Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood by Diane Waggoner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood by Diane Waggoner Katherine Wakely-Mulroney (bio) Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood. By Diane Waggoner. Princeton University Press, 2020. The impact of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass on modern conceptions of childhood was visual, as well as textual. John Tenniel's iconic illustrations encapsulate the play, discovery, boredom, frustration, and fear that Carroll's works describe. However, Diane Waggoner's study argues that the author's critical role in "expanding the meaning of the child to encompass a protean subversiveness, perversity, energy, and curiosity" was dependent on another, far less familiar cache of images (20). Between 1856 and 1880, the writer known in his private life as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, created hundreds of portraits of children using the new technology of photography. These were designed for private viewership, artfully arranged in the pages of albums rather than displayed on gallery walls. As Waggoner shows, Dodgson's photographs nonetheless reflect his extensive engagement with the Victorian art world, responding to debates concerning realism, Pre-Raphaelite compositional strategies, and the work of other pioneering photographers. Waggoner's volume is a treasure trove of nineteenth-century visual culture, allowing for comparison between Dodgson's beautifully reproduced portraits and their many artistic influences. By arranging her study chronologically, Waggoner invites readers to follow the evolution of Dodgson's aesthetic against the backdrop of Victorian cultural change. More crucially, she provides a powerful sense of how Dodgson's desire to look at and capture images of children, predominantly girls, intensified over the course of his adult life. His controversial interest in producing, commissioning, and collecting sketches and photographs depicting girls in a state of partial dress, or fully nude, became particularly pronounced in his final decades, and is consequently addressed in the last chapter of Waggoner's study. If images of this nature formed the "logical endpoint for [Dodgson's] decades-long undertaking to picture children's bodies," they also provide a logical endpoint for any work that seeks to reckon honestly with the man behind the camera (185). Waggoner begins by exploring the development of Dodgson's photographic style during the 1850s and 1860s, placing his work in dialogue with that of other photographers of [End Page 440] childhood, including Julia Margaret Cameron, and highlighting his role in the elevation of photography from a technical practice to an imaginative art form. Waggoner also uses this introductory chapter to establish the important social function of photography to Dodgson's life. The ritual of taking photographs and guiding adult and child friends through the images arranged in his albums allowed Dodgson to cultivate and commemorate relationships simultaneously. The second chapter is dedicated to Dodgson's portraits of his muse, Alice Liddell, and her sisters, Lorina and Edith. Waggoner avoids spending too much time treading familiar ground here, as Dodgson's complicated relationship with Alice and her family has been the subject of considerable scrutiny and speculation. His pictures of the Liddell girls are instead considered alongside eighteenth-century child portraiture, which provided a blueprint for the author's vision of girlhood as a time of innocence, beauty, and playfulness. Dodgson moved beyond this aesthetic, Waggoner suggests, by establishing a "poetics of imperfection" that celebrated both the unique attributes of individual children and his intimate knowledge of each subject (which is strikingly apparent in his portraits of Alice) (110). Chapter 3 considers Dodgson's understudied photographs of boys. These formed a significantly smaller percentage of his output, yet offer a unique insight into varieties of Victorian masculinity and the author's own childhood. Images of Alfred Lord Tennyson's sons epitomize what Waggoner terms "girlish boyhood," emphasizing the sitters' vulnerability and need. By way of contrast, Dodgson's portraits of pupils at his alma mater Twyford, a preparatory school for boys aged eight to fourteen, emphasize their subjects' transition from boyhood to maturity. These images were taken in 1858, and Waggoner examines them alongside the discourse of masculinity codified by Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days, published the previous year, and in light of Dodgson's own tenure as a pupil at Rugby School (the setting for Hughes's...