Michael Senior

Famous folklore tends to accumulate artifacts, even when they are false or fake. So, for instance, Nottinghamshire and Sherwood Forest are littered with Robin Hood artifacts and signs reading "Robin Hood Country," even though most of the early Robin Hood (Robyn Hode) tales are set in Barnsdale Forest in Yorkshire. In my home state of Minnesota, there are Paul Bunyan artifacts -- even though Paul Bunyan is mostly the fictional work of a writer named James Stevens (1892-1971, which shows you how recent all this is).

This book starts with another peculiar bit of artifacteana -- one that is unusually odd because it involves genuinely real people, some of whom were actually alive when the story started! I refer to the town of Llandudno, Wales claiming that it had a part in the creation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Llandudno does have a connection, of sorts, with Charles Dodgson ("Lewis Carroll"), in that the Liddell family, including of course Alice Liddell the heroine and inspirer of Wonderland, built a home there in the 1860s. The Liddells were certainly connected with Llandudno. There is no reason to infer, on the basis of this, that Dodgson was. And certainly not to claim that he wrote part of the book there!

Yet Llandudno, seemingly in an attempt to drum up tourism, has made the claim, and even erected a statue making it. They did this at a time when Alice Liddell Hargreaves was still alive although in her early eighties and not able to get about as she once had. The Llandudno authorities did make an attempt to contact her. Portions of the correspondence survive. Unfortunately, it is so fragmentary that it really doesn't tell us much.

This is where Michael Senior comes in. He starts this short book by describing something of the history of the Llandudno Folktale. He examines the evidence possessed by Llandudno (all of which is extraordinarily dubious, mostly third-hand claims from people long dead), and acknowledges that it proves very little, except that people at Llandudno wanted to claim Dodgson.

He also examines such records as we have of the travels of the Liddell family, as well as Charles Dodgson's diaries. He confesses that there is absolutely no mention of Dodgson going to Llandudno -- but he finds enough gaps in Dodgson's diary that there might have been the possibility of an un-mentioned visit in 1863. Why keep it secret from a private diary? To this there is no good answer. Nonetheless, I would say that the evidence he presents is just barely sufficient to allow for a visit -- if we had some supporting evidence, and no other contrary evidence.

Senior thinks he has found the supporting evidence, in a passing reference in a letter Alice wrote to her son in 1933. He does not give a catalog number for the letter that I can find. He does not include a photograph of it, even though he includes a copy of a postcard Alice sent at about the same time. He does not quote the full letter. Thus we have no obvious way to verify his claim. And the claim it makes is pretty obscure anyway -- it is not a mention of a visit, it is just a statement that a visit did not happen at a particular time (allowing the possibility that a visit happened at another time).

And we do have contrary evidence. Senior discusses Dodgson's interactions with the Liddells at some length -- but only in the period around 1862. He ignores all the evidence from after 1863 -- notably, he ignores the estrangement that happened after the latter year. There is debate about just how extreme the estrangement was. But there was an estrangement; Dodgson spent close to thirty years trying to get Alice to be his friend again (which should disprove the hypothesis that he was only interested in little girls. He didn't know how to meet adult women, but if his child-friends still wanted to be his friend when they grew up, he welcomed it). We don't know what caused the estrangement, but we do know one obvious fact about it: That Lorina Liddell, the mother of Alice, Lorina (Jr.), and Edith Liddell, disliked Dodgson intensely. Whether she feared his attention to her daughters, whether she felt he distracted the children, whether she simply felt him socially inferior, we don't know (I strongly suspect it was the last option) -- but, in any case, she wanted to be sure Dodgson wasn't around the children.

All this Senior ignores. Would Dodgson have dared to visit Llandudno in the face of Mrs. Liddell's opposition? It strikes me as extraordinarily unlikely. To go against that overwhelming weight of history, on the basis of a passing reference by Alice seventy years later in a letter he won't even let us judge for ourselves, strikes me as a stretch of almost Carrollian proportions.

And then there is the clincher: When Llandudno built their monument in 1933, they sent a copy of the program to Alice Hargreaves. This program was among a collection of Liddell artifacts auctioned by Sotheby's in 2001 (the year after Senior wrote). The Sotheby's catalog reports, "the program states 'Lewis Carroll... was a frequent visitor to Llandudno as a guest of Dean Liddell at Gogarth Abbey...' IN THE MARGIN ALICE HARGREAVES HAS INSCRIBED 'QUITE UNTRUE A.P.H.'"

There are also a few errors, mostly minor, but when one is following a chain of events this long and tangled, a minor error could be enough to destroy the whole thing. I didn't note them at first, when it didn't seem likely to matter -- but when it was becoming clear that Senior was not going to follow the preponderance of evidence, I found one last one: he calls Rhoda Liddell the youngest daughter of the Liddell family. But Rhoda was not the youngest; she was the fourth daughter. The fifth and last daughter was named Violet. Violet was dead at the time Senior is discussing, but that's no excuse -- Alice and Rhoda were not the last Liddells, and Rhoda was not even the youngest surviving Liddell, since their younger brothers Francis and Lionel were still alive.

The bottom line: Before I read this book, I would have told you without hesitation that Lewis Carroll never visited Llandudno. After reading it, I would allow the possibility. But I still don't believe it; there is simply too little positive evidence and too many reasons to think it never could have happened.

[Update 6/30/2019: added the paragraph that begins "And then there is the clincher: When Llandudno built...."]… (meer)