evelyn

When a friend asked him about his religious views, Carroll wrote in response that he was a member of the Church of England, but "doubt[ed] if he was fully a 'High Churchman'". He added:

I believe that when you and I come to lie down for the last time, if only we can keep firm hold of the great truths Christ taught us—our own utter worthlessness and His infinite worth; and that He has brought us back to our one Father, and made us His brethren, and so brethren to one another—we shall have all we need to guide us through the shadows. Most assuredly I accept to the full the doctrines you refer to—that Christ died to save us, that we have no other way of salvation open to us but through His death, and that it is by faith in Him, and through no merit of ours, that we are reconciled to God; and most assuredly I can cordially say, "I owe all to Him who loved me, and died on the Cross of Calvary."

— Lewis Carroll (1897)

Carroll also expressed interest in other fields. He was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research.

————————————

From ChinaDaily:

In 1922, the first Chinese version of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published. The critically acclaimed translation by Chinese-American linguist Zhao Yuanren enabled readers to embark upon the fantastical and bizarre journey undertaken by Alice down the rabbit hole in her garden.

And now, Alice and those strange characters she encountered on her adventures have come back to Beijing to celebrate the centennial of the novel's Chinese translation.

Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser, an exhibition staged last year at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, explores the evolution of Carroll's fiction-and its sequence Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There-since it first rolled off the press more than 150 years ago, from manuscripts to a beloved piece of English children's literature and afterward, a global cultural phenomenon.

The exhibition reaches Beijing on the first stop of its world tour, bringing to the U2 by the UCCA museum some 300 objects broken into five sections to explore the origin and development of Alice's adventures, as well as the fanfare this literary icon has created in the different dimensions of pop culture.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202203/11/WS622aa549a310cdd39bc8be5d.html

-------------------

Yet, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), otherwise known as Lewis Carroll, was an enigma. Like JJ Tolkien, CS Lewis and Charles Williams, he was a strongly religious man. But was there a darker side to him? He had a stutter and was of poor health… And Catherine Robson refers to Carroll as "the Victorian era's most famous (or infamous) girl lover”...

Dodgson's existence remained little changed over the last twenty years of his life, despite his growing wealth and fame. He continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881 and remained in residence there until his death. Public appearances included attending the West End musical Alice in Wonderland (the first major live production of his Alice books) at the Prince of Wales Theatre on 30 December 1886. 

The two volumes of his last novel, Sylvie and Bruno, were published in 1889 and 1893, but the intricacy of this work was apparently not appreciated by contemporary readers; it achieved nothing like the success of the Alice books, with disappointing reviews and sales of only 13,000 copies.

The only known occasion on which he travelled abroad was a trip to Russia in 1867 as an ecclesiastic, together with the Reverend Henry Liddon. He recounts the travel in his "Russian Journal", which was first commercially published in 1935. On his way to Russia and back, he also saw different cities in Belgium, Germany, Poland, and France.

Dodgson abruptly ceased photography in 1880, though he had established his own studio on the roof of Tom Quad. He had created around 3,000 images, and was an amateur-master of the medium, though fewer than 1,000 images have survived time and deliberate destruction.

He stopped taking photographs because "keeping his studio working was too time-consuming". He used the wet collodion process while commercial photographers had started using the dry-plate process in the 1870s, taking pictures more quickly. Popular taste changed with the advent of Modernism, affecting the types of photographs that he produced. As if Carroll could not have adapted to new ideas?...

A study by Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over half of his surviving work depicts young girls, though about 60% of his original photographic portfolio is now missing. Dodgson also made many studies of men, women, boys, and landscapes; his subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues, paintings, and trees. His pictures of children were taken with a parent in attendance and many of the pictures were taken in the Liddell garden because natural sunlight was required for good exposures.

Some late twentieth-century biographers have suggested that Dodgson's interest in children had an erotic element, including Morton N. Cohen in his Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1995), Donald Thomas in his Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background (1995), and Michael Bakewell in his Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1996). Cohen, in particular, speculates that Dodgson's "sexual energies sought unconventional outlets", and further writes:

We cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Charles's preference for drawing and photographing children in the nude. He contended the preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his emotional attachment to children as well as his aesthetic appreciation of their forms, his assertion that his interest was strictly artistic is naïve. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself.

Cohen goes on to note that Dodgson "apparently convinced many of his friends that his attachment to the nude female child form was free of any eroticism", but adds that "later generations look beneath the surface" (p. 229). He argues that Dodgson may have wanted to marry the 11-year-old Alice Liddell and that this was the cause of the unexplained "break" with the family in June 1863, an event for which other explanations are offered. Biographers Derek Hudson and Roger Lancelyn Green stop short of identifying Dodgson as a Paedophile (Green also edited Dodgson's diaries and papers), but they concur that he had a passion for small female children and next to no interest in the adult world.

Catherine Robson refers to Carroll as "the Victorian era's most famous (or infamous) girl lover” in her book Men in Wonderland — The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman.

Chapter four. Lewis Carroll and the Little Girl: The Art of Self-Effacement   

What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning? 

                       (Lewis Carroll, “Through the Looking Glass”)   

WHEN I first read Lewis Carroll’s late and unloved work, Sylvie and Bruno, I was searching for material that might help to bring the Oxford don's two main forms of creative expression, fiction and photography, into relation with his favorite subject in each genre, the little girl. Carroll studies have generally employed one particular girl to do this work for them: Alice Liddell, Carroll's most  inspirational muse in both media, is used as a kind of revolving doorway, allowing critics to move  effortlessly from one art form to the other. The  following passage appears, at first sight, to offer an  alternative and less-trodden route to my desired nexus:  

There are some things one says in life — as well as things one does — which come automatically, by reflex action, as  the physiologists say (meaning, no doubt, action without reflection, just as lucus is said to be derived "a non lucendo"). Closing one's eyelids, when something seems to be flying into the eye, is one of those actions, and saying "May I carry the little girl up the stairs?" was another. It wasn't that any thought of offering help occurred to me, and that then I spoke: the first intimation I had, of being likely to make that offer, was the sound of my own voice, and the discovery that the offer had been made.  

The  narrator of Sylvie and Bruno, a weary seventy-year-old man, is here explaining how he finds himself carrying an unknown crippled child out of a railway station. (A couple of pages later it will transpire that this child is not a real child at all, but a phantasm who swiftly transforms herself into the eponymous Sylvie, a metamorphosis that comes as no surprise in a work that habitually switches between realism and fantasy.) Here, in the middle of a story that presents the pairing of the old man and the little girl as the most natural thing in the world, the narrator provides an instance of the immediate and irresistible attraction ... 

------------------

Let me embed another story… Hush.

Tomfoolery, secret pacts — nothing is whatever it seems… Zelensky and Putin made a pact: get rid of the Nazis in Ukraine. But they could not appear to go hand in hand. They had to create a situation which appears to be something else. All the coded messages were in the speeches of Putin and Zelensky. The decision had been made a long time ago, possibly when Zelensky was elected, but the clean up of the Nazis in Ukraine needed to appear as a last minute job… We all got fooled, because guess what? The Nazis are being eliminated and are all seeking refuge in European countries, if they have not been killed beforehand. 

https://join.theintercept.com/go/45699?t=6&utm_

source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_

medium=email&akid=5861%2E715206%2Edx0AQP

U.S. Intelligence Says Putin Made a Last-Minute Decision to Invade Ukraine

James Risen

The U.S. likely relied in part on intercepted communications among senior Russian government and military officials.

Yes dear… Three bags full, dear. 

The only way that the West can change the situation is by going nuclear. And Putin knows this. The US/NATO trap is not working, as the bear and Zelensky placed a tree trunk in it…

Great fiction, Hey? Meanwhile people are being killed because of NATO and the US pursuit of unilateralism on their way to conquer the Heartland. Napoleon, Hitler, now The US Empire… You should know the rest... see:

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW…

Picture at top by Lewis Carroll: Evelyn Hatch, as photographed by Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) on July 29, 1879. Colored by Anne Lydia Bond on Dodgson's instructions......