About the Book

Lewis Carroll was the J K Rowling of his day, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland remains one of the most quoted books in the world, along with the Bible and Shakespeare. But his life-story as told in the biographies has become more myth than fact.

When In the Shadow of the Dreamchild first appeared in 1999 it created a furore by showing that a massive 'Myth' had grown to conceal the real and complex reality of the man's existence. Despite the hysteria that greeted its arrival,in the nine years since it first appeared In The Shadow of the Dreamchild has become an important reference work for Carroll scholars and fans, and it has helped transform our image of Lewis Carroll from lonely deviant to mature and complex human being. - Now it is out in a new paperback edition, revised and extended. You can read the detailed story of how the various biographers's obsessions, fantasies and failures combined accident and design to create the mirage of 'Carroll'.

This is the book that first showed:

I meant a. that your source for Holiday being difficult is not very strong, being only third hand, and b. I was asking you if you were joking when you said something about my manipulating evidence. If you prefer not to try and answer that is fine, but I think these odd non sequiturs about shoes and things only serve to annoy everyone. k
• Lewis Carroll was not 'exclusively focused' on female children
• He did not 'lose interest' in girls over the age of 14, and that many of his so-called 'child-friends' had actually been grown women.

• Alice Liddell was not 'the real Alice', and that Carroll was never in love with her, or asked to marry her.
• His life was haunted by an unnamed pain that may have involved a guilty love affair