Who was the mysterious woman Carroll loved in 1855

[ermete22]

There are many candidates: Alice Liddell, her mother after a recent very good book. Someone in the family suggested she was the well known actress Helen Terry. I have a new candidate on the basis of some evidences I collected: Elisabeth Siddal, Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s unlucky wife, who died for an overdose of laudanum and whose body was exhumed 7 years after her death to recuperate Rossetti’s poems. Is someone interested in the evidences I collected?
Carlo

[mikeindex]

I believe Lizzie Siddal has been hinted at before as a potential romantic interest for CLD, though I can't remember where. I'd certainly be interested in your evidence.

Why do you pinpoint 1855? (I can think of quite a good reason, but it hasn't been commented on very much - I'd like to know if yours is the same).

I actually worked as a research assistant on the book you mention and have passed your comment on to the author.

Mike

[ermete22]

Summing up all evidences is a long task; it will need many messages. The only "serious source" at the beginning at least was the book by Violet Hunt "The wife of Rossetti": she writes about a possible love story about Elisabeth and Carroll, but concludes he was too shy for her. 1855 is the date of the visit of Elisabeth to Oxford, more precisely to Dr. Acland and, at the same time the Epoch when Carroll produced many of his love poems. By analysing such poems you can easily observe that the loved woman has blue-green eyes; which seem to cancell candidates as Alice Liddel, but also others. Carroll has withdrawned Elisabeth Siddal (see a letter to Christina Rossetti after the death )
Other traces you can get by analysing the dates and contents of love poems. On this analysis I will prepare a short summary I will send as soon as possible in a next message as attachement

[johntufail]

This is an area I have had very little interest in. However, the current debate suggests I should have paid more attention to Carroll's Love' life. To be honest my utter contempt of tabloid style journalism and the lack of respect shown by both writers and publishers who trawl through Carroll's personal life for personal or corporate gain has always repulsed me. Most especially as the more we discover of Carroll's life, the less he becomes worthy of a sensationalist appoach.

However, I do accept that Carroll did have an intensely emotiotional relationship with at least one woman, possibly more than one. It is at least possible that sexual urges intruded into these relationships - given that Carroll, so far as we know was a) human and b) heterosexual (?)male.

What occurs to me is that there are clear differences between Carrol'd relationships between women/girls. His relationships with pre-bubescent females appear to be based on two themes, beauty and innocence. The second of these, innocence, appear, according to Carroll's own accounts, to comprise of the ability of the child to question fearlessly. This was the one thing above all that Carroll appears to have admired about childhood.

This is the reason that I both reject and refute the idea that Carroll ever had aspirations to marriage or carnal knowledge of Alice Liddell. Whatever Alice Liddle was as a pre-pubescent child, once she reached the age of pubescence we know that she very rapidly lost the 'innocence' that Carroll admired and became, frankly a spoiled and sulky brat. Anyway, 1855 completely eliminates Alice.

The interesting thing about 1855 for me is that it more or less coincides with his serious break with the established Anglican Church. It was the period when he began actively seeking out people like Maurice, Ruskin, Tennyson the MacDonalds etc. Prior to that we only have evidence of his reading and his Oxford squibs.

So, just on 'gut instinct', I would certainly be looking at a woman who was both attractive in a Pre-Raphaelite sense, but also intelligent and opiniated.

Futher than that I cannot go!

Regards

JT

[ladydear]

Physical descriptions of 'the lady' in LC's love poetry suggest she had dark hair. Eye colour isn't mentioned at all as far as I am aware.

[mikeindex]

ermete22 said:

By analysing such poems you can easily observe that the loved woman has blue-green eyes; which seem to cancell candidates as Alice Liddel, but also others. Carroll has withdrawned Elisabeth Siddal (see a letter to Christina Rossetti after the death )
Other traces you can get by analysing the dates and contents of love poems. On this analysis I will prepare a short summary I will send as soon as possible in a next message as attachement

To be exact the few love poems that CLD wrote were all produced between 1859 and 1862. I think I have probably studied his serious poetry more than most people and I can't place the references to eye colour - as far as I remember, in his poetry blonde/golden hair and blue eyes are consistently associated with the innocence of children (Beatrice/Only A Woman's Hair), while mature and sexually desirable women tend to be dark (Faces in the Fire/Only A Woman's Hair) - and the most explicitly romantic poems (Three Sunsets, Stolen Waters) have no physical description at all.

What makes 1855 interesting for me in this connection is that in August of that year that the Dodgson family saw the need to cut three consecutive pages from CLD's diary, covering the dates August 15-19. (This fact is not very well known partly because, incredibly, Edward Wakeling contrived to edit and publish the volume without noticing the cut pages).

Meanwhile on August 14, just before the cut pages, CLD reads Tennyson's Maud and gives it only a so-so write-up in his diary ('it will neither harm nor improve his reputation', or something to that effect). On Sept 25, however, he writes:

'Read Maud again in the evening: I enjoy it much more on a second reading. The canto beginning "I have led her home" is true, passionate poetry; one can scarcely believe but that it must have been written under the influence of a first love.'

Can it be that his own experience of 'first love' occurred in the intervening six weeks and was responsible for the differing impact of his two readings of the poem? And if so, could there be a connection between this and the cutting of the pages, and indeed the disappearance of the entire next volume? Intriguing possibilities.

Mike

[johntufail]

Hi Mike,

Reading all these exchanges on Carroll's relationships with women/girls, makes me realise how easy it is to forget dates, ages and other essential data. It occurs to me that an extremely uselful service this site could provide, especially for those participants who do not have easy access to the breadth of material required, would be a time-line section. This sectio could have, for example, a time line devoted wholy to Carroll's meetings with girls/women, togethe with ages, another timeline relating to publications, another relating to his significant meetings with other significant people in his life (The MacDonalds, Ruskin, Tennyson, Maurice, the Rossetti's etc, etc) This would enable paticipants to easily check basic data before, and even as they participate in doscussions. What do you think?

JT

[mikeindex]

johntufail said:

Hi Mike,

Reading all these exchanges on Carroll's relationships with women/girls, makes me realise how easy it is to forget dates, ages and other essential data. It occurs to me that an extremely uselful service this site could provide, especially for those participants who do not have easy access to the breadth of material required, would be a time-line section. This sectio could have, for example, a time line devoted wholy to Carroll's meetings with girls/women, togethe with ages, another timeline relating to publications, another relating to his significant meetings with other significant people in his life (The MacDonalds, Ruskin, Tennyson, Maurice, the Rossetti's etc, etc) This would enable paticipants to easily check basic data before, and even as they participate in doscussions. What do you think?

JT

An excellent idea John- finding the time to implement it is the problem.

[johntufail]

Hi Mike,

Try looking under the bed or under your favourite armchair. I find that when I lose time - that, invariably, is where it all dribbles!

[ermete22]

johntufail said:

This is an area I have had very little interest in. However, the current debate suggests I should have paid more attention to Carroll's Love' life. To be honest my utter contempt of tabloid style journalism and the lack of respect shown by both writers and publishers who trawl through Carroll's personal life for personal or corporate gain has always repulsed me. Most especially as the more we discover of Carroll's life, the less he becomes worthy of a sensationalist appoach.

However, I do accept that Carroll did have an intensely emotiotional relationship with at least one woman, possibly more than one. It is at least possible that sexual urges intruded into these relationships - given that Carroll, so far as we know was a) human and b) heterosexual (?)male.

What occurs to me is that there are clear differences between Carrol'd relationships between women/girls. His relationships with pre-bubescent females appear to be based on two themes, beauty and innocence. The second of these, innocence, appear, according to Carroll's own accounts, to comprise of the ability of the child to question fearlessly. This was the one thing above all that Carroll appears to have admired about childhood.

This is the reason that I both reject and refute the idea that Carroll ever had aspirations to marriage or carnal knowledge of Alice Liddell. Whatever Alice Liddle was as a pre-pubescent child, once she reached the age of pubescence we know that she very rapidly lost the 'innocence' that Carroll admired and became, frankly a spoiled and sulky brat. Anyway, 1855 completely eliminates Alice.

The interesting thing about 1855 for me is that it more or less coincides with his serious break with the established Anglican Church. It was the period when he began actively seeking out people like Maurice, Ruskin, Tennyson the MacDonalds etc. Prior to that we only have evidence of his reading and his Oxford squibs.

So, just on 'gut instinct', I would certainly be looking at a woman who was both attractive in a Pre-Raphaelite sense, but also intelligent and opiniated.

Futher than that I cannot go!

Regards

JT

I totally agree with you on the initial repulsion one feels for such kind of subjects, whether Einstein was violent with his wife, or Wittgenstein was homosexual; such kind of information looks totally irrelevant to me. But I was not interested at all in such subjects, at the beginning of my researches about Carroll; I am a professor a theoretical physics and was just interested in Carroll’s logic and math. Step by step however, by reading biographies, I was forced by some sense of realism to get involved in the details of Carroll’s personal life. There are too many a priori assumptions about who Carroll was which not fit the data (to use a scientific expression). I felt therefore the need to find a more sensible theory to fit them. On the other hand Carroll was so laconic in general that, with the support of his family, almost no reliable information arrived to us.
To be as honest as possible, I will also admit that, as I find this new forum a very promising one, I inserted the story of Siddal, assuming that it would have been somehow attracting for new members. I am aware of your intense work on Carroll, so you were not the target of course.
Going back to the Siddal affair, I first noticed a very simple detail: in his love poems, the beloved one always had blue-green eyes, and many proposed candidate for having been that mythic first love had dark coloured eyes: it’s a simple observation, almost a banality, but still a fact. The second point is that love poems are clustered around the year 1855, when Elisabeth Siddal shortly visited Oxford, met regularly with Pusey’s family and some voices talked about an affair of this girl with Carroll. Violet Hunt is normally reported being not very reliable, but it’s hard to imagine that she invented the story: why ? On the other hand, writing to Christina Rossetti after the death of her brother, Carroll informs her of having some drawing of Elisabeth done by himself.. But most of the evidences come from the analysis of the love’s poem. I promised to sum them up and I will send in a few days.
My personal opinion, assuming I am right, is that the relationship with pre-pubescent girls is somehow the consequence of this first love, a way not to renounce completely to contact with female subjects which could not, on the other hand, be a full, complete relationship. I realise my English is not so good to well express my point of view on this subject. So I totally agree with you on Alice’s subject. It seems important rather to take note that Siddal died in 1862, February; this detail can suggest some different connections, as it is the poem Just a woman’s hair, written a few day after Siddal’s death. If my idea is correct, the two involved characters, Elisabeth and Carroll, were very different from whatever point of view and following my interpretation of poems, their love story was short (1-2 months) and ended just because of that.
I am sorry I cannot send immediately my study on Carroll’s love poems; I took my notes in French ( I am bilingual) and must order them and translate. It take time.
A final funny detail: nobody has understood why, Elisabeth being in Oxford, Ruskin wrote to Rossetti it would have been a good idea to go there and take her somewhere else.

Sincerely yours .
C. Pellacani

[ermete22]

First to be noticed, te love poems are dated around 1855-56.
Beatrice and Just a wona's hair are produced just afer Elisabeth Siddal's death; the former a week after to be more precise, and it was written on a paper sheet which actually contained woman's hair.

[bettyboop]

Why cant it have been Alice Liddell?

[bettyboop]

Ouch, I feel kinda bad, as if I shut this conversation down. Wasn't meant as a dismissal, I really wanna know. You guys know more about Carroll's biography than I do, but from my perspective I wonder why the 'mysterious woman' couldn't have been young Alice? Didn't she have blue eyes?

[frockmaker]

Isn't it that Alice Liddell was too young? The love poetry is about women, not little girls. Is that correct?

[johntufail]

Mike,

I am sure I can recall reading somewhere that there is strong and direct evidence that as Alice Liddle reached puperty he became increasingly repulsed by her. There was some incident when Alice had an accident and he recorded his feelings about he at that time?

I would see this as very stong evidence that Carroll never seiously contemplated any seriously intimate relationship with the post-pubescent Alice.

Regards

JT