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Lewis Carroll's Photographs
From: Science Museum
| By:
Colin Ford |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Although he found fame chiefly as a writer of children's stories under the name Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson was a mathematician by profession. For almost 25 years, photography was his chief hobby. In addition to photographing his colleagues at Oxford, a favourite subject was young children. He abandoned his hobby suddenly and without explanation in 1880. Colin Ford of the Science Museum tells his story in this feature extracted from Making of the Modern World. |
 arly in 1855, when photography was not yet 20 years old, an Oxford student, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98), son of the rector of the Yorkshire village of Croft, went to the nearby town of Ripon where he had his 'likeness photographed by Booth. After three failures, he produced a tolerably good likeness, which half the family pronounce the best possible, and half the worst possible'. |
 Dodgson is today best known by the pen-name 'Lewis Carroll', under which he wrote two of the most enduring children's books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass. His Ripon portrait was taken with the wet collodion process which its inventor, Frederick Scott Archer, did not patent, but made freely available to all. |
One of Carroll's uncles, Skeffington Lutwidge, was an amateur photographer. Later in 1855, when Carroll was on summer vacation from Christ Church, Oxford, he observed his uncle's variable results and wrote Photography Extraordinary, the first of his many literary works to use the medium as subject matter. It playfully proposed an imaginary camera which would turn a writer's half-formed ideas into a finished novel. |
Back in Oxford, after taking advice from Skeffington, he and a fellow student, Reginald Southey, another enthusiast, travelled to London in March 1856 to buy a camera at Ottewill's, Islington. |
Though the wet collodion process was easier to manipulate than the daguerreotype or calotype, to make a negative required photographers to mix, precisely and dextrously, their own chemicals (in the dark) and to spread them evenly over a sheet of glass. To do this carelessly, or leave any part of the glass uncovered, resulted in a faulty picture. The negative had to be placed in the camera, and the picture taken, while the chemicals were still moist (hence 'wet' collodion): when dry, they lost their photosensitivity. Not surprisingly, there were many failures. |
 After photographing buildings, statues, medical specimens, trees, gardens, and still lifes, Carroll turned to portraiture. He began a series of portraits of university colleagues and friends, working in his rooms in Christ Church or outside in the Deanery gardens where the remarkable portraits of Alice Liddell were taken. Reginald Southey was clearly posed outdoors, apparently in front of a sheet of plain wood erected for the purpose. He was a medical student, and the skulls and skeletons with which he is standing suggest that he had views on Darwin's theory of evolution, the subject of furious debate in Oxford at the time. |
Later, Carroll had a studio, or 'glass house', built on the roof of the main ('Tom') quadrangle, to which he brought hundreds of sitters. For 25 years he seems to have spent more time on photography than on writing or on his work as a mathematics tutor. |
Increasingly, Carroll's subjects were young children, especially young girls of which Alice was the most important. Carroll referred to these sitters as his 'child friends'. Alongside his diary entries for March 1863, he listed 103 whom he wanted to photograph, in alphabetical order. It is a real achievement to have persuaded those who did pose for him to keep so still in front of his camera. The shortest exposure time he recorded is 40 seconds, and his diary is as full of notes of failed photographs as successful ones. But Carroll's success made him, as the distinguished photo-historian Helmut Gernsheim has said, 'The greatest Victorian photographer of children'. |
Though Carroll's pictures, of adults and children, are less stilted and artificial than many in the Victorian era, they are nonetheless carefully considered. Poses and grouping were his 'favourite branch of the subject' and he concentrated particularly on 'the arrangement of the hands'. Because of his long exposure times, sitters are virtually never shown smiling, but Reginald Southey and skeletons has something of the humour found in Carroll's books. |
The mystery about Lewis Carroll's photography is that he abandoned it in July 1880. As the sale of his books grew, he may well have taken the decision to concentrate on writing. A year later, he resigned his mathematics lectureship: 'I shall now have my whole time at my disposal and, if God gives me life and continued health and strength, may hope, before my powers fail, to do some worthy work in writing'. |
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