Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Truth About Alice in Wonderland

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

In this episode, we're well and truly going down a rabbit hole. To unpick the controversies surrounding the author of Alice in Wonderland, Kate is joined by author and Professor of Film and Cultural Studies, Will Brooker.Will introduces us to Charles Dodgson, pseudonym Lewis Carroll, and his life, relationships and photography. Will is a professor at Kingston University and author of 'Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture'.This episode was edited by Tomos Delargy and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.If you'd like to get in touch with the show you can contact us at [e-mail] up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lester. You are listening to Bertwitster Sheets. But before we can go any further, I do have to tell you. This is an adult podcast, Pokemon, adults, to other adults, bad, adulty things,

an adult way you're covering an adult subjects and you should be an adult too. Now, you know, I normally mess around with what we call the Fair Do's Warning, because fair do's, we did warn you. But this is actually quite a serious Fair Do's Warning. This episode is covering allegations of child abuse and indecent images of children. So you might just not want to listen to that today.

And in which case, do feel free to scroll back through our back catalogue and we will catch you next time. A golden afternoon in 1862, a rowing boat meanders steadily upriver, making its way through the bells and chatter of Oxford. Aboard, there are two grown men and three young girls fidgeting in the warm sun. Heavy picnic baskets are weighing the boat down in the water and the girl's small hands regularly slip from the oars. One of the men in the boat is reclined, eyes closed as he conjures up a new world for his young companions. With frequent interruptions in the odd childish squeal of delight, the world of underground, later to be known as Wonderland, is formed

and young Alice is placed squarely in the middle of it. What do you look for in a man? Oh, many, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel so damn. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Terry.

Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. It's rare to find somebody who has never met Alice. Whether they met her in Tim Burton's 2010 movie, the 1951 Disney Classic, or in the book. themselves. It's almost certain that you would have met Alice somewhere. Long blonde hair held back with an Alice band, big eyes and rosy cheeks, a blue dress with puffed sleeves and a white pinafore. She can often be found chasing anthropomorphic white rabbits down rabbit holes and having

tea parties with mad hatters. But where did she come from? In this episode of Betwixt the Sheets, we are going back to that boat in Oxford to find out more about the author Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Ludvich Dodgson, and in particular, his relationship with the real life, Alice. Joining me today to tease apart this very complex story is Will Brooker, professor of film and cultural studies at Kingston University. So let's crack on. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets.

It's only Will Brucker. How are you doing? I'm doing so well, thank you, Kate. Very nice of you to have me on. Oh, I mean, how could we not have had you on? this particular subject. Are you ready to ruin a few childhoods? I hope to preserve and cherish a few childhoods, actually. I think we'll come out of it. Well, I don't want to spoil the thing. Right. This is interesting. We are in controversial territory with, well, whenever you've got an author that is as cherished as Lewis Carroll is, and especially if it's to do with childhood stuff,

they become quite sacred. But can I ask you before we even get into discussing who this man was and what the controversy may or may not have been. Do you remember when you first read or saw Alice in Wonderland what your first contact with it was? I sure do. And it's quite precious to me, so I mean, we have to accept I might be biased. My mum gave me her copy of it. In fact, I think she first gave me her copy of Through the Looking Glass rather than Alice in Wonderland. It was when I was seven, which is the approximate age of Alice in the books. And it said, William Brooker, your turn now. And as my mum has now passed, it's even more special to me, you know, in her handwriting on the fontist piece. So she was handing it on like a, well, she's handing on her own childhood copy.

So yeah, really special for me. Why do you think that text is as precious as it is in the whole canon of children's literature? Well, I mean, we must know I read the sequel first, which is kind of odd. That's my mum's thought. It's kind of funny to give someone the sequel first. So through looking glass has always been my favourite of the two. And I think it's quite a lot of critics' favourite because it's more considered and intentional

and it's kind of more sophisticated. It's more planned, basically. I do wonder sometimes how important Alice in Wonderland is still to kids and to modern culture. I've got a six-year-old. I don't think he knows who she is. And I wonder if most people would know her through Disney or Tim Burton. But for a long time, during Carol's lifetime,

the book was certainly cherished as a kind of a childhood favourite. After he had died in between the... In World War I, it became sort of symbolic of a lost childhood, a lost period of lost innocence. And between the wars, it still symbolised something which was recently passed and now lost. And then not each decade, but each sort of major cultural period, I think, has had its own Alice, like Freudian Ellis, psychedelic Alice,

the 2000s, which is what I'm... Well, the 90s, actually, in 2000s, which I was writing about when I last significantly wrote on Alice. That was when these discourses around protecting children and paedophiles came into play. I think one of the reasons why it did become such a big text is if you like try and place it within the context of Victorian literature, it was sort of one of the first, if not the first children's texts to just be of an explosion of imagination and nonsense. Up to then, children's literature had been very much sit down, sit up straight and say your prayers. Yeah, it was irreverent, very irreverent, which is funny because he was a reverend, Dodgson, Carol. But it was irreverent.

So maybe Dodgson was irreverent and Carol was irreverent. It's got, you know, his perodic sermons and moral rhymes in it. So it was actively subverting what children are normally told to do. Yeah, and I think part of the lasting appeal, I think, is, that it's about a child's perspective on adult life and adult society. Whatever other interpretations we put on it, it's about how strange, sometimes oppressive, and complicated and unfair adult society with its rules seem to a kid.

And if kids do connect with it now, then I think that could be the meaning they're taking from it. Let's talk about the man himself. So Lewis Carroll is a pen name. What is his real name and what's his origin story? His name is Charles Lutwidge Dodson. Now, I've learned from all my friends in the Corollian societies that it's not Dodgson, but Dodson. Dodson, okay.

Yeah, and Charles Lutwidge became sort of reversed and I think de-latinized into Lewis Carroll. So Charles Lutwidge was sort of reversed and then adapted and translated a bit. So that's a sort of rather laboured joke. I was going to say, but all accounts and then try and summarise him, but actually all accounts, accounts are so different. And I think that's part of the trouble with Carol. There's lots of different sides to him, and there's not a lot that's really known about him personally. We know the facts of his life. He grew up with several sisters. He was producing sort of jockey pamphlets for the family from a young age. Pretty much lived his life, Oxford, in the same

rooms there, lecturer in mathematics, wrote books about logic, and also wrote these two incredible Alice books and the hunting of the snark which happens in what we would now call the same sort of universe you know the Alice universe or whatever I quite like the fact that you've got sort of crossover monsters between the two

they're clearly in the same environment and then later works which is supposedly for children I've never liked them Sylvie and Bruno two massive volumes of that for me sort of turgid sentimental tweed just don't work at all

some people like them more than I do to me never really he never really produced anything as good as the Alice books and the hunting of the snarkers and interesting sort of. It's a long poem about what the title says, Huntinger, a Mythical Beast. Very unusual for this man to have done it as well. Because I remember reading all of these essays and I've endlessly heard people say, oh God, he was off his tits on LSD, he must have been,

because Alice became really important to the psychedelic 60s movement as well. But from what I know of him, he was really quite dull and awkward. He was a mathematician. He was in the church. He didn't really like talking to people. Most of the descriptions I've heard of him was that he was awkward. Yeah, about the psychedelic thing. I think that's an example of people sort of having the Alice and the Carol that they want for their own period.

Yes. Because from inner culture in the 1960s where people are doing LSD in mushrooms, a book with a chapter where there's a caterpillar telling you to eat this bit of the mushroom, you'll grow big and small. It's in the gray slick song, White Rabbit. And also stoners would project the Disney movie on campus and, you know, do their thing with their substances. And they were absolutely convinced that it was a stoner movie. But, you know, not necessarily.

That's like seeing it through the framework of the time, isn't it? I think it's pretty definite. He didn't do any LSD, although the whole culture around drugs was different then, wasn't it? Opium was more widely available. I'm pretty convinced he didn't. He was a pretty abstemious, even drinker. You know, he'd have like a glass of sherry. Actually, I personally think, I think it's a little bit limiting to think

that he must have been on drugs to imagine all this stuff because I think it is also possible to have that imagination without being stoned, you know. And also, a lot of people get stoned and never write incredible works of literature. So I think it was him rather than anything he was imbibing and ingesting. Some people say that this whole image of him as being dull is also another myth and he was socially active, socially confident. Big in the world of theatre,

like to hang around people of higher ranks, like he liked to get access to royalty and to actors, and that he was a bit of a social mover. So it's funny, isn't it? There's all these myths around him. Really contradictory stuff as well. What's your thoughts from someone that's researched him? Do you think that he was quiet and bookish and into his maths?

Or was like, what do you think about him? I tell you what I think people contain multitudes. you know, and I think someone could probably look at you or me in different lights asking different people and say, well, you know, I knew the person like this. I think it's quite possible that someone could be all those things at different times in different company with different groups, actually. Because, you know, the way you might act with a child you meet on the beach, which he did, and this is partly what, you know, while we now have problems with him, he was very friendly with children that he'd only just met. is bound to be different from talking to actors backstage at a theatre. And the way you lecture to a class is going to be different for the way you have a laugh with your friends. So I think we might just have to accept that some things escape easy definitions,

especially because we're not really held by the fact his diaries. Firstly, they're really boring. And secondly, some have been destroyed and some have been tampered with, which is partly what leads to this controversy that they're missing bits. And so that helps with the mystery of Lewis Carroll. Why would his relatives have destroyed anything? How did the Alice books come about them? We should talk about that.

We've got this man who he's in the church. I can't remember, but he wasn't very high up in the church. But he was also a mathematician at Oxford. Is that right? Yeah, mathematician, yeah. That's where the hell does Alice come from? Well, there's sort of myths around that as well. And we can't know for sure what the facts were of the actual original occasion.

because it's been kind of retroactively made into the origin story of Alice in Wonderland, this so-called golden afternoon. But basically what happened is he and his friend Reverend Duckworth used to socialise with, take the daughters of the Little family, the nearby Little family, out on trips and everything. And they have many such trips, nothing much else to do, I suppose. Play in the meadows, go up the ISIS, which apparently is what the Thames is called when it goes through Oxford,

go up the ISIS on a boat and so on. And one of these trips, as he often did, he would tell the girls' stories off the top of his head. And supposedly the story he told on this particular day was an especially good one. And the girls clamoured for him to write it down. So he went home and in his quarters, you know. He wrote this one down. And Alice was his favourite of the little sisters, Alice. So it starts off as being kind of a story about a girl.

You know, just like you might have a kid and make up stories about them. and then you develop that into a, you know, Henry and the Monsters or something, whatever. And then when he shows it to other people and they say, oh, you know, Charles, you know, my dear Dodson, there's something in this, this could be a success. Then he elaborates it, makes it clever and makes it much longer. Originally had his own illustrations, which clearly shows something that looks a bit like Alice Little, who's like a brunette with a bob. He expands it and he gets John Tenial, a really good artist who drew for Punch Magazine,

to illustrate it. And I think by the time it's published in 1865, a few years later, it's kind of gone quite a long way from the original Alice, partly because Tenure draws her with long blonde hair. I think that's quite key somehow. That Dodson never said, Carol Dodson, never said, no, no, you've got to make her look like this girl. I think he was actually quite concerned there with commercial success.

He was a pretty canny guy. He was in charge of merchandising for Alice in Wondland. He was pretty possessive with the whole sort of, what we would now call the brand. I think by the time it was published, actually, it wasn't really about the little girl so much anymore, partly because years had passed and as girls grew older, it was less possible to kind of socialise with them

because, you know, as they into their teens, it wouldn't have been proper. So it starts out, I would say, a story about his favourite little girl from this family, told to her and her sisters on what supposedly is like an idyllic golden afternoon, this mythical boat ride. there's been lots of debate about whether it was actually raining that day and what really happened and so on.

But, you know, it's important to admit that it's this perfect, perfect daftanem. And then, you know, and it's important that this one's story was the best story which he then wrote down. But I think we should remember that the original story isn't the one that was published. That one, you can get it, is called Alice's Adventures Underground. You can see it in his handwriting with his pictures, but that's not the story that was actually published. There is a lot about Alice and her sisters in the finish. text, so isn't it? Like their cat really was called diner and isn't there a poem on the final page that if you read to the first letter of each line, it spells out Alice's name. Alice Pleasant

Liddle, yeah, a nice name. Yeah. Yeah, the sisters do crop up in it and in disguised form. In the, I believe it's the Dormouse who tells a story about three girls who lived in a treacle well, Elsie, Lacey and Tilly, and those are clearly the sisters. The lory bird is like based on. what based on, you know, it's kind of inspired by Lorena, Alice's older sister. So there's these little sort of in-jokes, but they're quite hidden now. It's not really about Alice and her sisters. You know, really it's about this character called Alice, who then appears again in a sequel, and by the time she appears in the sequel, that's 1871,

and Lewis Carroll was not really in touch with Alice Little anymore. And there's one key fact that I think is quite interesting. whatever we think about whether John Tennell drew a blonde girl, because this blonde girl that he drew as Alice, had appeared in some other of his pictures of punch. It was like one of his kind of characters, you know, this sort of Little Miss, prim little miss. In through the looking glass, I like this because it can't really be argued.

In through the looking glass, Alice leans out of a boat in a river again, and her hair touches the water. And the original Alice's hair would not have touched the water. So to me, that strongly suggests. for that point, he was thinking about the girl in the pictures, not the actual girl. I think she had evolved for him as his character, his kind of brand, his considerable literary success by that point. I'll be back with Will and Alice after this short break. So there's this mythical story that may or may not have happened where he tells this story

and they're all punting down the River Thames, but it's not the Thames because it's in Oxford. And Alice was seven and she has two sisters, right? Yes. Edith and Lorena, the younger Edith. and the older Lorena. So we're going to have to talk about the Little family then because this is where some of the controversy starts to come in. What was Carol's relationship with the Little family? Why was he taking these children out boating,

which is a very nice thing to do, but they must have been pretty close. Henry Little was the dean of the college, and so he's Carol's senior manager, you know, his kind of boss. Yeah. Live nearby. I suppose, you know, Carol is a... gentle nearby bachelor. It was just a nice, nice thing to do it, you know. And conventions were quite different then. I don't think it was so unusual that two clerical gentlemen would take out

someone else's daughters for day trips. It was considered to be quite an innocent friendship. Okay. But there is, there's more here to be unpicked, I think, is just the accusations haven't kind of come around because they went boating. It seems that Carol, the word have been used anything from obsessive or fascination or overly interested or just an affinity for he liked spending time with children. Yeah, he did. And it's not quite true either, although it's mostly true that he liked hanging out with young girls. And it's really hard to say these things without them sounding awful, actually. It's really hard to say things which were factual and okay in the 1860s without them automatically making me feel, how can this be

defended. He did mostly like hanging out with girls, yeah. And there was some controversy about it, which stems from the fact that, again, a mystery is created by the fact that four diaries are missing and several pages are cut out of one diary, and that is when there was a rift with the little family. Do we know what that was about? We don't know for sure, but there's a lot of interesting rumours and interesting stories. The stories might be more interesting than the truth. I have seen these cut pages during my research and it is... Have you? Yeah, yeah, you can see them in the British Library. I hadn't realised they actually survived. I saw the pages, the remaining pages with the cuts in them, not the pages. I saw the bit where the pages were cut. Oh, I see. I was going to go,

we've solved it. Wow. Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, there's a lot to this. I saw the bits where the pages were cut and they've been cut with nail scissors by Carol's nieces that is thought, Violet and F. Manila Dodson after his death. The mystery is, and it is an interesting mystery, that there also exists a piece of note paper, which I saw in the Dodson family collection of the Surrey History Centre in Glamorous Woking, which summarises those pages, okay? And the note is kind of in shorthand, so it could be interpreted in different ways, and it says that Carol is supposed by some to be courting, Ena, okay? And so different critics have, surmised that this could mean that Carol is thought to be courting the mother, who's also called

Lorena, or Alice's older sister, Lorena. I think the daughter is far more likely because you're not going to call Mrs. Little, Ena, in that familiar way. So he's thought by some to be courting Lorena Little, but that's just rumour, isn't it? But rumour would have been enough for a family to distance itself from Carol, and it would have been enough. I should have been enough. I should to say Dodson at this point probably, it would have been enough for Dodson to feel kind of both insulted and shocked and that he must do the right thing and for him to hold himself distant. And it's also rumoured that he might have been courting the governess, Miss Prickett. So basically, there's a couple of rumours around that him hanging around the house, he must have

had another reason. And I think it could be that in those times with those people, that rumour would have been enough for what seemed like a rift because you had to do the right thing and said, okay, well, no questions asked, I'll stay away them, because we can't have that kind of gossip. I can see that. I mean, I'm not sure how old the daughter would have been at this point when this argument rift. The rift began in June 1863 and Lorena would have been 14. It is supposed by some, and this is one of those things that like someone proposed once, and because there's no more information, it gets repeated in other biographies until it becomes like a thing everyone knows.

it's guessed that he may have proposed honourable marriage to Alice and then some people say well if he proposed marriage it would have been he went to her mother and father and said could we have an idea in the future if this connection is still there when it's appropriate perhaps we could move forward with a view towards marriage he wouldn't have actually proposed marriage but even we don't even know that that's just guesswork we don't we don't know anything at all no it's just filling in the blanks okay but he would have been

in his early 30s. Yeah, he would have been 31, I think. I'm not sure that people getting married at 14 would have been the normal state of affairs, even in 1865. But we are just filling in the gaps here. We don't know what the rift was. It's all rumor and supposition. They might have just fallen out over what they were binge watching on Netflix.

You have no idea at all. We have no way to know it. It could have been Netflix. I mean, who can really say? But any kind of shadow of a doubt would have been enough for people who, were about respectability to back off. It didn't really need anything at all. The idea that Carol was courting the governess, Miss Prickett, would have been enough.

Because I think that would have insulted him in terms of class. He would have been, well, of course I'm not. Would this have been widely known at the time? I mean, I completely get that. If there's any kind of whiff of impropriety, there's people with these rumours and they're not true. Yeah, you would. You distance yourself. Does that mean that people were gossiping at the time?

I think there would have been Oxford gossip within those circles. Yeah, within those circles. This is before Alice in Wonderland was actually published, though. So a lot of this is really retrospective. My overall view is that people try and find stories about this guy because there isn't really all that much to find. And perhaps there is a lot of complexity. It's just that we don't know it.

So we've got these absences that we've... The various biographers have, over the years, tried to fill... A lot of it is referring to each other's work, and then sometimes there's like a new document comes up or some new letters or a new interpretation or something. but the evidence is really very scant. One thing that does interest to me

is that in terms of his photography of children, which is another thing we've got to consider, as well as hanging out with them, he liked to take pictures of them. And as well as taking pictures of them, he liked to take pictures of them by how much clothes on. He did. And as well as that,

sometimes they didn't have any clothes on. And again, when you say this sort of thing, I kind of expect people to go, well, how can you possibly still defend Carol? And one of the things that I find interesting about that is there was some content. controversy among Oxford's families about him taking the photographs. It wasn't just that Victorians had a different idea of childhood and that nude photographs

were far more common as like symbols of innocence and cherubs and everything. There was a little bit of pushback from families. I imagine so. Well, but the thing is, what we imagine would be very, very different from what it was in, you know, the 1870s, 1880s, because now if someone came around to take pictures of our children, I mean, I don't even want to go there because it's so... You'd phone the police, wouldn't you? They'd be... So obvious.

You wouldn't even feel comfortable saying, well, yes, obviously go and have a little river trip with this person, would you? I don't even feel comfortable having it crossed my mind. Photography was a really new medium at this point, or at least it was new in the fact that amateurs like Carol was could experiment with it. So there's a newness to it. I have heard it argued that it was all right for him to be photographing nude children because he kind of recreates it in this sort of clobes.

classical Greek way that they look like cherubs. I've never been quite convinced by that because I've not found other examples of children being photographed nude to make the argument that this is completely within the standards of the time. I have heard comparison with Carol's contemporary Julia Margaret Cameron, who also took photographs of children. And I've also heard comparison with like greeting cars at the time, which would feature ostensibly nude babies.

You wouldn't see anything because, you know, they're cherubs. So there was a kind of different culture around the innocence of youth there that there wasn't so much to be protected and we should never see it but there was no shame in looking at it because it was so inherently innocent but then to our eyes now some of the pictures look suggestive. There's a picture of Alice Liddall. There's two, I think in fact. Alice is a beggar girl.

Yep, quite a famous picture that one. Part of her chest is uncovered, yeah, and no one would take that now. And yeah, he dresses them up in different ways, in sort of magnetic poses. he puts them as part of tableaus. The nudes, I think there are four extant nudes and others. The nudes were always in a vast minority. He took, which is all sorts of other things like, you know, one is of a fish skeleton, for instance.

So as you say, he was a pioneer in a relatively new technology and art, and I suppose technology and art together would have particularly fascinated him, this guy who's on one level really logical and on one level really imaginative. So he would have been like, you know, one of the few people practicing photography, and it was novel in that way, and he was an expert in something which is far more complicated than, you know, now we all carry a camera, but this involves, you know, chemicals and putting a canopy over my head and, you know, telling people to stand still for 30 seconds. So it's a very complicated process. His pictures are, as you say, sort of tabloes in costume, a lot of them. The nudes, which I think still exist, they're pretty twee and sentimental and sort of mawkish. They're colour. and they're like nymphs on a beach sort of idea. You know, they're in situations, you know, stranded on a rock somewhere, like the lost boys. I know that the argument is that, you know, it was a different time.

But I think we'd need to like look at the context of the time. I had a student who did that once for a master's research project. They looked into this to try and see what was the context of the time. And they made a really strong argument. There was actually a fetishization of young girls and virgins at this time. if you look through erotica and pornography, not that we've got any evidence, that's what Carol was doing,

but there's also quite a strong narrative that young girls at this time were highly sexualised. But we don't know if that's what Carol was doing. If that was like, I would like school, you know, an active discourse. If that was a dominant discourse at the time, then I would be persuaded by that. You know, I go where the evidence goes, basically.

If someone could show me, and no doubt they could, that there was this kind of culture of fetishizing young girls, then Carol wouldn't have been unaware of that at all. He was really culturally aware. I mean, we can't rule out the possibility. He genuinely did have a predilection, yeah.

Yeah, I think what we can be sure about is I don't think he reacted on it, unless we count taking photos of action, which nowadays we absolutely would. Taking photos of children is absolutely an abusive action. We obviously can't know what was in his head. I don't think he thought what he was doing was wrong. I think the pushback from families was mostly because the girls were like 14, 15.

and it was no longer appropriate because now they were young women, are often girls, and they were entering a different sort of social category. Again, wouldn't it be interesting to know what he was thinking? Or what his relationship with the children were? I mean, do we have anything, like when Alice Little grew up, for example, because I know that we don't have, there's no smoking gun, nobody who had any, because he had lots of these child friendships, and none of them have accused him of anything improper.

Nobody has said anything. This is all us looking back at what's there and trying to work it out. What was his relationship with these? Who were they, the girls in the pictures or like his child friends? Yeah, you're absolutely right. For what it's worth, all these girls who grew up into the early 20th century speak so highly of him. But then, on the other hand, these days, we wouldn't necessarily count matters

proving anyone was innocent because it could be a trauma response or whatever or false memories. So by contemporary standards, that doesn't mean too much. But we're absolutely right. There's no one who says, oh, that Lewis Carroll, you know, I always felt really uncomfortable with him. They say the opposite, and yeah, I don't know. Who were the girls? They were like children of friends.

Sometimes there were people who met on the beach. He used to go to Eastbourne a lot, hang out there. And you know, it sounds awful now, but used to go down to the beach with things like toys and safety pins to pin up their skirts and so on and drawing stuff. Stuff that almost seems grooming by today's stance, but maybe it was perfectly innocent.

And so he used to make these child friends, and their guardians and parents would let them come round his house and he's born. And this is something we have as evidence. He would write letters to them. And so we do have the letters. And a lot of those letters are actually like mini masterpieces like the Alice books. They're really charming and clever. They're sort of, you know, now come now, can you do this puzzle?

I'm sure even a baby could do this puzzle. So please tax your brain over this. There are all sorts of games and pictures in these letters would seem absolutely, you know, not just fine, but really, really nice. So we do have that. And we have his diaries which sort of say, you know, met a wonderful little girl today. I place a white stone by this day, meaning it was a special day. At the same time, and this, because we have so little evidence to go on,

some people have seized on the fact that also in his diaries, there are these desperate prayers for forgiveness and absolution of sin. and so people have argued about what that could be about. Some people say it's just him being too hard on himself because he was so saintly. Any divergence from a perfect life would have tormented him. Some people say it was masturbation or nocturnal emissions, wet dreams, which obviously even a man like him would have had.

We can't know. So again, it's like guesswork, you know, is it he felt really guilty about something he'd done or did he feel guilty about any kind of desires that troubled him in the middle of the night as they would any person, pretty much. Any kind of dreams? Or was he just being really harsh on himself

because he hadn't, you know, done as much work that year as he told himself? But in the diaries, there are these tormented dreams like, dear Lord, please save your kind of forsaken servant and purge me of this and let me start the new era of fresh. He had a troubled conscience, but we can't

know why, can we? No, we can't. I'll be back with Will and Alice after this short break. It's so difficult because if this happened today, it would be a crime. There are laws against it. You can't do that at all. So you have to constantly try and contextualize it.

And then also you are filling in the gaps. Very difficult because from a modern point of view, a crime has been committed, but we can't know what was going on inside his heads. We should remember as well that this is a very controversial topic within Keralian studies. And it has been for a very, very long time and will be viciously debated by lots and lots of different people.

When did this even start to come to light? Well, actually, it's not very much debated because among Corollians, the strictly agreed consensus is he did nothing wrong and that any insinuations are poisonous. Because I'm a bit more distant from that circle now, I feel a bit more kind of removed from it. But at the time, when I was hanging around in those circles, the only thing you could possibly say was,

This is judging a man unfairly by contemporary standards. Really? Yeah, yeah. When did it come to light? Well, his nephew, very short, Stuart Cawleywood Dodson, very shortly after Carol's death, wrote the first biography, and it was basically the sky was a sane on earth, how much we're going to miss the wonderful Lewis Carroll and how wonderful he's left these gifts behind for generations.

There's a kind of book you'd expect your nephew to write, and pretty much at the same time, I suppose, his nieces were pretty much the same time, burning the diaries and cutting the pages out. So if we join these things up, it does look like a sort of cover-up job, doesn't it? Then, as I say, I think we have the carol that we deserve and that we create. It was the rise of Freudianism into popular culture and understanding. So you're talking about the 40s, really, when, just like in cinema, you get kind of psychological film noir around that time.

That's when people start to use a version of psychoanalysis to think, well, what was the unconscious, what was going on there? And that's when the story about his obsession with Alice really emerges. It was haunted by Alice all his life. It doesn't help that he wrote a poem about Alice. Still, she haunts me, phantom-wise. I think it says Alice moving under skies never seen by waking eyes, which almost seems to be saying the quiet bit out loud. But that's when it's like, you know, what's the unconscious motivation?

He must have been obsessed with this girl, Alice, all his life. And then various biographies, as I say, just trying to sort of come up the slightly different version of what they've got, but it really says more, I think, about the frameworks of we use at the time than it does anything about

Lewis Carroll is so complicated, really. It's a bigger picture to me about, you know, how do we talk about stuff in the past? Do we apply our own views and knowledge to it? Or is that completely anachronistic? Like, the same way, could we talk about Oscar Wilde

in terms of LGBT culture and rights and everything? I have these sort of discussions in class, you know. Is it right to say Oscar Wilde was going? Well, in a sense, no, because term gay didn't enter into popular culture into the 20th century. But then what should we call our school world? I wouldn't want to call them the terms which were used at the time. And even homosexual sounds a bit over formal.

No. Now, to see what I mean. Can we use contemporary terms to describe the Victorians? It's a big discussion for me. It's made so much hard by the fact that we just don't know. We don't have a smoking gun. There was no accusations made. No one was put on trial.

No evidence was tested. This is us looking back and feeling intensely uncomfortable. And I'm sure everyone is listening. We've made feel intensely uncomfortable as well. It's hard not to, isn't it? It's just what happened, isn't it? It's really hard not to. To be more generous, I think it's also our type of celebrity culture,

which we're now applying back and thinking, well, there must be a smoking gun. It can't be everything that it seems. But what if it can? With all celebrities now, if someone's like really well behaved, we're looking for the scandal. What if there isn't a scandal? Well, like, what if he was just this kind of unusual guy, like the company of kids, also hang out with that ox, really good at logic, not a very good teacher, liked maths, also had an amazing imagination. Like, what if it was just this incredibly a unique guy?

And to be fair, we've never seen a guy like that again, really. But, you know, it's just an incredibly individual creator. And we should be kind of glad he's got these books. But I think it does say something about our view of celebrity that we're thinking, well, what's the hidden story here? it's possible that there isn't more. As a final question, do you think that this information about Carol would shape how we read and understand Alice?

It's the question about separating the art from the artist, I suppose. I'm really glad you asked that. Such a massive contemporary issue, even this year, maybe no names. We've had authors who are much beloved and have been very important to people for decades who now are involved in accusations of terrible crimes and abuse.

So this is absolutely ongoing at the moment on social media. Can we separate the art from the artist? Should we give away our books by a favorite artist who's turned out to be disappointing? Well, I think it's got to be down to the individual. I mean, personally, you know, and I hope I can be forgiven for thinking my Ellis book is precious because my mum gave it to me

and it serves an important part of my life. Would I read Alice to my son? That becomes another question, doesn't it? I mean, you know, he likes Minecraft and Mario, so he's not exactly saying, you know, Daddy, what's that book? Please, can I read that Victorian book? You know, if he did, would I try and contextualize it a little bit? Quite probably I would.

People are still, you know, Tim Burton made his Alice films quite recently. Alice is still big at Disneyland. Yeah. So it's almost like Alice has kind of become almost slightly separate. Even in my own book, like 25 years ago, I said it seems that people still cherish Alice, but they wouldn't want Lewis Carroll to be the one who reads it to their children. I think we're still in that place. Well, we might have to either forget Lewis Carroll or we just think of him as the saintly figure,

because I don't think we can hold both ideas in our mind at the same time, that we love Alice in Wonderland as his Innocent book. And yet, this guy was really problematic. I don't think that we can do it. Perhaps we should be able to entertain contradictions, but I mean, it's difficult. Will, you have been fascinating. I'm challenging to talk to.

You've been marvellous. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? I work at Kingston University. So if anyone wants to contact me, they can find me on the Kingston University website, I think, and they'd be very welcome to drop me an email. And you've been so fascinating and challenging as well.

Thank you so much. I feel we went beyond Carol into some really huge issues of like history there. Well, thank you very much. a pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Will for joining me. If you like what you heard, please don't forget to like with you and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from more real wives of dictators to the horrible, awful history of gonorrhea, all coming your way.

This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Sophie. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.