Congratulations! Having come this far, you now belong to an exclusive group of people who are up to date with Alice in Wonderland syndrome. You would probably never have guessed how easy it would be to become an expert on this medical topic—and yet, here you are, knowing more about it than the majority of medical specialists worldwide.
Nevertheless, a few mysteries still remain. So, let us start with the question that has been burning in our minds since the beginning of this book: Now that (more or less) all has been said and done, how much evidence do we have that Charles Dodgson actually experienced the perceptual symptoms he described so expertly in the Alice book?
The short answer to that question is that we have no evidence at all.
At least no direct evidence.
We simply do not know.
In his diaries, Dodgson never says anything like, ‘Had the most curious experience—while looking out over Tom Quad, saw everything as slanted’ or ‘Consulted the eminent alienist, Professor X, to ask his opinion about my legs shutting up like a telescope’. There is nothing of the kind, nothing even like that. Not once. The closest that we come to finding a description of anything that might hint at Alice in Wonderland syndrome in the diaries, are the passages where Dodgson refers to ‘seeing fortifications ’—which are, however, geometric visual hallucination s, not distortions —and the single passage (described earlier), where he reflects on his ‘foreknowledge’ of the Hymn that the curate gave out in Church. Although it is uncertain whether the latter experience was a déjà phenomenon , even if it had been, it would have been an adjuvant symptom of Alice in Wonderland syndrome and not a core symptom. In sum, I was unable to find any direct evidence, either in the primary or secondary sources, that Dodgson experienced perceptual distortion s—not before and also not after he wrote the Alice book.1
So, what about indirect evidence? If we zoom in on the one document that sparked this whole discussion, what does it say when someone casually describes 13 different symptoms of Alice in Wonderland syndrome in a single book? There we can read about illusory feelings of levitation , hyperschematia , hyposchematia , micropsia , macropsia , microsomatognosia , macrosomatognosia , somatopsychic duality , prosopometamorphopsia , loss of stereoscopic vision , time distortion , derealisation and depersonalisation . Moreover, all these symptoms have been so ingeniously incorporated in the Alice book (some of them multiple times), and each of them rendered in such a vivid way that we can totally imagine how it must be to experience them.
One might argue that this is a matter of circular reasoning: By first having Todd group these symptoms together by virtue of the book, and then saying, ‘Hey, look how many symptoms of Alice in Wonderland syndrome there are in the book’. However, since the majority of these symptoms had been described in the medical literature before Todd had linked them to the Alice book, this is certainly not a tautology. As a consequence, the real question is: How great are the odds that a non-medical author would randomly describe these 13 different symptoms in a book written for the purpose of amusing and entertaining children; the symptoms themselves being so obscure that hardly any health professional knew about them at the time, and that it would take another 90 years before an extraordinarily gifted psychiatrist, named John Todd , would first think of describing them in connection with one another?
I don’t think we need advanced statistics to establish that the odds of that happening tend to zero.
So, yes—on the basis of the descriptions in the Alice book alone—I believe that we possess overwhelming evidence that Dodgson had intimate knowledge of a large number of symptoms that we now consider part of the Alice in Wonderland syndrome. It may seem like a detour to investigate so many other sources before we come back to the one source that set this quest in motion, but those other sources needed to be checked anyway in search of additional evidence. Having done that, and having found none, we can now safely conclude that the Alice book itself contains all the evidence we need.
Still, that does not prove that Dodgson actually experienced these phenomena himself. We now know that he incorporated many elements from real life in his book—but who can say that this was something he had also experienced himself? Therefore, the next question is: What might have inspired him to describe them? Had he perhaps heard about them from someone else? With his interest in medicine, and his eagerness to help and dispense medical advice, whether or not with the aid of his homeopathy kit, could it not be possible that he had stumbled upon one of those very rare individuals who had experienced not just one, but a whopping 13 different symptoms of Alice in Wonderland syndrome? Or several individuals who had each given him a description of a few of those symptoms? Could it have been his nephew, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood , for example, or Charles’s own brother, Skeffington Dodgson (1836–1919), who were both known to suffer from epilepsy ? Or any of the number of persons he had encountered over the years while they were actually having a seizure? Could they have told him afterwards? Or could it have been Alice Liddell ? How touching it would be to imagine Dodgson learning about these peculiar perceptual phenomena from his beloved little muse, and then ‘handing them back’ to her in the context of a story that she loved, thus helping her to digest those haunting experiences and come to terms with them. How touching—and also how pathetic—since there is no indication whatsoever that Alice Liddell experienced perceptual distortion s, let alone confided in Dodgson about them. Obviously, the same holds true for the other persons I mentioned: Which brings us back to the question as to whether Dodgson himself had been the one who had experienced them and, if so, what could have caused them.
Since several interesting hypotheses have been offered in the past, what I will do here is provide a re-examination of the existing evidence and, where evidence is lacking, simply ask myself aloud what might have been at play. That way, in the end, it will be up to you to weigh the evidence and conclude for yourself whether or not there is sufficient reason to believe that Dodgson did indeed suffer from the syndrome that was named after his famous protagonist and what may have been the most likely cause of the related phenomena.
7.1 Health Myths
To investigate the nature and cause of Dodgson’s alleged perceptual distortions, some authors mobilised solid medical expertise. Prominent among them are Goodacre [1], Podoll and Robinson [2, 3], and Hart [4]. Others, however, have not always been quite so scrupulous. Thus, throughout the years, much has been made of mere snippets of information about Dodgson’s physical and mental health. In his own time, a rumour already circulated that he had become mentally ill. As Dodgson himself exclaimed (with barely hidden amusement) in his diary, after having made a new acquaintance who clearly had no clue as to who he was,
Only yesterday Mrs. Nash told me she had heard the author of Alice had gone mad! [5]
And that was only the beginning: Dodgson has since been called depressed, suicidal, a paedophile, a migraineur , an insomniac, an epileptic, an alcoholic , a cocaine addict, an opium addict, a cannabis addict and a magic-mushroom addict, to mention just a few of the more common allegations on offer. Others have pointed at his use of dangerous substances such as arsenic and sulphurous acid , although without mentioning that he took the arsenic in homeopathic dosages (implying that the solution was diluted to such an extent that not a single molecule of arsenic remained in it) and that sulphurous acid (a common disinfectant at the time) is something other than sulphuric acid , which is a very dangerous substance indeed. Moreover, Dodgson probably never used the sulphurous acid prescribed to him, since he disagreed with his physician’s diagnosis and, therefore, preferred to try something homeopathic. Still others believe that Dodgson must have had difficulty keeping his fingers off the LSD —which would have been a truly remarkable feat, since this hallucinogenic substance was developed half a century after his death.
But what about those other possibilities? In a scholarly analysis of famous people who allegedly suffered from epilepsy, Hughes reveals that Dodgson ‘was involved with cocaine’, although, unfortunately, without providing any sources to back up that claim [6]. On the Internet (not Wikipedia this time), I found another tantalising reference. The source mentioned was Lennon’s The Life of Lewis Carroll [7], which I subsequently binge-read in a single day—and guess what? Another dead end. Lennon’s classic was a marvellous read, but nowhere does it mention the use of cocaine or in fact any psychoactive substance, other than alcohol. The only reference to cocaine that I found (as detailed in Chap. 4) was its one-time use as a local anaesthetic to facilitate a minor surgical procedure [8]. Since cocaine under such circumstances does nothing but numb the peripheral nerve endings in the patch of skin to be incised, it requires a considerable stretch of the imagination to conclude that it has any influence on the central nervous system, let alone that it is the source of an addiction. Opium (also mentioned by Hughes [6]) was frequently employed in 19th-Century medicine in the form of laudanum , a tincture of 10% opium, equivalent to 1% morphine . It might perhaps have been prescribed to Dodgson during one of his many disease periods, or even to alleviate a toothache, since it was distributed liberally at the time to treat almost any ailment imaginable. It is pure speculation, however, as to whether he ever used it, since there are no known records to confirm this. For the use of cannabis (also suggested by Hughes [6]), the same holds true. As regard the alleged use of magic mushrooms , it was Carmichael who suggested that Dodgson had either read about the hallucinogenic effects of Amanita muscaria or experimented with this classic red-and-white mushroom himself—although, here also, without providing any evidence that he actually did [9].
So what about alcohol ? Could that have been the source of the mind-bending perceptual experiences described so vividly in the Alice book? Such distortions may accompany not only delirium tremens but also alcohol hallucinosis , alcohol withdrawal and even ordinary alcohol intoxication . As a curator of the Common Room at Christ Church , Dodgson had access to sufficient quantities of alcohol to put the entire academic staff at Oxford into a coma—buying wine and sherry in bulk and sampling the merchandise on behalf of his confreres, turning himself into a self-professed wine expert in the process [10]. Since he also had a habit of skipping midday meals, swapping them more than once for a glass of sherry and carrying a flask of his own preferred brand with him when he dined out, we may ask ourselves whether alcohol in fact played a more prominent role in Dodgson’s life than has hitherto been acknowledged [11]. However, all sources indicate that he used alcohol in moderate quantities, drinking no more than one or two glasses of sherry, wine, ale or beer per day and only occasionally a few glasses more. If that should qualify as an alcohol addiction , then the French should probably be considered collectively addicted. That said, we all know that alcoholics who successfully manage their drinking behaviour in accordance with their social and occupational schedules may go undetected by their surroundings for astonishingly long periods of time. Since Dodgson was a master at orchestrating his life and extremely picky about the topics he chose to report in his diary, we cannot be entirely sure whether, or not, he was secretly addicted. Even though there is no evidence for it, let us place a question mark here as a reminder that, in any given situation, the real problem may always turn out to be alcohol , lest we forget about it when we are up to our necks in discussing other possibilities.
To see what other possibilities there are, let us now revisit Dodgson’s medical history and connect it with what we have learned in the meantime about Alice in Wonderland syndrome.
7.2 Dodgson’s Medical History Revisited
One of the myths created by Dodgson was that he had always been thoroughly healthy. That is how he wanted the world to see him and that is probably why (in his letters and diaries) he proclaimed time and again that his health was ‘something to be most thankful for’—even though he suffered deeply from his speech and hearing impairments , and had to cope with painful conditions ranging from neuralgia , headaches and lumbago to annually recurring infectious disease s that often kept him on the sofa for weeks on end. He, for whom language was so vitally important, was deprived of the capacity to hear and speak freely, and he, who was so fond of exercising and long walks, was literally benched for long stretches of time due to his recurring ‘synovitis’ . On top of that, his face blindness turned his social life into a recurring nightmare, undermined as it already was by his speech and hearing problems. What was therefore probably true about Dodgson’s claim to health is that he had found ways to cope with his numerous health problems without succumbing to depression or despair—which is indeed something to be thankful for even though it is not quite the same as being healthy.
Since we already have an overview of all that is known about the medical conditions Dodgson suffered from (Appendix A, Table A.1), I will focus here on several aspects that might help us to find an answer to the questions that remain. First of all, let us see whether there are any indications for psychological or psychiatric conditions in Dodgson’s medical history that might justify the assumption that he experienced perceptual distortion s himself. Since we already know that Alice in Wonderland syndrome is a thoroughly neurological affair, this may not seem the most obvious place to start; but, then again, perceptual distortion s have also been described in the context of psychiatric disease, so this is a topic that we cannot just simply ignore. Moreover, so much has been said about Dodgson’s mental health in the past that it gives me a welcome opportunity to deflate a few more myths while we are at it.
7.2.1 Dodgson’s Psychological Profile
Every health professional knows that one cannot carry out a reliable psychiatric assessment without having seen and examined someone in person. However, with that proviso firmly in mind, I think we can safely conclude from the wealth of primary sources that Dodgson never suffered from a depressive disorder , or in fact from any other major psychiatric disorder—as we know them today, or as they had been known back then, during the second half of the 19th Century. He certainly was not ‘mad’, as Mrs. Nash had offered so unceremoniously. More specifically, there is no proof that he ever suffered from a psychotic disorder , a mood disorder , dementia or anything else that we categorise as ‘severe’ in my discipline. Undoubtedly, he had gloomy thoughts from time to time and grieved after the death of his mother and, especially, of his father; meanwhile, his diaries also show that, for a long time, he was plagued by recurring feelings of guilt and self-doubt, possibly mostly during the years spanning 1862–1866, about which we know so little. And yet, nowhere do we find any indication that he was depressed for weeks on end and that during such times of gloomy thoughts he lost interest in his activities, withdrew from society or wasted away due to a lack of appetite and sleep—all of which are cardinal symptoms of major depressive disorder. Even in the passages that show his darkest moments of self-recrimination, his diary allows us only brief glimpses of his despair, while, in between, it describes his life as going on uninterruptedly, apparently unaffected by whatever it was that haunted him. His diaries and letters, and even his poems, show that he did indeed think a lot about death but not in any way that we can construe retrospectively as suicidal ideation . So, whatever an actual psychiatrist might have brought to light at the time (at whatever point of his life, I am inclined to add, although we cannot be sure about the 4-year gap), it would probably have fallen outside the domain of major psychiatric disease. That includes the so-called split or dual personality that biographers ever since Langford Reed have offered as an explanation for his eccentric behaviour—as if ‘Lewis Carroll ’ had been split off from the actual person called ‘Charles Dodgson ’, the two of them functioning more or less independently of each other and dominating his actions in turns [11]. He was, undoubtedly, capable of compartmentalisation, meaning that he had the ability to adapt his behaviour and communication style to the social circumstances, allowing him to act like the don and gentleman that he was in academic circles, to adopt the role of a bohemian among his artist friends and to sit under the table with his child friends if that was what the game required. Meanwhile, he had also been well capable of giving and withholding information as he saw fit: Posing as a nonconformist in religious circles, as an open-minded spiritualist among his fellow members of the Society for Psychical Research , and as a boring mathematician (he admitted that to himself) among his students. In all that has been written about him, we find no indication whatsoever that this caused him any confusion over who he was, over what he had done while assuming a different role, or over the way he was supposed to act under all those different circumstances—except, perhaps, when an unexpected role reversal was required, such as when the telling of a story to his child friends was interrupted by the arrival of an adult. Therefore, I would tend to argue that Dodgson seems to have mastered an unusual set of social skills and an unusual capacity of juggling those around in varying social contexts rather than having suffered from dissociative identity disorder (as the ‘dual personality ’ is called today).
In sum, I do not believe that there is sufficient evidence to substantiate the claim that Dodgson suffered from any type of major psychiatric disease. That cannot be the explanation we are looking for. So, what about ‘minor’ illnesses? After all, psychiatry is not only about raving madness, so we should certainly not forget about the simpler afflictions that one can suffer from.
Thus, continuing our search outside the domain of major psychopathology, it may be interesting to have a look at two descriptions of ‘character’, as drawn up by contemporaries of Dodgson’s . At 20 years of age, he had had his character ‘read’ in Edinburgh by the phrenologist Edward Hamilton , who had ‘felt Dodgson’s bumps’ and subsequently declared that:
This gentleman has eight very prominent traits in his Character, namely, a strong love of children; a strong love of friends; much emulousness and amiability; much Circumspection; Lofty generous sentiments; much good taste for order & dress & elegance; Excellent analogical reason; & deep penetrating causality to trace the relation between cause and effect… [12]
Even though phrenology had gone out of vogue in Edinburgh around 1840, ‘having one’s bumps felt’ was apparently something that people still did from time to time, whether or not for entertainment. Another description stems from a woman who claimed to be a clairvoyant , possibly Maria Katherine Anderson (d. 1889), whom Dodgson had met (by invitation of a Dr. Erskine) at the Deanery. By holding in her hand a folded piece of paper containing some words written by persons unknown to her, the woman described the characters of those present, saying about Dodgson:
Very clever head; a great deal of number; a great deal of imitation; he would make a good actor; diffident; rather shy in general society; comes out in the home circle; rather obstinate; very clever; a great deal of concentration; very affectionate; a great deal of wit and humour; not much eventuality (or memory of events); fond of deep reading; imaginative, fond of reading poetry; may compose. [11]
Both readings could probably have been performed after half an hour in Dodgson’s company, provided that he could have been persuaded to talk about his favourite pastimes—so perhaps, it is not a surprise that both, on the basis of what we know about him, appeared to be fairly accurate. To this, we may add, without the need for any psychological testing, that Dodgson possessed several obsessive and compulsive character traits. The way he dressed, put on his gloves, cared for his teeth, prepared his tea, kept his diary, indexed his entries, archived his letters and photographs and carefully listed the names of pretty girls whom he had met (complete with dates and all), speaks for itself in this respect. We might even say that his obsessive traits sometimes bordered on fetishism , considering his habit of photographing people, asking for their autographs and visiting cards and collecting tiny locks of hair from his child friends. I somewhat reluctantly use the term fetishism here because we already saw that the photographs also served aesthetic purposes and, moreover, helped him to keep track of who was who in his extensive social network predating Facebook—hindered, as he was, by his face blindness . As a consequence, collecting autographs and visiting cards may also have served to document whom he had met. And yet, there also appears to have been a narcissistic side to this, as he only collected them from people he considered ‘up there’ with him in his social class, or preferably ‘above’ him. Dodgson had a very strong class consciousness , which led him to seek the acquaintance of professors, clergymen, artists, nobility and—if he got the chance—Royalty, hunting them down and literally stalking them, the way he had done, for example, with Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), the Poet Laureate, whom he had sought to approach via various family members, and whom he subsequently followed to his holiday destination to lie in wait for him, day after day, until he saw a chance to make his acquaintance. Upon completion, he would write about such ‘lion-hunting’ expeditions in his diary or to his sisters, boasting about his latest successes, which had often been accomplished with the aid of his faithful camera, which helped him to gain access to people who wished to be photographed and would otherwise have been ‘out of his league’.2 The reason for collecting locks of hair from his child friends can hardly have served any other purpose than the desire to possess something tangible of them—something to be taken out of a drawer once in a while and looked at, touched and smelled, perhaps, to remind him of the bond that he had created with this particular child by taking something that was hers in a most intimate way.3 Whether collections such as these—notably the photographs and the locks of hair—also had a sexual connotation for him, is impossible to know. Moreover, it is so sensitive an issue that I gladly leave this as a question to be answered by others—if they can. Speaking of which…
7.2.2 Sexuality and Sexual Characteristics
We already saw that a great deal of speculation has taken place as to whether Dodgson had been asexual or not, whether he had been capable of romantic love (and, perhaps, had been rejected), and even whether he might have led a life full of secret sexual encounters. Considering the way in which he carefully filtered what went into the diary, plus his awareness that it might be read by others, and the obvious realisation that his fellow Victorians would not take lightly to any hint or suggestion that he fancied the children or women with whom he had surrounded himself, it cannot be ruled out with certainty that he had been a Don Juan in disguise. Still, in that case, Dodgson must have been very skilled at hiding his frivolous escapades—if they ever took place—with all those parents keeping a watchful eye out over their daughters, prepubescent or not, and all the gossip that went on around him anyway. Moreover, it is hard to imagine that none of his former lovers—if they ever existed—would not have gone on to assert that they were the mother of an illegitimate child of his, if only to lay claim to the considerable fortune that everyone thought he had accrued.4
Whereas the possibility of an active sex life—however unlikely—can therefore not be totally dismissed, to make a case for asexuality may not be as desperate as it sounds. What if Dodgson had sought the intimate company of girls and young women, and enjoyed the exclusivity of being in their presence without experiencing any marked sexual or romantic overtones? Or, if he had experienced them, had enjoyed them in a platonic way? Wouldn’t that be possible?
As indicated before, asexuality is extremely rare in adults. And yet, it is not unthinkable that Dodgson belonged to the exclusive group of male adults who are devoid of any sex drive . This is another mystery that must go unsolved, although there is something more to be said about it that may throw some light on his ways with women.
As recounted before, at the age of 17, Dodgson had suffered from mumps , an infectious disease that can be complicated by meningitis , pancreatitis , deafness and—perhaps significant in the present context—orchitis or testicular inflammation. It is very likely that his pre-existing hearing impairment was aggravated by the mumps, leaving him deaf in the right ear. Whether he also went on to develop orchitis is unknown. Prepubescent boys suffering from mumps rarely go on to develop testicular complications, but in adult men, it is the most common type of complication, affecting about 5 to 37% of them [15]. At the age of 17, Dodgson could no longer have been considered a prepubescent boy and, therefore, belonged to the group at risk for orchitis .
What happens in such cases is that the mumps virus targets the testicles directly within the first few days of infection, destroying the parenchyma (the basic cellular tissue the testes are made of), thus causing a loss of function of one or both testicles. Initially, this causes pain, a ‘heavy’ feeling and a tender, swollen, red or purple aspect of the scrotum, along with nausea, vomiting and a further increase of the fever already caused by the mumps. Urination may become painful, and, in sexually active men, the sperm may become tinged with blood. Orchitis is lethal in a minority of cases, but those who survive it may find that one or both testicles have shrunk and that they no longer perform their proper functions. Apart from their role in the production of sperm cells, the testicles have a role in the synthesis of androgens, the hormones responsible for the development of secondary sexual characteristics. As a consequence of mumps orchitis, levels of testosterone and other androgens tend to plummet to unusually low levels, which happens in 40–70% of the cases, most often unilaterally, and in 15–30% bilaterally [16]. In the latter case, 13% of the patients go on to develop testicular atrophy (a shrinking of the testicles), a reduced production of sperm cells (oligospermia) and hence a strong decrease of their fertility—or even infertility .
Additional consequences of such a dramatic decrease in testosterone levels may be a loss of libido, impotence , gynaecomastia (i.e. the development of female breast tissue) and a failure to develop typically male characteristics such as heavy muscle and bone mass, body hair and low voice. Thus, an adolescent male affected by bilateral orchitis basically faces infectious castration . Being unable to go on developing typically male physical characteristics, he will then reach adulthood with a relatively low body mass, a frail habitus, feminine facial features, a minimum of facial hair and body hair (leaving the hair of the head unaffected), a high-pitched voice, little or no sexual drive , and sometimes also impotence, infertility and female breast tissue. Photographs of Dodgson indicate that the latter was not the case—although, for the record, it should be noted that one can never rule out the presence of breast tissue without a proper medical examination.5 So here is another question mark to be placed, and to be held firmly in place, since we really do not know whether or not Dodgson had any female breast tissue. As regards the other consequences of mumps -related orchitis , they would seem to apply remarkably well in his case, including the high-pitched voice, the frailty, the soft facial features and the—possible—asexuality .
Thinking this through, this might go a long way in explaining why Dodgson might have envied the Dean’s place in the Liddell family. If this is what had actually happened to him, with the mumps-induced orchitis and the subsequent detrimental effects on his sexual drive , he might have been physically incapable of starting a family. Having grown up in a lively household with ten siblings, and being such an obvious family man, with his love for children and female company, this must have posed a huge existential problem to him, even without the need for an active sex life. And now, having been introduced into the Liddell household, with those children of unsurpassed beauty and wit, a wonderful mother, and that outdoorsy husband of hers who so conveniently left a vacant spot to fill—which, moreover, he was allowed to fill—would it not have been possible that he had at least fantasised or dreamed sometimes, however briefly, of taking the Dean’s place for real? Dodgson was a rational person, who was too much aware of the social conventions of his day to ever think that this would have stood a chance in actual practice—however, having already ended up in this wildly unconventional situation, wouldn’t it have been the next logical step for him to daydream about? Again, these are a lot of ‘ifs’. So let us place another large question mark here and face the fact that we will probably never know for sure whether any of this took place.
What we do know is that it would have been unthinkable, especially in the Victorian era, that anyone outside the immediate family circle would have been told about so sensitive an issue. As a consequence, our chances of finding any confirmation of mumps -related orchitis and/or asexuality in letters or other written sources is negligible. This leaves us no other option than to tread extremely lightly here and conclude that we can by no means be sure whether Dodgson had been asexual, even though (with hindsight) he appears to have fit the bill rather well. On the basis of the odds mentioned above, the chances that he had suffered from unusually low androgen levels due to mumps-induced orchitis and, as a result, from a diminished sexual drive , lie somewhere between 1% and 10%, whereas the chances that he suffered from bilateral orchitis, and hence from total impotence and infertility , in the range of a tenth to 1%. While the odds are thus stacked against this possibility, we may then ask ourselves how many adult men end up with a physique like Dodgson’s, an all-consuming interest in little girls, and a marked predilection for children’s books and games.
7.2.3 The Asperger Hypothesis
The latter remark may serve to remind us of what we already know, namely, that at least some of Dodgson’s interests fell conspicuously outside the norm. Although certainly not all grown-up men are interested in sports, cars and women, they are an overwhelming majority in comparison with those who have an interest in wire puzzles, Euclid’s theorems, time zones, occultism , devices that enable one to write in the dark, backgammon, acrostics, poetry, photography, literature, art, cathedrals, homeopathy , fairy stories and prepubescent girls. It is this idiosyncratic combination of interests that has prompted some authors to suggest that Dodgson may well have had a condition not yet envisaged during his time, called Asperger’s syndrome —which is basically a fancy way of saying that he had peculiar interests and habits [17].
Asperger’s syndrome can perhaps be understood best as a diluted form of autism or ‘autism light’. Similar to people with autism proper, those diagnosed with Asperger’s do not easily fit in with society, although they may sometimes surprise friend and foe by finding a niche in life where they can flourish and end up with numerous social contacts. As we saw, that was certainly the case with Dodgson . Not only had he found his niche as a tutor of mathematics, he went on to excel at what he did, publishing mathematical papers in Nature (which indicates that at least some of his scientific work was top-notch), writing poetry, becoming a pioneer of the fledgling discipline of photography, mingling successfully in artistic circles, producing a steady stream of literary output (with the Alice book as an unsurpassed highpoint), earning enough money in the process to sustain his large extended family (as well as numerous others), and building an extensive network of meaningful social contacts. Meanwhile, however, he remained something of a fish out of water, looked upon as an anachronism among the anachronisms that already populated Christ Church , dressing and behaving in his oddly stiff way, going against the grain over issues that others found trifling, consulting top medical experts and then discarding their opinion in favour of his own, developing grand designs for ideas that were at least slightly out of touch with reality, taking things either very literally or mocking them in ways that ridiculed those who had brought them up, attaching more meaning to punctuality than is socially convenient and, generally, showing himself inflexible by imposing his own ideas upon others, and being unable to achieve more than a minuscule bit of change. In contrast to the majority of people with diagnosed autism , however, he did have a theory of mind ; this implies that he was well capable of putting himself in someone else’s shoes—especially those of children, who felt understood by him with unsurpassed subtlety and warmth. In addition, he was obviously well capable of social interaction with adults, despite the various practical obstacles he had to face.
Incidentally, these character traits—whether or not they would have justified, in our time, a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome —also helped Dodgson to deal with the constant assaults on his physical health. By stubbornly refusing to let himself be turned into a cripple despite his recurring knee problem and lumbago , and by securing vaccinations against smallpox , preferring homeopathic medications over the often dangerous treatments offered by regular 19th-Century medicine, continuing year-in year-out with his speech therapy, protecting himself against cholera and other diseases lurking in the drinking water and, in general, by continuing his private medical studies, he probably helped himself a great deal while battling his many ailments and preventing numerous others.
In other words, if we would conclude from this that the Asperger tag were indeed applicable as a retrospective diagnosis, then Dodgson must have belonged to a high-functioning subgroup who knew the sweet and the sour of this condition. Incidentally, in addition to the possibilities already mentioned, it may also have had some influence on his romantic and sexual interests, since asexuality , however rare, has been reported to be slightly more prevalent in the context of Asperger’s syndrome [18]. Nevertheless, there is no reason why this condition—or any of the other psychological traits discussed so far—would have prompted him to experience perceptual distortion s.
7.2.4 The Migraine Hypothesis
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