EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER ONE...

Charles Dodgson was born on January 27 1832. He lived his life and eventually died on January 14 1898.

Lewis Carroll was born on March 1 1856, and is still very much alive.

The hundred years of scholarship surrounding the author of Alice, has, I suggest, been largely concerned with the second rather than the first of these two incarnations. It has been devoted primarily to a potent mythology surrounding the name "Lewis Carroll", rather than the reality of the man, Dodgson. The evidence for this is everywhere, the reasons are only partly explicable in rational terms....

Charles Dodgson's family's incursive destruction of his papers immediately after his death, and their steady refusal to allow evidence to be made public, meant that the first hand biographical evidence remained almost non-existent until the second half of this present century. In a separate but ultimately linked development, a massive and almost irresistible myth surrounding the name "Lewis Carroll" had begun to develop even while Dodgson still lived. In the fallow space left by the lack of prima facie evidence, and the silence of his family, this myth grew in an unprecedented and powerful way. When early biographers wrote their studies of Lewis Carroll, lacking almost all first hand evidence, they had little choice but to fill their books with the stuff of this myth. And thus very early on it became dignified by an apparent scholastic pedigree. Later biographers took their lead and repeated these supposedly already verified "facts".

By the time any large amounts of prima facie data became available, the supposed "truth" about Charles Dodgson's life had become so well known, so embedded in the scholastic tradition that revision on any major scale seemed unnecessary, even impertinent. And evidence -- sometimes extremely large and conclusive amounts of evidence -- that suggested other possibilities tended to be marginalised and ignored....Thus, the current biography of the author of Alice is in some of its most important respects, an invented biography of an invented name. It is more an extended essay on the unconscious power of myth and its place in the most civilised society, than it is any kind of full exposition of Dodgson's life....

...Today, the modern 'official' portrait is widely familiar. It is a portrait of a Victorian clergyman, shy and prim, and locked to some degree in perpetual childhood. A Janus who stumbled into genius through psychological fragmentation. A man who "had no life", who lived apart from the world and apart from normal human contact, who was monkish and chaste, and "died a virgin" (Phillips 1974 , p. 78; Thomas 1996, p. 13).

Perhaps above all else, it is a portrait of a man emotionally focused on pre-pubescent female children; a man who sought comfort and companionship exclusively through serial friendships with "little girls", and who almost invariably lost interest in them when they reached puberty. His emotional life is usually presented as an ultimately sterile and lonely series of "repeated rejections", as the little ones grew up and inevitably left him behind. Since Freudian analysis plucked out the heart of his mystery sixty years ago, and found it cankered, this obsession has been seen by many as evidence of a repressed and deviant sexuality, and Carroll has been described as a man who struggled to master his "differing sexual appetites". To the popular press and the popular mind he is seen as a "paedophile". To distinguished scholars he is a man who "desired the companionship of female children" .... (Cohen 1995, pp. 340, 530).

...The idea that so much respected tradition might be no more than a collation of powerful but baseless myths seems an outrageous and impudent suggestion. But nonetheless, it happens to be true. The prima facie record, as it has emerged over the past fifty years, simply does not by any objective standard adequately support these images, or the present certitudes that have been built upon them. As this book will attempt to show, the very reverse appears to be the case....."