Beginning Senior Thesis

In response to Roger Fry’s exhibition “Manet and the Post Impressionists” at the Grafton House, Virginia Woolf pronounced: “in or about December 1910, human character changed.” According to Woolf, Fry and other members who comprised the exclusive Bloomsbury Group: the English were unable to push the boundaries of British art and refute the stuffiness of Victorian culture until French impressionist painters were exhibited in London. In my thesis, I will argue that Lewis Carooll engaged with modernism from within Britain, decades before Roger Fry’s show and the impressionist’s influence.

Under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson–a mathematics lecturer at Oxford–took photographs and published Alices Adventures in Wonderland. Through Wonderland, the Oxford don constructed his own version of Victorian Britain and produced the fantastical landscape that maps the beginnings of British modernism. This thesis will have three chapters: Carroll’s photographs of Alice Liddell, Carroll’s photographs of women reading and the original illustrations from Alices Adventures in Wonderland by John Tenniel. These chapters reveal cultural anxieties provoked by modernity’s rapid progress, placing Carroll’s achievements at the heart of British modernism. Lewis Carroll is not to be dismissed as a perephreal figure, an Oxford don, or a quirky Brit for, his work engages with the fantasy of modernity, situating British modernism before 1910.

Carroll “insisted that because his camera was mechanically automatic, it could do nothing but capture the truth of childhood, which, he also insisted, was inherently innocent.” Anne Higonnet suggests that children’s presumed innocence and the modern concept of childhood invented a cultural ideal that required modern representation: photography. The medium confirmed the Victorian’s romantic notions of childhood because it was able to encapsulate the child at that distinct instant when the shutter clicked. In Carroll’s photographs of Alice Liddell, the sanctity and purity of her innocence is juxtaposed to the mechanic nature of the photographic medium.

The Beggar Maid was taken during the summer of 1858. Here, Alice Liddell is dressed as a disheveled street beggar: she perches one hand defiantly at her waist while the other is cupped sideways, asking for change. Her costume of ragged cloth haphazardly cloaks her body and reveals her shoulders and bare feet. Despite Alice’s sincere attempt to assume the guise of a street beggar, “No one in Carroll’s audience would have been fooled for an instant into thinking this was a real beggar.” Alice’s skin is pristine and her hair evenly cut, neatly in place. The superficiality of Alice’s poverty is made overt–it is nonsensical for her to dress as a beggar. Yet, Alice’s earnestness in this photograph, the literal twinkle in her right eye, is what makes the photograph so captivating. Alice is able to pretend and act and play in a way that Carroll–or the contemporary viewer–cannot.

Throughout Carroll’s photographs of Alice Liddell, Alice’s innocence is captured by a 19th-century scientific invention. Not only is this an instance and example of modernity attempting to define the mysterious and fantastic, it is a visual representation of Carroll’s engagement with the modern crisis. He uses a fantastic invention of the 19th century to distill an ideal of the past. The “past” Carroll refers to is the potential clarity childhood imagination is able to elicit.

Lewis Carroll photographed Christina Georgina Rossetti and her mother Frances Rossetti in 1863. In this image, the women are completely absorbed by the contents of the book they hold however, the subject of the text remains unknown and mysterious to the viewer: literally out of focus. For the women in this photograph, the book is a means of escape and introduces Carroll’s obsession with Wonderland. Through his photographs of women reading, Lewis Carroll conceptualizes Alice’s fall through the rabbit hole. Text can take one anywhere–it can propel the Rossetti women out of the confines of the Victorian garden and into the fantastical realm of fiction.

John Tenniel illustrated the first published version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (Though Carroll illustrated the original version that was given to Alice Liddell, he quickly realized that he needed a professional draughtsman for the woodcuts). Carroll admired “what he called Tenniel’s “grotesquenss.” Tenniel’s illustrations, ike Carroll’s photography, synthesized the frightening aspects of modernity and the imagined on a grand level. With illustration, features can be exaggerated and fantastical creatures can exist on the page without the insistence of reality poking through.

Tenniel’s illustration of the Mad Tea Party echoes the form and character of a seance. Alice appears possessed in this depiction. Perhaps Alice is possessed by the voice of normalcy and Victorian reality in a world where nonsense reigns. At the end of the chapter, Alice is exhausted and skeptical of her (out of body?) experience: “At any rate I’ll never go there again!’ said Alice, as she picked her way through the wood. ‘It’s the stupidest tea party I ever was at in all my life!” Carroll and Tenniel both seem doubt of the strangeness and uncertainty of modernity.

St George and the Dragon is an image of the Kitchin children. The staged quality of this photograph and the children’s makeshift props heighten the imaginary aspect of children’s story telling and play. Anne Higonnet confirms that the photograph “is a revelation of

the impromptu devices involved in children’s pretence, disrupting the illusion of the performance.” Disrupting the imaginary with glimpses of realism is a theme explored repeatedly by Lewis Carroll. He does so by using the modern inventions of photography and children’s literature. The “disruptive” nature of modern inventions allows Carroll to engage with Victorian culture–he can question the progress of modernity by invoking Wonderland.

British modernism has its origins in Carroll’s photography and children’s literature. It is not born out of an exhibition of French painters in 1910, it begins much earlier with the creation of Wondlerand and a desire to return to a natural and innocent state, before machines. Through the mediums of photography and literature, Carroll situates the fantastic within the reality of Victorian spectacle and progress. His obsession with children, the fantastic, and modern technology allowed him to articulate the absurdity of nonsense and Wodnerland–which is inherently related to the strangeness of modernism.