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    The Story of Lewis Carroll Told for Young People by the Real Alice in Wonderland
    The Story of Lewis Carroll Told for Young People by the Real Alice in Wonderland
    The Story of Lewis Carroll Told for Young People by the Real Alice in Wonderland
    Ebook131 pages1 hour

    The Story of Lewis Carroll Told for Young People by the Real Alice in Wonderland

    By Isa Bowman

    3/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateMay 1, 1972
    The Story of Lewis Carroll Told for Young People by the Real Alice in Wonderland

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      It's not all Isa Bowman's fault. But it isn't for lack of trying.Charles Dodgson ("Lewis Carroll") was a very private man, who became famous for his works without really becoming known to the public. No celebrity author he! When he suddenly died, there was an instant rush to get information about him. This took three forms. Many of his friends offered short reminiscences. The Dodgson family brought out an authorized (and thoroughly sanitized) biography. And Isa Bowman produced this book.It isn't a biography, although there are some elements of that, and it isn't just another reminiscence, although it's mostly built around Bowman's memories. This makes it very useful to Dodgson historians, since it is one of the few substantial near-contemporary sources from someone who genuinely knew him well (Dodgson dedicated his book Sylvie and Bruno to Bowman).But there is always the question of just how far to trust it, because -- as many authors have noted -- Bowman went to substantial lengths to portray herself as younger than she was. Her friendship with Dodgson took place when she was in her teens, which in the late Victorian era was far more scandalous than for an older man to be friends with a pre-teen. It is true that the larger share of Dodgson's friends were younger than Isa, and almost all of them female, but Dodgson did not avoid older women -- what seems to be his very last truly personal letter was written to Beatrice Hatch, who by then was in her thirties. Similarly, he and Gertrude Chataway visited together when she was pushing thirty. And Dodgson was still trying to get Alice Liddell to once again be his friend when she was in her thirties. He liked women of all ages -- he just didn't know how to approach them when the got older, and most of the friends he made when they were children got tired of a relationship that never really changed.But Bowman, by giving the impression that she was very young when she knew him, helped cement the impression that he only cared about very young girls -- which has now turned into an impression that he preyed upon them. That's not really Bowman's fault, because she was trying to make everything look innocent (and there is every reason to think the relationship was innocent). But it always forces us to wonder what else she might have distorted. (Case in point: She called herself the "real Alice in Wonderland" -- based on the fact that she played Alice in a stage production, and Dodgson helped her get the part. But the real "Alice" was of course Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves.) And the book helped inspire an industry of much-too-Freudian analysis and false narratives about Dodgson. (Including at least three fictional accounts of the relationships between Dodgson and young girls which are demonstrably false but that couldn't be bothered to try to find some facts.)So students of Dodgson should both be glad to have this book and be cautious of it. Glad, because there is so much here that we could not find anywhere else. Cautious, because it isn't entirely trustworthy, and because Isa had clearly drifted away from Dodgson in her later years; she was not one of his more loyal child-friends. This is a snapshot of a short period of Dodgson's career. It's the clearest snapshot we have. But it doesn't really illuminate the rest of his life.

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    The Story of Lewis Carroll Told for Young People by the Real Alice in Wonderland - Isa Bowman

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of Lewis Carroll, by Isa Bowman

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

    Title: The Story of Lewis Carroll

    Told for Young People by the Real Alice in Wonderland

    Author: Isa Bowman

    Release Date: April 29, 2011 [EBook #35990]

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF LEWIS CARROLL ***

    Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at

    http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images

    generously made available by The Internet Archive.)

    Miss Isa Bowman as Alice in Alice in Wonderland

    THE STORY OF

    LEWIS CARROLL

    TOLD FOR YOUNG PEOPLE BY

    THE REAL ALICE IN WONDERLAND

    MISS ISA BOWMAN

    NEW YORK

    E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

    31 West Twenty-third Street

    1900

    Copyright, 1899

    BY

    E. P. DUTTON & CO.

    The Knickerbocker Press, New York

    ILLUSTRATIONS

    LEWIS CARROLL

    It seems to me a very difficult task to sit down at a desk and write reminiscences of a friend who has gone from us all.

    It is not easy to make an effort and to remember all the little personalia of some one one has loved very much, and by whom one has been loved. And yet it is in a measure one’s duty to tell the world something of the inner life of a famous man; and Lewis Carroll was so wonderful a personality, and so good a man, that if my pen dragged ever so slowly, I feel that I can at least tell something of his life which is worthy the telling.

    Writing with the sense of his loss still heavy upon me, I must of necessity colour my account with sadness. I am not in the ordinary sense a biographer. I cannot set down a critical estimate, a cold, dispassionate summing-up of a man I loved; but I can write of a few things that happened when I was a little girl, and when he used to say to me that I was "his little girl."

    The gracious presence of Lewis Carroll is with us no longer. Never again will his hand hold mine, and I shall never hear his voice more in this world. Forever while I live that kindly influence will be gone from my life, and the Friend of little Children has left us.

    And yet in the full sorrow of it all I find some note of comfort. He was so good and sweet, so tender and kind, so certain that there was another and more beautiful life waiting for us, that I know, even as if I heard him telling it to me, that some time I shall meet him once more.

    In all the noise and excitement of London, amid all the distractions of a stage life, I know this, and his presence is often very near to me, and the kindly voice is often at my ear as it was in the old days.

    To have even known such a man as he was is an inestimable boon. To have been with him for so long as a child, to have known so intimately the man who above all others has understood childhood, is indeed a memory on which to look back with thanksgiving and with tears.

    Now that I am no longer his little girl, now that he is dead and my life is so different from the quiet life he led, I can yet feel the old charm, I can still be glad that he has kissed me and that we were friends. Little girl and grave professor! it is a strange combination. Grave professor and little girl! how curious it sounds! yet strange and curious as it may seem, it was so, and the little girl, now a little girl no longer, offers this last loving tribute to the friend and teacher she loved so well. Forever that voice is still; be it mine to revive some ancient memories of it.

    First, however, as I have essayed to be some sort of a biographer, I feel that before I let my pen run easily over the tale of my intimate knowledge of Lewis Carroll I must put down very shortly some facts about his life.

    The Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson died when he was sixty-six years old, and when his famous book, Alice in Wonderland, had been published for thirty-three years. He was born at Daresbury, in Cheshire, and his father was the Rev. Charles Dodgson. The first years of his life were spent at Daresbury, but afterwards the family went to live at a place called Croft, in Yorkshire. He went first to a private school in Yorkshire and then to Rugby, where he spent years that he always remembered as very happy ones. In 1850 he went to Christ Church, Oxford, and from that time till the year of his death he was inseparably connected with The House, as Christ Church college is generally called, from its Latin name Ædes Christi, which means, literally translated, the House of Christ.

    There he won great distinction as a scholar of mathematics, and wrote many abstruse and learned books, very different from Alice in Wonderland. There is a tale that when the Queen had read Alice in Wonderland she was so pleased that she asked for more books by the same author. Lewis Carroll was written to, and back, with the name of Charles Dodgson on the title-page, came a number of the very dryest books about Algebra and Euclid that you can imagine.

    Still, even in mathematics his whimsical fancy was sometimes suffered to peep out, and little girls who learnt the rudiments of calculation at his knee found the path

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