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Sweet Companionship. To fill this gap in his life, the nervous, affectionate professor sought the companionship of little girls — "of course there isn't much companionship," he admitted sadly, "but what there is, is sweet — and wholesome, I think." For 40 years he took them walking and boating, gave them elaborate tea parties, corresponded with them, drew and photographed them in the nude ("I confess," he said, "I do not admire naked boys . . . they always seem to me to need clothes"), carried tiny scissors for snipping off locks of their hair, talked to them tirelessly with the utmost tact and kindliness. Face to face with strange little girls, the shy don who blushed and stammered in the presence of adults became an assured, understanding human being who won a child's confidence instantly with his grave humor. "May I offer you this?" he once said with a bow to a little girl who had fallen into the sea, holding out a scrap of blotting paper torn from his notebook.
Soon, he said, little girls were "three fourths of my life." Had they not been, English literature would have lost one of its great classics. For one day, after he had enchanted little Alice Liddell, daughter of a famed Oxford professor of Greek, with a story of "Wonderland," she begged him to write it down for her. Dodgson went home at once, sat up all night writing, and soon presented Alice with the famous original manuscript of Alice in Wonderland, beautifully written in his own hand and illustrated with his own drawings.
Soon after, he decided to publish it, but with his usual shyness concealed his real name. Charles Lutwidge, Latinized, be came Carolus Ludovicus, which, reversed and put back into English, became Lewis Carroll. Published with the now famous illustrations by John Tenniell, Alice was an instant success.
Gloves and Kittens. But the lonely, disjointed professor found little pleasure in being a celebrity. While he was becoming a household word, his adored little girls were growing into women, and, as a rule, passing out of his life forever. "He always used to say that when the time came for him to take off his hat [on meeting] one of his quondam child friends . . . it was time for the friendship to cease." And the public could hardly realize that the pixiness that gave enchantment to his books was, in real life, a subtle form of self-defense. When a too-adult girl sent him "a sack full of love and a basket of kisses," he neatly turned the danger into play by thanking her warmly for "a sack full of gloves and a basket of kittens." On the other hand, intelligent understanding of the things he liked charmed him at once. A young man once entered the professor's apparently empty room and heard a low growl from under the table. He at once dropped on hands and knees and growled back fiercely. The Rev. Mr. Dodgson emerged immediately, followed by three little girls, and the young man became one of Dodgson 's few intimate male friends.