With the controversy surrounding Mark Hipper’s portraits of naked children still simmering, Fiona MacCarthy reports on an exhibition of Lewis Carroll’s photographs of little girls
Xie Kitchin, little girl photographed as a pert Chinaman, perched in skimpy silk kimono on a pyramid of tea boxes. Alice Liddell dressed up as a small beggarmaid, rags falling off her shoulders, feet bare and eyes come- hithering, one hand cupped for an offering, outrageously provocative. Here is Wonderland Alice herself.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll, thanked heaven for little girls and photographed them obsessively. The shy, stammering and slightly limping mathematics lecturer and bachelor Fellow of Christ Church in Oxford travelled to London to buy a camera soon after his 23rd birthday in 1856.
This was in the pioneering period of photography, just after the wet collodian negative took over from the daguerreotype and calotype. Photography was now liberated from old patent restrictions. The historic moment is compared by Colin Ford, curator of an unmissable Lewis Carroll centenary exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, to the arrival on the market of personal computers.
Seven years later, drunk with possibility, Carroll made a list of 107 little girls he planned to photograph.
In days when university authorities were tolerant, Carroll built a glass- roofed studio above his rooms at Christ Church. Here, light flooded down on the great, the good and raffish. Carroll’s Victorian male portraits are delicious, especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti in cad’s costume of check bags and check waistcoat, a little overweight. But it is the “pretty children” who steal the show, Carroll’s adored and flirty and mysterious pre-pubescent female sitters. “What have I done,” he asked, “that I should be supposed desirous of photographing boys?”
What exactly did these children mean to him, and how did Carroll himself affect their lives? There is an undertow of narrative in the exhibition, from the day Carroll first spotted Alice, then aged three, younger sister Edith and older sister Ina in the Deanery at Christ Church. He noted the date in his diary with one of those “white stones” that marked what for him was a personal red-letter day. His technical proficiency as a photographer developed as Alice grew bigger. His feelings for her deepened, gathered in complexity, subsumed themselves in those wonderful strange stories, Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, ending in an inevitable tragedy. He did not attend Alice’s wedding in the end.
Carroll photographed his own seven sisters outside the gaunt vicarage in Yorkshire where they lived. They make a melancholy pre-Raphaelite picture: seven brides awaiting seven brothers, with no hope. Another group picture – Five Children in Check Dresses – shows the deadly uniformity of mid-Victorian girlhood. All have the same smooth hair with centre parting scraped back behind their ears, except for a more frizzy, smallest sister. In the solidly female households of his youth, Carroll created for himself a central role of entertainer, punning, riddling, doing tricks, telling stories and cavorting.
His 25 years behind the lens of the Victorian camera, with its complex and wondrous accessories, saw the maturing of his talent to amuse. The pedantic and inhibited young man acquired a glamour. Mothers entrusted their daughters to him. Carroll’s stiffness would vanish when he knew a child well, and the children can be seen to have entered into the spirit of the engagement, dressing up and discovering other potential selves. It would be a mistake to see Carroll’s photographs as exploitation or voyeurism. The beauty of them is that this was a two-way thing.
There is an extraordinary sense of relaxation in many of the pictures. Carroll’s pictures of siblings are convincing in their physical closeness: Annie and Henry Rogers slump together on a chaise-longue like fat puppies. He plays with the double worlds of wakefulness and sleepiness, entranced by the prospect of his “child friends” in white nightgowns. He sets up an opposition between adult expectations and child instincts for rebellion.
The most beautiful and poignant of his portraits shows Irene MacDonald, an indignant little figure with her hairbrush in her hand, protesting the impossibility of brushing her long, tangled hair. The picture is entitled It won’t come smooth: Carroll is subversively on the children’s side.
The academic Marina Warner goes so far as to claim: “This crabby Oxford don is a natural father to the Woodstock generation.” The sense of friendly conspiracy between photographer and sitter was what made all the difference between Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron, working on the same photographic circuit. Both, for instance, took Alfred Lord Tennyson. Carroll’s paler, vaguer portrait was preferred by the laureate himself. Cameron imposed her own histrionic vision on her sitters. Even children are viewed as figures of national myth. What makes Carroll’s photographs so winning is the feeling that the scene is actually happening. His sitters are often busy with their hands. There is an intimate involvement with idiosyncratic human activities that brings Lewis Carroll closer to Bill Brandt.
Nudity and kisses eventually caught up with him. So far as we can tell, he took his first nude photograph on May 21 1867. The subject was the child Beatrice Latham “sans habillement”, as Carroll self-consciously put it. He then took a whole series of pictures of Beatrice and her two sisters in “primitive costume”, minimal to non-existent. Small girls were gleeful about shedding their clothes for Carroll. Beforehand, he negotiated tactfully with their families, almost always within his own circle of friends.
In 1879, Carroll’s diaries show what Colin Ford describes as “a positive crescendo of activity” in photographing young girls naked. Frances Henderson was “in her favourite dress of nothing”; next day, little Leila Taylor “in jersey and bathing drawers”. Then Frances alone, “lying on a blanket, naked as usual”. On July 25, his model was Evelyn Hatch “naked – a kind of photograph I have often done lately”. He repaid his models with kisses, taking them up on his knee to do so, and in fact the lips of many of the children in his photographs seem pursed ready to give or take a kiss.
Suddenly, in 1880, the pictures stopped. It seems there was an Oxford scandal. Carroll destroyed most of his nude photographs before he died, and asked his executors to destroy the rest. A few survived, one of which is in the exhibition at the NPG. Carroll, a devout man, had surely acted less from guilt than from depression that his intentions had been misunderstood.
Our current preoccupation with child abuse can blind us to the social and sexual behaviour of past centuries. There was an enormous difference between the mid-19th century and now. Carroll was not a sexual predator. The delicate, ingenious relations he established with his sitters produced a serious new form of art.