Krafft-Ebing invented the concept and term paedophile in the 1880s, Karoline Leach points out in her sympathetic and reasonable attempt to rescue the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson/Lewis Carroll from modern charges of sexual psychopathology.
Before Krafft-Ebing, Victorians seemed able innocently to love children who were not their own, even to idolise them for imaginary angelic purity. Dodgson avowedly loved a succession of little girls he called his ‘child friends’. Parents permitted him - indeed, often commissioned him - to photograph their daughters, sometimes nude. Since Krafft-Ebing and Freud, Dodgson has been retrospectively suspected of a perverse obsession with prepubescents.
Leach blames a playful Balliol undergraduate for Dodgson’s generally accepted modern reputation as a sexual deviant. Anthony Goldschmidt, in 1933, published an article, ‘Alice in Wonderland Psycho-Analysed’, in The New Oxford Outlook, in which he contended that ‘the openeing section of Wonderland was a kind of cryptic message from Lewis Carroll’s subconscious’.
The fall down the rabbit-hole [her summary goes on] was a symbol of sexual penetration, the doors surrounding the hallway representing female genitalia. In selecting the little door in preference to the big, Alice (or rather Dodgson in the guise of Alice) was choosing to copulate with a female child instaed of an adult woman.
One Freudian analyst, Paul Schilder, in 1938, suggested, according to Leach, that ‘Alice might have been a substitute penis’. William Empson wrote that Alice is a father in getting down the hole, a fetus at the bottom, and can only be born by becoming a mother and producing her own amniotic fluid. John Skinner theorised that Lewis Carroll’s life seems to indicate that he did not like his adult, masculine character and that he wished to change himself into a small, adventurous girl. Martin Grotjahn inferred from Alice that Dodgson was ‘schizoid’, ‘compulsive’, paranoid’ and ‘regressive’, fascinated by ‘sexually undifferentiated child-actresses’.
Thick and fast they came at last, the preposterous allegations. One Geza Roheim even deduced that everything in Dodgson’s life and work was, in Leach’s words, ‘a metaphor for latent cannibalism’. By merely quoting the analyses Leach renders them ludicrous, and thus, justifiably, subverts Dennis Potter’s 1965 BBC radio play Alice. According to Humphrey Crapenter’s biography of Potter, the play was based on his appraisal of Dodgson as ‘that haunted soul, who didn’t stutter when talking to little girls but was done for as soonas they reached puberty’.
Dodgson’s posthumous public image was distorted in an entirely different way long before the Feudians seized on it. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, Dodgson’s nephew, published the first and only official biography in 1898. For his The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, Collingwood had unique access to all Dodgson’s diaries and correspondence, but used only the material illustrating his these that his subject, as Leach dubs this fantasy figure, was ‘St Lewis’. Having concocted his treacly, sentimental hagiography of the shy bachelor genius of Christ Church, Collingwood destroyed records that might have revealed a more realistically worldly portrait.
What did Dodgson write in the parts of his diaries that Collingwood and probably other members of his family decided should be withheld from all the would-be biographers who succedded him? Leach, a patient, resourceful and commonsensical literary detective, finds the greatest significance in the diary pages Collingwood cut out. By adducing circumstantial evidence, she constructs a theorynof what is missing, an account of a love affair that Dodgson had, apparently not with Alice Liddell but with her mother, the wife of the dean of his college.
Leach publishes, as an appendix to her excellent book, long extracts from Dodgson’s love poetry, which was written between 1859 and 1868, a period of emotional turmoil and depression. Some of the poetry, in her opinion, is ‘mediocre’, and so it is, but ‘all of it is honest, providing, even at its most rambling and self-indulgent, a rare insight into his heart and mind during this strange and troubled period of his life’. In a poem called ‘Stolen Waters’, the love-lorn Dodgson first eulogises, then laments the loved one: ‘She was lithe and tall and fair/ And with a wayward grace/ Her queenly head she bare’. (Surely not little dark-haired Alice Liddell?)
She plucked a branch above her head
With rarest fruitage laden.
'Drink of the juice, sir Knight', she said,
‘ 'Tis good for knight and maiden.'
I drank the juice and straightway felt
A fire within my brain:
My soul within me seemed to melt
In sweet delirious pain.
'Sweet is the stolen draught' she said:
'Hath sweetness stint or measure?
Pleasant the secret hoard of bread:
What bars us from our pleasure?'
Torrid stuff, which certainly does not seem to have been inspired by fondness for a child. And then, as if in post-coital tristesse, the poet writes:
In the gray light I saw her face,
And it was withered, old and gray:
The fruits were rotting in their place
The flowers were fading where we lay,
Were fading with the fading day.
In order to clear Dodgson/Carroll from the charge of paedophilia, Karoline Leach has had to demonstrate that he was an adulterer - a serial one at that, for she shows he developed many intimate relationships with married women, especially those whose marriages were unsatisfactory. It ios clear that he was neither saint nor pervert. I welcome this work of re-assessment, though it is by no means a whitewash, and I believe that many lovers of Carroll will be similarly relieved.
Patrick Skene Catling
At last a book with something new - and surprising - to say about Lewis Carroll. A great many Alice fans will hate it because it debunks her, as well as Lewis Carroll, as largely fictitious icons of the pious, sentimental literature of childhood innocence.
No, gentle reader, I do not mean that Charles Dodgson’s relations with Alice Liddell were guilty ones of repressed paedophilia, as has often been suggested in recent times. What Karoline Leach suggests, treading boldly into the field of Alice ‘experts’, is more shocking than that. It is that little Alice did not matter all that much in Dodgson’s life. He was certainly not in love with her. Although he created Wonderland for her (and did very well out of it commercially) his friendship with the real Alice was quite short-lived and no more intense than those with many other of his ‘child-friends’. The Dream Child existed only in the book.
What did matter to him intensely at that time was his feelings for her mother. What? Mrs Lorina Liddell, the domineering dragon of Christ Church and queen of Oxford society? Anyway, didn’t Dodgson say that he was not interested in girls after puberty? But this, of course, is to go along with the myth of the shy, stammering, celibate don who never grew up, who was at ease only with very young girls, whose life was blighted when they grew up and left him behind broken-hearted and lamenting lost innocence.
This myth was planted by Dodgson’s nephew, Stuart Collingwood, in the sanctimonious biography he published in 1898, the year of Dodgson’s death. The doctoring of his diaries - the missing volumes and cut pages - are due to Colllingwood or Dodgson's nieces wielding the scissors. His saintly version has since been substantially accepted. Why? Charles Dodgson, says Ms Leach who has burrowed into the archives at Christ Church, wasn’t really like that at all.
He had many girlfriends, attractive adult women whose visits and holidays spent with him often gave rise to gossip. He wrote love poetry, very anguished if not very good, which is clearly addressed to a full-grown temptress to whom he succumbed and then regretted it. And, for a period before and after writing Alice in Wonderland, his diary is full of guilty accusations of sinfulness and prayers to lead a better life which suggests a sexual affair. Such things far from amount to proof that he was in love with Mrs Liddell, a forbidden fruit if ever there was one as she was the wife of his employer. Yet the case the author builds up grows little by little more convincing.
The Dean, a crusty and crafty Oxford politician, was 15 years older than his wife Lorina, described by contemporaries as ‘a beauty of the Spanish type’, tall, dark, exotic, with a voluptuous figure and magnetic personality. By marrying him at 20 she had escaped from lowly origins in Lowestoft to turn heads in high society. Dodgson, 26 to her 30, was also magnetic, confident, ambitious and extremely attractive to women.
The common idea that she disliked or distrusted him is not borne out by fact. He was constantly visiting the Deanery and using it as a studio and dark room for his photography. Far from forbidding him, she urged him to photograph her three daughters, Ina Alice and Edith, who readily adored him.
Dodgson reached the point of acting almost as surrogate father to them. For four vital years of this friendship the diary volumes are missing. When they resume in 1862, shortly before the birth of Alice in Wonderland, they are full of guilty outbursts of self-reproach. The man who published the children’s classic and became famous was in private tormented and unhappy.
What happened between him and Mrs Liddell to cause the break in their friendship in June 1863, when the most famous missing page in his diary occurs? In the Dodgson archive the author found a small piece of paper in the hand of his niece Violet headed ‘Cut Pages in Diary’.
This discovery makes it clear that the break was nothing to do with Alice - it was to do with rumours about adult entanglements. An alarmed Mrs Liddell told him to ‘hold aloof’, as he put it, for six months. After that he was invited back - when the Dean was away. Mrs Liddell was alarmed about her and her family’s reputation. the following spring she refused permission for him to take the girls on the river any more. After that she disappears for two years from the diary and he enters a period of deep depression. But then he is back visiting the Deanery to see not Alice but her mother.
Was she the source of his guilty anguish, of his unhappy love poetry, and was their relationship, physical or not, the reason Mrs Liddell destroyed his letters to her children and did not allow his name to be mentioned in her husband’s biography?
They continued to meet in later life and in one letter Dodgson recalls their early days at Christ Church together as ‘that foolish time that seemed as if it would last for ever’. There will be much irritation and rebuttal of this well-argued, well-written case. But, whatever you think of Mrs Liddell as the key to his mystery, the myth of Lewis Carroll as the shy, dreamy recluse who could relate only to little girls has been permanently damaged.
Peter Lewis
A while ago in this column I sceptically noted on the basis of a preview in the Sunday Times, that a forthcoming book on Lewis Carroll intended to argue that far from being the diffident stammering figure with regrettably paeodphile tendencies that most of us thought we knew about, he was quite a dashing fellow who might even have had an affair with Lorina Liddell, wife of the Dean of Christ Church, and mother of his model for Alice.
This book has now appeared and its author Karoline Leach courteously wrote to suggest that inspection of what she had actually written might put her book in a better light than the Sunday Times and I had contrived to do. She was right.
It is a pity that the sections dealing with the putative affair between Lorina and Carroll have distracted from the book's real purpose which is clearly to peel away legend - a legend she suggests which his family fostered and went to great and sometimes unscrupulous lengths to protect. It isn't always convincing , and here and there where Leach has written : 'it may be significant...' I have noted in the margin : 'and then again it may not'. But the argument that we have tended to take the traditional picture of 'Carroll' for granted, and that there is good solid evidence, if only you look for it, which sharply changes the picture, is much more persuasive than I had expected.
Leach's book is less straight biography, than a sort of biographical detective story, reminiscent at times, of Humphrey Carpenter's portrait of Robert Runcie. The picture with which she replaces the former confected image is far from definitive. The destruction of essential documents, like the pages ripped from his journal, would alone have seen to that. But even if the verdict is sometimes no more than 'not proven', the investigation is well worth the scholarly struggles involved. We are nearer now than before, I think, to the man who wrote Alice.
David Mckie
Lewis Carroll was more than a pseudonym. he was another identity which became a mythic presence. That there never was such a person, that his creator lived a different life is irrelevant to the myth. Everyone knows about Lewis Carroll, yet almost everything, even when evidenced by personal recollections, photographs and letters, is an invention.
The reasons for invention are varied, Charles Dodgson (who became Carroll) is himself the primary culprit, creating an innocent public image behind which his indulgence and guilt could hide. Those who knew him, especially his family, had their own reputations to consider. So, an elaborate lie was established and believed even by those who might have spoken the truth. The public image grew so famous and so powerful that it mesmerized some of the most eminent men and women of the time.
...The imagery of Carroll is everywhere. So, too is the reputation which long since turned sour. Taking the public image at face-value, commentators have made inventions of their on, ignoring the realities to be found in Dodgson’s private papers. The diaries are quoted selectively. letters are quoted as evidence for a state of mind which s not necessarily so evident when seen in context. By such legerdemain speculation is given authority without reference to other interpretations; ‘What I tell you three times is true’
It is Karoline Leach’s achievement to cut through a century of unrealities to give a credible account of the man who was Lewis Carroll. her defence both of his brilliance and his frailties is more than chivalrous; it is just. The hostility has been extraordinary. No-one denies the quality of the Alice books, but they are treated as accidents emanating from a deviant’s pathology. there have been too few who have been able to accept Charles Dodgson as the poet-logician of rational genius extending beyond mere chance.
Someone as influential as Dodgson is certain to attract all manner of prejudice. But in his case this is singular in the degree of prejudice and its duration. The truth is more interesting than the myths for and against. Charles Dodgson was neither the shy, kindly celibate, nor the weird voyeur of innocence. His true nature has been evident for years, but lacking the systematic investigation of the relevant documents. there have been those, notably Edmund Wilson, who surmised that ‘Lewis Carroll’ obscured a more sympathetic man. Now we have the whole truth with an intelligent advocate. Karoline Leach’s achievement is considerable and it cannot be ignored.
Geoffrey Heptonstall
Biography murdered Charles Dodgson, wiped up the blood and whisked away the evidence before anyone could notice. In the space left behind a stand-in was carefully constructed.
He looked a lot like Dodgson, had the same stutter and a similarly unsettled sexuality. But there were important difference. While the original Dodgson spent his adult life struggling with a fierce desire for other men’s wives, the new Dodgson battled with longings for other men’s children. He had another name, too: Lewis Carroll.
It is Karoline Leach’s extraordinary contention that the Dodgson family were so embarrassed by Charles’s cavortings - proper, grown-up, rumpy-pumpy cavortings - that they carefully composed a picture of Charles as an innocent soul who liked nothing more than to help out with the baby-sitting.
Anxious surviving sisters and nieces snipped out those entries form Charles’s diary which seemed to point to wards an active and unregulated sexuality. Tame early biographers, who included one of Dodgson’s own nephews, then scraped together the remaining anodyne evidence to create a picture of a gentle neuter, a dreamy friend of children who never left his own emotional nursery.
Once Freudianism took hold of this replacement Dodgson, the mood turned darker. The child-lover became the child-molester, the happy snapper a pornographer. the diary gaps and ‘lost’ letters were now filled with wild biographical speculation. for instance, the sudden frosting of relations between Dodgson and the Liddell family was put down to the fact the Mrs Liddell, mother of Alice and wife to the Dean of Christ Church, was panicked by the creepy interest which her husband's colleague was showing in her little girl. Other ruptures, evasions and sudden departure’s in Dodgson’s long life likewise came to be viewed through the twentieth century’s preoccupations with ‘deviant’ sexuality. Suddenly the idea of straight, adult, consensual sex as an explanation for anything seemed very tame indeed.
Karoline Leach has chosen a difficult book to write. For while she aims for the general reader, she presents the kind of intricate reconfiguring of sources usually found in an academic monograph. The lengthy first chapter of the book comprises an exhaustive review of Carroll biography over the past century. This is essential if the rest of the book is to make sense, but it does demand a high level of commitment from readers who have spent the past 15 years dawdling towards the idea of Lewis Carroll as a paedophile.
The nub of Leach’s argument is that, far from fancying little Alice Liddell, Dodgson was having an affair with her mother. Lorina Liddell was a pretty, pushy woman who had married the chilly Henry Liddell as a way out of a third-rate background. But she reckoned without the fact that her husband was probably homosexual, always more interested in his beloved Arthur Stanley than he had ever been in her or the children they produced.
On the family’s arrival at Christ Church in 1856, Dodgson started paying court to his boss’s frustrated wife. For an unspecified time they were probably lovers, until the gossip became too hot. Terrified of losing everything she had worked for, Lorina withdrew suddenly. The Dodgson family, likewise worried about how both Oxford and London might view the scandal, jumped ion quickly with a version of their elder brother as a clueless castrato.
Of course Leach does not know this for sure, but she makes a good case. Particularly persuasive is her reading of Dodgson’s love poetry, written around this time, which deals with the agony of frustrated adult, sexual love. Since the verse was not published by ‘Lewis Carroll’ and fits uneasily with either the benign or malign versions of the child-lover, it has been ignored by biographer. So too has the extraordinary Sylvie and Bruno, 800 pages of prose soul-baring which forms a barely coded commentary on Dodgson’s relationship with the entire Liddell family.
What Leach does best is to remind us that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a writer whose achievement did not begin and end with Alice. But whether he really was the kind of man who had worried husbands reaching for their horsewhips is another matter.
Kathryn Hughes
... this is a handsomely produced volume from a theatre writer making her debut between the covers of a book.
Leach argues - and this is where her choice of title baffles me - that Carroll did not spend the greater part of his adult life nursing a forlorn, and originally paedophile, love for Alice Liddell, the girl to whom he first told the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on a famous boat trip in July 1862.
She traces the way in which the image of Carroll was created by successive biographers. He was first portrayed as a bachelor academic whose innocence was expressed in happy associations with children. then, of course, the world was changed by Dr Freud and he became a potentially dangerous pervert. The fact that there was some kind of quarrel between him and Alice Liddell’s family in June 1863 led to speculation that they had become suspicious of him, and the unmistakable sense of loss which coloured his later life was interpreted as evidence of a love for Alice.
This edifice was largely built on gaps in the record, for Carroll’s family not only destroyed key volumes of his diary but cut out entries from those which survived, including that for the weekend of his quarrel with the Liddells. As a result this book has something of the character of a detective story as Leach re-examines the evidence, including a note which summarises the contents of the crucial missing entry. She can’t shy away from the fact that Carroll liked photographing naked young girls, but places this convincingly in a cultural context which is now unimaginable to us: he could be public about this taste because it was seen as quite innocent. It was his photographs of mature women which he had to keep secret.
There is no doubt that Carroll was strongly heterosexual and fascinated by females of many ages. Weaving together an analysis of his diary with his love poetry, Leach makes out a persuasive case that the love of his life wasn’t Alice Liddell, but her mother - and that it wasn’t unconsummated.
Graeme Woolaston,
Lewis Carroll Review, 1999
In 1996, when Karoline Leach was researching the Dodgson Family Papers at Guildford, she came across a scrap of paper written by Charles Dodgson’s niece Violet, headed ‘Cut Pages in Diary’, referring to the contents of various pages she and her sister were intending to cut from their uncle’s journal.
What particularly caught Karoline Leach’s attention was an entry marked ‘Vol. 8 page 92’ which she realised was ‘the missing page, the one for 27-29 June 1863, that all the fuss is about, the one assumed to have contained the story of Dodgson’s marriage proposal (to Alice) and his banishment from the Deanery’. In fact Violet Dodgson’s brief summary revealed that the censored passages referred to Mrs Liddell telling Dodgson that he was rumoured to be ‘using the children as a means of paying court to the governess’ and that ‘He is also supposed (unreadable) to be courting Ina’.
The first item is rather curious. As far back as May 17 1857 there had been rumours that the real reason for Dodgson’s frequent appearances at the Deanery was that he was courting Miss Prickett, and even though Mrs Liddell was in Madeira at the time it does seem extraordinary that it should have taken six years for the story to reach her ears.
Similarly, as far as the reference to ‘courting Ina’ goes, there is nothing very new or remarkable in this. For some time there had been doubts as to whether Ina was still of a suitable age to be accompanying Dodgson and her younger sisters on their boating expeditions and there may well have been rumours about his intentions towards her, but this hardly seems sufficient reason for cutting a chunk out of the diary. One is left wondering whether there was not a great deal left out of Violet Dodgson’s terse aide-memoire.
However, that scrap of paper led Karoline Leach to two important conclusions. The first was that, since the ‘crucial’ missing page apparently contained no reference to Alice at all, the whole notion of Dodgson’s ‘supposed passion’ for her was rendered null and void, and the whole myth of the ‘Dreamchild’ was demolished. Her second conclusion was that the ‘Ina’ referred to was not the daughter but the mother and that Dodgson was involved in a fully-fledged love affair with the wife of the Dean of Christ Church, Lorina Liddell: ‘Circumstantially, the case for the ‘Ina’ of the document being not the daughter but the mother seems stronger than anything else presented in explanation of this strange and troubled time in his life ...’
The first of these conclusions is by far the more important since it calls into question the whole history of Dodgson biography and, indeed, the question of what kind of character he really was at all:
‘The axiom upon which the entire analysis of Carroll’s life and literature depends is the assumption that the girl-child was the single outlet for his emotional energies in an otherwise lonely and isolated life; that she was the sole inspiration for his genius and that she inhabited the place in his heart occupied in more normal lives by adult friends and lovers.’
The myth that Dodgson’s emotional life was centred entirely upon pre-pubescent, Karoline Leach argues, was a deception in which Dodgson himself participated:
‘The guise of patron saint of childhood offered itself at the right time and he took it up as a part-time persona.’
The concept was fostered by his nephew and first biographer, Stuart Collingwood (very much the villain of the piece in Leach’s account) and by the Dodgson family who, she alleges, suppressed any evidence of Dodgson’s involvement with adult women by mutilating the remainder with scissors or razors. Other letters or papers that contradicted the notion of Dodgson as a ‘delicate, ethereal spirit’ were disposed of by Wilfred Dodgson in the holocaust of documents and photographs which followed his brother’s death. Unfortunately the whole attempt to protect Dodgson’s character misfired and, from having been the children’s version of Saint Francis, he rapidly acquired instead the reputation of a sexual deviant and paedophile.
Subsequent biographers, Leach argues, Anne Clark, Morton Cohen and myself included, did not seek to question the ‘Dreamchild’ myth of Alice’s centrality to Dodgson’s life but extended and perpetuated it:
‘Charles Dodgson’s life, as he lived it or would have understood it, has yet to be recorded. In place of his experience of himself we have, for our own reasons, created ‘Carroll’, the voodoo doll for our own anxieties, a plastic saint or a Freudian cliché. But the splendour of his literary legacy, the sheer richness that he has bequeathed us deserves better than that. Without doubt, however unintentionally, we have sold him short.’
All that is very well argued and is highly stimulating. The disappointment is that, after this highly effective demolition operation, much of what follows is not so very different from the standard accounts of Dodgson’s life’ Because In the Shadow of the Dreamchild is part thesis and only part biography, too much of Dodgson’s life is presented in outline only and it is a pity that Karoline Leach did not make fuller use of her opportunity to let us see more of her liberated Dodgson in action.
We are given an astute and penetrating account of the Archdeacon’s relationship with his children, the extent to which he exercised control over them well into adult life, taking pains to discourage ‘romantic contact with the opposite sex’. She suggests that he was a man ‘in a sense dependent on his children's dependence’, which seems to me very well observed. Yet of Dodgson’s sisters, the formative relationship of his early years, we are told virtually nothing which, in a book which aims to put his sexual development in a new perspective, is rather disappointing. She does, however, give hints of a brighter, breezier, more carefree and yet more ruthlessly self-propelled Dodgson than we are accustomed to:
‘His scholastic career was only a stop-gap to other more exciting ambitions that he wanted hungrily ...’
It is not until her account of the reading party at Whitby in the summer of 1854 that Leach’s reinvented Dodgson begins tentatively to emerge as one of the lads in the bar of the Royal Hotel. His portrayal of frustrated passion for the local working girls and barmaids in The Lady of the Ladle and Wilhelm von Schmitz is used to demonstrate ‘at least interest and quite possibly experience of the opposite sex’.
Where Karoline Leach really does get into her stride, however, is in her assertion that the central emotional relationship of Dodgson’s life was not with Alice but with her mother, Lorina Liddell, and, highly unlikely as this may seem at first acquaintance, the thesis is forcefully and cogently argued...In the end I have to confess, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, that I cannot believe in any of it. Admittedly Karoline Leach’s thesis does account for Mrs Liddell’s daughter Lorina deliberately misleading Florence Becker Lennon over the real reason for ‘all intercourse ceasing’ between Dodgson and the Deanery by encouraging her to believe that it was all to do with Alice, but once again it is negative testimony only, as is too much of the other ‘evidence’ put forward to support the notion of Mrs Liddell being Dodgson’s mistress, although it is greatly to be regretted that restrictions were placed on the use of the Liddell papers at Christ Church which might have borne out the theory more effectively....
By far the best part of the book is the argument Karoline Leach makes out for Dodgson’s devotion to women in general throughout his life, from nymphets to dowagers:
‘He was, perhaps, before anything else, a man who adored and relished every aspect of femaleness, who responded sensually and emotionally to female company and who required the comfort and stimulus this gave him to provide a meaning for life ...’
She points out that girls of all ages were photographed or sketched by him in the nude, not merely the ‘little nudities’ for which he has become notorious and his collection of pictures included studies of women who were certainly far from pre-pubescent.
Isa Bowman, closest of all Dodgson’s ‘child-friends’, with whom he enjoyed an emotional relationship far more long-lasting than his acquaintance with Alice, was thirteen when he first met her and their friendship lasted until she was twenty. Many of the girls whom he entertained tête-à-tête in his rooms were in their late teens and early twenties and Dodgson’s life, particularly in his later years, was rich in friendships with older women, Constance Burch, Edith Shute and Sarah Blakemore among them, not to mention the pathetic Gertrude Thomson, brilliantly portrayed in this book. I cannot help feeling that the book’s thesis might have proved more convincing if far more space had been devoted to the exploration of these and many other similar friendships than to the single-minded pursuit o Mrs Liddell. This has been a markedly under-researched area of Dodgson’s life and one which might yield much greater insight to the limitless complexity of his character. Dodgson ultimately grows in strength and interest the further he is taken away from Alice and the Liddells.
What this book demonstrates is that despite the thousands of letters and all the surviving volumes of the diary, the biographies and the reminiscences, there is so much that we really do not know about Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, possibly because that is the way he wished it to be.
After Karoline Leach’s book Carroll studies can never be quite the same again. We may not agree with it but we cannot ignore it and it should certainly be read by anyone concerned with Dodgson’s life and work. The author may not in the end have stormed the castle but she has blown a considerable breach in the walls.
Michael Bakewell