"YOUR SEXAGENARIAN LOVER...": The ages of Charles Dodgson's female friends as reflected in The Letters of Lewis Carroll by Karoline Leach The jacket-notes of The Letters of Lewis Carroll (Macmillan, 1979) make it plain that letters from Lewis Carroll to his famed collection of 'child-friends' are expected and intended by the editor to represent a majority of what is on offer to readers: But by far the largest number are those intended to puzzle or delight the many young girls he ardently cultivated and who meant so much to him. These letters to child friends are often gems from Wonderland...No less interesting are the letters to the children's parents arranging to 'borrow' this young friend or that... ('Letters' ed. Cohen, 1979; jacket notes) The first surprising thing about that statement is that is not true. Curiously, despite the jacket-notes' claim, letters from Carroll to children simply do not represent 'by far the largest' number in the collection. The second surprising thing is that, on inspection, it turns out the largest number of letters in the collection are to woman-friends aged 20 or more, and his letters to young female children are outnumbered by those to older girls and women (an age range he is traditionally supposed to have disliked and almost pathologically avoided) by a factor of 3-2 in Volume I and 7-1 in Volume II. (We have to emphasise in view of recent claims by Morton N. Cohen that this is woman- friends, specifically excluding family, business acquaintances and the mothers of child-friends unless the friendship with the mother can be shown to have been the primary source of attachment.) So, in claiming 'by far the largest number' of letters were to children the editors were apparently voicing expectation - the expectation everyone had about Carroll - and not the reality of their own sampling. This may be understandable, but it is still regrettable in an important work of reference. But , more curious perhaps is the matter of "why?"; why do letters to children feature in such surprisingly small numbers in this volume - particularly when the editorial intention was evidently for them to form a significant majority? The matter is made even more curious by the fact that this is not an isolated example. Over a century ago, a very similar thing seems to have happened to Lewis Carroll's very first biographer, his nephew Stuart Collingwood. He intended to devote a large section of his book to Dodgson's correspondence with his already legendary 'child-friends', and being Dodgson's nephew, with unlimited access to family papers, as well as person al acquaintance with many of Dodgson's female friends, he was in the best position possible to acquire as many of these letters as he needed. However, for some reason he doesn't seem to have been able to. In fact he seems to have been unable to find even e nough letters to little ones to fill his required space, and to have had to pad them out with other material, with the result that something over half his published collection of Carroll's letters to supposed 'child-friends' were actually letters to teenagers or grown women aged over 20. In somewhat questionable practise, he got over this awkward anomaly by omitting to mention the ages of the females in question. Again, when Morton Cohen was writing his biography of Carroll (1995) he seems to have encountered a similar situation. In writing a chapter somewhat sensationally called 'The Pursuit of Innocents' that purported to analyse Dodgson's numerous and potentially exploitative relationships with pre-pubescent girls, and the supposed 'differing sexual appetites' that underpinned them, Cohen was apparently unable to find sufficient 'little girl' examples to make his case, and like Collingwood, padded his material by including Dodgson's friendships with post-pubescent girls and grown women in his assemblage of supposed children. Again, like Collingwood, he tended not to include the girls' ages, thus giving the impression to the casual reader that they were all uniformly 'little', but background checks yield the fact that (again) about half the sample of letters were actually to girls aged 14 or more and about a quarter were to women aged over 18. The irony of a chapter entitled 'the Pursuit of Innocents' and devoted to a supposed analysis of Carroll's sexual fixation on pre-pubescent children, in which over 25% of the 'little girls' referred to were adult women, did not seem to impact on Cohen or his publishers. So far as I have been able to determine, a similar story seems to have unfolded each time any author has depended on finding hard data in support of Le wis Carroll's utterly exclusive and bizarre passion for very little girls. It seems that each time a writer goes to the subject of Carroll and his child-friends with the expectation of finding large amounts of material, and each time it seems the material isn't available in the quantities or character that is expected. Instead of a homogeneous sample of 'little girls', the evidence provides something more complex, and possibly more inconvenient. Something which is often subsequently crushed or manipulated into supporting a story it doesn't actually support at all. This is not, of course to suggest that Lewis Carroll had no interest in children, or that there are no letters to children in the published volumes. We are all familiar with the flirtatious letters to little 'favourites' like 10 year old Gertrude Chataway, or 11 year old Agnes Hull, or the younger sisters of his actress-friend Isa Bowman, offering kisses and hugs, like the somewhat infamous 'kissing letter' to Chataway [October 28 1876, Letters vol. 1 p. 260]. Such letters exist plentifully and are meaningful in any assessment of his social interaction. It is simply that they are nothing like as numerous, or as wholly representative of the extent of Carroll's correspondence as has long been assumed. These letters are often-quoted and reproduced, whereas by contrast we are less familiar, indeed almost totally unfamiliar, with the corpus of affectionate, warm and flirtatious letters to teenagers and grown women. Although many of them are there between the leaves of the published ,em> letters in large quantities, actually outnumbering the letters to younger females, they somehow remain invisible, overwritten by the expectation of 'little girls'. But let's, for once, take a look at some of them, shall we? I can't quote all 434 of the letters to older female friends reproduced in the published volumes, but we can offer a few examples to try and redress the balance. It was 16 year old Clara Halyburton Cunynghame who inspired 36 year old Charles Dodgson to this possibly regrettable but unquestionably romantic and sentimental bout of versification: Oh Caledonian Maiden Oh Hallie shy and still When 'ere I hear sweet music On you my thoughts will fill I shall think of those "half-hours" In Ripon spent with you; I shall dream of sweet Beethoven And of Mendelssohn so true .... Think how I loved your music Not for itself alone But for the hands that played it The mind that felt its tone (Letters vol I, p. 110-12, January 1868) The poem quoted above apparently accompanies an 'inscription' in Dodgson's hand that reads: Dedicated with profound respect to Miss Clara Hallyburton(sic) Cunnynghame from her humble Servant The Author, In remembrance of January 1868 (Letters vol I, p. 110n) We are left to wonder what Hallie's parents made of his attentions to their daughter, and indeed what Dodgson himself wanted his behaviour to convey. At 16 Hallie was of an age when suitors would have been expected. Writing poems like this to her would seemingly carry a danger of his intentions being interpreted as romantic. Did he intend them to be taken this way? Or was he simply being rather riskily flirtatious with this young girl? We have no information about this at all at present. More generally, examples like these (and it is not isolated) indicate that the long held belief that Lewis Carroll only began associating with physically mature girls as he entered late middle age, is as misleading as the other diagnoses of his social and emotional life have appeared to be. On the contrary, the Letters seem to show that relatively mature teenage females were forming a significant part of his social interaction before he was 40 years old and still exceedingly marriageable. In later life it was to 24 year old Edith Miller that 62 year old Dodgson wrote on Sept. 3 1894: Though your crimes are such as lambs cannot forgive, nor worms forget, yet as it happens, I'm neither a lamb nor a worm; so perhaps I can manage it. Please remember that, so long as Beatrice is here, it will be strictly proper for either of you to call, even alone. I think your mother will agree in this view. And even after she has left, need you be supposed to know it for a week or so? Your sexagenarian lover CLD. 19 year old Ethel Arnold received the following letter from the still-marriageable 53 year old Dodgson because her elder sister Judy (aged 22) had neglected to kiss him goodbye the previous day: You will be kind enough to tell Judy...that I may forget but cannot forgive her utterly heartless behaviour in my rooms yesterday...I will be even with her some day; some sultry afternoon, when she is here, half fainting with thirst, I will produce a bottle of delicious cool lemonade.