The Mystery of Lewis Carroll by Jenny Woolf

Author:Jenny Woolf [Woolf, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312612986
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2010-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

… I suppose you don’t remember when Mr. Dodgson ceased coming to the Deanery? How old you were? I said his manner became too affectionate to you as you grew older and that mother spoke to him about it, and that offended him so he ceased coming to visit us again, as one had to give some reason for all intercourse [i.e. personal communication] ceasing. I don’t think you could have been more than 9 or 10 on account of my age! I must put it a bit differently for Mrs. B.’s book. …”13

So, in these letters, Ina was saying that she had needed to give Mrs Becker some reason why Carroll had stopped visiting the family. Whatever the real reason was, she did not want to say. Instead, she told the biographer that Carroll had become too fond of Alice.

The matter might have remained there. A few scholars have puzzled over the letter, which only came to light in recent years, but have surmised nothing more. None apparently noticed another letter from Ina, written around the same time, now at the University of Colorado. Colorado is not a centre of Carroll studies, but happens to be the institution to which Mrs Becker bequeathed her correspondence.

In this letter of 28 April 1930, Ina told Mrs Becker, ‘my childish recollections of Mr. Dodgson are very small, as we saw little of him after I was about ten or so …’. Yet as her letter to Alice just four days later makes clear, this was completely untrue. Ina was elderly in 1930, but she was not in the slightest bit dotty. Her letter to Alice shows that she was well aware Alice had been pre-pubescent, on account of her own age of 14. Just like the actress Isa Bowman all those years earlier, Alice’s sister had pretended she was about 10 when she was close to Carroll – when she knew she was in fact older, and of an age when she would be considered eligible.

Ina continued to emphasize to Mrs Becker just how very young she really had been. A little further on in the letter, she added that she and her sisters were ‘young children’, underlining the word ‘young’. And on 4 May, she artlessly remarked, with two exclamation marks, that ‘… I don’t know how we first knew Mr. Dodgson! I suppose because he liked little girls!!’ Just to make her point crystal clear, she added that, ‘The whole story of “A in W” has no mystery!’

Then she launched into the familiar tale of the ‘three little sisters’ going out on the boat, and asked Mrs Becker to remove the reference to Carroll having been ‘too affectionate’ towards Alice. Mrs. Becker believed her unquestioningly, and used Ina’s quotations as she had been asked to do.

Ina’s letters raise some interesting questions, however. First, why did she lie at all? Mrs Becker was interviewing her in 1930, not 1860. Elderly as she was, Ina had not retired from the modern world.

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