5

Ore House, Hastings: Stammering, Speech Therapy and the Voice of Infancy

THE EXPERIENCE OF RUSSIA, as I have charted it, involved for Carroll a coming together of sight and touch in a correspondence between the modern form of the photograph and the ancient one of the Orthodox icon. Aside from all the other cultural benefits he took from it, in these terms alone, the Russian trip demonstrates the larger significance of photography to Carroll’s experience. Not only was he fascinated by the relationship of visual images to touch, as realized on his foreign tour by the icon, but from early in his photographic career Carroll recognized and embraced a relationship of the medium of photography to speech. A correspondence between the photographic and the verbal took many forms in his work, but it found particular expression in the relationship of photography to his own speech as perpetually flawed.

Throughout his life the author of the Alice books was dogged by a stammer. Carroll’s personal writings document, from time to time, the persistence of the condition for which he sought help and advice at various periods. From 1857 Carroll consulted the speech therapist James Hunt at his clinic at Ore House near Hastings (illus. 63), and from 1870 he saw Henry Frederick Rivers, who took over the practice following Hunt’s death. The south coast of England thereby figured large in Carroll’s attempts to treat his pathology that, so integral to his habitual experience, held a fundamental relationship to his photography.

From the first, speech was an important component in Carroll’s practice of taking photographs. Indeed, a novel conjunction of visual and verbal characterized the photographic sitting as Carroll both conceived and engineered it. That verbal space of the photographic sitting, the playful banter he enjoyed with a model, was in turn itself shaped by his idiosyncratic experience of speech as hesitant and imperfect. Speech was a perpetual cause of anxiety for Carroll. His diaries and letters document an ongoing pursuit of successful therapy, and his experience of stammering as a source of shame prompted Carroll’s efforts to help various individuals who suffered from the condition, including six of his seven sisters. In a letter to Rivers of 2 February 1874 Carroll sets out the ‘state of the case regarding [his] sisters’ as follows:

63 ‘The Cottage’, previously Ore House, The Ridge, near Hastings, before demolition in 2010.

1 does not stammer.

2 stammer very slightly (of these one is such an invalid, you are not likely ever to see her).

2 stammer a moderate amount (of these one is married and lives in the north of England – you will never see her).

2 stammer rather badly.1

However, the difficulty of speaking fluently, without succumbing to what he referred to as his ‘hesitation’, the stammerer’s anticipation of what might come out of his mouth wrongly, or indeed not at all, enabled Carroll to explore new imaginative realms. It did so, not only in the most obvious sense of affording opportunities for fictional scenarios, and singular characters notable for their manner of speaking, but by newly informing the nature of his photographic practice and those ways in which he understood it as a peculiarly magical form of representation.

In Critique et clinique, Gilles Deleuze, writing about literature as linked with the problematic of Life, refers to those writers who use stuttering ‘to stretch language along an abstract and infinitely varied line’, who ‘make [it] take flight . . . send [language] racing to ceaselessly [place] it in a state of disequilibrium’.2 Dante, Deleuze notes, was admired for having ‘listened to stammers and studied speech impediments not only to derive speech effects from them but in order to undertake a vast phonetic, lexical and even syntactic creation’.³ And, for Deleuze, Dante’s interest in defective speech supports the phenomenon that Marcel Proust identifies, namely, that ‘great books are written in a kind of foreign language’.⁴ It is in a related sense that a stammerer such as Carroll might be thought to occupy the role of a foreigner in his own language. But critics have celebrated the spheres of Carroll’s fictional nonsense in which the nature of the stammer is overtly played out, the dodo of Dodgson in Alice being the most famous example, while largely neglecting the relationship of Carroll’s speech impediment to his photographic practice. Such neglect is probably owing to the fact that, while it might seem natural to trace a relation between irregularity of speech and literary language, it requires a different type of conceptual turn to draw a connection between a visual practice (photography) and a phenomenon of speech (stammering). Carroll enables such a connection by fixing upon the body of a child. However, any attempt to reconsider his stammer in these terms precisely exposes the hesitant nature of such new theoretical spaces between visual and verbal forms of representation.

Prevailing critical opinion regards Carroll’s stammer as compatible with his sensitive nature, and as a reason, in addition to the theatre, for his decision not to take up the priesthood. References among critics to the speech impediment otherwise detail a familiar scenario in which, in the company of his child friends, Carroll speaks without faltering. There persists a view that, in the manner of a stage actor adopting a persona, Carroll enjoyed a reprieve from his stammer in the performative realm of photographing little girls. While this is a rather compelling notion, since at least one of his young models, May Barber, recalls the occasion of Carroll’s stammering as ‘rather terrifying’, it cannot be accepted as definitive: ‘it wasn’t exactly a stammer, because there was no noise, he just opened his mouth. But there was a wait, a very nervous wait from everybody’s point of view: it was very curious.’5 There is little doubt that in spite of his stammer and its accompanying bodily contortion – the open mouth that offers up nothing – as here described by Barber, Carroll felt very comfortable among children. Yet a belief that Carroll’s ‘hesitation’ was cured in the company of little girls mythologizes the nature of that association, which in turn fuels a line of argument promoting his reluctance or inability to mature. Such a view thereby obstructs ways of thinking about Carroll’s stammer in its relationship both to photography as a visual practice, and also to that delicate balance he so openly strove to maintain between the private and public, and the psychic and social aspects of his life.

In an emphatic and revealing sense, the speech impediment cuts across the distinct personae of Carroll’s public and private selves. A letter of 5 January 1898 to Henry Littlejohn Masters Walters, curate of Aust, Gloucestershire, one of three letters Carroll wrote just days before his sudden death from pneumonia, shows him declining an invitation to read prayers in a church owing to his lifelong stammer. This letter provides an intimate focus upon the personal in an account of his speech impediment, his ‘hesitation’ that, he says, ‘is always worse in reading (when I can see difficult words before they come) than in speaking’.⁶ Carroll earnestly explains the lifelong pain he has experienced in such public display and the fear that, if he were to read prayers, his ‘hesitation’ would distract the members of the congregation ‘from what ought to be the only subject on their minds’.⁷

It is a poignant letter not simply because, as readers, we possess a prospective knowledge of its author’s impending death but because at the age of 65 Carroll is still having to account for the public discomfort caused by his own stammer. He communicates a profound sense of the effects of the physiological upon the psychological in his life as expressed in a fear of the visualization of ‘difficult’ words in the act of reading. Moreover, as Carroll’s comment on the reading process discloses, the stammer involves a disruption of the flow of speech in a movement forwards and backwards in time.

On a more specific level, however, the letter dramatizes a distinction between words as linguistic signs to be read, as visualized primarily, and words as sounds separated at the level of utterance from their significative value. In so doing, the missive invites a shift of emphasis such that the question of whether Carroll’s speech impediment left him when he spoke with little girls is of less consequence than how, in larger terms, the stammering adult might be differently tied (or bound) by his speech to the child. Clearly, the child’s relationship to speech is enabling for Carroll. From the point of view of a desire ‘to put language into flight’, to recall Deleuze’s phrase, Carroll’s fascination for linguistic games celebrates that way in which all children might be said to stammer with their frequent grammatical irregularities, their evocative pauses and haunting repetitions. Carroll empathizes with the invariably ‘imperfect’ hesitant speech of childhood in which there yet remains a distinction between pronouncing a sound and using that sound for speaking sense. For in that distinction new conceptual possibilities open up. Such possibilities occur most meaningfully for Carroll in the process of photographing a child. In that encounter he is not afraid to acknowledge his stammer and thereby, at a certain level, dissolve his difference from the child by speaking her imperfect language, as it were. Furthermore, the temporality of photography is analogous to that of the stammer in the sense of inviting temporal disruption in the simultaneous experience of past, present and future.

It might seem somewhat contradictory that the act of photographing rendered mute those ‘child friends’ that Carroll courted especially for their linguistic ingenuity; that, time and time again, the magic medium silences upon a photographic plate the little girl as speaking subject. Yet by that very sleight of hand, the photographic process thereby envelops the hesitancy or stammering of speech by representing, as still, as voiceless, the perfect body of a child who as a speaking subject can never be perfect. In other words, it renders the imperfect body whole. This is distinct from other forms of mechanical reproduction because of a photograph’s unique assault on temporality, that disarmingly simple yet irrefutable quality of the medium that enables a subject to occupy simultaneously more than one temporal moment: Walter Benjamin’s notion, that is, of the eloquent subsistence of the future in the past if only we had known where to look for it.8

For Carroll, there exists an analogous quality to the medium of photography as showing forth that which is to come but yet has already been. And in the photographic encounter not only does Carroll identify with children as wonderfully uninhibited speaking subjects, but he welcomes the translation of their surfeit of speech into the calm of the photographic image. In photographic portraits, Carroll is able to hold the child without the flaw of language (his own hesitancy), hence the tremendous power upon him of the sleeping child, of the child photographed as if sleeping.⁹

64 Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), Gertrude Chataway, 1876, albumen print.

Rather in the manner of Ruskin’s compulsion to commemorate Rose La Touche in replicas of Vittore Carpaccio’s Dream of St Ursula, Carroll privileges visual replicas of children as conduits to longed-for associations. Those associations are not only with particular children but with an unattainable condition of infancy as a state prior to language, a condition of speechlessness.10 Carroll made several photographs of girls posed as if asleep. His portrait of Gertrude Chataway (1876; illus. 64) shows the child posed on a sofa in his Christ Church studio. It is a distinctive image for the way in which the figure appears in a haunting space illuminated with ghostly effect. Carroll achieves an odd perspective such that a viewer appears to look through an interposed medium. Gertrude Chataway’s vulnerability in sleep is augmented by the indeterminacy of the interior and she appears to float almost as if occupying the space of a dream. Here, then, the sleeping child is perfectly true to type, in an etymological sense that is, of infancy, ‘infantia’, as speechlessness.

The nature of the photographic encounter, as it brings together the linguistic and visual (as Carroll stage-managed it), suggests a number of enabling ways in which to begin to articulate a relationship of photography, stammering and infancy, together with the means by which visual and verbal realms might come together in that conjunction. Carroll’s photographic ‘sittings’ frequently involved theatricality and masquerade, tools and props welcome to a stammerer as aids to adopting a protective persona. Such role-playing also reinforces those links between photography and magic that Carroll played up. But role-playing further allows us to dwell upon a condition of empathy involved in the photographer’s placing the child subject in a position of relative powerlessness, of identifying with that particular form of disempowerment that children experience in having their likenesses ‘taken’.

Carroll reads such powerlessness through a linguistic relationship of the child to himself, the child, like the stammerer, as existing as a kind of foreigner in her own language. A projected linguistic tie to the child again recalls the powerful equivalence between a state of infancy and an absence of language. It is also a reminder that when a child begins to speak he or she does not simply translate a wordless state into one of words, that we must consider that which might be lost or might resist translation from that babbling stage into speech. For Adam Phillips, because ‘young children are apprentice, often dilettante speakers, amateurs of the sentence’, they are uniquely placed ‘to teach us what it is like not to be able to speak properly; and by showing us this they remind us not only of our inarticulate and virtually inarticulate selves, but also of our internal relationship with those buried, vestigial versions of ourselves.’11 Thus, most crucially, the child learning language can restore to us ‘the border in ourselves where we struggle or delight to articulate against powerful external and internal resistances’.¹²

In Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers several ways in which to consider, for the child learning to speak, a distinction that arises between pronouncing a sound and using that sound for speaking sense.¹³ In Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Roman Jakobson’s approach to language, phonemes are preferred over words as elements by which to pose the problem of language acquisition. Unlike words that refer to certain concepts, phonemes, Jakobson argues, since they do not hold meaning, allow one ‘to surpass the distinction between sign and concept’. Accordingly, in a child’s ‘transition from babbling to the articulation of words’, there occurs a reduction such that ‘suddenly the richness of babbling disappears’ and ‘the child who previously differentiated perfectly his [k]s, all of a sudden loses the possibility of differentiating them, although he recognizes them very well when an adult speaks them’.14

Jakobson identifies a ‘moment’ as soon as the child begins to speak at which he stops being able to utter sounds, not because he cannot physically articulate them or hear them, ‘but because he temporarily ceases to be able to pronounce them as significative utterances because they are not yet part of his significant phonemic system’.¹⁵ Merleau-Ponty takes issue with the rigidity of Jakobson’s model, arguing that babbling finds yet a residual outlet in a child’s continued use, when learning to speak, of ‘onomatopoeia and interjections’ that are not placed under the rules of Jakobson’s phonemic system. Merleau-Ponty writes:

For example, a child does not yet know how to pronounce an [r] in the context of language, but he uses it without any trouble when imitating bird songs. He knows how to pronounce it as long as he doesn’t have to use it for speaking. This can be compared to the re-education of stutterers. They are provided with situations in which they become accustomed to pronouncing the [r] by imitating the turning over of a motor, for example. After that, they are encouraged to integrate it into their language.¹⁶

In the context of his own difficulties in pronouncing individual letters in particular combinations, Carroll voices a distinction equivalent to that of the sound of an ‘r’ in, say, birdsong and the sound of the same letter in a word. For example, writing on 1 September 1873 to the speech therapist Rivers, whom he consulted during that period, Carroll explains:

I should like to see whether you can give me any further help as to my difficulties with ‘p’ in such combinations as ‘impossible’, ‘them patience’, ‘the power’, ‘spake’, which combinations have lately beaten me when trying to read in the presence of others, in spite of my feeling quite cool, and trying my best to do it ‘on rule’.¹⁷

On 19 December of the same year, Carroll requests Rivers’s ‘most valuable superintendence and instruction’, claiming:

Just now I am in a bad way for speaking, and a good deal discouraged. I actually so entirely broke down, twice lately, over a hard ‘C’, that I had to spell the word! Once was in a shop, which made it more annoying; however it is an annoyance one must make up one’s mind to bear, I suppose, now and then – especially when, as now, I have been rather hard worked.18

Eight days later he writes again to Rivers with feedback on his previous advice:

Thanks for advice about hard ‘C’, which I acknowledge as my vanquisher in single-hand combat, at present. As to working the jaw more, your advice is in my power generally: but as to the direction to ‘keep the back of the tongue down’, in the moment of difficulty, I fear you might almost as well advise me to stand on my head!¹⁹

Such bad periods, as recounted in the letters and diaries, tend to be followed by good ones and vice versa, thus confirming, in the manner of Carroll’s final letter to Walters, that he could never sustain confidence in a long-term solution to the problem. The following postscript to a letter to Rivers of 2 February 1874, in which Carroll explains the varying degrees of his sisters’ stammers, impresses the profound effect upon him of a reprieve from his own: ‘I have been speaking lately with almost no hesitation and with great comfort to myself – with the consciousness that the breath was flowing out in an unbroken stream – being decidedly better since my last visit with you.’²⁰ Two years later, on 22 January 1876, Carroll communicates the unrivalled joy he feels in being once again distinctively better than he had been a month or so previously: ‘Twice I got through family prayers, including a chapter, without a single hitch – a thing that has not happened before, in my recollection, more than once perhaps in many years.’²¹ He continues: ‘Also I have more than once expected to stick fast and not done it – which is a new and delightful sensation to me. It generally happened to me by saying to myself, “Stick or not, at any rate the lip shall be kept in, and the breath shall flow out”’.²²

In spite of such very specific references it remains difficult to trace in Carroll’s writing a coherent narrative of his speech impediment. The artist Gertrude Thomson, who made drawings for him in the later part of his career, recalls that although Carroll ‘deplored [his stammer] himself, it added a certain piquancy, especially if he was uttering any whimsicality’.23 Yet mention of that condition so deplored by him is significantly intermittent in his correspondence. The stammer haunts the letters and diaries as a preoccupation sometimes transferred to related physiological concerns. What is certain, though, is that, prior to beginning treatment with Rivers in 1870, Carroll had been treated by the speech therapist James Hunt at his clinic at Ore House near Hastings. Carroll had family connections with Hastings since two of his aunts lived there and he was familiar with the town from visiting them. Hunt, better known as an anthropologist and founder of the Anthropological Society of London, published in 1854 his influential Stammering and Stuttering, Their Nature and Treatment, which went through seven editions before 1871.²⁴ It is a history of ‘impeded utterance’ from the ancients to the contemporary that asserts the popular nineteenth-century study of physiology as a key to the eradication of what Hunt calls ‘any misuse of the organs of speech’.²⁵ That text, a source of therapy for Carroll, testifies to the extreme stigma attached to stammering, which, in the male in which it was more common, was linked with effeminacy, masturbation, indolence and vanity, to name but four ‘vices’.

Classical authors commented widely on stammering. For Aristotle, stammering was caused when the tongue was not ‘obedient to the will’,²⁶ while Demosthenes, who suffered badly from the condition, practised speaking with pebbles in his mouth, anticipating later contraptions, such as Itard’s early nineteenth-century fork-like instrument placed under the tongue.²⁷ At the time of the publication of Hunt’s thesis, mutilation of the mouth and tongue was common practice in the attempted cure of stammering and he successfully argues the barbarity and ineffectiveness of these methods.²⁸ Perhaps the most significant factor about his position is that, in the manner of his father before him, Hunt refutes the notion that stammering is an organic disease; it is rather ‘the loss of habit (always unconscious) of articulation’. The cure thus requires teaching ‘the patient to speak consciously, as other men speak unconsciously’.²⁹ Hunt’s therapeutic method required the repetition of exercises in speaking and in making the stammering subject hyperconscious of vocalization and articulation, both of which, he writes, ‘acquired in infancy, the mode and cause of their production is unknown even to many adults’.

In the manner of writing on insanity contemporary with his work, there is a strong element of moral management running through Hunt’s book. He believes that ‘discipline of the vocal and articulating organs, under an experienced instructor, is the only means of overcoming impediments of speech’.30 The stammerer is characterized as physically weak, in children sometimes stunted, and as someone whose physical strength is invariably drained by his defective condition. He is also susceptible to quacks who, according to Hunt, travel ‘from place to place, drum the stutterers together like the recruiting officers, see them perhaps once or twice, sell them some bottles [of gargle] for good payment . . . and then depart for other towns’.³¹ It is owing to such widespread charlatanism, together with the profound loneliness and isolation of the stammerer, who ‘desire[s] to attach himself to somebody he trusts’,³² that Hunt recommends a residential course of treatment at his practice in which the patient becomes part of a family and undergoes therapy in a group situation. In a section of his book on cruelty to children who stammer, for example, Hunt powerfully communicates as especially psychologically damaging to a child sufferer the invisible and chameleon nature of the condition: ‘if he were blind he would not expect to see. But when he knows there is no deformity, that his organs are just as perfect as other people’s, the very seeming causelessness of the malady makes it utterly intolerable.’³³

Carroll felt considerable empathy with others who stammered. On several occasions he arranged appointments with Hunt, and later with Rivers, for his sisters. As early as 11 April 1860, writing to his sister Mary from Wellington Square, Hastings, the home of his aunts, Carroll notes: ‘I like Dr Hunt’s system very much, and think I am benefitted by it.’³⁴ The following spring, he was again receiving speech therapy, staying with Hunt at Ore House and using that address for correspondence.³⁵ As early as 1862 he can be found recommending his speech therapist to acquaintances. Moreover, he worked with some undergraduates at Oxford who shared the same condition. For example, on 29 October 1862, Carroll records: ‘Young of B.N.C. (who is a pupil of Dr Hunt’s) came in the evening for our first hour’s reading together’ and he pronounces himself ‘fortunate in having found one with whom I can carry on the system’ (IV, 141). Henry Savill Young, an undergraduate at Brasenose, was one of a number of students with whom Carroll was able to practise Hunt’s system of readings. Later, on 16 March 1874, he writes to Rivers enlisting his help in treating another undergraduate, Walter Rees from Christ Church, who, he claims, ‘is a very bad stammerer’. On this occasion, since the prospective patient is from a large family and ‘very poor’, Carroll works as an intermediary and attempts to secure discounted terms for his treatment.³⁶

65 Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), The Tennysons and the Marshalls, 1857.

However, I want to dwell on an early occasion in 1857, the year during which Carroll first began therapy with Hunt, and in which he took this remarkably haunting photograph. To do so is to bring together, by way of the photographic medium, those visual and verbal spaces I have been exploring. The photograph, entitled The Tennysons and the Marshalls (illus. 65), shows the poet Alfred Tennyson and his five-year-old son Hallam in the company of the Leeds industrialist James Marshall and his family at Monk Coniston Park, Ambleside.³⁷ It is an early image, taken a year after Carroll acquired his camera, and it represents a format that he will go on to largely abandon, the group portrait that as we have found will be replaced with the portrait of a single child. Carroll abandoned it in part because he was most interested in a portion of the visual field depicted here, namely the infant Hallam Tennyson nestled in his father’s lap. The photograph is one of several of the earliest photographs that Carroll took of Tennyson.

Compositionally, in terms of the arresting gaze of the poet, the image splits into two: the left-hand side occupied by Tennyson and his young son is much more striking than the right, which seems to be striving to mimic the traditional grouping of an eighteenth-century portrait. The left side is what Carroll will increasingly come to realize (and here it is already manifest in advance, very subtly, hidden almost), namely intimacy between a man and a child. Significantly, it is a male child here, rare in Carroll’s photography that comprises several portraits of fathers and daughters. Christened ‘Hallam’ after his father’s beloved Cambridge undergraduate Arthur Hallam, who had died suddenly in his early twenties and for whom Tennyson had composed the series of elegies that became In Memoriam, published seven years before in 1850, the child is cradled in the poet’s arms. In the manner of all photographic subjects, Hallam Tennyson suggests the future in the imminence of his arrested development. But the child’s photograph also functions as a memorial to a dead adult and, in so doing, demonstrates in a rather overdetermined way that which all photographs of children are capable of doing.

But while the process of naming a loved one after another can encapsulate such a movement, a photograph is able to perform that temporal shift in a way more arresting than naming alone can. The child Hallam, in the photographic present, is the future in addition to his signalling the past. It is as if the poet’s son Hallam anticipates that which the older Hallam will become (but reciprocally that which he has already been), namely devoted to Tennyson as a friend. The child Hallam, who will himself be the close partner and biographer of his father, functions here as a kind of predictor of the future in the present. Such an investment in the photographed child involves a conception of the present as always confirming the past as prophetic. It is the issue of memory, released through naming here, that compounds the relationship of the photograph to temporality and allows us to muse upon the peculiar nature of prophecy of which Walter Benjamin has written so compellingly.38

66 Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), Hallam Tennyson, 28 September 1857, albumen print.

But there is a further subtle connection with stammering here. Carroll shows empathy with the Tennyson boys, Hallam (1852–1928; illus. 66) and Lionel (1854–84), after the event of the photographic sitting that produced this image. Indeed, we find out in letters of the 1870s that Carroll has remembered that the younger of Tennyson’s sons, Lionel, stammers. It is most probable that Carroll discovered Lionel’s stammer on the occasion of his visit to the Lake District when he took this photograph of him aged three (illus. 67) with his brother and the twelve-year-old Julia Marshall. It was a day that Carroll marked in his diary with one of his famous white stones. But, whatever the date at which he first realized the child’s stammer, Carroll kept it in mind, writing from Christ Church on 19 June 1872 to recommend a speech therapist for Tennyson’s son:

If Lionel is, as I understand, still suffering, as I have done for most of my life, from that most annoying malady, I do most strongly advise that he should go over to Sheffield and hear Dr Lewin. One lecture will in all probability be all that he will need, and he can then complete the cure for himself.³⁹

Tennyson writes back on 23 June declining Carroll’s suggestion on the grounds that his son’s stammer is much ‘ameliorated’ and ‘will possibly pass or nearly pass away with advancing life’.⁴⁰ And although one detects more than a grain of irritation in Tennyson’s reply, Carroll’s memory of the boy’s speech impediment not only indicates the extent to which the stammer affected his initial meeting with the child, but hints at that more fundamental connection between infancy and hesitancy.

In Carroll’s empathy for a child who stammers, stammering provides a kind of perpetual, if unwelcome, connection for the adult to his own child self, the self as frightened, disempowered, vulnerable. More emphatically, such a connection to the child through imperfect speech (in which the speech impediment comes to stand in for the speech of childhood) suggests a way of preserving, halting that imperfect speech, that state of disequilibrium prior to its translation into sense.

The connection of the photograph to stammering further works in a way similar to naming. The photograph cannot speak the name of the absent loved one but it can otherwise commemorate that individual by triggering a temporal flight. By definition, the silent visual medium of photography cannot figure forth a stammering subject but perhaps photography can come closer to doing so than any other visual medium. This is the case, not only through a temporal connection – the act of stammering occupying a temporal trajectory in the anticipation, the forward movement of that which will be said but reciprocally has already been uttered – but one of a sense of disempowerment I touched upon earlier.

67 Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), Hallam and Lionel Tennyson with Julia Marshall, 28 September 1857, albumen print.

A similar temporal dimension resonates in both photography and stammering. In the photograph (see illus. 66), the child Hallam Tennyson recalls his namesake long since dead, such that retrospection becomes simultaneously its opposite, a looking forward. The photograph also tells us of that ‘equivalence’ death in the future⁴¹ by performing an odd aesthetic resurrection, in showing forth the child Hallam who has been to the future and back, so to speak, and whose death, yet to come, we viewers have already witnessed. In Carroll’s anxiety about ‘seeing difficult words’ before he ‘comes’ to them, he is similarly projected, or takes flight, into a future that is simultaneously a past in which he has already stumbled over words. The act of stammering, like that of photographing, is then to anticipate, in the present, future hesitation as having already occurred.