Customer Reviews

The life of Lewis Carroll

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This was the second full-length biography of Lewis Carroll. (The first, by his nephew, appeared in the year of his death.) Reed was able to talk to many people who knew Carroll, including several close relatives, and even to the sexton who buried him, so this book is a significant source of information. Reed includes several interesting letters from Carroll (some, amazingly, not reprinted in Carroll's collected letters) and photos. On the down side, Reed's speculations are often more nonsensical than anything Carroll wrote. This book probably started the myth that Carroll had a split personality - the lecturer in mathematics from Oxford being somehow detached from the writer of children's stories. It would be unfortunate if this down side stopped people admiring the rich store of information in this book.

Not a biography at all, but a strange imaginative exercise. Reed had almost no data at his disposal, as Carroll's family wouldn't provide any, so he simply made a lot of it up -including the 'fact' that Carroll lost interest in girls once the reached the age of 14 -. But that didn't stop later biographers repeating a lot of it as if it was true.
For a good summary of Reed see Karoline Leach's 'In the Shadow of the Dreamchild'