Guided by the influence of his family and Canon Pusey and Bishop Wilberforce’s, young Charles Dodgson was ( inevitably) ordained Deacon at Christ Church, Oxford on December 22, 1862. Canon Pusey once remarked, “I love my grief better than any hollow joy.” The mood at Oxford was palpable: “The undercurrent of guilt and sorrow that pulses through the lives of the best men is not sufficiently accounted for by their anachronistic education, or even by the great incubus of other worldly religion that hung over them; there was a real guilt and a real sorrow…even more poignantly – the crucifixion of their fellow man.”
Dodgson did not go on to become rector for myriad reasons. His love of the theater and attendance at plays and musicals was not considered conduct becoming of a minister, and he was not willing to give up either his photography or love of theatre. After petitioning the Dean and expressing his wish not to continue on to become a rector (in part, because of his stutter and later, seizures) Dodgson was allowed to remain a deacon and maintain his post as a Mathematics Don. Dodgson stayed at Christ - forty-seven years - until his unexpected death from pneumonia in 1898.
Charles the younger though conservative in many ways, was influenced by other friends, and no doubt, by Alfred Lord Tennyson (whom he photographed) and who tended toward a more liberal stance and believed that the concept of “eternal punishment and damnation” were the result of superstition and were “unworthy of doctrinal sanction.” Tennyson embraced the new religious liberalism and the ‘mysterious nature of the Universe.” For his part, Dodsgon felt that he could do the same, deciding for himself the criterion for salvation. He could embrace this doctrine while remaining Anglican.
Dodgson’s great sin, as one biographer noted, was the sin of thinking for himself about religion. What he believed, ultimately, was that God is a God of love. He wrote in his Easter Greeting in the preface of Alice, “I do not believe that God means us thus to divide life into two halves – to wear a grave face on Sunday and to think it out of place to mention him on a weekday… surely their [children’s] innocent laughter is a sweet in his ears as the grandest anthem that ever rolled.”
Article comments
1 - Lono
nice peace. I find Alice in Wonderland to be the greatest book ever, and I'll stake my literature degree on it! To me, the backstory of all of it makes it so much more interesting. People don't know it is a pen name, or that he was a mathmetician, or that he was a preacher, or that there really was an Alice (Alice Little). Also, not commonly known is that the entire second book of Alice is actually a chess game being played.
2 - Eric Olsen
another great one Sadi, I thought I knew a fair amount about CD, but I didn't understand the religious angle at all. Thanks!
3 - sadi
if you want, you can check out my other work re; lewis carroll/charges dodgson. some of it is posted here, and you can also check my other site at www.grandmal.blogspot.com, or get it from the home page of my site www.sottovocce.blogspot.com. I'm working on a biography of Carroll. Yes, about the young girl Alice; her last name is spelled Liddell and pronounced "little" as you wrote. She was also one of his models for his photography, along with his favorite Xie Kitchen, who i can show you pics of as well.
i'm very fortunate in that i have an ORIGINAL FIRST edition of Alices's Adventures Underground, all handwritten and drawn by Carroll and even signed to a young girl named Ada, who featured in his work as well. It's amazing to own something that he actually wrote in -- i'm always a bit in awe when i take it out of it's very protective wrapping. Let me know if you want to see more of my work on Carroll. You can also buy my book, Biography & Source Studies, volume 5, editor Fred Karl, that has a long piece on Carroll. But do check out the posts here on Blogcritics that i have written about Carroll. If you're interested in him, then i have a ton of information that you might find interesting. he is also ranked as one of many epileptic geniuses, alng side Alfred Noble, Pythagorus, Oppenheimer, Poe, Rimbaud, Socrates, Napoleon, Alexander the GReat etc etc. - there is a strong connection between temporal lobe epilepsy (the kind Carroll had) and genius - which is the topic of my NEXT book. I'll be posting bits of it here as it comes along.
Thaniks for reading and for your comments. If you want, you can get a mimeograph of the original edition thorugh Amazon by lookng up Alice's Adventures Underground, which is all in his handwriting and is a facsimile of hte original edition that i have.
let me know if you want more...
cheers, - sadi
4 - Kate
Hey, just to point out that it wasn't Pusey who preached the sermon on National Apostacy in 1833, but Keble. Pusey did become the unofficial leader of the Oxford Movement after 1845.