Hiawatha Photographing

From his shoulder Hiawatha

Took the camera of rosewood,

Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all square and oblong,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.

This he perched upon a tripod -
Crouched beneath its dusky cover -
Stretched his hand, enforcing silence -
Said, ‘Be motionless I beg you!’
Mystic, awful was the process.

(Charles Dodgson’s photographic equipment can be seen further along the trail.)

After that Dodgson came often to the Deanery and over the years took many photographs of the Liddell family and their friends. Among the pleasures there were croquet games on the Deanery lawn with Dinah, Alice’s cat, looking on perhaps from the Chestnut Tree with its horizontal bough like the one on which the Cheshire Cat grinned and faded. Sometimes on a summer day you can see the treetops of the Deanery garden through an open door in the north wall of the Cathedral.

Dean Liddell was an effective and active administrator wbo instigated many changes at Christ Church. Charles Dodgson moved his rooms a number of times during his life there — partly because of Liddell’s renovations and building works. As an undergraduate he lodged first with a Rev. Jacob Ley; then in April 1851 moved into Peckwater Quad for a year; then to Cloisters until December 1862. In October 1862 he moved into a room in Tom Quad which is now the Junior Common Room and in October 1868 he settled into his spacious two-storey apartment in the north-west corner of Tom Quad, overlooking St Aldate’s. You can see the position of his rooms (not open to visitors) from across the quad or when you walk along St Aldate’s.

Isa Bowman described them as ‘two tiny turret rooms on each side of his staircase.’

His many young visitors gave us a picture of his living room (not tiny really) with its green wallpaper, turkey carpets and red brocade curtains and its red-covered sofa and chairs. He had a mahogany dining table and a writing desk where he stood. The walls were lined with books and pictures and photographs. Over the whole hung an aroma of developing fluid from his dark room: he had been given permission to erect a small photographic studio above, on the roof behind the chimney stack.

Alice was almost grown up by the time that Dodgson made this last move, hut many other children came here over the years. One of his last child friends recalled how they used to play hide-and-seek among the chimney pots on the roof above his rooms and look down on the passers-by in St Aldate’s far below.

Before he finally settled here it is likely that on many mornings Dodgson would have woken to the voices of workmen outside his window. Perhaps voices like these:

“Where’s the other ladder?— Why I hadn’t to bring but one; Bill’s got the other — Bill! Fetch it here, lad! — Here, put ‘em up at this corner — No, tie ‘em together first — they don’t reach half high enough yet — Oh! they’ll do well enough; don’t be particular — Here, Bill! catch hold of this rope — Will the roof bear?— Mind that loose slate — Oh, it’s coming down! Heads below!” (a loud crash) — “Now, who did that? — It was Bill, I fancy — Who’s to go down the chimney?— Nay, I shan’t! You do it! — That I won’t, then! — Bill’s to go down — Here, Bill! the master says you’re to go down the chimney!”

The interruptions and inconveniences brought by the Dean’s improvements to Christ Church cannot have been always welcome to Dodgson or other members of the college, and this and other actions by the Dean and his imposing wife were to give гise in the 1880s to two Oxford jingles which Dodgson no doubt heard and enjoyed:

I am the Dean and this is Mrs Liddell,

She plays the first and I the second fiddle.

and

I am the Dean of Christ Church, sir,

This is my wife, look well at her.

She is the Broad and I’m the High:

We are the University.

(Later you will walk along the ‘Broad’ and the ‘High’, two of the main thoroughfares of central Oxford.)

Dodgson’s last set of rooms were very near Tom Tower which holds the ancient bell Great Tom. The original Student population (the Fellows) of Christ Church was 100 with a further Student added in the 17th century, and by tradition the bell is rung 101 times at five past nine to denote them — in those days by the end of the tolling all the undergraduates had to be inside. Dodgson used to entertain his guests by standing by Tom Tower as the great bell tolled. The Lion in Through the Looking Glass speaks in a deep, hollow tone that sounded like the tolling of the great bell with which both Alice and Dodgson were very familiar.

The order of your walk through Christ Church is not of chronological importance, but wherever you go, remember that you are walking in the very places where Alice and Charles Dodgson walked — sometimes separately but often together.

But before you set off, one final introduction. Isa Bowman was a child actor who appeared in the operetta version of Alice in Wonderland, In July 1888 Dodgson invited her, and later her sister Maggie, to spend a few days in Oxford to see the sights. Afterwards he wrote a frivolous journal, Isa’s Visit to Oxford, to commemorate her visit. In the journal Isa was accompanied by the ‘A.A.M.’ or the ‘Aged Aged Man’. Dodgson also wrote a poem to commemorate Maggie’s visit, and excerpts from these two pieces accompany the trail. (Dodgson’s much less well known children’s story Sylvie and Вruno is dedicated to Isa Bowman.)

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 711