Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage: Theatricals in a Quiet Life (review)

As someone who has not only written on Charles Dodgson's lifelong passion for the dramatic and visual arts, but also found Richard Foulkes's 1986 Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage a precious guide in my research of nineteenth-century drama, I have been eagerly awaiting the publication of this comprehensive study of the prominent part played by the Victorian stage in Lewis Carroll's life. I anticipated a revaluation of Dodgson and theatre as groundbreaking as Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling's work on Dodgson and photography in Lewis Carroll Photographer (2002), and my expectations have been more than fulfilled. Foulkes's exceptional scholarship enables him to establish such convincing connections between previously fragmented and superficially acknowledged facts and data that I have learnt even more from this book than I hoped.

As in Morton N. Cohen's biography of Lewis Carroll, Foulkes's account of Dodgson's lifelong fascination with anything theatrical combines chronological and thematic approaches. The first two chapters explore its development through his childhood and university years; the remaining seven delve the grounds on which it blossomed in connection with his other interests, friendships, and contemporary moral, religious, and social standards.

Chapter 1 tackles the apparently intractable paradox in Dodgson's education: that his passion for puppet shows, toy theatres, and home theatricals may have been condoned, or even encouraged, in the household of a strict Evangelical reverend who endorsed Tertullian's faith in the innate evil of any dramatic activity. Though acknowledging the lasting disagreement on that issue between father and son, Foulkes does not go as far as Cohen in his description of the estrangement it entailed between them. The second chapter highlights the ancient Thespian traditions at both Richmond school and Rugby and stresses Henry George Liddell's enthusiastic involvement in the production of the Westminster plays while headmaster there. As Foulkes argues, that shared passion for the stage could explain why Dean Liddell allowed Dodgson to keep his studentship and residence at Christ Church in spite of his inability to receive the full orders. These orders had been denied by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who regarded as an "absolute disqualification" an entertainment Dodgson found perfectly legitimate and would not renounce, though he refrained from attending the Oxford playhouses until the last decade of his life.

A whole chapter is deservedly devoted to the dramatic elements present in the Alice books and their adaptations for the stage. Any Carrollian familiar with Charles C. Lovett's Alice on Stage (1990) could be tempted to skip this section, but Foulkes delves into some new material that makes it well worth reading. This is even more true of Foulkes's in-depth approach to the amateur theatricals Dodgson attended at some of his friends' homes, from charades and tableaux vivants to George MacDonald's reverential adaptation of The Pilgrim's Progress (first performed in 1877).

Chapter 6 looks at Dodgson's friendship with the Terry sisters, which lasted more than thirty years and is one of the many instances disproving the widespread assumption that Carroll lost interest in girls when they reached puberty and attended only plays featuring child-actresses. He indeed was able to discern in the nine-year-old Mamilius the seeds of the future Ellen Terry, but far from rejecting her later as a sexually active young woman living in sin, he was eager to meet her when she was seventeen and maintained a close friendship with her and her sisters until his death. Dodgson's defense of the employment of children in theatres and his personal involvement in promoting the career of many young actresses, from Isa Bowman to his cousin Minna Quin, are brilliantly dealt with in the next chapter, as are the numerous and intricate links between his two major hobbies, theatre-going and photography, in the penultimate.

The final chapter, which amounts to almost a third of the whole text, analyzes Dodgson's regular...