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Lewis Carroll Photography on the Move
Lindsay
Smith
London: Reaktion Books, 2015 Hardback. 288 pp. 90 illustrations, 55 in colour. ISBN
978-1780235196. £25.00
Reviewed
by Laurent Bury Université Lumière–Lyon 2
To be precise, this is not a book about Lewis Carroll’s photography, but
rather about Lewis Carroll and photography:
the subject is not only Carroll the photographer, but also the avid collector and
consumer of amateur or professional photographs. Dodgson cherished those
material objects which “reveal a great deal about the aesthetic, technological
and conceptual capabilities of the medium that absorbed him” [15]. As opposed
to the prevalent vision, according to which Carroll lost interest in
photography after 1880, this book shows that he was still very much involved in
the purchasing and supervising of photographic pictures during the last two
decades of his life: even though he did give up photography as an active
personal practice, there were still “various other ways in which he invested
the photographic medium” [189]. Lindsay Smith has long been working about Victorian poetry, art and
photography. She is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, where she
is also the co-director of the Centre for the Visual. Her new book shows her to
be extremely competent about the social context of nineteenth-century Britain,
in fields of expertise as diverse as popular entertainment, seaside bathing or
speech therapy (just one misprint, about the Arabian Nights, whose French translator and adaptor was not named
“Gallard” [156] but Galland). All her arguments are based on close readings of
Carroll’s letters and diaries – those which have survived, at least – and a
detailed knowledge of Dodgson’s public and private life. All of which goes to
say that one should not expect any of the wild vagaries which Lewis Carroll has
sometimes inspired. True, Smith does resort to phrases like “it is difficult
not to” [127] when she thinks the bundle of evidence is strong enough to allow
her to formulate some more daring hypotheses, but after all, her book makes no
claim to being a biography; she tries to make sense of what Carroll produced
and collected, which means that she obviously has to interpret things. And most
of what she says is quite convincing. The introduction explains the choice of the title: “changing hands
through the post, photographs were frequently on the move” [9]. Lindsay Smith
then extends the notion to Dodgson’s travels, abroad or within his native
country; she also justifies Carroll’s interest for the theatre by considering
spectacles as “moving pictures”, echoing his desire to capture movement in
photography. The first chapter focuses on the status of childhood in the Victorian
age, an era which was characterised by the “fantasy of girlhood” studied by
authors like Catherine Robson, but also by a heated debate about the “age of
consent”. Photographs of children mixed past and future, temporal fluctuation
being inscribed in images; photographic permanence made it possible to
eternalise transitory states of being. By taking pictures of children, Carroll
“was not simply interested in reclaiming via the image a fleeting past but also
in anticipating, and thereby inhabiting in advance, an uncertain future” [34]. Train stations provided Dodgson with opportunities to meet new
child-friends, and “the rail journey approached the performative freedom of a
photographic sitting” [48]. Travelling by train was a way to satisfy his
“compulsion” [74] or “impulse” [77] to acquire likenesses of children. Carroll
would take the train to go to London whenever he wanted to attend a play, an
opera, etc. Lindsay Smith focuses on two kinds of show: child acrobats
(including the ambiguous Miss Lulu, who later turned out to be a boy, and
Connie Gilchrist, whose portrait was painted by Whistler) and child actors,
like the “Living Miniatures”. This is the occasion for a reflexion on the
relation between child performers and mechanical toys, lay figures and dolls. Disguise
is another prominent topic: “[Dodgson’s] fondness for attending the same
production several times [...] migrated to his photographic practice in which
he liked to take different children in the same costume” [93]. The use of (pseudo-)ethnic costumes was precisely one of the
consequences of Carroll’s only trip abroad, his journey to Russia in the summer
1867. His camera had been left at home, but he spent most of his time looking
for images to buy, and Smith asserts that his work after 1867 reflects “the
rich visual experience of religious icon and secular photographic ‘type’”
[136]. Some of his portraits of Xie Kitchin, the Hatch sisters or Rose Laurie
do remind the viewer of the cartes de
visite representing “Russian types” one could buy in Moscow or St
Petersburg at the time. The devotion of Russian believers in front of Orthodox
icons may also have reminded Dodgson of his own affective investment in
relation with portraits of children. Hastings was the town where, starting from 1857, just one year after he
bought his own camera, Dogson went regularly to try and cure his language
impediment. Puzzling out the links between photography, which silences the
speaking subject, and the speechlessness experienced by stammerers, Lindsay
Smith suggests an analogy which may seem a bit far-fetched: “The act of
stammering, like that of photographing, is then to anticipate, in the present,
future hesitation as having already occurred” [186]. Another seaside resort,
Eastbourne, was where Carroll spent all his summer holidays between 1877 and
1898. The notion of the beach as “a ‘theatrical’ space of sorts” [190] conveys
a vague hint of Dodgson watching children playing by the sea a bit like
Aschenbach looking at Tadzio and his friends on the Lido beach. In the
Postscript, photography and letter-writing are associated with the Freudian fort/da: “it is not only photographs
that stage loss and return [...] a photograph of a child both rehearses her
absence and restores the child to him” [241]. >> Illustrated version on the Victorian Web: http://www.victorianweb.org/photos/carroll/smith.html
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