The Photographic Eye and

the Vision of Childhood in

Lewis Carroll
by Rosella Mallardi

Wait a moment. . . . I am going to interrogate

myself.1
Heraclitus

ewis Carrolls fame is undoubtedly tied to the centrality of child-

hood in his works, both in relation to the content of his works and
to the modalities of invention and writing: it is this latter aspect
that my article intends to investigate. Most illuminating are the special
occasions in which he cultivated his friendship with his young friends,
and among these his photographic practice is particularly important.
As a matter of fact, his glass-house becomes a sort of stage where
the photographic sitting alternates with his narration of stories invented
or reelaborated in that moment for and with his child friends/models.2
This analysis is meant to explore the ways in which the close occur-
rence between the proceedings of photographic author and portrai-
turepositive and negativegave birth to forms of literary contami-
nation by photography, forms really unprecedented and subversive,
which contributed to significantly accelerating the renewal of current
literary canons and to foreshadowing Modernism and the Avant-garde.
In this perspective, Carrolls letters and diaries offer precious testi-
mony of his interest in photography and of the relation of the infant art
not only with the other visual arts but also, and here more relevantly,

1Heraclitus, in Storia della filosofia greca: i presocratici, ed. Luciano De Crescenzo, vol. 1
(Milan: A. Mondadori, 1983), 82.
2The Glass-House, in George Dawson, A Manual of Photography: Founded on Hard-
wichs Photographic Chemistry (London, 1873), 7477.

548

2010 The University of North Carolina Press

 Rosella Mallardi 549
with the literary world. Since 1855, the year when he started his photo-
graphic practice, Carroll reproduced in poems and short stories the
charming, mysterious atmosphere and typical proceedings of the new
art. Some years later, his close relationship with his child friends/models
on the occasion of more and more refined photographic sittingsas
an amateur-photographer whose special line is children3played a
prominent role in the definition both of his childhood ideology and his
new aesthetics.
In the two decades (186080) that represented the golden period of
photography, Carroll searched and created with children the space for a
more concrete and direct interrelationship: the extended period of time
needed by the new art process and its novel communicative capacity
fueled, more than any other art did, his disposition to experiment with
new forms of invention. In fact, it is in the glass-house that childhood
inspires his most beautiful pictures and his most original writing.
In the 1860s and 70s Carroll captured the attention of the literary
world with the extraordinary writing of the Alice books. In Alices Ad-
ventures in Wonderland (1865), among other conspicuously disruptive
factors, the presence of the body itself and the peculiarly volatile appa-
ritions of Wonderland creatures, as framed by an exclusively subjective
vision, are particularly marked. These are factors that undoubtedly re-
call the photographic eye: in the new art, the sitters body, as shot by
the eye/I of the artist, is the precondition for image reproduction. In
the 1850s, daguerreotypes and photographs were still largely viewed as
apparitions rather than as images, which, spectral as they might be, re-
ferred back to a body, absent but real and historically recorded.4 For this
reason, the daguerreotype was called the mirror with memory.5 Also,
early photographs, because of the apparatus limits and the long expo-
sure time, uncovered the inner disposition of the sitters real body to
metamorphosis, deconstruction, and deformity, a condition that high-
lighted the bodys immersion in time to such a degree that was unique

3 Lewis Carrolls Letter to P. A. W. Henderson, June 18, 1877, in The Letters of Lewis Car-
roll, ed. Morton Cohen, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1979), 1:277.
4It was the daguerreotype that most inspired the idea of spectrality, since it mirrors
an image that appears or disappears according to the viewers position before the silver
plate; besides, to the early spectators of the newly-born art it also suggested the presence
of death, given the fixed expression of the face, due to the long exposure time. As a mat-
ter of fact, the photographic reproduction of people on their deathbeds was then one of
the most popular genres.
5See H. W. Holmes, The Stereoscope and the Stereograph, in Classic Essays on Photog-
raphy, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leetes Island Books, 1980), 74.
550 Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Carroll
among previous art forms. In this context, Carrolls relationship with
his child friends/models, which for the first time was being cultivated in
the gloomy and mysterious atmosphere of a photographic atelier, now
acquired an unprecedented significance in that it nurtured a childhood
vision that distanced itself from the idealized, metaphysical, ethical,
and didactic approach of Romanticism and at the same time decidedly
rejected the image of the little adult popularized by Victorian iconog-
raphy.
From the late 1850s to 1885, Carrolls amateur photography got so re-
fined as to gain him prestige and, more importantly for child portrai-
ture, the complete trust of the childrens parents. In 1878, he claimed
that child photography had been his greatest amusement for more than
twenty years: Photography from lifeand especially photographing
childrenhas been [my] one amusement for the last twenty years.6
Usually, it was a conversation that gave him the opportunity to make
friends with children; then, with the permission of their parents, a sit-
ting followed. What struck him most was their natural kindness, a
spontaneous politeness, free from affected manners. This feeling is
pointed out and annotated by Carroll in his description of Sir Nol
Patons children:
[Patons] children are most complete children of nature. They are unique in
my experiencesomething like South Sea Islanders with the instinct of gentle-
men and ladies: no manners, but simple, natural politeness. I cant quite de-
scribe it, but it charmed me very much, as being thoroughly real. 7
Or in a letter to Mary Manners:
Next to what conversing with an angel might befor it is hard to imagine it,
comes, I think, the privilege of having a real childs thought uttered to one. I
have known some few real children (you have, too, I am sure), and their friend-
ship is a blessing and a help in life.8
And it is most of all this infantile character that connotes gentle Alice.
The new photographic experience, as shared with children, focuses
on the particular idea of naturalness and on that of the exploration of
parallel realities. In fact, according to notes and commentaries recorded
in Carrolls letters and diaries, and to those of his ex-friends/models, re-
ported when adults, the photographic room provided a setting always

6To Arthur Ackermann, in Letters, ed. Cohen, 1:321.

7To His Sister Mary, in Letters, ed. Cohen, 1:16566.
8To Mary Manners (December 5, 1885), in Letters, ed. Cohen, 1:607 (italics in origi-
nal).
 Rosella Mallardi 551
enriched with verbal invention: he charmed his models with extempore
stories and fairytales that stirred his young friends curiosity, imagi-
nation, and cooperation. These were the necessary preliminaries for a
natural and spontaneous photographic sitting. Thanks to his irresistible
witticisms, to his nonsensical and paradoxical humor, the pressure and
boredom of habits and conventional rules and regulations were miracu-
lously swept away. In this regard, Ethel Arnolds, Alice Liddells, and
Dymphna Elliss memories are illuminating:
I never catch a whiff of collodion nowadays, without being transported on the
magic wings of memory to Lewis Carrolls dark room, where, shrunk to child-
hoods proportions, I see myself watching, openmouthed, the mysterious pro-
cess. . . . And then the storiesthe never-ending, never-failing stories he told
in answer to our never-ending, never-failing demands! He was indeed a bringer
of delight. . . . What an El Dorado of delights those rooms [Dodgsons] were to
his innumerable child friends! The large sitting room was lined with well-filled
bookshelves, under which ran a row of cupboards all round the four walls. Oh!
Those cupboards! What treasures they contained for the delectation of youth!
Mechanical bears, dancing dolls, toys and puzzles of any description, came
from them in endless profusion. Even after I was grown up I never paid a visit
to his rooms without experiencing over again a thrill of delicious anticipation
when a cupboard door swings open.9
When we were thoroughly happy and amused at his stories, he used to pose us,
and expose the plates before the right mood had passed. He seemed to have an
endless store of these fantastical tales, which he made up as he told them, draw-
ing busily on a large sheet of paper all the time. They were not entirely new.
Sometimes they were new versions of old stories: sometimes they started on an
old basis, but grew into tales owing to the frequent interruptions which opened
up fresh and undreamed-of possibilities.10
Much more exciting than being photographed was being allowed into the dark
room, and watch him develop the large glass plates. What could be more thrill-
ing than to see the negative gradually take shape, as he gently rocked it to and
fro in the acid bath? Besides, the dark room was so mysterious, and we felt that
any adventures might happen then! There were all the joys of the preparation,
anticipation, and realization, besides the feeling that we were assisting at some
secret rite usually reserved for grown-ups! Then there was the additional ex-
citement, after the plates were developed, of seeing what we looked like in a
photograph.11

9See Ethel Arnold, in Letters, ed. Cohen, 1:209.

10Alice Liddell, in Morton Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995),
86.
11Ethel Arnold, in Cohen, Lewis Carroll, 16465.
552 Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Carroll
Carroll came to our country house to photograph the children. . . . I feel sure I
was a favourite. He made every child that. He developed the photographs in
our cellar. . . . I remember the mess and the mystery. . . . We cried when he went
away. . . . We were absolutely fearless with him. We felt he was one of us, and on
our side against all the grown-ups.12
The reconstruction of the atmosphere of an ordinary photographic
sitting highlights this particular intersemiotic crossover: in Carrolls
glass-house, photography needed, beside the will and trust of children
and family, the full freedom to express emotions and feelings. In the
60s, photography was very intricate, for the wet collodion process was
fraught with difficulties, developing sometimes failed, bad weather
could spoil glass plates, and long exposure times, which varied accord-
ing to the subject (one minute and a half on average), made a successful
photograph a really rare event. So, it was not unusual that a good final
result was preceded by many failed proofs. The young models not only
witnessed all the stages of the progress but cheerfully joined the artist
himself in prefiguring, reading, interpreting, and commenting on the
tracings delivered by the machine.
In order to set up the adequate scenery for the most popular genre
picturesthe composition picture, the ghost picture, the narra-
tive pictureCarroll equipped the glass-house with a variety of fan-
ciful costumes and with an ingenious bag of tricks and tools, above
all fashionable optical instruments: stereoscope, kaleidoscope, micro-
scope, magic lantern, telescope. But really unforgettable to his ex-child
friends/models was the atmosphere that surrounded the conversations
and the telling of stories invented anew, or varied on the spot thanks to
the audiences suggestions.
Carroll used to illustrate the stories with instant drawings, more suit-
able to illiterate children but in any case useful to stir the imagination
of them all. This scene was then followed by more exciting ones, which
foresaw the final pictures, when they all in turn looked into the image
on the cameras rear glass, ready to photograph: what kind of reality
was that which showed the little girls bodies turned upside down and
laterally inverted? And how would development transform them?
After exposure, as the tracings began to emerge out of the plate dur-
ing development, the artist and his friends engaged in the most fantas-
tic interpretation of signs. Development was the real space where the
black art stimulated the childrens curiosity and heightened their im-
patience to grasp the final result in their hands.

12Dymphna Ellis, 25 July 1865, in http://www.hrc.utexas.edu./exhibitions/online/carroll.

 Rosella Mallardi 553
What was or was to be the correspondence between the foreseen or
desired image and the realization before their eyes? With what won-
der did they scrutinize those little ghoststo them no less real than
themselvessingling out the likeness to or divergence from the origi-
nal model? And, surely, much more intriguing were the failed nega-
tives, predisposed toward grotesquerie and tinged with folly.
The experiences of preparation, anticipation, and realization pro-
vided each an opportunity to frame and seal the profound sympathy
between the artist/narrator and the friends/models, an opportunity
that distanced them from the adults tedious world: the pictures now
opened the eyes, the mind, and the heart of the writer/photographer
to other worlds. The little girls intellectual and emotional sensitivity
gave new strength to his nonsensical genius, liberating imagination
from the straits of intellectualism and morality and breaking the aes-
thetic canon that regulated Victorian childrens literature. In this way,
photography and verbal invention went apace, creating an intersemiotic
space that was different, ludic, and liberating. The new medium, thanks
paradoxically to its limits, afforded an unexpected source for modern
nonsensical-grotesque literary metamorphoses.
As there is no doubt that painting, drawing, and literature influenced
Carrolls photographic practice,13 so it is undeniable that his literary

13Carrolls passion for photography interweaves with those he held for painting
and drawing, especially with the anti-academic techniques and philosophy of the Pre-
Raphaelites. Particularly beautiful are Carrolls photographs of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
Sir Frederick Leighton, James Sant and Mrs. Sant, Arthur Hughes, Sir Nol Paton, William
Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and John Ruskin. As for his talent and taste for the
grotesque, it was undoubtedly nurtured by his friendship with very famous cartoonists,
such as John Tenniel, Arthur Burdoll Frost, Henry Holiday, and Harry Furniss, who illus-
trated most of his books. No less important are his relationships with other great Victo-
rian photographers, such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Oscar Gustav Rejlander, and Henry
Peter Robinson.
From all these various circles, Carroll the photographer drew on suggestions and tech-
niques that he experimented with in a wide range of genres, including child nude study.
In 1878 Carroll wrote to A. B. Frost: I had rather not have an adult figure (which always
looks to me rather in need of drapery): a girl of about 12 is my ideal of beauty (see Morton
Cohens note to To A. B. Frost, in Letters, ed. Cohen, 1:308). He knew that nudes might
be acceptable to or tolerated by predominant Victorian prudishness only in a painters
atelier but not in a photographers studio, because whether or not photography might be
conceived as an art form was still a hotly debated issue by contemporary art and literary
critics. Carroll was fully aware that he was cultivating out-of-the-way (1:339) or rather
outr or unconventional notions of art (1:262), challenging the Victorian cult of decency
and respectability. He knew that his preference for pre-adolescent female models might
become a target for that humiliating, myopic and wicked bigotry to which he gave the
fictional name of Mrs. Grundy, but as he absolutely never ignored even slight objections
or reservations, whether from the children themselves or from their parents, so he firmly
rejected any bigoted attitude, as he states plainly in a letter to Mrs. Mayhew: I fear you
554 Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Carroll
works integrate most of all the photographic eye, adopting its fiction-
alization of the real through strategies such as perspective variation,
distance, body deconstruction, and metamorphosis under the invisible
hand of time, up to the reduction of the thing to sign. All these struc-
tural features are pervaded by a more profound alchemy: the nostal-
gic distance that accompanies the vision of a photograph, the same
that binds the writer to childhood in the photographic laboratory, and
which, thanks to the actual presence of children, is transformed into
a brilliant linguistic exploration and explosion unveiling/developing
other, infinite worlds.

T H E M E W I T H VA R I AT IO N

According to Alice Liddell, Ethel Arnold, and Dymphna Elliss memo-

ries, the interlocution with the child friends/models, preparatory to
photographing, was accompanied by storytelling, which was not a
mere repetition of known stories but rather a variation on a particu-
lar theme, improvised and open to the audiences remarks, demands,
and aspirations. This specific narrative method, which became highly
refined in Carrolls major works, is, at its earliest, found in a poem en-
titled Theme with Variation, composed in 1855, the year in which he
started photographing. This same technique is presented in his first
short story Photography Extraordinary, inspired by the new inven-
tion and composed in the same year as the poem, and it is also adopted
in the other photographic stories that precede the Alice books.
Theme with Variation, four quatrains in alternate rhyme, is a par-

will reply that the one insuperable objection is Mrs Grundythat people will be sure to
hear that such pictures have been done, and that they will talk. As to their hearing of it, I
say of course. All the world are welcome to hear of it, and I would not on any account sug-
gest to the children not to mention itwhich at once would introduce an objectionable
elementbut as to people talking about it, I will only quote the old monkish (?) legend:
They say
Quhat do they say?
Lat them say!
(To Mrs A.L. Mayhew, in Letters, ed. Cohen, 1:338; Carrolls italics)
Though his eccentric habits gave rise to rumors about his supposed folly, Carroll did
not draw back against Mrs. Grundy (see Letters, ed. Cohen, 1:338, 536, 575, 576, 600, and
601). Only in 1880 did he give up photography, destroying all the negatives in his posses-
sion if requested and in any case preventing their ending up in some bigots hands. There
are other reasons for his abandoning photography: in an unpublished letter to Mrs. Hunt
in 1881, Carroll states that he decided not to photograph anymore because the proposed
subjects required instantaneous photography, a technique that he did not like (Letters, ed.
Cohen, 1:60).
 Rosella Mallardi 555
ody of a famous passage The Fire Worshippers, lines 3235from
the romance Lalla Rookh (1817) by Thomas Moore. Each of the lines
quoted from Moores poem becomes the first line or theme of each of
the four quatrains in Carrolls poem, a theme that in the three following
lines expands into nonsensical digressions with a figurative and chro-
matic effect and that a latere is also provided by musical notes. This fine
hybrid style, characterized by intertextual, intersemiotic, intrasemiotic,
metalinguistic, and paratextual strategies, also informs Photography
Extraordinary, whose main aesthetic and linguistic novelty consists in
the transmutation of peculiarly photographic procedures into a liter-
ary domain. The story describes the operations of a technologically ad-
vanced camera, capable of recording interior reflections and emana-
tions by a mesmeric rapport and directly from the source, that is the
models mind. The exposed paper is then immersed into chemical baths
that change and vary its tones, from pale to very bright, corresponding
to current literary schools such as the sentimental, realistic, and
dramatic-spasmodic. The importance of this technique in a story in-
spired by photography lies in the fact that instead of a chronological
development of events, the text reformulates the photographic develop-
ment in literary terms, in that the photographer brings forth the latent
tracings of the subjects intimate consciousness in order to plunge them
into a varied literary bath. This extraordinary mixture between photo-
graphic and literary methods performs a fantastic, unprecedented spec-
tacle, all pervaded with ironical-farcical-nonsensical mockery.
This same exhilarating aesthetic experiment returns during his meet-
ings with children in his glass-house. The stories that Carroll narrates
are often improvisations and variations on a known theme, all accompa-
nied by drawings of the episodes and integrated by notes and details as
requested by his young audience. Such comments and curiosities blend
with the magical and mysterious atmosphere of the dark room and its
specters, creating a divertissement that transforms the photographic trac-
ings into a new resource for nonsense and romance.
A poem dedicated to Edith Argles, A Double Acrostic, composed
in September 1869, reports the phantasmagoric atmosphere and par-
ticular process of the camera obscura.14 Fear, mystery, curiosity, magic,
and great amusement surround the failed negatives: it is the grotesque

14Other poems that refer to his photographic experiences are the following: Four
Riddles (not dated); A Double Acrostic (dedicated to Mabel and Emily Kerr [1871] in
To Mabel and Emily Kerr, in Letters, ed. Cohen, 1:164); and Riddle for Xie Kitchin (in
Morton Cohens note to To Alexandra Kitchin, in Letters, ed. Cohen, 1:384).
556 Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Carroll
charm of the deformed bodies that most stirs the imagination of both
the photographer and the spectators:
So home again from sea and beach,
One nameless feeling thrilling each,
A sense of beauty passing speech.
Let lens and tripod be unslung!
Dolly!s the word on every tongue:
Dolly must sit, for she is young!
Photography shall change her face,
Distort it with uncouth grimace-
Make her blood-thirsty, fierce and base.15
The variation on a theme starts from that carnivalesque subversion that
pervades the monstrous and surreal portraits delivered by the ma-
chine: it is this particular development of the potentialities of the new
aesthetic of the ugly that also inspires the short story, A Photographers
Day Out (1860):
Picture 317th sitting. Placed the baby in profile. After waiting till the usual
kicking had subsided, uncovered the lens. The little wretch instantly threw its
back, luckily only an inch, as it was stopped by the nurses nose, establishing the
infants claim to first blood (to use the sporting phrase). This, of course, gave
two eyes to the result, something that might be called a nose, and an unnaturally
wide mouth. Called it full face accordingly and went on.16
How striking the likeness of the image of the baby in a fit is to the
family portrait of Pig and Pepper in Alice in Wonderland, and that of
the babys monstrous profile to Humpty Dumpty in Through the Look-
ing Glass:
Thats just what I complain of, said Humpty Dumpty. Your face is the same
as everybody hasthe two eyes, so (marking their places in the air with his
thumb) nose in the middle, mouth under. Its always the same. Now if you had
the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instanceor the mouth at the
topthat would be some help. 17
The rhetorical strategies suitable to the particular photographic eye, as
can be found in Photography Extraordinary or in the failed proofs

15Carroll, Double Acrostic, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, ed. Alexander
Woolcott (New York: Random House, 1939), 829.
16See my edition, Letteratura e fotografia. Quattro racconti e una poesia di Lewis Carroll,
(Pescara: Tracce, 2002), 97.
17Carroll, Alices Adventures in Wonderland; and Through the Looking Glass and What
Alice Found There, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 196.
 Rosella Mallardi 557
of a typical Victorian bourgeois family, in A Photographers Day Out
and Hiawathas Photographing (1857), are then readopted and ex-
panded in the Alice books (1865 and 1872), up to Sylvie and Bruno (1889,
1893). The extempore variation is refined to the point of abandoning any
design or story plot, as Carroll himself states in the Preface to Sylvie
and Bruno: actually, the nucleus of his composing process springs out of
chance, out of the casual deconstruction of language and of any kind of
conventional representation:
As the years went on, I jotted down, at odd moments, all sorts of odd ideas, and
fragments of dialogue, that occurred to mewho knows how?with a transi-
tory suddenness that left me no choice but either to record them then and there,
or to abandon them to oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to their source these
random flashes of thoughtas being suggested by the book one was reading,
or struck out from the flint of ones own mind by the steel of a friends
chance remark but they had also a way of their own, of occurring, a propos of
nothingspecimens of that hopelessly illogical phenomenon, an effect with-
out a cause. 18
The interlocution with and intent listening to the wishes, interests, and
chance remarks taken from the childrens very mouths are for Carroll
an inestimable treasure that allows him the contact with the deepest
and most obscure dimensions of consciousness, a situational context
clearly highlighted in both the prefatory poems to the Alice books:
Imperious Prima flashes forth
Her edict to begin it:
In gentler tones Secunda hopes
There will be nonsense in it!
While Tertia interrupt the tale
Not more than once a minute.19
This transitory suddenness is remarked by Carrolls friend Robinson
Duckworth when he defines Alice as an extempore romance,20 and it
remains the cipher of Carrolls writing up to Sylvie and Bruno,21 where
consciousness appears as a field indefinitely open to different, incon-
gruous factors, so that the barrier between fiction and reality is abol-
ished to allow the automatic passage from waking to dreaming, from
visible to invisible, from self to other, and vice versa.

18Carroll, Preface to Sylvie and Bruno, in Complete Works, ed. Woolcott, 255.
19Carroll, Alices Adventures in Wonderland, ed. Green, 3.
20Cohen, Lewis Carroll, 91.
21Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, in Complete Works, ed. Woolcott, 46667.
558 Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Carroll
In the photographic stories composed between the late fifties and the
early sixties, Carroll observes with great amusement the irreverent and
comical-grotesque ghosts that emerge out of the camera obscura and as-
sociates them with the sudden, unpredictable voices of the unconscious
and subconscious dimensions of the I. As a matter of fact, his photo-
graphic experience spurs him to experiment with new forms of inven-
tion, abandoning the idea of development as logical progression and
replacing it with the revelation of hidden potential, that is of those fac-
tors and phenomena that elude the control of the I/eye. Corresponding
to the homophony between the eye and the I, Carroll conceives the first
as a frontier of the visible/invisible and the second as a moment be-
tween waking and dreaming: a correlation that gives birth to infinite
and fantastic scenarios. It was precisely the closer and closer relation-
ship that Carroll formed with his young friends/models that retargeted
the photographic potential of his previous stories to children, paving
the way for that revolution in literary forms and in childhood vision
that constitutes Carrolls fame.

D I S TA N C E

Distance techniques in photography, not only physical but also psycho-

logical distance, are fundamental, in that the photographer can either
adopt an empathic attitude or oppose irony to the emotional and intel-
lectual world of the subject model. This physical and intellectual dis-
tance, as it is evident in Carrolls photos, appears indisputably in his
writing. In the major works, and before them in the photographic
stories, the narration, more or less inspired by the photographic ethos,
always includes distance strategies. In Alice, for example, the narra-
tors point of view is split between the superior and the underground
worlds: on the one hand there is the adults separateness from Wonder-
land, a guarantor of a stable relation with the real world, and on the
other there is his proximity to the underground, as the narrator is also
mediator of the heroines instant perception there. As far as the heroine
is concerned, the sudden, surprising apparitions and the often frustrat-
ing situations are no impediment at all to her curiosity about the under-
ground monsters, as if those sub-natural and latent creatures were in
a way her family members, and in any case they always seem to her no
less real than the world she has left. This was what happened to Car-
rolls child friends/models during the apparition of the photographic
uncouth grimaces.
 Rosella Mallardi 559
But, paradoxically, neither the narrators rational control nor the
direct perception of events manages to convey chronological conti-
nuity and coherence to the adventures. Indeed, in Alices world truth
is reduced to a visual illusion: things appear real and lively as long as
they are enclosed within the heroines limited visual-aural field. Con-
sequently, her experiences are restricted within pictures, autonomous
and separated from any logical links or any linear sequence along the
time-space axis, a sort of photographic tableau, dramatized and sur-
rounded by a frame. In Wonderland, nobody and nothing can afford or
provide any kind of coherence or logical development, because those
adventures are under the force of change, metamorphosed, deformed,
and serialized indefinitely.
Just as the photographic eye is eclectic, democratic, heterogeneous,
immediate, and direct, in the same way Alices eye is impressed by un-
predictable and strange objects and people, and, consequently, lan-
guage itself breaks into inter- and intra-semiotic hybridity. This is what
Carroll calls litterature (sic) in his text.22 The difficulty in defining
Alices genre, whether it is a fairytale, a romance, a short story, a fantas-
tic story, or other, is essentially due to the peculiar mixture and hetero-
geneity of genres, modes, codes, narrative situations, and characters:
narrative, poetry, drama, nonsense, the grotesque, magic, fairytale, and
satire cross and mix to various degrees mutually, with singing, danc-
ing, drawing, and photography underlining the unpredictable nature
of events and characters.
On an inter- and intra-semiotic level, this particular mixture extends
to metafiction, whereas the multiplication of narrative layers with a
mise en abyme effect foregrounds the importance of reflexive distance.
It is a plastic craft, informed by the reflexive and self-reflexive strate-
gies of characterization. One of the most significant examples of Car-
rolls metafictional, metanarrative, and metalinguistic style is the epi-
sode that describes Alices awareness of being at the center of a fairytale
and soon after of being ready to write the story that she is experiencing,
since she has already passed the age for fairytales. And all this happens
while the reader is holding in his hands the same book about those ad-
ventures, as if they were reported as a document on the spur of the mo-
ment, as if all these time-space jumps were compressed and at the same
time unfold under the eyes of the reader, as if the book were a miniature

22Preface to Sylvie and Bruno, in Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, ed. Woolcott, 256.
560 Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Carroll
stage or a photographic reportage of those past events. The reality effect
was craftily supported by deictics:
It was much pleasanter at home thought poor Alice, when one wasnt always
growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits
I almost wish I hadnt gone down that rabbit-holeand yetand yet its rather
curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me!
When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied this kind of thing never happened, and
now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me,
that there ought! And when I grow up, Ill write onebut I am grown up now,
she added in a sorrowful tone: at least theres no room to grow up any more
here. 23
The distance technique with an effect of mise en abyme between micro-
and macro-story is recurrent in Alice in Wonderlandas in the case of the
micro-stories told by Mouse, Dormouse, Mock Turtle, Knave of Hearts,
and Alice, and the macro-story of the heroines underground adven-
turesand is readopted with variations in The Hunting of the Snark, in
that the micro-stories told by the ships crew are all centered on differ-
ent focalizations of the mysterious Snark.

N O S TA L G IC D I S TA N C E

Distance is connoted nostalgically when it expresses the emotional

relationship between the adult narrator and his audience. The prefa-
tory poems, which recall idyllically the encounter with Carrolls young
friends and the subsequent narration that filled the generational and
cultural gap, thanks to the adults keen attention to the childrens com-
ments, expectations, and observations, are really illuminating: it is a
unique, creative state that opens the doors to the magic transformations
of language, to fantastic, subversive, even disquieting scenarios that are
wonderful and intriguing both for children and adults. It is the wonder-
land that the writer depicts in writing and the photographer in pictures.
In fact, which of the arts more than photography is pervaded by and
at the same time rouses that particular feeling of nostalgia, since the
miraculous presentation of a moment of the past always conveys a feel-
ing of loss, a melancholic sense of the ineluctable passing of time?
This special relation is perfectly represented in the frontispiece image
in Alices Adventures through the Looking Glass, drawn by John Tenniel:
the elegiac nostalgia of infancy has all the charm emanating from the

23Carroll, Alices Adventures in Wonderland, 33 (words originally underlined by the au-

thor replaced by my italics).
 Rosella Mallardi 561
posture of an old shaky and outlandish knight, whose melancholic and
dreamy eyes are gazing at an object beyond the frame.
The picture of Knight draws the curious and amused eyes of the
heroine, whose posture links, thanks to a subtle perspective strategy,
the external spectators eyes to those of the inexhaustible inventor, all
together looking at the invisible object beyond. Retrospectively, the
image suggests the idea of the strange dimension of childhood that
illumines the adults invention and writing, which are mediated to the
reader/spectator by the little heroine.
In his most destabilizing work, The Hunting of the Snark, notwith-
standing the absence of children as main characters, Carroll also dedi-
cates the prefatory poem to Gertrude Chataway. The poem was origi-
nally copied on the back of a drawing Carroll made of the little girl, who
was on that occasion wearing boyish clothes on the beach. At Sundown,
in September 1875, Carroll had made friends with the Chataways and
was particularly struck by the quick spirited and photogenic Gertrude,
then eight years old. In fact, Gertrude was photographed the follow-
ing year in the same clothes but in a pensive, crouching posture.24 In
Gertrudes memories, in that faraway September, she was also his muse
who, with silvery voice and cheerful, fighting spirit, inspired his amus-
ing stories and also that nonsensical hunting of monsters, on which Car-
roll was then working:
He was writing The Hunting of the Snark . . . and was also thinking about Sylvie
and Bruno . . . and Rhyme and Reason? He told me while we sat on the steps or
walked up and down on the shore many stories in these, as well as others as he
thought of at the time. I would dash off into the sea for a little paddle, but even
paddling was also forgotten in the delight of the wonderful stories. I took them
as a child does as if it were true and asked soon or later for some particulars.
That was enough as I now see to start a new train of thought; at once he caught
my idea, and off he would go into a fresh series of adventures.25
In the first lines of the prefatory poem, the dreaming gaze of the adult
recalls and represents the scene on the beach with Gertrude in boy-
ish clothes boldly wielding a spade.26 But the colon of the caesura soon
introduces the intense emotional and psychological counterpoint

24Morton Cohen, Reflections in a Looking Glass (London: Aperture, 1999), 86.

25Letters, ed. Cohen, 1:232.
26The image of the fighting girl in the prefatory poem recalls two other photographs
taken by Carroll in 1875, one portraying Xie Kitchin with her three little brothers in the
tableau Saint George and the Dragon with Brook Kitchin as Saint George wielding a
spade, the other with only Brook as Saint George (Cohen, Reflections in a Looking Glass,
6869).
562 Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Carroll
which Gertrudes posture in the photograph conveys perfectly
between the fabulators voice and that of the curious and actively par-
ticipating child. In that peculiar proximity between visual and verbal
representations, Carroll elaborates aesthetically his nostalgic distance
from childhood:
Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task,
Eager she wields her spade: yet loves as well
Rest on a friendly knee, intent to ask
The tale he loves to tell.
Rude spirits of the seething outer strife,
Unmeet to read her pure and simple spright,
Deem, if you list, such hours a waste of life,
Empty of all delight!
Chat on, sweet maid, and rescue from annoy
Hearts that by wiser talk are unbeguiled
Ah, happy he who owns that tenderest joy,
The heart-love of a child!
Away, fond thoughts, and vex my soul no more!
Work claims my wakeful nights, my busy days
Albeit bright memories of that sunlit shore
Yet haunt my dreaming gaze! 27

R E P RO D U C T IO N A N D M E TA M O R P H O S I S

Wonderlands fleetingness depends on two main conditions, the sud-

den apparitions of bodies, and their reproductions, which are volatile
as well, just like those that can be seen on or through a deforming lens
or mirror. Wonderland is dominated by this swirling, reproductive,
and protean force affecting all visible forms. Wonderlands ensign, the
first reflection coming out of the mysterious world, has a rabbit form, a
shy and dodging animal, a pet dear to children, a protagonist in magi-
cal tricks, a creature living between a visible surface and an invisible
underground, and one also known as a prolific creature.
Attracted by White Rabbit, so much so that she falls into his hole,
Alice undergoes the strangest and most grotesque transformations:
she appears as a column, as a snake, gigantic and small almost to the
point of disappearing or bursting, always feeling estranged from her-
self. Who in the world am I? she repeatedly wonders and makes the

27Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, ed. Martin Gardner (London: Penguin, 1995), 1.
 Rosella Mallardi 563
reader wonder. Likewise, her mates bodies abide by the same rules. It is
a sort of theme variationas in the case of the twins Tweedledee and
Tweedledum, where the noun tweedle varies by two suffixes, -dee
and -dumor it is a reproduction by physical, phonetic and morpho-
logical association, as in the case of rabbit that recalls hare, whereas
March Hare is associated to Hatter (March Hare, assonant with much
hair, is linked morphologically to hat-t-er). It may be an extended or
shorter reproduction of a phonetic groupso rabbit can generate rat,
bat, and cat, and rat-mouse can generate dormouse. The apparition of
a characters body reduced to detail is quite surreal and disquieting, as
in the case of Cheshire Cat, which appears as a row of teeth, or of Alice,
who, bursting out of White Rabbits house, appears to the landlord as
an arm wielding a menacing hand. The image of Alices invisible hand
holding in the air White King, whose face grows into a frightened and
grotesque masque, is also impressive, while the hidden heroine, like a
cruel demiurge, heartily enjoys her victims metamorphosis:
She said afterwards that she had never seen in all her life such a face as the King
made, when he found himself held in the air by an invisible hand, and being
dusted: he was far too much astonished to cry out, but his eyes and his mouth
went on getting larger and larger, and rounder and rounder, till her hand shook
so with laughing that she nearly let him drop upon the floor.28
Like a necromancer or a photographer manipulating tools and pic-
tures in the dark chamber, Alice evokes, creates, and transforms those
specters: similarly, in the final chapters of Through the Looking Glass, she
turns Red Queen into her kitten. It is a passage that Tenniels two syn-
optic illustrations depict skillfully:
She shook her off the table as she spoke, and shook her backwards and forwards
with all her might.
The Red Queen made no resistance whatever: only her face grew very small,
and her eyes got large and green: and still Alice went on shaking her, she kept
on growing shorterand fatter-and softer-and rounder-and
and it really was a kitten, after all.29
These sophisticated reproduction strategies spectacularize undreamed-
of visions, extraordinary perspectives, which, being inscribed in Alice
the intradiegetic focalizerseem phantasmagorical reflections of her
interiority and identity.

28Carroll, Alices Adventures in Wonderland; and Through the Looking Glass, 13132.
29Ibid., 24041.
564 Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Carroll
These apparitions of the marvelous mirror underground, as they
are so sudden, surprising, and subversive, can be associated with that
magic that Victorians, like all the early spectators of daguerreotypes
and photographs, viewed as a typical feature of the new art. In fact,
it was not unusual to look at the invention of the century through a
magical-occult-spiritualist lens, so that photography seemed a
miraculous mirror with memory, which, thanks to the artists mys-
terious strokesdescribed variously as taker of men, expert magi-
cian, necromancer, and sun worshipperopened the doors to an
infinite spectredom, peopled by spell-bound metamorphoses.30
The actualization of Wonderland filmy silhouettes, which are framed
into moments/fragments, recalls their origin as tracings of memory
emerging in the deformed shapes of the heroines consciousness. It is a
wonderful and puzzling resurrection. In this regard, it is noteworthy
that Dormouse tells Alice a story where the three little (Liddell) girls
in the well were drawing what began with an M: as mouse-traps, and
the moon, and memory, and muchnessyou know you say things are
much of a muchnessdid you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a
muchness?31 It is as if the specters of Wonderlandredundant traces
or semiotic muchnesswere emanations or deformed ex-cess of her
body/identity. It reminds the reader of mystic and spiritualist theories
familiar to Carroll and still current in Victorian culture.32
In other words, as the heroine penetrates into that labyrinth, not only
does she find that spectral and incoercible condition in the others but
she also discovers in herself the risk of disappearing like them. What
about that deadly silence that invariably breaks in and paralyzes the
fragile weave of conversation? It is as if those encounters moved her
onward to make her touch the intrinsically impenetrable nature of the
Thing, which is actually reduced to a signifier, a trace, a letter, a form, a
surface, a specter about to fade away into the blank sheet of paper.

30William Henry Wills and Harry Morley, Photography, published in Household

Words, March 1853.
31Carroll, Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, 67.
32In the Preface to Sylvie and Bruno, Carroll declares his familiarity with esoteric
buddism. He was well acquainted with Oliver Wendell Holmess works (in this regard
particularly interesting is The Stereoscope and the Stereograph, Atlantic Monthly, 1859)
and with Ralph Waldo Emersons. In the early age of photography, the peculiarly myste-
rious atmosphere suggested also the so-called theory of spectres attributed by Nadar
to Balzac (see Quand jtais photograph [Babel: Actes Sud, 1998], of which Le daguerreo-
tipiste by Champfleuri is an indirect parody). The presence of plenty of books on occult
sciences and spiritism in Carrolls personal library is also noteworthy (Jeffrey Stern,
Lewis Carroll Bibliophile [Luton: White Stone Publishing Society, 1997]).
 Rosella Mallardi 565
Bodies are nothing more than light and shade, says Mr. Tubbs,
the photographer in A Photographers Day Out: the photographic
third eye has trained Carroll to gaze at bodies as reflections, silhou-
ettes, specters, forms drawn by light, the pencil of nature. In Wonder-
land, the world of reflections, light illuminates the bodies indirectly, but
also when it is represented as natural, as in Sylvie and Bruno, it is ulti-
mately a means of narrative artifice.
By re-trans-lating to light the inner self, Carroll the writer/photogra-
pher, like the photographer/scientist in Photography Extraordinary,
represents it as a mask, a sign, a surface that can now double as the
other but also as infinite others, challenging the idea of uniqueness and
originality. Alice likes to split and to slide laterally into others, so that
Wonderland can really be the world with her latent reflections made
manifest. The technique recalls the episode when Alice tries to dispel
her solitude by playing at being two people:
Come, there is no use in crying like that! said Alice rather sharply to herself.
I advise you to leave off just this minute! She generally gave herself very good
advice (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded her-
self so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered boxing
her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing
against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two
people.33
Or the episode when Alice, playing with her sister, asks her to play just
one role, while she will do all the others:
She had had quite a long argument with her sister only the day beforeonly
because Alice had begun with Lets pretend were kings and queens; and her
sister, who liked being exact, had argued that they couldnt, because they were
only two of them, and Alice had been reduced at last to say Well, you can be
one of them, then, and Ill be all the rest. 34
Photography presents the splitting of the subject into the other, frozen
on the paper, an image free from any contextual link or chronological
development and spiteful of any hierarchical order, because governed
by the passing of time, a capricious master beyond any human control.
In the same moment as the other is frozen and immortalized forever, it
is also irremediably lost, which rouses in the spectator a feeling of nos-
talgic melancholy, a deep sense of loss and impotence in front of the im-
pending force of time taking bodies toward death.

33Carroll, Alices Adventures in Wonderland; and Through the Looking Glass, 1415.
34Ibid., 126.
566 Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Carroll
In The Legend of Scotland, Carroll had already dealt with the
photographic other as a representation of death: in the story, the pho-
tographer, Lorenzo, witnesses the ghastly metamorphosis of a dame,
Gaunless, in the dark chamber and finally in the cellarwhere Car-
roll also used to develop photographs, according to Dimphna Elliss
memoriesand in fact at the end of the story it is in the cellar that he
watches the spectacle of the other characters terror in front of the same
ghost perceived as death. In Legend Carroll tried to aestheticize and
anesthetize the fatal enemy through the strategies of nonsense and ro-
mance, but it is the ingenuous, curious, and vital gaze of children at
those underground monsters that miraculously succeeds in over-
throwing the normal arid courses of common sense. This new photo-
graphic eye boosts the signifier in its fullest autonomythe much of
a muchness or appearance of essencecreating fantasies, challenging
and bizarre, and above all radically breaking away from the artificial
fetters of conventionalism.

T I M E A N D M E TA M O R P H O S I S

During the photographic sitting, Carrolls glass-house turned into

a stage for his young friends/models: current events, or people and
heroes from the far or near past, were being performed, following the
conventions of a narrative picture; it was up to that strange and puz-
zling phenomenon, the ghost picture, to fill the stageanother way of
paying homage to the occult and spiritualist revivalthanks to specifi-
cally photographic techniques that highlighted a spectral atmosphere
or made the subject double. In this intersemiotic blend between litera-
ture and photography, time became the real protagonist, capable of
disrupting any expectation by bringing to the surface incredible and
undreamed-of forms: it was just the contrast between intention and
realization that created the most subversive and exhilarating divertisse-
ment. Carroll starts the representation of these particular situations in
Hiawathas Photographing (1857) and in A Photographers Day Out
(1860):
PICTURE 5.This was to have been the great artistic triumph of the day; a family
group, designed by the two parents, and combining the domestic with the alle-
gorical. It was intended to represent the baby being crowned with flowers, by
the united efforts of the children, regulated by the advice of the father, under
the personal superintendence of the mother; and to combine with this the sec-
ondary meaning of Victory transferring her laurel crown to Innocence, with
 Rosella Mallardi 567
Resolution, Independence, Faith, Hope, and Charity, assisting in the graceful
task, while Wisdom looks benignly on, and smiles approval! Such, I say, was
the intention; the result, to any unprejudiced observer, was capable of but one
interpretationthat the baby was in a fitthat the mother (doubtless under
some erroneous notions of the principles of Human Anatomy), was endeavour-
ing to recover it by bringing the crown of its head in contact with its chestthat
the two boys, seeing no prospect for the infant but immediate destruction, were
tearing out some locks of its hair as mementos of the fatal eventthat two of
the girls were waiting for a chance at the babys hair, and employing the time
in strangling the thirdand that the father, in despair at the extraordinary con-
duct of his family, had stabbed himself, and was feeling for his pencil-case, to
make a memorandum of having done so.35
This narrative picture describes a typical bourgeois family, in their
best clothes and in religious silence before the magical strokes of the
new invention, anxious to watch their public image celebrated, even im-
mortalized, and at low cost: but the marvellous machine only returns
deformed masks.
It is easy to imagine their disillusionment, the cries of hatred and re-
venge against this inconceivable offence. The domestic-allegorical in-
tention is overthrown by the invisible hand of time.
But, how could a nonsensical writer/photographer miss such an op-
portunity for wit? So, a typical Victorian familys inclination to show off
the conventional signs of respectability is turned into irresistible ridi-
cule. Just as in photography, it is times invisible hand that conditions
light in its representation of reality, so in the new nonsensical writing,
it is the capricious action of time that controls latent apparitions in their
grotesquely deconstructed forms.
In properly photographic terms, latency consists in the image hidden
in the negative before development. Actually, in the beginning of pho-
tography, by latent image W. H. Fox Talbot meant the faded negative
that was later revived by new chemical procedures. In the early twen-
tieth century, this suggestive phenomenon was associated by Walter
Benjamin with psychological theories concerning optical unconscious-
ness. Carroll seems here to anticipate Benjamins reading, underlining
first and foremost the strange and surreal aspects of latency.
The Legend of Scotland (1858) craftily thematizes the relation
between times invisible hand and the photographers role in photo-
graphing. Here the narrator presents a merveillous machine called by
men Chimera (that ys, a fabulous and wholly incredible thing); where

35A Photographers Day Out, in Complete Works, ed. Woolcott, 980.

568 Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Carroll
wyth hee [Lorenzo] took manie pictures, each yn a single stroke of
Tyme.36 The hand of the photographer Lorenzo is foregrounded and
represented metaphorically as an axe unexpectedly striking its blows.
Lorenzo, with his merveillous chimeraa camera that produces
chimeras, mythical monsters, updated in medieval costumesand yn
a single stroke of Tyme, captures the body of a lady in parts, never suc-
ceeding in shooting her body as a whole. The preposition yn suggests
two interpretations, one pointing literally to exposure time, the other,
metaphorically, to the plunging of the photographic body into time. The
stroke of time is a sort of final gesture that condenses and freezes the
power of corrosion and change that is responsible for the bodies gro-
tesque metamorphoses.
Carroll repeatedly focuses his attention on the function of time,
charging it with symbolic and metaphoric pregnancy, all inspired by his
photographic ethos: for example, the frontispiece illustration of Hia-
wathaa Photographing drawn by Frost is particularly illuminating, in
which the photographer is represented as half man and half machine.
The scene foregrounds a huge objective third eye, with a big left hand
to the rightthat of the black art performerthat demands absolute
silence and the immobility of its victims before pulling off the shutter.
No less important is the right hand hidden under the hood, ready to
steal the models soul and carry it into the dark chamber, where the
development will stick it on the paper and reproduce it indefinitely.
Wonderland too is constantly dominated by invisible time, which
capriciously opens, closes, or suspends the pictures-conversations.
In Alice it is White Rabbits watch and his fear of being late that opens
the contact with Wonderland, whereas in Through the Looking Glass it
is the clock on the mantel piece that witnesses the heroines passage into
the looking-glass house, or possibly into the looking glass-house.
This presence is more evident in The Hunting of the Snark (1876), where
it is Bellmans bell, beating the hours for the ships crew, that signals
the change of scene, investing the dramatic rhythm of the poem with a
sense of incumbent death.
In The Hunting of the Snark, particularly significant for its photo-
graphic allusion, is Frosts illustration of Bandersnatchs violent attack
on Banker: the poor man is portrayed full length sitting on a chair in
the center; on his right, Beaver and Butcher gaze at him terrified, while
in the background on the left Bellman is striking the bell. Frost spec-

36The Legend of Scotland in Complete Works, ed. Woolcott, 1002.

 Rosella Mallardi 569
tacularizes the effect of the attack through Beavers and Butchers scary
gestures, omitting the monster to let the reader/spectator imagine it,
and including in the tableau the bell stroke, which in the written text
marks the passage from the monsters exit to Bankers spectacle in front
of Butcher and Beaver. The wonderful photographic effect on the
Bankers body, turning him into a negative, is in this case supported by
the posture of Bellman, whose hand in particular recalls that of a pho-
tographer ready to develop the nonsensical tragi-comic-grotesque
sides of that ghostly crew:
The Bandersnatch fled as the others appeared:
Lead on by that fear stricken yell:
And the Bellman remarked, It is just as I feared!
And solemnly tolled on his bell.
He was black in the face, and they scarcely could trace
the least likeness to what he had been:
While so great was his fright that his waistcoat turned white -
A wonderful thing to be seen!
To the horror of all who were present that day,
He uprose in full evening dress,
And with senseless grimaces endeavoured to say
What his tongue could no longer express.
Down he sank in his chair, ran his hands through his hair -
And chanted in mimsiest tones
Words whose utter inanity proved his insanity,
While he rattled a couple of bones.
Leave him here to his fate - it is getting so late!
The Bellman exclaimed in a freight.
We have lost half the day. Any further delay,
And we shant catch a Snark before night! 37

In this poem Carroll pushes his verbal and visual creativity to the ex-
treme. For the young reader, and Gertrude Chataway is a witness to
this, the magical play on words, its nursery rhyme refrain, its genial
tricks, and even its somber and surreal daydream atmosphere might
still amuse a child, but for the adult the poems distinctive cipher is that
soft melancholy with its hypnotic and tragic-comic nuances inexorably
haunted by the presence of time.

37Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, 9092 (my italics).

570 Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Carroll
T H E S P E C T E R A N D T H E T H I N G

Paradoxically, in Carrolls works nonsense is credible and realistic, and

this thanks to specifically referential rhetorical strategies, such as the
frequent use of deictics, dialogue, and ostension. Referential techniques
are even more marked in characterization: the spectral creatures are
definitely self-referential, in that Carroll, following the habit of children
to individualize and personify objects and animals, upgrades common
nouns to proper nouns, turning them into dramatis personae. In Alice, for
example, the characters perform their name roles as long as they are per-
ceived by the heroine. This materialization and personification process
is clear in White Rabbits first apparition, which is craftily performed
so as to create the illusion of a physical fall into the hole. In a spiritual-
ist key of interpretation, familiar to Carroll and in the 1860s currently
attributed to photographic magic, the idea of representing, in the same
picture, a real sleeping body projecting its oneiric double would have
been quite common. And Carroll himself experimented on this in his
double exposure pictures, for example, in The Dream (1863).38 As a
matter of fact, Alices prologue is an example. But in Wonderland, Car-
roll allows his heroine a double consciousness, in that the deconstruc-
tion and dissociation of language and experience in the present do not
cancel the memory of the superior world and the need to keep her
bodys integrity. Also, the others she meets, though fleeting and incon-
sistent, claim for themselves the right to reality. Wonderland paradoxi-
cally puts on stage characters that are materialized and self-referential
specters.
Those underworld traces, precisely because they recall, though de-
formed, everyday situations, make the reader wonder about their real
origin, function, and identity. What is their relationship with the hero-
ine? They might be doppelganger, or, as in Phantasmagoria, according
to Mr. Tibbetss definition of the specters in his house, they might be
fantastic familiars, all dependent on the protagonist, since it is the Is
physical senses and above all sight that materialize them.
The reduction of the thing to a specter, or the play of representing
the specter as a real thing, recalls the photographic eye and the per-
ception of photography during its early years. This technique is more
explicitly developed in Phantasmagoria where the adult narrator pro-
tagonist discovers and then talks with his personal ghost. On a win-

38See also Brody Familyghost picture (1862), Donkin Familyghost picture

(1863), in http://www.wakeling.demon.co.uk/.
 Rosella Mallardi 571
ter night, coming home late for dinner, he notes that the table is still
set, and, more importantly, in the room something white and wavy
[is] standing near [him] in the gloom.39 The thing moves, speaks, com-
ments, criticizes, eats, contradicts, and even hits the landlord when it
is rebuked or turned down. In fact, although their conversation deals
with the most evanescent topics and creatures like familiars,40 specters,
in(n)-spect-ors(-ers)/teachers, goblins, ghosts and so on, the effect on
the whole could not be more domestically and nonsensically dramatic,
in that it creates a familiar situation.
While in Alice the dream is framed within the prologue and epilogue,
in Phantasmagoria the ghosts apparition is presented in medias res co-
inciding with Mr Tibbetss double: the landlord first indicates him as
the Thing, and then as something, a thing, my man.41 The man
wakes up only at the end, when the night visitor realizes that he mis-
took Mr. Tibbets for Mr. Tibbs, to whom he had been sent. If the scenes
of the oneiric encounter with the little enchanter remain for Tibbets
vivid and unforgettable against the fading ordinary world, the readers
mind swirls around the meaning of truth and reality.
Another referential or self-referential strategy in the text, which is
particularly illuminating in Carrolls criticism, consists of the corre-
spondence between illustrations and writing, and some of the most in-
triguing images are certainly those that portray the bizarre or impos-
sible events and forms as real, as is the case of the tale-tail, or that of
Jabberwocky or Humpty Dumpty. It is actually the demonstration that
nonsense creates language and reality together.
The strict relation between verbal and visual representations in Car-
rolls works highlights their nature as surface signs, made autonomous
from the external referent, which is related to the photographic eye be-
cause, though photography needs a body/model, in its final product the
new art emancipates itself from any logical or external link, allowing
infinite reproduction and serialization and freeing the reception to sub-
39Carroll, Phantasmagoria, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, ed. Woolcott, 741.
40This word has different meanings in English: it indicates an intimate associate; a
member of the household of a high official; a layman employed as a resident servant in a
Roman Catholic institution or in the household of a high dignitary of the Roman Catho-
lic church; a confidential officer of the Inquisition whose task was to apprehend and im-
prison the accused; a supernatural spirit often embodied in an animal and at the service
of a person; or one who is well acquainted with something; one who frequents a place. In
the text, this multilayered word evolves into related others, such as night visit(-or), house
hierarchy, ghost hierarchy, and tasks, manners, etiquette, education, or pleasure, creating
the lightest and wittiest fabric that can irresistibly attract the reader, both adult and child.
41Carroll, Phantasmagoria, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, ed. Woolcott, 741.
572 Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Carroll
jective interpretation. Photography is a new source of inspiration for
nonsense: as the new visual art discovers the difference between natu-
ral vision and latency, in the same way nonsense writing discovers the
deconstruction/deformation of language by the invisible hand of time;
it discovers the folly hiding in and cosubstantial with normality and
trains the eye and mind to explore details, edges, symptoms, and traces
in order to recognize the aberrant, misrecognized, and repressed self in
the other.
The fantastic metamorphoses of forms and sounds and the mul-
tiple perspectives originating virtual semiotic worlds are expansions of
banal details, inspired by ordinary events that go beyond everyday life:
it is as if poetic force and a sort of demiurgic magic miraculously trans-
formed the spectral nature, the fatal deformation of the bodies plunged
into the grip of time. The thing as essence and source of truth, nature as
emanation of God, the material world as an essential condition of stable
knowledge, and the referent as foundation of realism and positivism
are by nonsense reduced to form, trace, and detail under the constraint
of the deforming force of time.
The photographic eye, as explored in literature, breaks the mirror of
Victorian identity, with its cult of respectability and morality, and ex-
poses its conventional texture through a fine humor.
Carrolls friendship with children saves him from past and current
mythologies and helps him to create a room of his own, where he can
originally create his unconventional photographic writing. This is actu-
ally a specterdom of pictures and conversations, unprecedented and
subversive, that stirs the intelligence, imagination, and curiosity of chil-
dren, and that means for adults not only the recovering of the childs
eye and sensibility but also the plunging of our philosophic mind into
the mysteries of consciousness and knowledge.

University of Bari
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