STORY OF A CONTROVERSY

The appearance of In the Shadow of the Dreamchild in the late spring of 1999 was something of a rock thrown into the calm millpond of Carroll scholarship. As the Lewis Carroll Review put it - "Carroll studies can never be quite the same again".

On the face of it the book wasn't doing anything very remarkable; it simply traced the way that Carroll's biography had been developed over the hundred years since his death -- but the story it told was strange and gripping. Step by step it showed how accident and confusion, occasional deceit and wild imagination had combined with the huge popularity of the 'Alice' books to create a simplified, mythic image of 'Lewis Carroll'; an image that had little resemblance in many important particulars to the real man. It created something of a furore by showing that many of the most famous 'facts' about this 'Carroll' - including his assumed passion for Alice Liddell and his infamous 'obsession' with pre-pubescent girls, were actually quite poorly supported by the evidence and quite unlikely to be true. At the same time it unearthed the forgotten story of Dodgson's friendships with adult women, which had been a feature of his real life and yet lost to biography for many years.

In this way, the 'little book' demanded a radical alteration of the entire landscape of Carroll studies, forced a reconsideration of all previous biographies and challenged several academic reputations to boot. -- The fallout from this was understandably considerable.

Today, six years on, Leach's book is becoming an important reference work for Carroll scholars and fans, and it has helped to transform our image of Lewis Carroll from lonely deviant to mature and complex human being, but when it first appeared it polarised responses. General critics and historians were enthusiastic for what it was doing, while many Carrollian stalwarts reacted with a storm of emotional fury. The biographers whose work Leach deconstructed were indignant, while the most hardline Carrollians were outraged at her unravelling of the myth. The book was described as 'dangerous', and one elderly churchman even demanded it should be burned. Respected authorities like Donald Rackin wrote what can only be described as hysterical denunciations that wildy misrepresented the book's content and made claims for it that Leach herself had never made. Lewis Carroll's own family even tried to prevent the book being published and took the extraordinary step of denouncing it in the pages of The Lewis Carroll review Given the fact that they had never before taken such a step with any book about Carroll, (not even the bizarre book that suggested he was Jack the Ripper!), their conduct is very hard to explain. In the Shadow of the Dreamchild remains the only book the family has ever tried to ban, though they have never publicly stated their reasons. Beyond this, even today there are some Carrollian diehards who can hardly bear to mention the name of In the Shadow of the Dreamchild or its author. The result of this very emotional and intense response was to sometimes obscure the issues the book was trying to raise.

Given that a central tenet of the book is that Carroll's reputation as a would-be pedophile is a simplistic misapplication and given that Leach does so much to show that history has badly misjudged the man on that account, the negative reaction is in some ways quite surprising. Yet many Carroll admirers were apparently infuriated at Leach's rediscovery of Carroll's forgotten relationships with adult women, and the other examples of his clearly mature lifestyle. The reasons for this are hard to find.

Beyond the hysteria, it's apparent that all Leach has done is to show that the evidence for Carroll's life tells a different story from the mythic version of that life which we find in the biographies. The emotional response to her work perhaps tells us how vital Carroll and his creations remain in the modern world, and how important therefore it is to strive for a better understanding of both. In the Shadow of the Dreamchild is not 'dangerous', cynical or 'fictional' as it has variously been called. It is a new approach to Lewis Carroll, and one which has so far survived all attempts to disprove and denigrate it.

In the words of the Lewis Carroll Review "it should certainly be read by anyone concerned with Dodgson’s life and work".