After Such Kindness (36 page)

I was initially wary about writing another novel set in the nineteenth century, and featuring yet another famous writer. But the idea of exploring the relationship between ‘Lewis Carroll’ and Alice Liddell was tempting for a number of reasons. Carroll (or rather, the real-life Charles Dodgson) has suffered a generally bad press on account of his fondness for small girls, a predilection of which we are highly suspicious in our post-Freudian age. Having worked in Child Protection myself, and being aware of the distorted thought processes of most abusers, I was interested in how a man such as Dodgson, in spite of behaviour that would now be considered as the most blatant kind of ‘grooming’, maintained an apparently unstained reputation while he lived. I did not, however, want to focus only on Dodgson. Many writers of the epoch (for example, Ruskin and Dickens) seem to have held idealized (and sometimes highly confused) views on the desirability of ‘child-women’ and even the apparently well-balanced Rev. Francis Kilvert is not above giving voice to feelings about little girls that we would regard as very questionable today. In fact, nineteenth-century writers for children, particularly male clergymen such as Charles Kingsley, seem to have been given to exorcising their own religious and sexual demons through the apparently innocent stories they devised. Thus,
After Such Kindness
is not just the Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson tale in disguise; it is an exploration of a number of themes that interest me; and my made-up story of Daisy Baxter has ramifications that never, as far as I know, affected either the real-life Alice or those around her.

Apart from the fiction of Lewis Carroll, I have taken information and inspiration from a number of other sources:

The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll
(ed. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, 1898)

Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dream Child as Seen Through the Critics’ Looking Glass, 1865–1971
(ed. Robert Phillips, Penguin Books, 1972)

The Beast and the Monk: Life of Charles Kingsley
(Susan Chitty, Hodder & Stoughton, 1974)

Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, Volume 1
(ed. Frances Eliza Kingsley, 1877)

Secret Gardens
(Humphrey Carpenter, Houghton Mifflin, 1985)

Kilvert’s Diary, 1870–1879
(ed. William Plomer, Penguin Books, 1977)

John Keble: A Study in Limitations
(Georgina Battiscombe, Constable, 1963)

I would like once more to thank all at Tindal Street Press, especially my editor, Alan Mahar, whose detailed advice, suggestions and words of encouragement helped me knock this book into a much better shape. My thanks are also due to Luke Brown and Emma Hargrave for their additional comments and many pertinent queries, and to Melissa Baker, who has worked in many unseen ways to ease the book into its public life. I’m also grateful to the current members of Tindal Street Fiction Group for their feedback when the manuscript was in its early, unformed stages. And, of course, to my husband, for all the meals he cooked and all the cups of tea he brought me during the entire period when I was writing this book, especially during the late night sessions, of which there were rather too many.