Alice In Wonderland author’s regret: Why Lewis Carroll hated being a legend that is literary

Queen Victoria loved it, fan mail arrived because of the sackful and then he grew to become recognised in the pub.

This was sheer hell for a shy and retiring academic who doubled as an Anglican deacon plus the extent of his torment is revealed the very first time in a previously unseen letter which is anticipated to fetch significantly more than Ј4,000 when it is auctioned at Bonhams month that is next.

In the letter written to Anne Symonds, the widow of eminent Oxford surgeon Frederick Symonds, he laments being thrust to the public eye by his success and treated like a zoo animal by admirers.

He even suggests which he wishes he previously never written the classic tales that brought him worldwide fame.

“All that kind of publicity leads to strangers hearing of my real name in connection with the books, and to my being pointed out to, and stared at by strangers, and treated as a ‘lion’,” he wrote.

“And I hate all of that so intensely that sometimes I almost wish that I had never written any books after all.”

The letter, printed in November 1891, was penned 26 years following the publication of Alice In Wonderland, as he was 59.

He died six years later and then how his reputation would be tarnished in death he would have been even more horrified if he had known. His fondness for children along with his practice of photographing and sketching them, sometimes in the nude, led to a posthumous lynching in the court of literary opinion.

As a result the creative genius who gave us Humpty Dumpty, the Cheshire Cat additionally the Mad Hatter was labelled a pervert, paedophile and pornographer.

Alice Liddell inspired him to publish the book GETTY

and I also hate all that so intensely that sometimes I almost wish that I experienced never written any written books at all

The fact four of this 13 volumes of his diaries mysteriously went missing and therefore seven pages of another were torn out by an hand that is unknown put into the circumstantial evidence against him.

But while Dodgson never married, there was an abundance of evidence inside the diaries that he had a interest that is keen adult women both married and single and enjoyed an amount of relationships that could have already been considered scandalous by the standards of that time period.

Sympathetic historians also argue his studies of naked children have to be seen in the context of their hours.

The “Victorian child cult” perceived nudity as an expression of innocence and such images were mainstream and fashionable as opposed to emblematic of a sick fascination with young flesh.

The speculation over Dodgson’s sexuality has its own roots in the little girl to his relationship who had been the inspiration for his fictional Alice. The real-life Alice was the younger daughter of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, where Dodgson plied his trade as a mathematician and served as a deacon.

She was by all accounts a vivacious and pretty 10-year-old as he first surely got to know her and then he would often take her out along with her sisters for picnics and boat trips regarding the Thames.

On these days he would entertain all of them with his stories about the fictional Alice, tales he was eventually persuaded to put into book form and send to a publisher.

While his critics have suggested after growing into adolescence, one biographer proposes a very different analysis that he grew fixated with Alice Liddell, took photographs of her in inappropriate poses and was devastated when she broke away from him.

The dodo presenting Alice with a thimble in an illustration by Tenniel GETTY

“There is not any evidence from her presence. which he was at love with her,” wrote Karoline Leach in The Shadow regarding the Dreamchild. “No evidence that her family concerned about her, no evidence which they banned him”

She added: “There are no letters or private diary entries to suggest any kind of romantic or passionate attachment, or even to indicate which he had a particular desire for her for any nevertheless the briefest time.”

It was not Alice who was the main focus of Dodgson’s attentions, she suggests, but her mother Lorina. Far from being a way of grooming the daughter, their day trips were a cover for a passionate and affair that is reckless the caretaker. If the Alice books were written Dodgson was in his early 30s.

Lorina, while 5 years older, was – within the words of writer William Langley – “a free spirit and a renowned beauty stuck in a dull marriage to Henry, the Dean, who had been both notoriously boring and reputedly homosexual”.

He added:“Carroll might have now been seen as something of an oddity around Oxford however in contrast to Henry he had been handsome, youthful, engaging and witty. And he been able to spend an astonishing length of time at the Liddells’ house much of it while Henry wasn’t in.”

It was this liaison, according to Leach, which led family members to censor his diaries as opposed to any inappropriate relationship with an underage girl. Her thesis is supported by the findings of another author, Jenny Woolf.

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She tracked down Dodgson’s bank records for her 2010 book The Mystery Of Lewis Carroll and discovered that despite often being in debt Dodgson gave away about Ј50 per year (Ј5,500 in today’s money) to various charities while earning an income of Ј300 (Ј33,000 today) teaching mathematics at Christ Church and double that by means of royalty payments from Macmillian, his publisher.

One of the charities Dodgson supported was the Society When it comes to Protection Of Women And Children, an organisation that “used to trace down and prosecute men who interfered with children”.

Woolf adds: “He also supported other charities which rehabilitated ladies who had been abused and trafficked and a hospital which specialised in the treatment plan for venereal disease. It suggests the damage concerned him the sex trade inflicted upon women.”

A sceptic might argue that this was the window-dressing of a young child abuser but Woolf makes a telling point in his favour.