Lewis Through The Camera Lens

They’re making a biopic of Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll).  But before we talk about him, let’s talk aboutAlice.  

‘Alice in Wonderland’ is one of those rare stories; not only do you not need to have read the book to know it, you also don’t need to have seen the films either.  It is a story that it just known, deeply rooted in popular culture worldwide. 

And it absolutely deserves that status – it is legendary in a literal sense; ‘Alice In Wonderland’ is a legend that can be interpreted and re-interpreted over and over again to different creative effects.  The famous Disney cartoon places the story firmly in fairy tale territory; Tim Burton takes the idea into darker territory.

The rampant dreamlike happenings of the story (and that of its superior sequel, ‘Through The Looking Glass’) lend themselves well to visuals both in film and illustration.  John Tenniel’s

Alice & Friend

original drawings are testament to that, and are perhaps still the best (although I think Anthony Browne’s Magritte inspired pictures give Tenniel a run for his money…)  Perhaps because the story started as part of the ‘oral tradition’ style of telling tales it allows it to be flexible and fluid; Carroll no doubt had to incorporate interruptions and questions into the story as it went along.

Of course, because the story was told before it was written the magic of the Alice books really lies in its use of language and absurd ideas. All of the wordplay, nonsense poetry and parodies of nursery rhymes, unanswerable riddles (“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”), anthropomorphic characters, playing cards painting flowers, murdering time, babies turning into pigs, disembodied smiles left hanging in the air…  Everything is possible, especially when it shouldn’t be.  It is anarchic in every sense – there are no rules to what happens.  This is why, I believe, the Alice books still have the capacity to terrify children; there are no genre tropes here where the heroine will be fine after defeating the villain/discovering the treasure/winning the game, etc.  The lack of rules or objectives is completely disorientating, and children can find this troubling (it terrified me – my Mum had to give up during the second chapter apparently). 

And where is Carroll actually going with all of this?  It goes nowhere of course; it ends with that most clichéd of dues ex machina endings – Alice woke up and it was all a dream.  It’s a complete admission on Carroll’s part that his anarchy doesn’t have a conclusion or a ‘point’ to make – it is there to be enjoyed, and then it isn’t.  It’s notable that this is exactly the same way the sequel ends, and was not seen as something from the first book that could be ‘fixed’ this time round.  It’s also notable that no one complains about either of the books having weak endings.

So, that’s my opinion of the Alice books.  Written by Lewis Carroll…

… but then Lewis Carroll didn’t exist in real life.  Charles Dodgson existed in real life but we don’t know very much about him.  Or rather, we don’t know very much about the part of him that wrote the Alice books, which are the only relevant bits for us.  It is worth little to us now to know that he was a good but very dull maths lecturer.  His biographical details are largely uninteresting apart from the aspects of Dodgson’s life that converged with Carroll’s – namely the nature of his relationships with children.  Nevertheless, they (‘they’ being Hollywood) are planning a biopic, called 'Queen Of Hearts'.  Hmm.  It's being talked about on industry sites, and the one sentence synopsis is as follows: "Oxford instructor Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) tells stories to the dean's daughter, Alice, and her sisters, while falling in love with the dean's wife."

Now, it may seem unfair to judge an unmade film on a tagline, but this already sounds a bit lame.  The emphasis sounds like it’s on completely the wrong thing.  The story of Carroll/Dodgson doesn’t have anything to do with falling in love with a Dean’s wife (something which maybe, possibly, might have happened but which is in the end pure speculation based on some missing diary pages).  No, the only story to tell about Dodgson’s life worth telling is about his love for Alice Liddell.

What form that love took is quite unknowable.  There are the posthumous accusations of paedophilia, but no direct evidence for them.  He shared a typical Victorian taste for over-sentimentalising children, and girls in particular (see also Little Nell and most of the rest of Dickens).  But I don’t think he wanted to sexualise children.  He comes across in biographies as a man who wasn’t particularly interested in sex, and was probably frightened of it, and I think it more likely that he enjoyed the company of children because they represented to him a retreat from the sexualised world of adults.  Which is undoubtedly still rather messed up; but then he lived in the Victorian era, which had a very messed up code of ethics and morals about most things.  There’s something of the ‘Old Peter Pan’ about his character, someone who shouldn’t have grown up but did.  Perhaps that explains the reoccurrence of time as a concept in all of his books.  And perhaps that’s why there’s also an air of sadness and of violence amongst all the comedy, expressing a sense of frustration with the tediousness/emotional responsibilities of the adult world.

Charles Dodgson

This aspect of his character is the only part worth examining, frankly, because that’s the only bit we know that links directly to the work we remember him for.  If the rumours (and I think even ‘rumours’ is too strong a word) that he was having a fling with the Dean’s wife were true then you’d still just have a dull melodrama set in Victorian Oxford.  You can say what you want about her importance in his life, but he didn’t write a book for her, he wrote one for her daughter.  The complex bit of his character, and therefore the interesting bit, is his attitude to childhood and his relationship with children; his relationship with adults just doesn’t sound very interesting. 

Even if the film is a good piece of drama about a love triangle – and it could be a very good piece of drama – that’ll probably put Alice in more in the background which is… well, fine I suppose – but it would seem a bit perverse to make a film about the relatively unremarkable life of Charles Dodgson instead of the more enigmatic Lewis Carroll.