Breathless

Since Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, died exactly 100 years ago, vast numbers of books and articles have been written about his complex elusive personality. No one living knows him better than Morton N. Cohen, English professor emeritus of the City University of New York. He wrote the splendid “Lewis Carroll: A Biography” and edited a two-volume collection of Carroll’s letters. Now he has given us a strikingly beautiful volume about Carroll as a skilled photographer.

While teaching mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and writing his two immortal fantasies about Alice, Carroll became fascinated by the exciting, newly invented art of photography. In those days when the art was in its infancy, those who posed for pictures had to remain perfectly still for almost a minute, and the process of developing plates was tedious and difficult. Considering these primitive conditions, it is astonishing that Carroll’s pictures are so wonderfully clear and detailed.

Cohen introduces his selection of photos with a delightful summary of Carroll’s life and achievements. He loved the theater, invented endless games and puzzles, enjoyed chess, liked to do magic tricks for children and had a great fondness for art,music and poetry. Although he took lessons in drawing and even illustrated his first version of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”--it was a small book he hand-lettered as a gift to Alice Liddell--the art critic John Ruskin assured Carroll that his talent as an artist was mediocre. Carroll accepted this judgment. Nevertheless, he had a remarkable feel for composition that stood him well in his picture-taking. Many of his landscapes and portraits are as artfully composed as paintings. He was unquestionably his century’s finest photographer of children.

Only four of Carroll’s many photographs of little girls in the nude have survived; hand-colored reproductions of all four are in Cohen’s book. One of them, a frontal nude of Evelyn Hatch stretched out on a sofa, would probably be banned today as child pornography. From our vantage, the photos raise the question: What should we make of Carroll’s fondness for photographing little girls sans habillement, as he once phrased it in a letter? A devout Anglican, Carroll was scrupulous about obtaining the consent of parents before he took nude photos. At the same time he was constantly distressed by unsavory gossip. Before he died, he destroyed almost all the negatives and prints he had retained of such pictures.

As for those who see impure motives in Carroll’s nude photos, Cohen has this to say: “They see a dour, bleak, unhealthy world in these photographs, a repressed sexuality writ large. One wonders if they are not bringing their own neuroses to these works, twisting and despoiling their beauty. . . . Carroll was as successful in sublimating his emotional desires as he was in achieving his distinction as a photographic artist, and, certainly the two are related. But he was aware of himself and his unconventional desires, and he was honest and open with his child sitters and with their elders. . . . “

Carroll’s best-known photograph of Alice Liddell shows her garbed as a barefooted child beggar. Hauntingly lovely, and perhaps colored by Carroll himself, it graces the front cover of Cohen’s book. In his biography of Carroll, Cohen has given his reasons for believing that Carroll was romantically in love with Alice and at one time even hinted to her parents that, when she became of age, he would ask them to consider a marriage proposal. We do know that Mrs. Liddell, wife of the dean of Christ Church, angrily broke off Carroll’s relations with Alice and burned all his letters to her. Even some relative of Carroll, unknown to us, tore out the pages of Carroll’s diary which covered this episode.

Apropos of Carroll’s passion for photographing unclothed little girls, Cohen ends his essay by quoting a passage from one of Carroll’s letters to his artist-friend Gertrude Thompson. She had suggested that he sketch some children she had seen on the seashore romping about in the nude. Carroll’s response reflects his unique sense of humor, his knowledge of poetry and, in the last sentence, his addiction to puns. It would be, Carroll concluded, a hopeless quest:

” . . . to try to make friends with any of the little nudities. . . . A lady might do it: but what would they think of a gentleman daring to address them! And then what an embarrassing thing it would be to begin an acquaintance with a naked little girl! What could one say to start the conversation? Perhaps a poetic quotation would be best. ‘And ye shall walk in silk attire.’ But would that do? . . . Or one might begin with Keats’ charming lines, ‘Oh where are you going, with your lovelocks flowing, And what have you got in your basket?’ . . . Or a quotation from Cowper (slightly altered) might do. His lines are ‘The tear, that is wiped with a little address, May be followed perhaps by a smile.’ But I should have to quote it as ‘The Tear, that is wiped with so little a dress’!”