Methods of Concealment: Lewis Carroll and Disguise

Ray Dyer, PhD

[Victorian Web Home —> Authors —> Lewis Carroll —> Works —> Through the Looking Glass]

rom earliest childhood Lewis Carroll was his mother's adored "Charlie," her first-born male child. He was home-schooled to the age of eleven in a highly educated rural environment where he easily imbibed the poetry of the English Romantic Movement. The lasting effects of such an idealised "one to one" mental and personal stimulation may be gleaned from Carroll's prolific writings in later life. In particular, for the present purpose, examples of the influence of these early years can be found in his second major children's story, Through The Looking-Glass. Chapter VIII ("It's My Own Invention") shows him drawing on them, as he makes subtle but calculated efforts to hide, disguise and thereby maintain and remember quite privately his own youthful experiences of first and unrequited love. Such life-changing events, we should note, occurred before his first meeting with the young Oxford girls who would later inspire the books that made him famous.

His techniques come from various sources. Like so many Victorian children, in early childhood Carroll read the work of an author whose own literary disguises had been required for survival in harsher times of religious and political oppression — John Bunyan. Bunyan's grandly allegorical The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) provided him with not only an acceptable religious and moral compass, but also a literary technique, a veritable Gospel in "Types, Shadows and Metaphors" (Bunyan: 4). Such was its lasting impact that, in the summer of 1862, whilst assisting his friend and Christ Church contemporary William Ranken at the latter's rural church services, Carroll would incorporate readings from The Pilgrim's Progress (See Carroll, Diaries, 4: 74 passim).

In early life too, Carroll's local church in Daresbury, Cheshire, gave him opportunities to study the clever use of acrostics with their hidden messages carved into the church walls. Acrostics with their hidden agenda would subsequently be employed in most of the major publications of Lewis Carroll - and in book gifts, presentation copies and elsewhere, enabling him to hide the name of a favoured child friend, for example in his characteristic opening frame-poems. As with any competent cryptographer, the technology must reflect progress against counter-analysis/decryption over time. The typical elementary "first letter" acrostic of his early Alice's Adventures in Wonderland of 1865 - to Alice Pleasance Liddell - began "A boat beneath a sunny sky…." By 1893 in his Sylvie and Bruno Concluded his more evolved technique had become a "third letter" acrostic, beginning with "Dreams…." to his child-friend Enid Stevens.

In Chapter VIII of his second published Alice book we find Carroll treading his usual delicate tight-rope between the opposing forces of agendas and sub-agendas with their varying degrees of concealment and announcement — because the loved one at least must not be left in ignorance as to the intended message. To this end he appears to have employed both his own narrative, and his directions to John Tenniel for the accompanying illustrations. For the chapter's lengthy nonsense poem, which the White Knight sings to Alice, he tells her that "The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes.'". His subsequent involvement of the hapless Alice in a series of logical and semantic subtleties regarding degrees of "is called," "really is" and "the name is," reflects a veritable master class of pre-digital encryption. This produces no fewer than four known titles for his song, announced by Carroll as "It's my own invention," as also for the title of the chapter. However, with a late and further deep level of concealment, the Knight claims the tune also to be his own invention. Here, however, the knowledgeable Alice readily detects that in fact "the melancholy music of the song" had been borrowed from I give thee all, I can no more. The true composer of this flute duet was Thomas Moore (1779-1852), who named it My heart and lute, the first line of which corresponds to the popular admonition known to Alice and her generation. With this expert ploy of allowing his young heroine to apparently expose an error of the older man, Carroll attains a further level of concealment: that of distraction, as with the conjuror and card-sharp, who display prominently a minor effect of one hand, whilst covertly employing the other hand to greater effect. Conjuring and card-tricks were popular Victorian pastimes, and drew Carroll's attention and reporting on a number of occasions, (see Carroll, Letters I: 9 (November 1853, to his sister Mary); and Diaries 6: 249, from the Hatfield House New Year's Party on 1 January 1873).

Left: The Battle between the Red and White Knights. Right: The White Knight Falling off His Horse.

Left: Alice Helping the Knight out of a Ditch. Right: The Knight and the Aged, Aged Man.

The four levels of deception and concealment in Carroll's nonsense song above seem to be paralleled in Tenniel's four related pictures of Alice with the White Knight. (A fifth picture, suggesting an elevated perception of Alice, is in Chapter VIII, where she finds a crown upon her head, and this links to others in Chapter IX, of Alice wearing her crown, and standing by a doorway with "Queen Alice" inscribed on its arch). But as for these four: numbers and their symmetry, as here in Chapter VIII, were of more than ordinary importance to the Oxford mathematician hidden behind the pen-name Lewis Carroll. Carroll and his works have recently been shown to have figured, around 1930, in the teenage reading and thought of the gifted Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing, six years before the latter produced his epochal paper "On computable numbers" of 1936, and before going on to break the "impossible" German Enigma code in the war years 1939-1942 (See: Dyer 2016: lxxxix, a discussion of new work on this subject by Professor Stuart Schieber of Harvard University in 2015).

Another formative influence on Carroll, in complete contrast to his love of mathematics, was the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson. No sooner did Tennyson publish Maud in 1855, the summer of Carroll's twenty-third year, than the latter was reading it and pouring into his Journal his own heartfelt feelings. Tennyson had described passing through the vale of "the cruel madness of love," and had pined mournfully:

Ah, Maud, you milk white fawn, you are all unmeet for a wife…
You have but fed on the roses, and lain in the lilies of life. (IV: 10)