctioned form.
Foucault calls this kind of rhetorical maneuver a “reverse discourse.” The Alice stories
might be understood in similar terms. A “reverse discourse” appears to speak on behalf of
the persecuted group, say, in Dodgson’s case, the child, for in thein the Alice books
“Lewis Carroll” has articulated the magical, nonsensical world of the child’s mind, or so
the traditional wisdom of the dominant culture maintains. But as a “reverse discourse,”
Alice is in fact “a tactical element operating within the same field of force” that it
questions, and it inadvertently employs the same vocabulary and the same hierarchical
categorization of the world. “Under the guise of protest, this reverse discourse is worse
than quiescent, since it is drawn into the service of the very master it hates.” 14
Power and relations of power produce reverse discourses as a conscious way of denying
the game they are playing, while at the same time, unconsciously reproducing the
dominant ideology that gave rise to them in the first place. Above all, Victorian culture
represented a web of human and cultural relations that celebrated its power to dominate
and remake the other in its own image—including, and especially, the child. This power
went largely unquestioned by the status quo—and when it was considered by writers of
the period it was more often than not reproduced as unconscious reverse discourses of
adult domination over the child, or English domination over the other, as in the case of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis
Stevenson, and Kenneth Grahame, to name only a few. Power and the use of power
defined the dominant ideology of Victorian England, and its practice—between the adults
and the child or between
Mother England and her colonies—figured as a sign of the dominant culture’s
technological, cultural, and spiritual superiority. The use of power, in short, justified
itself. Not without individual and cultural consequences,
however. On the one hand, most people choose to live lives of quiet desperation, quietly
plagued by regular bouts with anxiety, loneliness, and anger. Most of us simply go on,
and this serves the status quo. On the other hand, others choose to become violent and
express their rage and powerlessness in extreme ways. Others still manipulate those that
they can when they can, having been taught as children that power is the nature of the
human relationship, and that taking power over others is the only real pleasure life offers.
A felt sense of powerlessness—fueled and justified by unconscious rage at having been
made powerless—motivates the individual who takes pleasure in his ability to dominate,
subjugate, and use another for his own pleasure. Though rage often manifests itself
through unpredictable violence, more often than not a sublimated version finds its truest
expression in the hierarchical relation of power between the adult and the child. Here
ambient and chronic rage can be expressed, denied, and sanctioned all at the same time; a
violent culture unaware of its own roots of violence imbedded in the practice of its
human relationships. All of this has led to a reproduction of the dominant culture in an
ever-increasing spiral of intensification.
Extreme cases of rage and violence occur as a result of the experience of great emptiness
and isolation in childhoodin childhood, without any witness or transitional relationship
of even the most moderate sort. In his study of Charles Dodgson, Wallace writes, Rage
develops early from the frustration caused by a sense that needs are being neglected by
those the child depends on, and then later either when as an adolescent or an adult he
realizes the magnitude of how he has been cheated. Or, if he is faced with a traumatic
emotional experience such as abandonment, fears of annihilation, or enormous loss it
further destroys any sense of self that remains. For such a person may suddenly realize
that primary caregivers or “society” as their surrogates are directly or indirectly
responsible for his situation due to their failure to provide either coping skills or an
environment in which the woefully inadequate learned skills “work.” Rage expression
can take many forms, including an explosive behavioral outburst, self-abuse, or a
calculated vengeful act or series of acts executed with utmost cunning. 15
According to Wallace, Dodgson was nothing if not cunning in his construction of the
text. The nonsense of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland atWonderland at every narrative
moment has a shape and a structure. What concerns us here, however, is the nature of the
relationships between Alice andAlice and the Wonderland characters, for they reveal a
correspondence between the “real” world of Victorian England and the “dream” world of
Wonderland aWonderland a correspondence that the “dream” cannot altogether mitigate,
nor, I think, did Dodgson intend it to. That his “nonsense” was never seen for what it was
in his lifetime was, according to his own diaries, a source of some anxiety for Dodgson,
for even as he enjoyed his popularity as a writer he feared that at any time the nature of
his venomous attack on Victorian culture—and the child—might be identified.