Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (263 page)

He easily fell in with the routine of the school, but discipline, even as late as 1846, was hard to maintain.
The Head-Master had his hands full; there were six under-masters—one for each form—and special tutors for the boys who required them, and from the fifth and sixth forms, certain monitors were selected called “præposters,” who were supposed to preserve order among the lower forms.
In reality they bullied the smaller boys, for the system of fagging was much abused in those days, and the poor little fags had to be bootblacks, water-carriers, and general servants to very hard task-masters, while the “præposter” had little thought of doing any service for the service he exacted; in fact the unfortunate fag had to submit in silence to any indignity inflicted by an older boy, for if by chance a report of such doings came to the ears of the Head-Master or his associates, the talebearer was “sent to Coventry,” in other words, he was shunned and left to himself by all his companions.

Injustice like this made little Dodgson’s blood boil; he submitted of course with the other small boys, but he always had a peculiar distaste for the life at Rugby.
He owned several years later that none of the studying at Rugby was done from real love of it, and he specially bewailed the time he lost in writing out impositions, and he further confessed that under no consideration would he live over those three years again.

These “impositions” were the hundreds of lines of Latin or Greek which the boys had to copy out with their own hands, for the most trifling offenses—a weary and hopeless waste of time, with little good accomplished.

In spite of many drawbacks, he got on finely with his work, seldom returning home for the various holidays without one or more prizes, and we cannot believe that he was quite outside of all the fun and frolic of a Rugby schoolboy’s life.
For instance, we may be sure that he went bravely through that terrible ordeal for the newcomer, called “singing in Hall.”
“Each new boy,” we are told, “was mounted in turn upon a table, a candle in each hand, and told to sing a song.
If he made a false note, a violent hiss followed, and during the performance pellets and crusts of bread were thrown at boy or candles, often knocking them out of his hands and covering him with tallow.
The singing over, he descended and pledged the house in a bumper of salt and water, stirred by a tallow candle.
He was then free of the house and retired to his room, feeling very uncomfortable.”

“On the night after ‘new boys’ night’ there was chorus singing, in which solos and quartets of all sorts were sung, especially old Rugby’s favorites such as:

“‘It’s my delight, on a shiny night

In the season of the year,’

and the proceedings always wound up with ‘God save the Queen.’”

Guy Fawkes’ Day was another well-known festival at Rugby.
There were bonfires in the town, but they were never kindled until eight o’clock, which was “lock-up” time for Rugby school.
The boys resented this as it was great fun and they were out of it, so each year there was a lively scrimmage between the Rugbeans and the town, the former bent on kindling the bonfires before “lock-up” time, the latter doing all they could to hold back the ever-pressing enemy.
Victory shifted with the years, from one side to the other, but the boys had their fun all the same, which was over half the battle.

Charles must have gone through Rugby with rapid strides, accomplishing in three years’ time what
Tom Brown
did in eight, and when he left he had the proud distinction of being among the
very
few who had never gone up a certain winding staircase leading, by a small door, into the Master’s private presence, where the rod awaited the culprit, and a good heavy rod it was.

During these years Dickens was doing his best work, and while at Rugby, Charles read “David Copperfield,” which came out in numbers in the
Penny Magazine
.
He was specially interested in
Mrs.
Gummidge
, that mournful, tearful lady, who was constantly bemoaning that she was “a lone lorn creetur,” and that everything went “contrairy” with her.
Dickens’s humor touched a chord of sympathy in him, and if we go over in our minds, the weeping animals we know in “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass,” we will find many excellent portraits of
Mrs.
Gummidge
.

He also read Macaulay’s “History of England,” and from it was particularly struck by a passage describing the seven bishops who had signed the invitation to the Pretender.
Bishop Compton, one of the seven, when accused by King James, and asked whether he or any of his ecclesiastical brethren had anything to do with it, replied: “I am fully persuaded, your Majesty, that there is not one of my brethren who is not innocent in the matter as myself.”
This tickled the boy’s sense of humor.
Those touches always appealed to him; as he grew older they took even a firmer hold upon him and he was quick to pluck a laugh from the heart of things.

His life at Rugby was somewhat of a strain; with a brain beginning to teem with a thousand fairy fancies that the boys around him could not appreciate, he was forced to thrust them out of sight.
He flung himself into his studies, coming out at examinations on top in mathematics, Latin, and divinity, and saving that other part of him for his sisters, when he went home for the holidays.

Meantime he continued to write verses and stories and to draw clever caricatures.
There is one of these drawings peculiarly Rugbean in character; it is supposed to be a scene in which four of his sisters are roughly handling a fifth, because she
would
write to her brother when they wished to go to Halnaby and the Castle.
This noble effort he signed “Rembrandt.”

The picture is really very funny.
The five girls have very much the appearance of the marionettes he was fond of making, especially the unfortunate correspondent who has been pulled into a horizontal position by the stern sister.
The whole story is told by the expression of the eyes and mouth of each, for the clever schoolboy had all the secrets of caricature, without quite enough genius in that direction to make him an artist.

The Rugby days ended in glory; our Boy, no longer little Dodgson, but young Dodgson, came home loaded with honors.
Mr.
Mayor, his mathematical master, wrote to his father in 1848, that he had never had a more promising boy at his age, since he came to Rugby.
Mr.
Tait also wrote complimenting him most highly not only for his high standing in mathematics and divinity, but for his conduct while at Rugby, which was all that could be desired.

We can now see the dawning of the two great loves of his life, but there was another love, which Rugby brought forth in all its beauty and strength, the love for girls.
From that time he became their champion, their friend, and their comrade; whatever of youth and of boyhood was in his nature came out in brilliant flashes in their company.
Boys, in his estimation,
had
to be, of course—a necessary evil, to be wrestled with and subdued.
But girls—God bless ’em!
were girls; that was enough for young Dodgson to the end of the chapter.

CHAPTER III.

HOME LIFE DURING THE HOLIDAYS.

When Charles came home on his holiday visits, he was undoubtedly the busiest person at Croft Rectory.
We must remember there were ten eager little brothers and sisters who wanted the latest news from “the front,” meaning Rugby of course, and Charles found many funny things to tell of the school doings, many exciting matches to recount, many a thrilling adventure, and, alas!
many a tale of some popular hero’s downfall and disgrace.
He had sketches to show, and verses to read to a most enthusiastic audience, the girls giggling over his funny tales, the boys roaring with excitement as in fancy they pictured the scene at “Big-side” during some great football scrimmage, for Charles’s descriptions were so vivid, indeed he was such a good talker always, that a few quaint sentences would throw the whole picture on the canvas.

Vacation time was devoted to literary schemes of all kinds.
From little boyhood until he was way up in his “teens,” he was the editor of one magazine or another of home manufacture, chiefly, indeed, of his own composition, or drawn from local items of interest to the young people of Croft Rectory.
While he was still at Richmond School,
Useful and Instructive Poetry
was born and died in six months’ time, and many others shared the same fate; but the young editor was undaunted.

This was the age of small periodicals and he had caught the craze; it was also the age when great genius was burning brightly in England.
Tennyson was in his prime; Dickens was writing his stories, and Macaulay his history of England.
There were many other geniuses who influenced his later years, Carlyle, Browning and others, but the first three caught his boyish fancy and were his guides during those early days of editorship.
Punch
, the great English magazine of wit and humor, attracted him immensely, and many a time his rough drawings caught the spirit of some of the famous cartoons.
He never imagined, as he laughed over the broad humor of John Tenniel, that the great cartoonist would one day stand beside him and share the honors of “Alice in Wonderland.”

One of his last private efforts in the editorial line was
The Rectory Umbrella
, a magazine undertaken when he was about seventeen or eighteen years old, on the bridge, one might say, between boyhood and his approaching Oxford days.
His mind had developed quickly, though his views of life did not go far beyond the rectory grounds.
He evidently took his title out of the umbrella-stand in the rectory hall, the same stand doubtless which furnished him with “The Walking Stick of Destiny,” a story of the lurid, exciting sort, which made his readers’ hair rise.
The magazine also contained a series of sketches supposed to have been copied from paintings by Rembrandt, Sir Joshua Reynolds and others whose works hang in the Vernon Gallery.
One specially funny caricature of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s “Age of Innocence” represents a baby hippopotamus smiling serenely under a tree not half big enough to shade him.

Another sketch ridicules homeopathy and is extremely funny.
Homeopathy is a branch of medical science which believes in
very
small doses of medicine, and this picture represents housekeeping on a homeopathic plan; a family of six bony specimens are eating infinitesimal grains of food, which they can only see through the spectacles they all wear, and their table talk hovers round millionths and nonillionths of grains.

But the cleverest poem in
The Rectory Umbrella
is the parody on “Horatius,” Macaulay’s famous poem, which is supposed to be a true tale of his brothers’ adventures with an obdurate donkey.
It is the second of the series called “Lays of Sorrow,” in imitation of Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome,” and the tragedy lies in the sad fact that the donkey succeeds in getting the better of the boys.

“Horatius” was a great favorite with budding orators of that day.
The Rugby boys declaimed it on every occasion, and reading it over in these modern times of peace, one is stirred by the martial note in it.
No wonder boys like Charles Dodgson loved Macaulay, and it is pretty safe to say that he must have had it by heart, to have treated it in such spirited style and with such pure fun.
Indeed, fun bubbled up through everything he wrote; wholesome, honest fun, which was a safety valve for an over-serious lad.

This period was his halting time, and the humorous skits he dashed off were done in moments of recreation.
He was mapping out his future in a methodical way peculiarly his own.
Oxford was to be his goal, divinity and mathematics his principal studies, and he was working hard for his examinations.
The desire of the eldest son to follow in his father’s footsteps was strengthened by his own natural inclination, for into the boy nature crept a rare golden streak of piety.
The reverence for holy things was a beautiful trait in his character from the beginning to the end of his life; it never pushed itself aggressively to the front, but it sweetened the whole of his intercourse with people, and was perhaps the secret of the wonderful power he had with children.

The intervening months between Rugby and Oxford were also the boundary-line between boyhood and young manhood, that most important period when the character shifts into a steadier pose, when the young eyes try vainly to pierce the mists of the future, and the young heart-throbs are sometimes very painful.
Between those Rugby school-days and the more serious Oxford ones, something happened—we know not what—which cast a shadow on our Boy’s life.
He was young enough to live it down, yet old enough to feel keenly whatever sorrow crossed his path, and as he never married, we naturally suspect that some unhappy love affair, or death perhaps, had cut him off from all the joys so necessary to a young and deep-feeling man.
Whatever it was—and he kept his own secret—it did not mar the sweetness of his nature, it did not kill his youth, nor deaden the keen wit which was to make the world laugh one day.
It drew some pathetic lines upon his face, a wistful touch about mouth and eyes, as we can see in all his portraits.

A slight reserve hung as a veil between him and people of his own age, but it opened his heart all the wider to the children, whose true knight he became when, as “Lewis Carroll” he went forth to conquer with a laugh.
We say “children,” but we mean “girls.”
The little boy might just as well have been a caged animal at the Zoo, for all the notice he inspired.
Of course, there were some younger brothers of his own to be considered, but he had such a generous provision of sisters that he didn’t mind, and then, besides, one’s own people are different somehow; we know well enough we wouldn’t change
our
brothers and sisters for the finest little paragons that walk.
So with Lewis Carroll; he strongly objected to everybody else’s little brothers but his own, and it is even true that in later years there were some small nephews and boy cousins, to whom he was extremely kind.
But as yet there is no Lewis Carroll, only a grave and earnest Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, reading hard to enter Christ Church, Oxford, that grand old edifice steeped in history, where his own father had “blazed a trail.”

Mathematics absorbed many hours of each day, and Latin and Greek were quite as important.
English as a “course” was not thought of as it is to-day; the classics were before everything else, although ancient and modern history came into use.

For lighter reading, Dickens was a never-failing source of supply.
All during this holiday period “David Copperfield” was coming out in monthly instalments, and though the hero was “only a boy,” there was something in the pathetic figure of lonely little
David
, irresistibly appealing to the young fellow who hated oppression and injustice of any kind, and was always on the side of the weak.
While the dainty picture of
Little Em’ly
might have been his favorite, he was keenly alive to the absurdities of
Mrs.
Gummidge
, the doglike devotion of
Peggotty
, and the horrors of the “cheap school,” which turned out little shivering cowards instead of wholesome hearty English boys.

Later on, he visited the spot on which Dickens had founded
Dotheboys Hall
in “Nicholas Nickleby.”
“Barnard’s Castle” was a most desolate region in Yorkshire.
He tells of a trip by coach, over a land of dreary hills, into Bowes, a Godforsaken village where the original of
Dotheboys Hall
was still standing, though in a very dilapidated state, actually falling to pieces.
As we well know, after the writing of “Nicholas Nickleby,” government authorities began to look into the condition of the “cheap schools” and to remedy some of the evils.
Even the more expensive schools, where the tired little brains were crammed to the brim until the springs were worn out and the minds were gone, were exposed by the great novelist when he wrote “Dombey and Son” and told of
Dr.
Blimber’s
school, where poor little
Paul
studied until his head grew too heavy for his fragile body.
The victims of these three schools—
David
,
Smike
, and
Little Paul
—twined themselves about the heartstrings of the thoughtful young student, and many a humorous bit besides, in the works of Lewis Carroll, bears a decided flavor of those dips into Dickens.

Macaulay furnished a more solid background in the reading line.
His history, such a complete chronicle of England from the fall of the Stuarts to the reign of Victoria, appealed strongly to the patriotism of the English boy, and the fact that Macaulay was not only a
writer
of English history, but at the same time a
maker
of history, served to strengthen this feeling.

If we compare the life of Lord Macaulay with the life of Lewis Carroll, we will see that there was something strangely alike about them.
Both were unmarried, living alone, but with strong family ties which softened their lives and kept them from becoming crusty old bachelors.
It is very probable, indeed, that the younger man modeled his life somewhat along the lines of the older, whom he greatly admired.
Both were parts of great institutions; Macaulay stood out from the background of Parliament, as Lewis Carroll did from Oxford or more particularly Christ Church, and both names shone more brilliantly outside the routine of daily life.

But the influence that crept closer to the heart of this boy was that of Tennyson.
The great poet with the wonderful dark face, the piercing eyes, the shaggy mane, sending forth clarion messages to the world in waves of song, was the inspiration of many a quaint phrase and poetic turn of thought which came from the pen of Lewis Carroll.
For Tennyson became to him a thing of flesh and blood, a friend, and many a pleasant hour was spent in the poet’s home in later years, when the fame of “Alice” had stirred his ambition to do other things.
Many a verse of real poetry could trace its origin to association with the great man, who was quick to discover that there were depths in the soul of his young friend where genius dwelt.

Meantime Charles Dodgson read his poems over and over, in the seclusion of Croft Rectory, during that quiet pause in his life before he went up to Oxford.

There was a village school of some importance in Croft, and members of the Dodgson family were interested in its welfare, often lending a hand with the teaching, and during those months, no doubt, Charles took his turn.
For society, his own family seemed to be sufficient.
If he had any boy friends, there are no records of their intercourse; indeed, the only friend mentioned is T.
Vere Bayne, who in childish days was his playfellow and who later became, like himself, a Student of Christ Church.
This association cemented a lasting friendship.
One or two Rugbeans claimed some intimacy, but his true friendships were formed when Lewis Carroll grew up and really became young.

Walking was always a favorite pastime; the woods were full of the things he loved, the wild things whose life stirred in the rustling of the leaves or the crackle of a twig, as some tiny animal whisked by.
The squirrels were friendly, the hares lifted up their long ears, stared at him and scurried out of sight.
Turtles and snails came out of the river to sun themselves on the banks; the air was full of the hum of insects and the chirp of birds.

As he lay under the friendly shelter of some great tree, he thought of this tree as a refuge for the teeming life about it; the beauty of its foliage, its spreading branches, were as nothing to its convenience as a home for the birds and chipmunks and the burrowing things that lived beneath its roots or in the hollows of its trunk.

These creatures became real companions in time.
He studied their ways and habits, he looked them up in the Natural History, and noting their peculiarities, tucked them away in that quaint cupboard of his which he called his memory.