Alice on the Isis

The books that shape a language are seldom set out to be written. More often they begin as an afternoon obligation, a way of keeping three children quiet between Folly Bridge and Godstow, while the man at the oar talks past his stammer and forgets, for an hour and a half together, that he is a Christ Church tutor at all.

THE TUTOR

He is the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, thirty years old, born at Daresbury parsonage in Cheshire on the twenty-seventh of January 1832, son of the Daresbury rector and Frances Jane Lutwidge. Rugby. Christ Church Oxford, BA 1854, MA 1857. Senior Student in mathematics since his undergraduate years, in his eighth year at the lecturer's desk. Deacon's orders taken in 1861; priest's orders declined, partly from the stammer that troubles him at the lectern, partly from a personal disinclination to the parish ministry. He is unmarried. He writes nonsense verses for the magazines under a pseudonym he has arrived at by latinising his given names, Charles Lutwidge into Carolus Ludovicus, then Englished back and reversed: Lewis Carroll. The name will outlive every other thing about him.

FOLLY BRIDGE

It is twenty past one on the afternoon of Friday the fourth of July 1862. The light over the Isis, which is what Oxford calls the upper Thames above Folly Bridge, is hard and clear. He is in a clinker-built Christ Church four-oar, rowing the second-bow oar. The Reverend Robinson Duckworth, his colleague, rows stroke. In the stern-sheets sit the three Liddell daughters of Dean Henry George Liddell, the Greek lexicographer: Lorina Charlotte, thirteen; Alice Pleasance, ten and a half; Edith Mary, eight. White muslin dresses, pale-blue ribbons. They have been on these picnics with him perhaps ten times in eighteen months. The pattern is fixed: the row up to Godstow, tea at the Trout, the row home in the evening light, and a story improvised across the rowing to fill the hour and a half between bridges.

THE RABBIT-HOLE

He begins, by Duckworth's later memoir, with the line that will survive every revision: Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do. The Alice in the story is the Alice in the boat, opposite him in the stern, ten and a half years old and watching him steadily. He chooses her at once, without thinking, and only afterwards notices that he has chosen. The rabbit-hole comes next; it is a piece of below-stairs imagery he has been turning over for some weeks, the college as a warren. What follows arrives by its own logic. A country at the bottom of the hole that is the inversion of Christ Church itself, run by a Queen who orders beheadings for arbitrary cause, populated by a Mad Hatter and a March Hare at a tea-party that never ends, all of it the satirical look an Oxford don keeps to himself and now, by the trick of the rowing rhythm and the three faces in the stern-sheets, is letting out for the first time. He talks past his stammer. He does not stammer on a river. The story runs about ninety minutes, paced to the oar. They land at Godstow towards half past three and take tea at the Trout on the bank.

THE PORT MEADOW

They row back down the Isis in the long evening, arriving at Folly Bridge towards half past six, and walk home across the Port Meadow with the cattle moving slowly in the low sun. Somewhere on that walk Alice Liddell, who will remember this afternoon for the next seventy years and will broadcast her account of it on the BBC at the age of eighty, falls into step beside him and asks the only question the afternoon requires. Mr Dodgson, please write that story down for me, she says, please please please. He has improvised perhaps a hundred such tales for the three girls in eighteen months. None has been written down. They drift off the river by the time the boats are tied up at Folly Bridge and are gone before the lamps are lit. He keeps walking. He thinks of the warren under the college, the Queen on her bench, the long-eared judges. He thinks: this one might survive the journey home. The word he gives her costs him nothing in the moment and everything afterward; it is the only decision the day required, and, having made it, he will spend the next thirty-three years of his life answering for it.

THE VELLUM NOTEBOOK

He begins writing that autumn at Christ Church, in the hours after the mathematics lectures and the chapel duties. The work runs through the winter of 1862 and into the spring of 1863. He illustrates it himself with thirty-seven pen-and-ink drawings; he is a competent draughtsman, no more, and the figures are stiff and serious in the manner of a man who has not yet learnt that the joke ought to be in the line as well as the legend. He binds the finished pages in green calf vellum, titles it Alice's Adventures Under Ground, and on the twenty-sixth of November 1864 gives it to Alice Liddell as a Christmas present. By that date the Dean's lodgings have cooled towards him for reasons the record will never quite settle. The vellum notebook is the last clear thing that passes between them.

MACMILLAN

Alexander Macmillan, the publisher, calls at Christ Church in the spring of 1864, reads the manuscript, and offers to bring it out at length and in proper form. John Tenniel of Punch is commissioned for the illustrations and produces the wood-engraved plates that will fix the look of Wonderland in the English imagination for the next century and a half: the pinafore, the long blonde hair, the Cheshire grin, the playing-card soldiers, the hookah-smoking caterpillar. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, is published by Macmillan on the twenty-sixth of November 1865, three years and four months after the row to Godstow. The first edition of two thousand copies sells through by Christmas.

THE RIVER

The book has not been out of print in English since 1865. By the publishing surveys of the present decade it has been translated into about a hundred and seventy-three languages, ranking with Collodi's Pinocchio and Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince among the most translated children's books in the world, and is by the careful judgment of the historians the foundational text of modern English-language children's fantasy. Alice Liddell married Reginald Hargreaves of Cuffnells in 1880, sold the vellum manuscript at Sotheby's in 1928, and died at Westerham in Kent on the fifteenth of November 1934, eighty-two years old. Charles Dodgson died of bronchopneumonia at his sister's house at Guildford on the fourteenth of January 1898, sixty-five years old; he is buried at the Mount Cemetery there, and the Christ Church chapel has carried the Dodgson memorial window since the year of his death. The story belongs now to its readers and not to its author. The pseudonym he made by reversing the Latin of his own name is the name the world remembers him by; the surname Carroll, in his hands, became something larger than a surname. The vellum notebook he wrote out for a ten-year-old in the winter of 1862 sits in a temperature-controlled case at the British Library. The three-mile stretch of brown water between Folly Bridge and Godstow, slow and lined with the long grass of the Port Meadow, is rowed every summer afternoon by the Christ Church and Lady Margaret Hall college boats, and is marked on the Oxford tourist maps as the Alice in Wonderland river.