Reader Reviews for The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful, and Sometimes Lonely Man Who Created "Alice in Wonderland":
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Summary: A Product of Victorian England
Comment: 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.
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Summary: a tad apologetic
Comment: Woolf has created the Carroll/Dodgson she wants him to be, beginning with the use of the nom de plume in her title. One look at the four surviving Dodgson photos of naked girls, housed at the Rosenbach Foundation in Philadelphia and sometimes publicly displayed, will dispel notions that Dodgson wasn't a pedophile. They are posed in ways, e.g., on divans, that remind one of French pornographic postcards of the period! This does not mean that Dodgson ever touched any of his girl "friends," but to deny that the attraction was devoid of sexuality seems preposterous. In this regard, especially, Cohen's biography is a more reliable guide. In "Alice in Wonderland," consider the figure of the Mad Hatter, who hovers over/around Alice with his hands almost, but not quite, touching Alice. Here, I believe, is Dodgson's avatar.
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Summary: The Real Carroll Rescued From Darkness
Comment: 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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Summary: The Likeable, Peculiar Man from Wonderland
Comment: 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.
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Summary: The Mystery of Lewis Caroll
Comment: I am thoroughly enjoying reading this account of Lewis Carroll's life and, am very pleased with the condition of the book. Look forward to purchasing more books when budget allows.
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