A new biography of Lewis Carroll, just in time for the release of Tim Burton’s all-star Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll was brilliant, secretive and self contradictory. He reveled in double meanings and puzzles, in his fiction and his life. Jenny Woolf’s The Mystery of Lewis Carroll shines a new light on the creator of Alice In Wonderland and brings to life this fascinating, but sometimes exasperating human being whom some have tried to hide. Using rarely-seen and recently discovered sources, such as Carroll’s accounts ledger and unpublished correspondence with the “real” Alice’s family, Woolf sets Lewis Carroll firmly in the context of the English Victorian age and answers many intriguing questions about the man who wrote the Alice books, such as: • Was it Alice or her older sister that caused him to break with the Liddell family? • How true is the gossip about pedophilia and certain adult women that followed him? • How true is the “romantic secret” which many think ruined Carroll’s personal life? • Who caused Carroll major financial trouble and why did Carroll successfully conceal that person’s identity and actions? Woolf answers these and other questions to bring readers yet another look at one of the most elusive English writers the world has known.
The Mystery of Lewis Carroll
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"Goes beyond the central controversy over his life to shed light on a man who has proved elusive to his biographers."
--Wall Street Journal
"Engaging...Woolf writes with affection as well as admiration for the man revealed by her research."
--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World
About the Author
JENNY WOOLF has written for The Sunday Times Magazine (UK), Reader’s Digest, and Islands and has reviewed children’s literature for Punch. She is author of Lewis Carroll in His Own Account. She lives in England.
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More About the Author
When I was a young child, "Alice in Wonderland" was my favourite book. Wonderland's bossy people and its strange, wonderful and alarming surprises exactly reflected my own experience of life. I wanted even then to meet this writer who seemed to understand the world of children so well.
When I grew up and read the biographies of Carroll, I just felt puzzled. So finally I went back to the basic facts about him to see if I could get a glimpse of who he'd really been. After all, he had eaten, bathed, blown his nose, smelt a rose, had feelings and a life of his own. THIS was the man I wanted to find
I was helped on my way by discovering his personal bank account, unseeen since his death. It was an amazing find, and my book "Lewis Carroll in his own Account" was the result. I made a BBC documentary about it, and it paved the way for the biography.
At present I'm still mentally dwelling in the nineteenth century, although only part-time now. I'm writing a time slip story which deals with who we really are: a subject that might have interested Lewis Carroll
I live in the Hampstead area of London, England.
Here are some links to Lewis Carroll Societies in London : http://www.lewiscarrollsociety.org.co.uk
and in the USA : http://www.lewiscarroll.org/
Here's Lenny's Alice in Wonderland site, probably the most comprehensive on the web: http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/
And here is Contrariwise, which aims to demolish some of the stupider myths about Lewis Carroll: http://contrariwise.wild-reality.net/
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Likeable, Peculiar Man from Wonderland,
By R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful, and Sometimes Lonely Man Who Created "Alice in Wonderland" (Hardcover)
It has become part of our received knowledge that Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice books, liked being with little girls, and liked photographing little girls without their clothes, and that for all we may enjoy Alice's adventures, we have to wince at their author's being a pedophile. I have heard a presenter classify him in that category in a medical presentation on child abuse, for instance. I want to put quickly into this review that such accusations are not true, even though clearing them away is only one of the many insights within _The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful, and Sometimes Lonely Man Who Created Alice in Wonderland_ (St. Martin's Press) by Jenny Woolf. Woolf is a reviewer of children's literature, and has written about Carroll before. There are plenty of other biographies of the famous author, but she says, "The more closely Lewis Carroll is studied, the more he seems to slide quietly away." (She doesn't mention it, but this is rather like Alice trying to put her hands on items on the shelves of the sheep's shop.) Some of the problem is that the original source documents we would like to read about Carroll have disappeared, like diaries from certain years that seem to have been deliberately cleared away by his family after his death. Part of the problem is that very few of the people that knew him, even close friends, wrote about him or talked to biographers after he was gone. Part of the problem is that there was gossip about Carroll while he was alive (and the gossip was about subjects other than his relationships with little girls). Part of the problem is that his times and his locale in academic Oxford were peculiar viewed from our own time. And a big part of the problem is that he was very peculiar himself. Not naughty, not sociopathic; just very odd, an oddness you might expect of the author of Wonderland. Woolf's thoughtful volume is not a chronological biography, but an examination of different aspects of Carroll's life, aspects which give a satisfyingly full portrait.
The events in Carroll's life were not complicated or exciting, and we would not care anything about him if he had not written _Alice in Wonderland_ (1865) followed by _Through the Looking-Glass_ (1871). The lack of a moral to the tales is regarded by some as a strike against the author, evidence that he was bad in other ways. Those who get carried away by such thinking accuse him of being an opium addict or being Jack the Ripper. The more moderate of the calumniators say that he was having an affair with Alice's mother, or with Alice's governess, or with Alice's elder sister, or, of course, with Alice herself. Part of the "evidence" against Carroll is that he took pictures of naked little girls. We think this shocking now, and even parents have been summoned to court when pictures of their children sunbathing show up at the developers, but Carroll and his proper Victorian contemporaries held a different view. His fascination with little girls was, in fact, a rejection of sexuality - they were seen as non-sexual and pure. He was loved by his child friends, and it gave him an emotional foundation without any hint of carnality. Naked girls were not at all the main theme of his photography; of nearly 3,000 negatives this enthusiastic hobbyist took, around 1% are of children partially or completely nude. All of his pictures of children were taken when the children wanted to, and when the parents consented, and anyone had a veto. "There are no assertions, no reports of gossip, and no hints or suggestions that any parent of any young child portrayed nude by Carroll felt threatened by anything he did," says Woolf. "Nor did any of the children themselves, after they grew up, suggest that they had been upset by their encounters with him: the opposite seems to have been the case." There are those who charge that Carroll was too innocent to understand the pedophilic crimes he was committing, but Woolf is justifiably proud of a scoop she has on all other Carroll biographers: his bank account, which she discovered in a financial archive, and which she calls "the only major document about him which is both factual and completely unaltered." Carroll did know of the problem of child exploitation, and supported organizations like The Reformatory and Refuge Union, The Society for the Suppression of Vice, and The Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants. He did not boast of such support, nor can the case be made that singling out such causes indicates a guilty conscience, for Woolf goes on to show that they were a mere part of a larger system of giving to many good causes. It was said that Carroll was rich from his books, and they did produce a respectable income, but he was rather busy giving it away to charities and as support for family and friends. He paid little attention to material wealth, and specified when he died that he was to have the cheapest of funerals "consistent with dignity." He was no saint; he was exasperatingly fussy with his contemporaries, and he showed little interest in what ought to have been his life's work, teaching math to undergraduates. He did have many adult friends, and that they were of less emotional support to him than were his child friends is decidedly peculiar, but far from criminal. Woolf does more than debunking the pedophilia claims, taking chapter-by-chapter views of Carroll's life at Oxford, family relationships, literary life, and more. Such an approach gives a full picture of the strange and likeable man who gave us the imperishable Alice books and whose life needs no apologies.
31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An in depth look at the character of Lewis Carroll.,
By
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This review is from: The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful, and Sometimes Lonely Man Who Created "Alice in Wonderland" (Hardcover)
Having read many other books about Lewis Carroll, I thought this was excellent. It was very easy to read and I thought the theories were all reasonable, and made use of the latest information avialable. The actual 8 page "Personal Conclusion" did seem a bit disjointed and rushed for some reason, but this did not detract from the whole. This book focuses in on the innner man, his motivations and true character. It makes use of the facinating new discovery of Lewis Carroll's bank account which was recently found in the archives of the Barclay's Bank. One thing this clearly reveals is what a charitable man he truly was, with a deep concern especially for women and children who had fallen on hard times in the streets of London. This book would be well to read in conjunction with Morton Cohen's biography which tries to give a much more historical look at the man; going into detail about all of the names and places and dates surrounding the man. But this book is much more pleasant to read and gives you a quick glance into the phyche of a very private man; a most beloved friend to dozen's of children, brother to seven sisters and three brothers, and famous author of children's books.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Real Carroll Rescued From Darkness,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful, and Sometimes Lonely Man Who Created "Alice in Wonderland" (Hardcover)
In the century since his death, the life of Lewis Carroll became ensnarled in dark innuendo. Biographers and commentators have unleashed modern psychological theory on him to accuse him of pedophilia and other perversions. Jenny Woolf's fine new biography rescues Carroll from the darkness and describes the kindly, shy and admittedly eccentric man as he really was.
Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the oldest son in a large family fathered by a clergyman whose means never kept up with his expanding brood of children. Dodgson grew up surrounded by loving siblings then endured a difficult education at Rugby School. At Oxford his gift for mathematics blossomed, and he became a professor at Christchurch. He was not successful teaching college men since his shyness, stammer, and general diffidence did not inspire respect among the upper class hearties with whom he was afflicted. He did much better teaching young women at a private school in Oxford. This seems to have been the general pattern of Carroll's life: a preference for the company of young women and girls with whom he could let his gift for being droll and even nonsensical develop. In our era a man who prefers the company of children, especially young girls, is viewed with suspicion. In the nineteenth century, as Woolf ably points out, attitudes were different. In a number of remarkable and illuminating chapters Woolf describes Carroll's love for children, chronicling his celebrated friendship with Alice Liddell and her siblings among others and linking it to his interest in photography. Seen in this light, his "fairy photos" of scantily clad children have a much more innocent explanation than is commonly given them today. Woolf also describes Carroll's abundant generosities and other kindnesses to his family and friends, which eventually led to financial embarrassment. The picture that emerges is of a gentle, not very practical man who lived in a dream world in which reality intruded only rarely and usually painfully, as when some of his young friends or their parents turned their backs on him. Knowing the story behind them gives his stories and poetry new meaning and delight.
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