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Commentary by Ray Dyer

There is no obvious precedent to the gentle, doe-eyed Fawn in Lewis Carroll's life and work, but it is not antagonistic to his late romanticism. As noted by Jeffrey Stern, his bookshelves certainly held, amongst the poetry of most if not all of the Romantic poets, the works of Wordsworth in seven volumes (362). In one of the Lucy poems, "The Education of Nature," the poet says that Lucy

         shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things. [Lyrical Ballads, 1800]

Such a mood perfectly reflects the meeting of Alice with the silent, pensive Fawn, which will later bound away in a more wildly gleeful mood. Tenniel, robust political satirist and commentator that he is, nevertheless rises to new heights of delicacy of touch and aptness here, perfectly capturing the softly melancholic romanticism of the scene in question. We may add that Carroll's creativity has also employed challenging aspects of syncretic symbolism in this episode, with elements variously biographical, literary-linguistic, poetical and animistic.

From the earlier Shakespearian era, much beloved by Carroll, Edmund Spenser had employed the word "fawn" in its verbal sense, in a work which may well have been known to Carroll from his nursery and home-schooling days with his own mother and spinster Aunt Lucy (note the connection with the Wordsworth poem cited above): "Mother Hubbard's Tale." This includes the lines, "To eate thy heart through comfortless dispaires;/To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride...." (see Browning 357). Whilst Carroll could be combative with adults, with children, whose company he preferred, his psychology could readily lend itself to fawning, as when he allowed special child friends like Isa Bowman to refer to him as "Goosey," or foolish (Collingwood 402). The initial origin of the whole Alice saga, in its oral storytelling form, may readily be seen to have had an element of similar relational freedom (gentle bullying, or the modern "pester power") from the three Liddell children, in the famous boating outings on the river in the summer of 1862. There, the continually hard pressed storyteller and author-to-be was eventually driven into complaining to his diary of having to go on "yet again" with the by then "interminable fairy tale" (see Carroll's Diaries, 94, 96, 98, 110-115, 162, 163, 169 and so on).

When the Fawn does ask Alice a question "at last," the answer Alice gives is not very satisfactory, leading the Fawn to chide her. "Think again," it says: "that won't do." With this exchange we perceive more clearly the adult author Carroll, disguised in yet another of his many avatars, carefully preserving a modicum of moral instruction in his new style of nonsense tale for the education, as well as the entertainment, of a child audience.

Bibliography

Browning, D. C., ed. Everyman's Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs. London: Dent & Sons, 1951.

Carroll, Lewis. Lewis Carroll's Diaries. The Private Journals of Lewis Carroll. Vol. 4. Ed. Edward Wakeling. England: The Lewis Carroll Society, 1997.

Collingwood, Stuart D. The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll. London: Fisher-Unwin, 1898. NB Collingwood was the nephew of Lewis Carroll through his sister Mary. As a close family member, he had access to all Carroll's papers and Journals, including several later "lost" and unavailable to future biographers. This "very first" biography of Lewis Carroll therefore, whilst brought out somewhat hurriedly in the year of Carroll's death, preserves unique moments and insights into the famous child author's life and work.

Stern, J. Lewis Carroll's Library. Carroll Studies No. 5: Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 1981.

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Last modified (commentary added) 27 April 2021