Reviews

In his time, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was known to the world as an outstanding pioneer photographer of children, particularly of female children, as well as for being the author Lewis Carroll. One of Dodgson's "child-friends," Alice Lidell, served as the inspiraton for his literary Alice. These child-friend associations subjected Dodgson to public scrutiny, gossip, and suspicion concerning his emotional and sexual proclivities, suppressed though they may have been. Dodgson chose to "let them talk." Biographer Cohen (Lewis Carroll: Interviews and Recollections, Univ. of Iowa Pr., 1988) uses previously unavailable family and personal documents, diaries, and letters to show that the shy bachelor Dodgson, Oxford mathematics don and lecturer, held himself to the strictest of moral codes. While Lewis Carroll has been probed and analyzed by countless writers (see, for instance, John Pudney's Lewis Carroll and His World, 1976), this book is about the intimate and complex life of the man behind all those who lived on the other side of the looking glass. Recommended for all literature collections.‘Robert L. Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind.

Eccentric, fastidious, class-conscious, deeply religious Oxford don Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), better known as Lewis Carroll, spent his adult life pursuing friendships with little girls, many of whom he drew or photographed in the nude. These friendships, particularly with Alice Liddell and her two sisters, daughters of his college dean, sparked his energy and imagination, yielding Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Rejecting the thesis that Carroll's overwhelming fascination with children was an obsession or a sign of arrested development, Cohen, professor emeritus at City University of New York, nevertheless opines that Carroll's fixation resulted from fear-inducing, punitive childhood experiences with his rigid, imperious father, an archdeacon. Drawing on Carroll's published and unpublished diaries and letters, full of self-castigation and torment, Cohen reveals that Oxford mathematician Dodgson saw himself as a repeated sinner. His troubled conscience, Cohen suggests, stemmed from his suppressed erotic feelings for children. Delightfully illustrated with photographs and Carroll's drawings woven throughout, this extraordinary, meticulous biography gives us a sharper and deeper picture of Carroll than any before, presenting a many-sided man‘gadgeteer, amateur inventor, poet, logician, pamphleteer, antivivisectionist animal rights advocate and paranormal researcher who believed in ghosts, telepathy and fairies. (Nov.)