‘The [Glass] House’: Christ Church, Oxford
BEFORE VENTURING FURTHER AFIELD with Carroll in his pursuit of photographs, I want to begin at Christ Church, Oxford, commonly known as ‘the House’, and effectively his home for 47 years. It was here on 1 July 1876 that Alexandra Kitchin (1864–1925), one of the children to whom Carroll alludes in his letter to Dolly Draper, crossed Tom Quad chaperoned by her mother, on her way to have her photograph taken. Not at a professional studio, however, but at the photographic studio built above Carroll’s college rooms. Arriving there, Xie, as she was affectionately known, donned a mob-cap and fancy costume to pose in the guise of Joshua Reynolds’s Penelope Boothby, painted in 1788 (illus. 5). The daughter of the historian and Student of Christ Church George William Kitchin, Xie was one a string of little girls who, over the course of a three-month period, had filed into that most traditional of Oxford colleges to be photographed. Prior to the sitting, in all likelihood she had enjoyed a picnic of Bath buns in Carroll’s sitting room and the chance to play with a mechanical bear and talking doll emptied from the cupboard there. But the highlight of the visit was to pose for the camera and afterwards steal into the mysterious darkroom to be allowed to watch a ghostly form appear upon the glass plate of the negative.
Four years earlier, in February 1872, Carroll had moved into his purpose-built studio.1 Close at hand he enjoyed the convenience of a dedicated darkroom and a changing room for models. From March of that year he began taking photographs there and was able to operate like a proper photographer; a situation he had long wished for. In the new facility, Carroll had space to house his negatives rather than store them with commercial printers, while the roof provided a place to set out printing frames for exposure to the sun. Writing on 11 May of that year to Mary MacDonald, the daughter of his contemporary and friend the novelist and clergyman George MacDonald, Carroll notes that he is ‘taking pictures almost every day’ and were she to ‘bring [to Oxford her] best theatrical “get up”’ he would make ‘a splendid picture’ of her.2 He carried on taking photographs at a rapid rate; the glass structure reduced exposure times allowing photography more easily in dull weather. Between May and July of 1873, for example, Xie Kitchin, Alice, Ida and Carry Mason, Julia and Ethel Arnold, Herbert Kitchin, Lily Bruce, Miss Ward, Miss Jones, Margaret and Frederica Morell, Isabel Fane, Maud, Isabel and Helen Standen and Beatrice and Ethel Hatch all came to be photographed: six of them on more than one occasion.3
5 Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), ‘Penelope Boothby’ (standing), 1876, albumen print.
6 Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), Alice Liddell, 25 June 1870, albumen carte de visite.
7 Julia Margaret Cameron, Alethea, 1872, albumen print.
It must have been a strange sight in the all-male context of Christ Church, and of Oxford colleges more generally, to witness figures of little girls entering and leaving. Prior to this period, during the late 1850s and early 1860s, Carroll had enjoyed a ready supply of child subjects at the nearby Deanery. Henry George Liddell, who had succeeded Thomas Gaisford as Dean of Christ Church in June 1855, had had six children growing up there, four of whom Carroll had photographed regularly in the garden.4 By 1876 Alice Pleasance Liddell, the inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), was a woman of 24. She had last sat for Carroll to take her picture on 25 June 1870 at the age of eighteen (illus. 6). On 24 April 1873, on visiting the Dean, the author of the Alice books had been invited into the drawing room by Lorina Liddell senior to view new photographs of her daughters and Alice had proudly shown him three of herself by his contemporary amateur Julia Margaret Cameron. The Alice Carroll had captured in his own photographs of the 1850s and ’60s had been transformed by Cameron’s large-format images into the mature goddesses of ‘Alethea’ (illus. 7), ‘Pomona’ (illus. 8) and ‘St Agnes’.5
By contrast, on her visit to be photographed in 1876, Xie Kitchin was still a minor and she belonged to a third generation of Carroll’s ‘child-friends’. Four successful prints survive from that session. Two of them create the persona of ‘Penelope Boothby’ from Reynolds’s celebrated portrait of the three-year-old daughter of Sir Brooke Boothby. That portrait had become retrospectively imbued with significance following the child’s death in 1791 and remained popular in the 1870s in the form of Samuel Cousins’s mezzotint after the painting (illus. 9). Mourning the loss of his six-year-old daughter, Boothby had commissioned a marble funerary monument from the sculptor Thomas Banks and published a collection of his own commemorative verses.6 In 1793, with the exhibit of ‘the plaster model for the final sculpture’, many were deeply moved by its portrayal of the apparent life of a sleeping child.7 When Carroll recalled ‘Penelope Boothby’, therefore, he referred photographically to a child associated in cultural memory with public outpourings of grief.
8 Julia Margaret Cameron, Pomona, 1872, albumen print.
In the standing version of Carroll’s Penelope Boothby (see illus. 5), Xie Kitchin poses centrally against the wall, her left hand displaying a half-opened fan. Apart from the child’s white mob-cap with its dark ribbon, and her dark fingerless gloves, there is little to suggest the original. Carroll attempts to recreate with a shawl her white crossed bodice and gives his subject a similar, though narrower, sash. Other details, by comparison, the striped stockings, decorative sleeves, black choker with heavy metal cross and printed overskirt, are his invention and much fussier than their painted counterparts. Even the signature mob-cap of Reynolds’s original, its caul barely generous enough to accommodate her hair, appears perched awkwardly on Xie Kitchin’s head. With her eye-line directed slightly off to the left, the child holds a sombre expression. In Carroll’s seated version of the photograph, with her chin resting on her hand, she adapts a distinctly mature pose (illus. 10). In so doing the twelve-year-old turns the faraway look of Reynolds’s infant subject into a direct unflinching gaze into the camera lens.
9 Samuel Cousins, Penelope Boothby, mezzotint after Sir Joshua Reynolds, published 1874.
Carroll’s choice of the persona of Penelope Boothby as photographic subject emphasizes the enduring significance to him of dressing up children to photograph, bringing to mind one of his earliest in the genre, and his best-known child portrait, Alice Liddell as ‘The Beggar Maid’ (illus. 11). Possibly intended as a companion piece to the less familiar Alice Liddell Dressed in her Best Outfit, and conceivably taken on the same day in 1858,8 this now controversial image of a child dressed in rags, posed begging for alms, refers to the story of the ancient African King Cophetua and his ‘beggar maid’, resurrected by poets in the nineteenth century (illus. 12). Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Beggar Maid’, written in 1833 and published in Poems (1842), was most likely an inspiration for Carroll’s photograph.9 As the speaker of the poem relates the admiration of onlookers for the beggar’s rare attributes, ‘more fair than words can say’, the reader, like the viewer of Carroll’s photograph, is invited to see through her ‘poor attire’. Her clothing is at the same time, however, key to her unparalleled attraction.
10 Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), ‘Penelope Boothby’ (seated), 1876, albumen print.
11 Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), Alice Liddell as ‘The Beggar Maid’, 1858, albumen print.
12 Julia Margaret Cameron, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1875, albumen print.
The register of Carroll’s ‘Beggar Maid’ alters when read against its ‘companion’ photograph Alice Liddell Dressed in her Best Outfit, which shows a clean upper middle-class child. Pictured in ragged clothing Alice personates the street Arab in a popular conceit of the period but, changing her back into neat contemporary Victorian dress, Carroll explores the difference between the two states in a ‘before and after’ that overtly signals the more subtle metamorphic potential of photography. The persona of a beggar maid, however, was not a photographic one-off for Carroll. Xie Kitchin also posed in the role that would become synonymous with Carroll’s celebrated likeness of ‘Alice’. In so doing, she joined others who had ‘sat’ for his camera in the ‘beggar’ dress. As a photographer, choreographing successive children in the same roles, he took particular pleasure in capturing qualities of resemblance.10
But in his take on ‘Penelope Boothby’ Carroll raises the additional spectre of infant mortality that haunted nineteenth-century photographic portraits more generally as it had done earlier painted and sculpted ones. Referencing a painted portrait commemorating a dead child, Carroll’s photograph calls to mind a particular state of arrested development. In evoking Reynolds’s younger subject, Carroll alludes to a quality peculiar to the infant that the poet and essayist James Henry Leigh Hunt had earlier uniquely captured in his essay ‘Deaths of Little Children’.11 Written in 1820, at a time of high infant mortality, Hunt’s piece theorizes the impact upon adults of the deaths of children. He regards such loss as a ‘bitter’ necessity ‘thrown into the cup of humanity’, not because he claims ‘the loss of one child enables us to appreciate those remaining’ but rather because ‘if no deaths ever took place, we should regard every child as a man or woman secured’.12 As a consequence, Hunt further notes, an unbroken connection with infancy would be lost, in which case:
Girls and boys would be future men and women, not present children. They would have attained their full growth in our imaginations, and might as well have been men and women at once. On the other hand, those who have lost an infant are never, as it were, without an infant child. They are the only persons who, in one sense, retain it always.13
Hunt does more than recognize that, by fixing a stage prior to maturity, premature death makes a child immortal. He communicates in powerful terms the enduring identity of a dead child. To lose a child is paradoxically to keep one close, he claims, since that loss prevents an adult self from supplanting the infant one. As the deaths of children prevent their being regarded as incipient adults – and the category of infancy becomes something other than a route to maturity – Hunt anticipates temporal implications essential to photography, not only in the broad sense of what Roland Barthes has called the ‘catastrophe’ of the photograph, its propensity to ‘tell’ death in the future, but by petrifying a child at a point in time such that an owner of a photographic image ‘in one sense, retain[s that child] always’ as uniquely attached to it.
Portraits were Carroll’s preferred photographic genre. Although he took pictures of adults, including a number of eminent contemporaries, it was undoubtedly the case that he enjoyed photographing little girls more than other subjects. His preference for female minors might not have proved so problematical were it not for the fact that within the all-male Oxford college environment he was photographing other people’s daughters. But it is pointless to try to argue, as some have done, that Carroll lacked discrimination and relished just as much photographing objects such as the skeleton of a ‘tunny fish’ for the new Oxford Museum – an unlikely assumption whichever way one looks at it. It is equally important to resist a crude psychobiography in which Carroll’s interest in photographing little girls is read either as a displacement of his feelings as a ‘frustrated bachelor’ or as a straightforward form of perversion.14 These polarized interpretations oversimplify both the place of photographs in his life and also what it meant historically to photograph children in the nineteenth century. Since during the period in which Carroll worked photography had not yet been seamlessly accommodated to existing categories of cultural and aesthetic response, it is important to be alert to provisional aspects of the new medium as they intersect with similarly provisional definitions of childhood.
It was in the nineteenth century that a modern Western concept of childhood acquired, through photographic representation, a particular form of visual ubiquity. By the 1850s photographic portraits of children had already begun to constitute a popular genre and during the second half of the century, in particular, childhood became the object of systematic scientific investigation as the camera acquired the status of a major instrument of classification more generally. At the same time, fine art and amateur photography sustained a profound connection with the figures of children. While before the invention of photography images of children abound, it is those representational possibilities offered by photographs that provide new methods by which to generate children’s likenesses. The implicit tendency of early photography to unsettle epistemological questions resembled the status of childhood as a variously demarcated and contested stage of human development.
There are a number of ways in which to account for the emergence in the nineteenth century of what would increasingly become a special connection between child and photograph. Most obviously, the relatively instantaneous process of taking a photograph provided a fitting method by which to preserve a transitional state. At the same time, as Hunt’s pre-photographic essay anticipates, a photographic portrait uniquely facilitated identification through its links with mortality and loss: the death or absence of a loved one. It is in such a context that one may situate, for example, the popularity in the nineteenth century of post-mortem photographs of children. Yet, in more general terms, photographic portraits of children evoke, in an over-determined form, that which all photographic portraits have the capacity to evoke, namely a desire to identify with a photographed subject simultaneously in terms of the restoration of a lost object (the raising of the dead) and in the form of a hallucination or premonition of the future. As I have argued in The Politics of Focus, photographs of children perhaps more than any others invite experience in a single image of the simultaneous existence of multiple points of time.15 As past and future tenses coexist in the photographic image it becomes impossible to refuse identification with the figure of a child, prompting fresh consideration of that disarmingly simple yet irrefutable quality of the medium that enables a subject to occupy at the same time more than one temporal ‘reality’, to experience a sense of that which is yet to come as, in effect, already having been.
A photographic sitting of the period involved an encounter, albeit standardized or unorthodox, in which ‘trust’, together with a relative degree of unselfconsciousness, were crucial. The very action of uncapping, of exposing the camera lens to take a photograph, and then re-covering it, emphasized the role of duration in the process. In real terms it was one that highlighted exposure in a practice distinct from the later and, from the time of the first Kodak, ubiquitous trigger mechanism of releasing a shutter that, as Barthes and Susan Sontag have pointed out, gave rise to a notion of ‘shooting’ a picture.16 The quality of duration implicit in the slower process of exposing the ‘eye’ of the lens generated a distinctive ‘look’ in the resulting image. For Walter Benjamin, referring to the calo-types of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, it conveyed a sense of subjects appearing to grow into their images, a condition of permanence evident in the indelible creases of their clothing.17 What Benjamin refers to as ‘the eloquent subsistence of the future’ in the past moment captured in a photograph dwindles, he claims, following the commercialization of photography that accompanied the reduction of exposure times.18 As with technological improvements photographers were able to take pictures more quickly, lost was a palpable sense of the physical trace of time passed, passing and yet to pass in the image.
Carroll was drawn to the magical distinctiveness of photographic representation and its unique physical relationship to time. He recognized that while a photograph, like any other visual image, might benefit from artistry, its physical and chemical existence always, in some senses, override it. As if acknowledging this fact, at the end of ‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’ (the manuscript version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) Carroll pasted a photograph of the face of a young Alice Liddell (illus. 13). It was cropped from a larger portrait format he took of her in 1860 in which she is seated with ferns (illus. 14). Beneath it was discovered, long after his death, his original sketch of the child.19 Readers have tended to construe the author’s act of covering the original drawing with a photograph as a sign of dissatisfaction with his draughtsmanship. Yet, rather than a lack of confidence in his ability to draw, might not the photograph instead celebrate the singular reproductive capacity of photography? For in reinstating the physical relationship of a photograph to an original, the placement of the photograph over the drawing captures powerfully the marked difference of the photographic medium from such a graphic form of representation. It is telling in this context that, when later he published the facsimile edition of his manuscript ‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’, Carroll covered the portrait photograph of Alice Liddell. Not wishing it to be seen, he withheld from prospective readers the intimate status of the cropped portrait photograph of Alice Liddell.20
13 Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), photograph cut from Alice Liddell, 1860, pasted on the final page of the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Underground.
14 Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), Alice Liddell, 1860, albumen print.
Accentuating his interest in the temporal distinctiveness of photography, and its peculiar attachment to the corporeality of the child subject, Carroll highlights complex and provisional ways in the photographic medium and an emergent concept of ‘childhood’ were each implicated in the other. He further prompts questioning of those processes by which in the period a child’s body (for Carroll specifically that of a little girl) comes to signal the most appropriate object for a camera. As Benjamin and Barthes have demonstrated, an adult subject’s identification of him or herself with a photograph of a child involves a kind of infantilization before the image. Or, to put it differently, a photographic portrait alludes to a future as a place of return, as a realm at some level already familiar. In the case of Benjamin’s well-known description of a photograph of the young Franz Kafka, caught in the ‘upholstered tropics of the photographic studio’, a viewer specifically identifies with the humiliation read in the uncomfortable countenance of the child subject.21 The picture taken for an adult album compounds not only the photographed child’s lack of agency but that peculiar brand of powerlessness implicit in having one’s likeness ‘taken’. In related terms, for Barthes, mourning his mother in the writing of Camera Lucida, the image that most fittingly restores her to him is a photograph of her as a child. That photograph originates precisely from a time when his mother was unknown to him.22 Such poignant examples of identification, otherwise evident in Barthes’ figure of the ‘amorous subject’ invariably feminized by the act of waiting for the beloved, resemble those to which, via photographs of girls, Carroll was drawn.23
Critics have addressed the middle-class Victorian male fascination with the little girl as a desire to reconnect with a long-lost feminine phase. Following on from more general studies such as U. C. Knoepflmacher’s Ventures into Childland, which deals largely with literary representations of femininity in the genre of the fairy tale, and James Kincaid’s Child Loving, which tends not to demarcate in terms of gender adult male affiliations with children, Catherine Robson’s Men in Wonderland specifically takes up the nineteenth-century gentleman’s investment in a condition of girlhood.24 Robson traces Victorian male investment in a fantasy of girlhood as a crucial psychic stage in developing masculinity that signals a pervasive longing among middle-class men for a lost feminine self. It is a selfhood associated for a male with childhood as a feminine realm he had previously inhabited until forced to leave it behind for the masculine world of school. Once lost, the nineteenth-century gentleman might access that earlier self in fantasy through the figure of the girl. Robson’s interpretation of the importance of girlhood in the period is useful in cutting through simplistic labels of deviance used to explain tendencies to privilege the child over the adult. In this context of identification with the figure of the girl, however, it is important to consider how, owing to its indexicality and capacity for temporal disjunction, photography differs from other forms of visual representation.
During the period in which Carroll was working parameters of girlhood and womanhood were variously defined. Legal debates around the age of consent were very much part of the discourse in which he had to situate his desire to photograph minors. On two occasions in 1885 he wrote to the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, expressing concerns over the impact of Thomas Stead’s notorious revelations of child trafficking in the Pall Mall Gazette.25 Carroll expressed a preference for photographs of girls below the age of consent. His own photographs frequently preserved them as minors. At the same time, however, were it possible to override acknowledging photographic subjects as consenting adults, acquiring instead the consent of parents and effectively still treating those subjects as dependents, Carroll would secure ‘sitters’ above the age of consent. Sensitive to gossip and fully aware that his photographic sittings might provoke questions, he was careful to explain in letters to the parents of his ‘sitters’ the legitimacy of his wish to photograph minors. He claimed never to have undertaken a photographic session without the consent of the child in question.26 Yet the fact that Carroll entertained a degree of flexibility around concepts of majority and minority suggests one attraction of photographs was their capacity to fast forward minority and transform majority back to minority, or disguise a distinction between them.
Throughout his photographic career, in letters and his private journals, Carroll reflects upon the increasing idiosyncrasy and extremity of his practice. He recognizes, too, and voices quite self-consciously, the insistence of his pattern of procurement of photographic ‘victims’, as he self-ironizingly called them. In addition, however, Carroll registers with comic flourish his eagerness to gain photographs of the children of friends and acquaintances. In a letter of 23 January 1872 to Anne Isabella Thackeray, eldest daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, he writes:
You would be conferring a great additional favour if you could for love or money get me photographs of those charming little friends of yours, Gaynor and Amy – especially (if such a thing exists) one of Amy at 3½ as a sailor. You will think me very greedy, but, as the Americans say, ‘I’m a whale at’ photographs.27
Likewise, as late as September 1888, Carroll records taking the actress Isa Bowman, on an extended visit to him in Eastbourne, to the photographer William Hardy Kent’s studio where he ‘got three photos done, two as Willie [the notorious character from East Lynne] and one in sailor frock’ (VIII, 423). He has Isa Bowman photographed not as herself but cross-dressed in theatrical guises.
Yet, while the photographic sitting, the resulting negatives and prints and compiling of albums all fascinated Carroll, he was also drawn to more abstract implications of the medium. In wishing to photograph and acquire photographs he explored the significance of photography as a technology of capture. Drawn to its conceptual intricacies, Carroll enjoyed the metamorphic potential within the unitary image. When photographing children he was impelled by that peculiar nature of prophecy that photographs articulate. Occupying shifting identifications with those subjects photographed, he welcomed the activation by the medium of the anterior future tense. In so doing, he was not simply interested in reclaiming via the image a fleeting past but also in anticipating, and thereby inhabiting in advance, an uncertain future.
DREAMING PHOTOGRAPHS 
Writing in his diary on 15 May 1879, in a relatively rare discursive passage, Carroll records ‘as a curiosity’ a dream he had the previous night containing ‘the same person [the actress Marion ‘Polly’ Terry, sister of Ellen Terry] at two different periods of life’:
And there was Polly, the child, seated in the room, and looking about 9 or 10 years old: and I was distinctly conscious of the fact, yet without any feeling of surprise at its incongruity, that I was going to take the child Polly with me to the theatre, to see the grown-up Polly act! Both figures, Polly as a child and Polly as a woman, are I suppose equally clear in my ordinary waking memory: and it seems that in sleep I had contrived to give to the two pictures separate individualities (VII, 175–6).
15 Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), Marion (‘Polly’) and Florence Terry, 1865, Photographs, vol. III, albumen print.
At one level, this splitting into two of Polly Terry gives graphic form to the degree of interchangeability among Carroll’s child-friends. Yet, if there is a sense in which one little girl may invariably substitute for another as photographic model and, in Polly Terry’s case, one sister for another, since Carroll photographed her siblings, implicit in this example is a different order of substitution. In the dream the doppelganger Polly embodies that temporal dimension, the simultaneous existence of multiple stages of development that photographs generate more generally. The child/woman is divided into two different embodiments (present and future Polly and past and present Polly) united miraculously by the temporal action of photography. Rather tellingly, Carroll refers to the two figures of Polly as ‘pictures’ and, in so doing, his ‘curious’ dream tests out the workings of the photographic image. In staging the simultaneous existence of the child and adult Polly, the dream captures that temporal fluctuation that a photographic portrait has the capacity to hold in a single image. To reverse the positions of the child and the adult Polly, such that the adult watched herself as a child, would produce a different effect, one of retrospection. But as it stands, the course of Carroll’s dream, in which the child is to be taken to see her adult self act, resembles a premonition, the clairvoyance of photographic agency.
At the same time, in facilitating Polly’s seeing herself in the future, the dream attributes wish fulfilment to the child. Staging in advance her talent as an adult actress, Carroll does not want to jettison the grown-up Polly for the child but rather to make her child self live again simultaneously with her mature one. Key in this respect is the capacity of the dreaming mind to generate more than one child, more than one ‘picture’, but ‘without any feeling of surprise at its incongruity’.
This memorable dream inflects a reading of Carroll’s photograph Marion (‘Polly’) and Florence Terry (illus. 15) taken at their home in Stanhope Street, London, on 14 July 1865. The sisters, aged eleven and nine, are pictured with the head of the younger girl pressed comfortingly against the cheek of the elder. Their two bodies merge, as does their clothing, into one billowing dress while the combination of one girl’s full-face and the other’s profile, along with the striking resemblance between the two sisters, suggests different physical facets of a single child. In arranging his sitters in this way, Carroll appears most interested in effectively picturing, as one face, two sides of the same coin, full-face and profile, as it were. Moreover, the monochrome of photography, in highlighting the tonal variation and texture of the fabrics of the children’s dresses, the prominent white channels of the girls’ centre-partings, and bleached thumbnails, consummately expresses the touch of the sororal embrace. These qualities, along with the assured hand with which Polly Terry has signed the image, impress Carroll’s attachment to the medium for its ability to fix sibling resemblance.
In taking the photograph of Marion and Florence Terry Carroll indulged what he regularly acknowledged as a time-consuming habit. But photographs of girls also embodied for him a ‘compulsion’ in the sense of a persistent urge both to take and to acquire them. Thus, when on 25 March 1863 Carroll lists in his diary under ‘photographed or to be photographed’ the names of 107 girls grouped together according to their first names, the very heading blurs a distinction between those children already preserved photographically and those he yet desires to capture (IV, 178–81). These include four Alices, seven Ediths, fourteen Marys and a single Lily (MacDonald). In eighteen cases the children’s birthdays are also noted. This process of listing past and future child subjects establishes a type of equivalence for Carroll between the thought of photographing and photographing itself. Indeed, a wish to photograph is in some ways congruent with the act of photographing such that to think of photographing a child is already in a sense to photograph her. But, as this example further intimates, the child’s name is of vital importance to Carroll’s wish to photograph and retrospectively to the memory of taking a likeness.
In Carroll’s story ‘A Photographer’s Day Out’, published in the South Shields Amateur Magazine (1860), the name ‘Amelia’ connotes an overwhelming desire on the part of the first-person narrator to photograph ‘a young lady’ in possession of the name.28 Indeed, as elsewhere in Carroll’s writing, investment in a female name precedes acquaintance with its owner: ‘why is it, I wonder, that I dote on the name Amelia more than any other word in the English language?’29 Structured as diary entries, the story comically explores the perils of family portraiture for a photographer who longs only to capture ‘a young lady’. Carroll’s text mocks each family member’s pretensions as they adopt ridiculous poses for the camera. The ‘Paterfamilias’ with his expression ‘of a man with a bone in his throat’ goes first, followed by his wife who, with Shakespearian aspirations, puts on ‘a ruffle’ and ‘a Highland scarf’ and poses with the unlikely prop of ‘a hunting whip’.30 Following subsequent photographs of the ‘inevitable’ baby and children, the intended pièce de résistance, a family group, fails but it clears the way for the narrator to accomplish ‘the aim’ of his life, namely to ‘photograph an Amelia!’
The distinctive function of the name ‘Amelia’ in this early text establishes a role for names more generally in Carroll’s work. Just as the speaker in ‘A Photographer’s Day Out’ relishes the very pronunciation of a name as attached to a hypothetically ‘ideal’ photographic subject, Carroll makes much of the names of those children he photographs. Helmut Gernsheim was the first to point out the relative oddity of the diary entry for 25 March 1863 in which Carroll grouped photographic subjects according to their shared first names.31 But what has subsequently become apparent is that this process of listing and repeating names evokes the power of photography to capture their owners, to generate multiple images of a single ‘Constance’ or ‘Grace’. Just as for the narrator in ‘A Photographer’s Day Out’ to speak the name ‘Amelia’ is to align it with photographic permanence, for Carroll to register the names of children is to grant to them the indelibility of physical imprints.
Carroll was from the first keen to incorporate into his albums the signatures of photographic subjects. Indeed, he sometimes included a signature on an album page in anticipation of securing a likeness to go with it. Everywhere apparent in his photograph albums are intricate varieties of letter-formation and haphazard spacing characteristic of a child’s attempts at neat copperplate script. On some occasions the signatory has omitted a letter or, as in the case of the photograph Irene MacDonald, ‘Autographed’ (1863), omitted one letter and transposed another.32 In such portraits, the combined effect of photograph and signature – the alignment of the inscription of a hand with photographic trace – impresses both the closeness and distinctiveness of each. The juxtaposition of the technologically and the manually generated forms begs the question of what kind of mark, in relation to that of writing, photography constitutes.
As Carroll embraced the potent appeal of a medium at once thoroughly scientific and wonderfully mysterious, he further theorized its merits in sophisticated and witty prose. In September 1855, a year before he began photographing, Carroll wrote ‘Photography Extraordinary’, applying principles of photographic physics and chemistry to the agency of the human mind. He inserted the story as a cutting in Mischmasch, his family magazine that comprised texts he had written for the Whitby Gazette and the Oxonian Advertiser.33 Relating a ‘mesmeric rapport’ between the mind of a photographic subject, or ‘patient’ as he calls him, and the glass plate of a negative, Carroll’s story plays upon the existence of latent and manifest images as applied to the mental realm. The narrator introduces a secret photographic ‘experiment’ to which he has privileged access. Its benefits as applied to the mind show the capacity of the medium to ‘develop’ to the highest degree of intensity even the ‘feeblest’ of intellects. Moreover, the revolutionary impact upon the creative faculty of this invention is, the narrator claims, to significantly develop any literary style and thereby ‘reduce the art of Novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour’.34 To demonstrate, he submits various schools of literature to the test. First goes ‘the milk-and-water School of Novels’, followed by the infinitely more ‘saleable’ ‘Matter-of-Fact School’. Finally, ‘the Sporadic or German School’ takes its turn, to be greeted by ‘indescribable sensations of surprise and delight’.35 For in this case, poetic language reacts so effusively to ‘photographic’ chemicals that, faced with Byron’s ‘fiery epithets’, the system overloads to leave the photographic paper ‘scorched and blistered’.36
‘Photography Extraordinary’ offers a prospective account of a young Carroll just beginning his academic career at Christ Church. He had only recently encountered photography and hankered after a camera of his own. Yet the fictional scenario ingeniously situates ‘photographic’ agency in a context prior to the invention of the medium and, in so doing, the piece also predicts just how indispensable photography will become to Carroll’s creative life: not only in the form of his output of photographs but, as photography turns it into an automatic one, the act of writing. It is unusual to find as early as 1855 the links Carroll establishes between photographic agency and writing. Nonetheless, while the model of latent and manifest content, both in the forms of images and writing, would later come to characterize theories of the unconscious mind as exemplified most famously by the work of Sigmund Freud (especially in the model of the mystic writing pad), a prototype had surfaced six years earlier than Carroll’s story in the figure of the palimpsest in Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria de profundis.37 De Quincey’s fascination for the dreaming capacity as ‘the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy’ chimes with aspects of Carroll’s tale.38 Restoring that which was unknown, or thought to be lost, the camera functions rather like the mechanism of the unconscious in dreams. De Quincey famously likens memories to ‘lost’ inscriptions restored by modern chemicals as archaeological layers of a palimpsest. He thereby presents memory in the form of a linguistic model: a code that may be cracked.39 For Carroll, scientific discovery similarly underpins his fictional account of photography as revelatory.
Close to the conclusion of ‘Photography Extraordinary’, the narrator claims: ‘the mind reels as it contemplates the stupendous addition thus made to the powers of science’.40 ‘Photography Extraordinary’ is an extraordinary text, not only because it forges a relatively early connection between photography and the unconscious mind, but because it rehearses remarkable aspects of the medium that will come to populate both Carroll’s fictional writings and his personal ones, especially his letters that chart, along with his diary entries, the extent and details of his passion for the relatively new technology of reproduction. Not only do they record photographic sittings and elaborate schemes for securing an ongoing supply of child subjects for his lens but, as subsequent chapters will demonstrate, they reveal his complex psychological stake in representing the child photographically. Frequently adopting personae in his letters to children – the wronged lover berating his mistress, the fickle suitor disregarding a forgotten tryst, or the avuncular figure offering measured advice – Carroll’s personal investment in the medium is bound up with the larger impact of photography upon visual perception and cognition.
While Carroll’s ‘Photography Extraordinary’ rehearses a version of Benjamin’s ‘optical unconscious’ in which the action of photography releases hidden phenomena, ‘A Photographer’s Day Out’ differently reveals how, with an exposure time of ‘1 minute and 40 seconds’, things get in the way that were not ‘seen’ at the point of taking.41 They get caught, that is, in a very different way from in painting, engraving or, indeed, writing, unless it claims to be automatic. At the same time, when they are not static throughout an exposure, objects appear transformed in a photographic image, sometimes beyond recognition. In ‘A Photographer’s Day Out’, movement during a photograph turns picturesque compositional elements of a farmer and a cow into grotesque ones. The cow gains additional heads, while the farmer is equally afflicted: ‘I should be sorry to state how many arms and legs he appeared with – nevermind! call him a spider, a centipede, anything.’42 Transforming the appearance of objects, or capturing random ones with the same degree of faith as those consciously staged, a photograph thereby implicitly poses the question of how to visually determine the difference between those intentionally and unintentionally arrested objects.
16 Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), Alice Liddell [sleeping], 1860, albumen print.
Carroll’s photograph Alice Liddell [sleeping] (illus. 16) of 1860 demonstrates this point in more subtle terms than ‘A Photographer’s Day Out’. It often remained necessary in the period to take the subject outside to ensure sufficient light for a tolerable exposure time and Carroll has posed the child as if asleep in an outdoor space he has done his best to mask. In the portrait, taken in the Deanery garden, Christ Church, a canvas backdrop fails to accommodate the whole frame and the viewer is left to speculate upon what may lie at the edges and, by extension, beyond the border of the image. A photograph of a child pretending to be asleep might look awkward in many outside contexts. Here that awkwardness is exaggerated by apparently insignificant details, such as the chips of gravel in the foreground that, in their relatively high degree of focus, impress the height of the photographer’s point of view.
Such visual discrepancy, generated by the fact that the medium treats with equal precision a precious object and a stray detail, does not disappear from Carroll’s photographs once he need no longer go outdoors, enjoying instead the favourable conditions of his purpose-built studio. During the 1870s a residue of that awkwardness persists in his repeated juxtaposition of dressed-up children and barren interior spaces. But the indiscriminate agency of the medium remains in other ways. When in 1873 Carroll centred against a wall in his studio Xie Kitchin dressed in Greek costume, three fugitive bars of sunlight imprinted themselves to the left of the child (illus. 17). These remain as indelibly present in the print as the child herself. With the overt presence of light this later, more sophisticated, studio shot retains a quality of the earlier one. It is a reminder that part of the emotional pull of photographs for Carroll remained lodged in that agency beyond the control of the photographer. In thrall to light, photos, photography was a dependent technology. Appearing to elude the eye of the photographer, this quality of something unseen but present at the time of taking the photograph evokes a peculiar quality of prophecy. Such a quality conveys that sense of incipience that Emmanuel Levinas has referred to as a type of ‘presentiment of fate in the image’.43
In 1876, dressing up Xie Kitchin as ‘Penelope Boothby’ to photograph in his Christ Church studio, Carroll had moved a long way from his 1857 parody of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, ‘Hiawatha’s Photographing’, published in the Train in December of that year.44 The poem dramatizes the enigma of the photographic process together with the singular persona of the photographer. In his witty imitation of what he called the ‘verbal jingle’ of Longfellow’s metre, Carroll explores the tricky business of collodion photography:
First, a piece of glass he coated
With Collodion, and plunged it
In a bath of Lunar Caustic
Carefully dissolved in water:
There he left it certain minutes.
17 Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), Alexandra (‘Xie’) Kitchin in Greek Dress, 12 June 1873, albumen print.
The precise and laborious method required to make a photograph stretches the metre, though not quite to breaking point:
Finally, he fixed each picture
With a saturate solution
Of a certain salt of Soda –
Chemists call it Hyposulphite.
(Very difficult the name is
For a metre like the present
But periphrasis has done it.)
Regardless of his considerable efforts, however, Hiawatha’s sitters regard the success of a final family ‘grouped’ photograph as scant compensation for what they judge the ‘failure’ of their individual likenesses.
In Hiawatha, just one year after acquiring his first camera, Carroll had created a memorable persona for the photographer. Unwilling to put up with abuse for failing to flatter his sitters, and lacking ‘that calm deliberation, / That intense deliberation / Which photographers aspire to’, Hiawatha looks to the railway to make a quick escape:
Hurriedly he took his ticket,
Hurriedly the train received him:
Thus departed Hiawatha.
Saved by the train! However, as Carroll’s fictional photographer beats a retreat to the station he also anticipates what would become the itinerant figure of his author. Even with a much-desired studio of his own, Carroll continued, as he had always done, to get out and about for photographs. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, Carroll’s wish to picture Xie, and other little girls, in a range of costumes found its origins, and complement, in a wealth of contexts beyond Christ Church. For his regular excursions to the London theatre and other entertainments, his annual visits to the seaside and for his one trip abroad, to Russia, Carroll took the train.
