Like the recently passed J.D. Salinger, Lewis Carroll was an author who shunned publicity and sought privacy. While it may have made his life easier to live, all the secrecy can be damaging to one's reputation, especially if you're no longer around to defend yourself.
Carroll has had it harder than most, notably demonized as a pedophile. Long a fan since devouring his stories in her childhood, London journalist Jenny Woolf set out to find the truth — or as much that could be determined — in her biography of the legendary writer, THE MYSTERY OF LEWIS CARROLL: DISCOVERING THE WHIMSICAL, THOUGHTFUL, AND SOMETIMES LONELY MAN WHO CREATED ALICE IN WONDERLAND.
With 10 brothers and sisters, Carroll had no shortage of support throughout his years, right up to his death in 1898. But it's his non-familial relationships that, understandably, remain under society's microscope. Woolf finds that while many women were taken with Carroll's charm, it's likely that he died a virgin, as rumored, or at least found his limited sexual experiences so shameful, that he chose celibacy at great length.
Perhaps that's why his interest in young girls — we're talking not yet "age of consent" here — has set so many tongues a-wagging. Woolf spends a great deal of time discussing his interest in photography, particularly shooting friends' children scantily clad or even nude. While Woolf notes that this was normal for the times, the creepiness is tough to shake.
His most famous object of affection, of course, is Alice Liddell, for whom he wrote ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, and even that relationship became fractured, as Woolf investigates. What's more interesting are the Freudian analyses of ALICE she presents from others, such as the interpretation that a shrinking and growing Alice represented Carroll's erection, or that "going down the rabbit hole" was his thinly veiled desire to penetrate Liddell.
Even if not all of the mystique is solved, THE MYSTERY OF LEWIS CARROLL at least clears up some misconceptions, putting a mild spit-polish on the author's rep (as there's no evidence he diddled kids). I'd place Woolf's work on par with Rebecca Loncraine’s recent L. Frank Baum bio, THE REAL WIZARD OF OZ: neither definitive nor mandatory, but certainly smart and stimulating enough. —Rod Lott
Buy it at Amazon.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
There’s a good movie on the Carroll-Liddell relationship from several years ago, called “Dreamchild,” which is about her unresolved feelings for him.
Thanks very much for your review. I just wanted to correct one point of fact, (and that’s simply because I’m a nit pickety biographer). There’s no evidence that Carroll wrote “ALice’s Adventures in Wonderland” FOR Alice Liddell. He was careful to make that clear, just as he also made the point that Alice Liddell wasn’t the “Alice” of the stories. As usual nobody took any notice of what he actually said! But to me this is one of the interesting but so far unsolved mysteries of just what was going on.
If you liked Jenny Woolf’s book you might well be interested in Karoline Leach’s ‘In the Shadow of the Dreamchild’ (Peter Owen 1999, extended 2nd edn 2009), which along with the articles of Hugues Lebailly really kicked off the New Carroll Studies movement and exposed the myth-driven nature of LC’s popular image. (Leach kicks the Freudian critics’ collective arse good and hard too).
Steve – Coral Browne is extremely good in ‘Dreamchild’, and so are the Jim Henson puppets. But don’t take it as history.
Why is it likely he died a virgin? Who says there’s no evidence he diddled kids? Or anyone else? Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.