In this biography, the author reveals Lewis Carroll as a man who faced what Robert Browning described as "The Dangerous Edge of Things", closer to the underworld of psychopathology, crime and vice than his admirers thought possible, yet closer still to the golden afternoon of Wonderland. Despite the apparent seclusion of his life in an Oxford college, Lewis Carroll as the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson had strong political views and was unusually well informed about the vices of his age. He saw mid-Victorian London at its most raffish, while his library contained books on prostitution and the criminal underworld. He showed a sustained interest in law, crime and madness, counting the most eminent advocates and judges among his friends. "Alice in Wonderland" may appear as a spontaneous tale told on a summer afternoon; David Thomas shows it as the fruit of Dodgson's classical education and a reflection of momentous changes in mid-Victorian law and society. Though a recluse in his later years, Dodgson in the 1860s was an inveterate theatre-goer, a friend of a young actress, a guest in the bohemia of the Pre-Raphaelites, and photographer of the famous. His summer months were spent in the elegance and comfort of the fashionable Voctorian seaside. The most paradoxical of Victorians was an opponent of vivisection and blood sports who teased his readers with the humour of cruelty. He was importunate in persuading "little nudities" to pose before his camera, yet described any attempt to overcome their reluctance as a "crime before God". Dodgson, the anxious prude, left to the world unfettered imagination of Lewis Carroll in Alice and "The Hunting of the Snark". Within 40 years of his death, his progency had escaped the nursery to rub shoulders with Swift and Sade, Freud and surrealism.
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The marvelous whimsy of Alice in Wonderland masked unsparing revelations about the uncertainty of identity and impossibility of truly grasping reality--philosophical themes that biographers have dealt with far more comfortably than the now-famous fondness for little girls displayed by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98). This is certainly not true of British novelist and biographer Donald Thomas, who positively revels in the less savory interests of his subject, from prostitution to lunatic asylums. Nonetheless, this enjoyably gossipy volume renders the repressed Oxford lecturer, who took "Lewis Carroll" as his pen name, a curiously appealing figure.
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