Thinking about this lately.<\/p>\n
Living people are complicated and multi-layered, make jokes, contradict themselves, change as they age, have different viewpoints at twenty from the ones they hold at fifty. \u00a0They are almost impossible to fully understand and would take years of close study to be able to describe with any accuracy or completeness. But\u00a0the Famous and Dead are different.<\/p>\n
Or they are if you happen to be a certain kind of biographer.<\/p>\n
The first\u00a0 thing about the Famous and Dead in certain kinds of biography is the known facts about them are \u00a0all <\/em>the facts. Or at least all the salient ones. The rest can easily be filled in with inference or repetition.\u00a0 Like, the 20 or so fragmentary facts we have about Shakespeare\u2019s life are more than enough for certain kinds of biographer to just guess the rest and be probably right. I mean when you\u2019ve read his \u00a0will, a list of his debtors and his\u00a0 tax returns, what else do you need to be able to figure\u00a0 who he fell in love with and what he really thought of James 1?<\/p>\n It\u2019s all made easier too by the fact that\u00a0the Famous and Dead were apparently\u00a0 born, lived and died with a single set of opinions, traits and feelings. If a man was described as\u00a0 \u2018forgetful\u2019 by someone who knew him aged ninety-seven, then he was obviously \u00a0\u2018forgetful\u2019 from birth, and\u00a0 so certain kinds of biographers are quite justified in \u00a0considering how being \u2018forgetful\u2019 at school would have caused problems, and what those \u00a0problems might have done to his psyche, and how that damaged psyche might have given him a complex and how that complex might have made him depressed, and then they can\u00a0 call it a \u00a0solid fact \u00a0that this person was forgetful and chronically depressed about it.<\/p>\n All this is of course definitely<\/em> true once it has been said, because another fortunate thing is that \u00a0biographers of a certain kind always know more about the Famous and Dead than they did themselves.<\/p>\n I mean, suppose our aforementioned \u2018forgetful and depressed\u2019 man spent his life visiting aquariums, and writing about how fish were just wonderful. You or I might just\u00a0assume he rather liked fish, unless there were some strong evidence in his own behaviour to suggest otherwise. But certain kinds of\u00a0biographers know better than this.\u00a0 They don’t even need evidence, since intuition is more than enough. They can simply say that \u2018despite all outward appearance\u2019\u00a0 (great phrase frequently used), \u00a0 he actually hated fish quite a lot and preferred newts. And that is enough to make it true.<\/p>\n The only<\/em> thing that is required as an axiom to be taken literally about the Famous and Dead are their jokes, because , as we all know, \u00a0in the olden days they \u00a0had no sense of humour or irony, and never made a joke about anything. \u00a0If our man once said \u201cI\u2019d find a dead horse more interesting than Simpkins and his slideshow,\u201d then that is what he meant \u2013 literally<\/em>.\u00a0 This forgetful, depressed, fish-phobic, newt-lover\u00a0liked dead horses for company.<\/p>\n And there’s a lot more books in that.<\/p>\n Lewis Carroll has had more than his share of this treatment from his biographers of course.\u00a0 They mostly either had no facts available so just made stuff up (Reed, Taylor), or ignored the facts and…well, just made stuff up \u00a0(Green, Hudson). Even the best of them, who strove to get some real understanding of their subject (Cohen, Clark in places, Lennon, to the extent she could at the time),\u00a0 would too easily fall back on just \u2019knowing\u2019 \u00a0what his\/her hero really meant, even if that is entirely\u00a0 contrary to anything he actually said. One biographer, for example \u2018knew\u2019\u00a0that \u00a0\u00a0\u2018despite all outward appearance\u2019\u00a0 Mrs Liddell \u2018hated\u2019 \u00a0Charles Dodgson. \u00a0He didn\u2019t\u00a0say how <\/em>he knew. He didn’t need to. He was a biographer. He just\u00a0knew<\/em>.<\/p>\n The situation is, hopefully, changing a little now, but it\u2019s a legacy hard to escape. \u00a0It hangs about, and\u00a0 even very new biographies\u00a0and source texts can \u00a0stray into the \u2018well\u00a0 I just ignored that fact because I was sure Carroll didn\u2019t really mean it\u2019 kind of \u00a0mindset. For example, \u2018Esoteric Buddhism\u2019 or Theosophy as it’s now known, formed \u2013 as Carroll\u00a0says in his own foreword \u2013 the basis of his last novel Sylvie and Bruno<\/em>. \u00a0As such it was clearly highly important to him personally, and a vital expression of his own spiritual exploration. It also set him within a very important philosophical and spirtual context within his own time. But one recent biographer decided he\/she knew better. And that when Carroll said\u00a0\u2018Esoteric Buddhsim\u2019 he really meant \u2018Japanese Buddhism\u2019. And why? Because – apparently –\u00a0the author read up on Theosophy and decided it was not the sort of thing Lewis Carroll would have liked!<\/p>\n So, there y’are Mr D. Now you know what you really<\/em> thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thinking about this lately. Living people are complicated and multi-layered, make jokes, contradict themselves, change as they age, have different viewpoints at twenty from the ones they hold at fifty. \u00a0They are almost impossible to fully understand and would take years of close study to be able to describe with any accuracy or completeness. But\u00a0the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-carroll-myth","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17WIo-2O","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}