{"id":431,"date":"2010-10-26T15:26:23","date_gmt":"2010-10-26T15:26:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/contrariwise.wild-reality.net\/blog\/?p=431"},"modified":"2015-07-24T01:06:30","modified_gmt":"2015-07-24T01:06:30","slug":"i-cannot-remember-any-other-motive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/2010\/10\/26\/i-cannot-remember-any-other-motive\/","title":{"rendered":"“I cannot remember any other motive…”: the chronology of creating Wonderland"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"dl-portrait-npg-lewis-carroll\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It’ll\u00a0 be November soon, the month in which Alice’s\u00a0 Adventures Underground<\/em> was begun and (two looong\u00a0 years later) finally delivered to its intended recipient, Alice Liddell.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s\u00a0 one of the most myth-drenched areas of Lewis Carroll’s life.\u00a0 So it does no harm to use the upcoming anniversary to take another look.\u00a0 (By the way, for those who know what I’m talking about, \u00a0 I think of the image on the right as being captioned\u00a0 “trying to engage in rational argument on an e-list.” )<\/p>\n

Anyhoo…The creation of Alice’s Adventures<\/em> has always\u00a0 – until recent times – been presented as something ‘ Lewis Carroll’\u00a0 did entirely and spontaneously\u00a0and willingly for the little girl<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed, Charles Dodgson himself later defined it that way when,\u00a0 in the Theatre<\/em> magazine\u00a0 many years after the event, he claimed he wrote the story\u00a0 “for a child I loved”.\u00a0 Though the fact he added the rather odd qualification\u00a0 “I cannot remember any other motive” \u00a0 might alert us that a little bit of creative ‘amnesia’ is going on.\u00a0 Maybe by then, some twenty years after the event, that was how he actually remembered it.\u00a0 But the truth, while not exactly an entire contradiction, was a lot more ambiguous<\/p>\n

Let’s begin with a univeral constant though.\u00a0 One thing that is definitely true – Lewis Carroll did<\/em> begin writing Underground<\/em> because Alice Liddell asked him to,\u00a0 in fact his diary records her request in July 1862.\u00a0 But this is where the Myth and the Reality tend to part ways. \u00a0 The Mythic version goes on to have\u00a0 him writing down the entire\u00a0 story\u00a0 the very night that Alice asked him to do so,\u00a0 or at least very soon afterwards (chronologies can tend to be vague in these accounts).\u00a0 It has the story finished inside a few weeks\/months, and the book lying on a table at the Deanery where it chances to be seen by a family friend, who urges\u00a0 Mrs Liddell to get a shy and reluctant Carroll to publish the book.\u00a0 Hence, the story goes, an\u00a0 unassuming, unwordly Don stumbles into immortality, and all because he loved a child.<\/p>\n

It’s\u00a0 a lovely tale, to which,\u00a0 as\u00a0 the glorious Fielding (I never tire of quoting it)\u00a0 says,\u00a0 I have only one objection – namely that it is not true<\/em>. Or at least it’s not the whole truth. It’s not even nothing but the truth. This is what really happened.<\/p>\n