For the 42 seconds it took to expose the plate, he and the subject were free of the strict confines of Victorian society and he was, as he felt when with a child, in the presence of something sacred. As Morton Cohen notes, “He rejected outright the Calvinist principle of original sin and replaced it with the notion of inborn divinity.” (107, Cohen) Dodgson himself saw a “child nature,” something “Other”, and in whose company he saw “a spirit fresh from God’s hands, on whom no shadow of sin…has yet fallen.” (105, Cohen)
“We are but older children, dear, / who fear to find our bedtime near,” Lewis Carroll wrote in one of his poems — a phrasing that clearly suggests his own awareness of aging and mortality. Perhaps the fact that he had epileptic seizures emphasized the point all the more, for grand and petit mal are much like a little death, a loss of consciousness, a parting Should it be any surprise to us that he wished to remain in the nonjudgmental world of children, a world as yet unjaded by society, and through photography to “hold the little girl forever young in the looking glass”? (26, Pleasures Taken) One can hardly blame Dodgson, who had experienced so little freedom in his own childhood, for wanting to savor the moment, the “golden afternoon” that he saw in those early years. But the naturalness of his vision mocks us and makes us uncomfortable, and so we refuse to acknowledge what is before us, the sitter’s untamed energy, and instead cast blame on the photographer – the pervert who reveled in little girls. It is thus that we demonize Dodgson, ascribe motive where perhaps there is none.
What Dodgson really wanted was to stop time, and who wouldn’t? In the moments he spent with children, especially during the 42 seconds it took to expose the plate, when the sitter had to remain perfectly still, he was trying to freeze the very essence of childhood. For 42 seconds, time seemed suspended, and no doubt he did derive something from this. Was it something deviant? There is very little real evidence to suggest it. It is more likely that he wanted simply to preserve his contact with this fleeting and precious time, to live vicariously through his sitters. But his models grew up one after the other, and child-friends went on to marry and became part of the world of rules and regulations where the Red Queen reigned and where he was never comfortable. That he had to constantly find new subjects – a practical matter because children age – must have been a source of considerable grief for Dodgson. Their passing to adulthood, out of that beautiful light of the golden afternoon, must have felt to him as a death.
The truth is, we can never really know Dodgson’s inner thoughts, and if we are to guess and try to make sense of the man who was and is such an enigma, then not only he, but we, would be better served by using the information that we do possess. The fact that he had epilepsy, for instance, though ignored by many of his commentators, is hardly small or insignificant. In many ways Dodgson was the model of an epileptic genius who, through his writing and his photographs, sought to show us something of his world – a world sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrifying, but the world as he saw it. Perhaps, after all is said and done, he achieved what he wrote about so long ago, to invent a “memory camera” that could capture all the thoughts inside a man’s head and translate them into negatives, photographs for all the world to see and wonder about. Perhaps that is what he was after when he took so many portraits of his sleeping, unconscious, un-self-conscious children: to photograph the unphotographable world of the mind.
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
Article comments
1 - Lono
Charles Dodgeson is a phenomenal genius. I regard the Alice books as my favorite ever written, and I have a literature degree to back that up. It's unfortunate that history will probably judge him as a creepy pedophile. He was a mathmatic genius, and several of the passages in the second book (through the looking glass) are actually working puzzles.
The first piece of music I wrote I put to Charles Dodgeson words (I think it was Shadowland).
take care,
lono
2 - srp
agreed. it is sad. I don't judge him that way myself, and i hope that is clear in the piece. It would indeed be sad if he were judged so. I'd like to think that as biographers, we really do our research before condemning anyone to something as serious as that... Let's hope so.
Be well
s.r.p.
3 - Eric Olsen
exceptional and infomative - I love your theory on stopping time
4 - Purple Tigress
I also have found Lewis Carroll's writings exceptional.
I wasn't aware of his suffering from epilepsy and stuttered. I think this goes a long way to explaining his love of photography and his preference for the company of children.
I also prefer not to think of him as a creepy pedophile although there are some more modern "art photographers" that I would consider coming under that category.
Thanks for the book reviews.
5 - Robert Nagle
This is a fascinating essay, especially the part about the epilepsy (which I'd never heard of).
It's interesting to contemplate how our view of photographs differ from other generations. The generational difference is seen today by how nonchalantly teenagers take photos of themselves and friends without inhibition (and how in contrast, a middle aged man or woman grumpily declines).
The novelty of the device in Dodgson's time probably ensured that neither parents nor children thought too hard about issues of exploitation. It also ensured that poses were more spontaneous (contrast this with Americans who see glamour shots of all kinds of models everyday and everywhere).
Aside from the pseudo-prurience of these photos, it would be interesting to view these photos as indicating what people of that time period considered as tableux. In that time, the cliches were cherubs; in the time of playboy pinups, the cliches were water hoses and horses and automobiles. Future historians will find the setups more fascinating that the models themselves.
6 - m
a pity there is no posting of his pictures
7 - sadi
i can organize some pics online for you to look at. give me a few days and i'll post the link and you can go to it. be sure to check back. i'll try and get it done before the end of the day on monday and will post the link back here.
be well,
sadi
8 - sadi
here is the link on my site to Dodgson's photographs. i've uploaded quite a good sample, but no doubt, this will increase over time....
http://www.tantmieux.squarespace.com/display/ShowGallery?moduleId=68673&galleryId=8877
cut and paste that into your browser, OR,
go to
www.tantmieux.squarespace.com and go to IMAGES and then select the gallery marked Lewis Carroll nee Charles Dodgson.
Hope this helps and good luck...
Cheers,
Sadi
9 - Melisande
Excellent work, enjoyed exploring the essay.
Interestingly, Dodgson's epilepsy is, of course, a matter of some dispute. The fact that he tended towards neologisms, clang assosications and listmaking, indicates bipolar disorder rather than/in addition to temporal absence epilepsy.
While looking up Dodgson's epilepsy, I happened across this interesting medical diagnosis, termed Alice In Wonderland Syndrome.
10 - sadi
yes, i've heard of alice in wonderland syndrome. i believe it's called that becaus eof the macropsia and micropsia, that are common to many temporal lobe seizures. the sense of time, things growing and shrinking, even the headaches, as you noted, the listmaking, the compulsive hypergraphia, etc etc. are all signs.
Dodgson WAS officially diagnosed in his life several times as someone with temporal lobe epilepsy and had several grand mal seizures that are well-documented, themost famous of them being the one at the chapel at Christ Church where he was teaching. He was on several medications for seizures though none of them agreeable. He also had the classic migraine symptoms that often accompany TLE and took Dilaudid and other opiates for this.
His friend Tennyson was also diagnosed with epilepsy and took treatment for it, though he was very private about it.
this is understandable; at the time, epileptics were considered 'insane' or 'mad' and were often confined to asylums. sad, when i know that in other cultures, epileptics are often revered as shamans and medicine men (inuit and native american cultures often do this).
What would be best would be for those with epilepsy to be treated just like everyone else, or for society to recognize the many good qualities that often accompany TLE and the many great men and women who have been the best leaders, artists, writers, etc. who all had well-documented cases - a few, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, Napoleon, Julius Ceasar, Alexander the Great, Alfred Nobel, Socrates, Aristotle, Pythagorus, Lewis Carroll (of course), Tennyson, as noted, and on and on... i'm compiling a master list of document cases only that i hope to soon have on my site.
Be well, and thanks for reading...
Sadi