Customer Reviews

The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful, and Sometimes Lonely Man Who Created "Alice in Wonderland"

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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.

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.

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.

Jenny Woolf interprets the life of Charles Dogson, known to the world as Lewis Carroll. She examines far flung letters and diaries and recently discovered bank account records. From these she pieces together his story, noting gaps and speculating on how and why these gaps exist.

She concludes that the innuendo that surrounds Carroll is not deserved. She presents him as a pious eccentric with wide ranging interests. He was a Renaissance man for his time with accomplishments in photography, mathematics, and medical studies in addition to his famous children's novels.

His stammer may be a reason for his bachelor life or it could be the restrictive economics and career options of his time. As the oldest of 11 brothers and sisters (only 3 of whom married), upon his father's death he became the head of his birth family. His teaching position provided room and meals. If he married, he would lose his faculty position and would need to become a minister, most likely in a rural parish.

While he had many adult friends, it appears his closest friendships were with young children, mostly girls. When they became adults, most remained his friends. Woolf contends that these childhood friendships and the nude photographs (1% of his photographic output) that resulted from them are the root of Lewis's tarnished reputation. She says that there is no evidence that the girls' Victorian families had any reservations about the photos for reasons that she explains as an extension of the period's views of women and children. She presents Carroll as a deeply religious and repressed Victorian man, trapped by the morals and class system of his time.

The book is arranged by topic which had me flipping on a few occasions to understand the time relationship of the photos, the bank records and other topics.

I just finished reading this book and it is wonderful. It was clearly very carefully researched, and does not paint Carroll as a saint or a sinner, but as a complex man, that was as difficult to fully understand in his time as he is ours, but only for different reasons.

One of the things I appreciated most, was how well things were put in context. Lewis Carroll was a man in Victorian England, each of those parts are looked at how they contibuted to who he was. Too ofen he is judged by twenty first century standards which is niether fair nor reasonable. Jenny Woolf combines the pieces to create a very real individual.

If you are interested in the man behind story, read this book.

It seems Woolf has 2-3 speculative points about Lewis Carroll's character-- centering on his relationship with children and with women-- that redundantly carry the book. I gained a small amount of knowledge about his life, but most of the mysteries remain undiscovered.

There's a cultural divide yawning between our time and that of Charles Dodgson, a time in which, argues Jenny Woolf, the sexual and the physical were very much a thread of human knowledge and yet it was fine to take naked photos of girls and boys one knew.

Photography itself was so rigorous that its subjects and objects alike seemed to regard it as the next thing to medical. Well, I've read Woolf's book from cover to cover and I'm not persuaded all that much by some of her conclusions, but I applaud the zeal with which she is working, and the research she has done into Dodgson's private banking statements is astonishing. Regarding the "Forster" business... Woolf has found out that there was one year in which Dodgson wound up giving 1 quarter of his total income to an otherwise unknown Forster. Maybe I missed something, but Woolf seems to be sure that Forster is in fact a man. She is too good a biographer to speculate needlessly, or frivolously, but after all that is why the Amazon review is invented, and of course I wondered instantly if he was being blackmailed by this guy Forster. Blackmailed about what? Well, I don't know, since the pedophilia has been conclusively ruled out by Jenny Woolf and other anti-revisionist scholars.

On the whole it seemed to me that with all that banking information, she could have made more of what she obtained and given us a clearer picture of Dodgson. Infuriatingly, no scrap of new knowledge does much to clarify the man, it's like finding a suitcase filled with price tags but not knowing what they were once attached to.

Woolf's method on the whole is one I have been seeing more and more lately, chapters arranged not in particular chronological order, but on themes (a la Wayne Koestenbaum's "Andy Warhol"). "The Human Body." "The Supernatural." "Money." It is a method with solid advantages for the biographer. You can foreground the things you know most about, while tea-tabling those of which you're perhaps less sure.

When trying to understand a complex, multi-faceted and talented person it is not surprising to see a "tangle-tale" whirling in all directions. It's somewhat amusing to see all the angles and ideas created from only a change of mind-state or simply a skip of generations. All the so called mysteries conceived by a swift of percpective or just by accidental loving-caring recollection of events certainly can transform a man's life... C.L. Dodgson was no exception.

This new, insightful and refreshing biography gives us a different view and fair context to visualize an interesting person that sometimes raised brows right from the begining all the way on to our modern standards. This goes specifically around 1930's when all the misladen information arrange in a manner that, instead of helping, lead us to a pit-stop of confussion... giving itself more space to connotations and aiding our modern approach wich sometimes collides unrighteously.

It's about time for someone to use the most updated information and un-published recollections to make an accurate description the best as possible. To make sense and re-direct us for the true aspects of Dodgson's charcter and life even though it may not suit everyone... but that is what a true biography is all about. Of course we don't have to agree with every theory and statement but undoubtedly will encourage us to view things the right and proper way.

Mrs. Woolf cleared away most of the pieces unjustly sticked together. With much optimism and thorough research the author tackles the positive-negative spectrum of his life telling us that he was always seeking goodness but not always suited him... as often happens with our own life. So now at last C.L. Dodgson will stand forth!

This is a remarkably silly book. Woolf's big research find, Carroll's bank accounts, are not yet digested, yielding only more unsolved mysteries.

The major mystery of Carroll's biography, of course, is why he trolled for prepubescent girls, even carrying a bag of toys to pick them up on the beach. Woolf, in order to clear Carroll of charges of perversion argues: 1) Carroll's child friends were not all girls, and in fact he was more interested in Harry Liddell than in his sister Alice; 2) Carroll sometimes made friends with women who were already grown; 3) the great shame and sorrow of Carroll's life was an affair with a married woman when he was young. None of these, even if true, explains his penchant for the company of little girls, and the last is purely speculative. Woolf does offer some explanations, one more ridiculous than the other: Carroll spent large amounts of time with children because he found being with children relaxing. (Which surely begs the question, since adults do not generally seek out the company of children to relieve stress, eschewing the company of other adults.) Carroll used his contacts with children as entrée to an acquaintance with their parents. (He needed to do it this way even as a famous author?) A very large proportion of Carroll's child friends were girls because Carroll's methods were more successful with girls than with boys; he was not interested in the things boys were generally interested in; not all girls were interested in playing with Carroll either. (Which again begs the question, why did he particularly interest himself in the things certain little girls are interested in.) Carroll received innocent hugs and kisses from little girls which satisfied his need for physical affection. (Which begs a whole slew of questions.) Carroll was attracted to women and established himself as an "uncle" to little girls so that when they grew up he could continue to get hugs and kisses from them as women. (Right.) Speaking of Carroll's interest in photographing girls naked, Woolf seriously considers the explanation that Carroll admired the human body aesthetically, but found pictures of naked women arousing, and "did not like the look of the bony and muscular bodies of men and boys, so that left little girls' bodies as the only ones he could view with joy and without evil." (An "explanation" which, among other things, ignores the changes in boys' and girls' bodies brought about by puberty.)

I have always loved the Alice books. I knew Alice in Wonderland by heart before I could read--many adults went hoarse reading it to me. But love of the books is no reason to shy away from the facts of Carroll's behavior, or try to minimize them. Woolf quotes Laurence Irving concerning what she calls Carroll's "entourage" of lady friends, whose "affectations of whimsies long past, and now, to flatter their author, kept up with desperate naivete [was] embarrassing, if not a bit macabre." The same can be said of Woolf's effort.

Using forensic bookkeeping, of a type, the life of Lewis Carroll is reexamined devoid of prejudice and concerning itself only with facts instead of conjecture the book paints a slightly different image of the genius of Oxford.