Victoria in Wonderland

It began at a party. One guest innocently mentioned a recent controversy in a London newspaper, in which Lewis Carroll’s late-in-life disavowal of the authorship of his celebrated Alice in Wonderland books was rehashed. The claims were widely dismissed.

But the guest went on to note that first novels are usually autobiographical, and that there seemed to be no parallel between Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the life of Charles Dodgson, who used Lewis Carroll as his pen name. So why not take Carroll at his word and try to use the texts to deduce whom the author might be, suggested the guest. And so a dozen or so friends met regularly for nearly 10 years, trying to decipher clues in the books.

And they arrived at some pretty astonishing conclusions.

They first published a book about their findings in the early ‘80s, but chose 2001 to be the year in which they promote the four books they’ve written because it is the hundred-year anniversary of the death of whom they believe to be the actual author–Queen Victoria.

Society members know it sounds preposterous. “It took me 10 years to believe it,” admits David Rosenbaum of Mill Valley, a charter member of the group.

Of course, that was starting from scratch, the earliest inkling that the tomes had royal origins. Member William Adams, a lawyer from San Ramon who knew Rosenbaum professionally and had heard the story from him, says it took him two years of reading the group’s notes on the works attributed to Carroll before he believed it—and that was only after viewing the results of a textural analysis done by computer that indicated that the classics bore a greater likeness to the known writings of Queen Victoria than they did to the pre-Alice writings of Carroll.

The first thing Rosenbaum does upon surveying a pile of reference tomes and Continental Historical Society books is seize a volume and turn to a painting of Queen Victoria’s husband and consort, Prince Albert. He is depicted, age of reason be damned, in a suit of armor. “It was her favorite picture of him,” Rosenbaum says. Then he picks up a copy of the Alice sequel Through the Looking Glass and turns to a picture of a knight clad in armor. “Look at the bump in the nose,” exclaims Adams. “It’s exactly the same. And in armor … when was the last time people wore armor?”

There are clues to the actual author’s identity scattered throughout Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, the society believes. Going along with the group’s theory requires a little suspension of disbelief—or perhaps a lot. But the group can be surprisingly persuasive in arguing that two of the best-loved children’s books of all time are actually shockingly honest memoirs that use fantasy and metaphor to describe a brutal royal life that would have been unpalatable to the public of the day.

But how startling could that life be? Queen Victoria ruled England for 64 years. She was devoted to her husband, had nine children, lived a life of the greatest rectitude, and ruled an empire on which the sun never set.

But that’s just the public version of events, says the society. In reality, says Rosenbaum, “it was her mother’s plan that she never know of her destiny.” The Duchess of Kent, Queen Victoria’s mother, plotted to have her daughter confined due to mental illness and rule the British Empire herself. The supposedly ideal marriage of Victoria and Albert was strained by his physical coldness (they still managed to have nine children, so evidently it was a relative kind of coldness). And, of course, the little matter of Queen Victoria having an illegitimate child by Emperor Louis Napoleon Bonaparte of France probably didn’t make the marriage any warmer.

Of course, the group is aware that its assertions sound … unusual. Their findings were reviled by the Lewis Carroll Society and after one article by the society was included in a scholarly periodical, their subsequent work was rejected, which the group attributes to the fact that their claims for Through the Looking Glass are much racier than those made for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—not surprising, since the group believes the first book traces Victoria’s sad but relatively innocent childhood, right down to the inclusion of her dog Dash. Dash, the group claims in its book Queen Victoria’s Autobiography: A Cultural Time Bomb, was “her closest companion as a teenager”; the dog was lost and eventually buried in effigy with a sentimental tombstone marking the site. In an 1890 abbreviated version of Alice, called The Nursery “Alice,” there is a passage reading “Once up a time, I knew some little children, about as big as you; and they had a little pet dog of their own; and it was called Dash.”

Everything in the books speaks to the life of the queen, according to the group. The March Hare becomes the March heirs: The princesses Charlotte and Elizabeth, the daughters of Victoria’s predecessor King William IV, both of whom died in infancy, and Victoria’s own mother, all of whom died in the month of March. The Cheshire Cat’s disembodied visage symbolizes the need for the queen to use her head in all matters. Tweedledee and Tweedledum are Victoria’s cousins Ferdinand and Augustus of Saxe-Coburg-Kohary, whose looks and mannerisms closely resembled each other.

The clues the group sees can, perhaps, easily be dismissed. But the society doesn’t want people to listen because they enjoy offbeat theories, but because they’ve put in years of work and found that what began as a playful exercise has convinced them. They want people to hear their theories with an open mind—and if they aren’t inclined to believe speculation, to turn to the results of the computer study the group conducted to provide the most concrete proof possible, at least in the absence of a signed confession by Victoria.

The study focused on the use of the six most commonly italicized words in the Alice books. It compares the frequency of them in the two books with the girlhood diaries of Queen Victoria (edited by her daughter Beatrice), the pre- and post-Alice works of Lewis Carroll, and, for a sense of contemporary literature, Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens and William Thackeray’s Early and Late Papers.

The finding indicated a close correlation between the Alice books and the queen’s diaries, but little with Carroll’s pre-Alice works. “He didn’t use them at all,” says society member Katherine Schaaf of Berkeley.

The number of similarities found between the Alice books and Carroll’s post-Alice writings are also high. The reason, according to the group? Carroll was doing his part to ensure the ruse succeeded by mimicking the queen’s style. “You have an over-exaggeration, as if he was deliberately trying to imitate her style,” says Rosenbaum.

For that matter, says the group, the repeated occurrence of the word queen in the book is a clue. “That’s one of the things that cemented it for me,” says Adams. “There are something like 258 references to queen in the book. If you’re writing a children’s book, would you include the word queen on almost every page?”

But why would Carroll chose to go along with the ruse? Well, as the group sees it, it was a personal request from the ruler of his country. And why would the ruler of the most powerful nation in the world choose a not-particularly distinguished mathematics professor as a front?

There is a historical connection between the royal family and Carroll. Queen Victoria’s oldest son, Crown Prince Edward Albert, studied at Christ Church College at Oxford University, where Carroll taught. They are known to have met; the prince signed Carroll’s photograph album, although he supposedly declined a photograph request from avid amateur shutterbug Carroll.

And Carroll’s warm relationship with the Liddell family presumably helped things along. Alice Liddell, the young daughter of the family, was such a favorite that Carroll broached the topic of a future marriage between the two of them. He was turned down by her father, Henry Liddell, the dean of Christ Church College. Perhaps the immense difference in their ages persuaded him against the match.

Or it could have been that the Liddell family, although friendly with Carroll, was simply so far above him socially that the idea was absurd. The Liddells were on such close terms with the royal family that when Crown Prince Edward Albert wed Princess Alexandra, the couple stayed with the family following their honeymoon; Victoria’s son Prince Leopold later fell in love with Alice Liddell, says Rosenbaum. So both Carroll and the royal family were on most cordial terms with the Liddells—although the society says the name Alice was chosen not to honor Liddell, but rather Princess Alice, the queen’s second daughter.

The books were written, according to the group, as a form of therapy following the death of Victoria’s husband in 1861. But why would the queen publish the books and risk exposure?

“An awful lot of energy went in those books,” says Adams. “I think it would have been impossible to resist publishing them. When you’ve spent so much energy on them, you don’t want to just put them on the shelf and forget about them.”

Of course it’s a little mind-boggling to think that Queen Victoria had a child by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte of France, or that she connived in the cover-up of the murder of one of her mother’s ladies in waiting, as detailed in the society’s books (all available at http://www.conhissoc.com) Queen Victoria’s Alice in Wonderland, Queen Victoria’s Through the Looking Glass, Queen Victoria’s Autobiography: A Cultural Time Bomb, and the straightforward title Queen Victoria’s Affair with Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, which the group describes as a historical romance based on fact. But the Continental Historical Society stands behind its works proudly; they’ve put in years of effort, and are confident in their scholarship.

“When I first heard it, I thought it was a totally crackpot theory,” Adams says. The group just hopes other readers are as open to persuasion as he was.

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Originally published in the Mill Valley Herald.