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

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Lenny's description:
Throughout the years, several biographies about Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) have appeared. According to Jenny Woolf, each new biography was more and more about fiction instead of facts, and contained lots of speculation about his supposed pedophilia and drug use. Woolf tells us she tried to keep an open mind and stick to the facts, in order to describe the man he truly was.

Woolf not only turned to sources like Dodgson’s diaries, but she also discovered Dodgson’s bank account – a source that remained untouched by his family members, and she uses his sources of income and his expenses to shed more light into the matters Dodgson found important (or did not care about at all).

It is interesting to read lesser known facts, like Dodgson writing more about Harry (Alice’s brother) in his diaries than he did about Alice herself, that his friendship with the Liddell’s actually started through Harry, and that Dodgson did not only have child friends, but many female adult friends as well.

Woolf refutes the descriptions of Dodgson as a recluse, weirdo, or druggie, by pointing out that there is no evidence for it at all (on the contrary), but on the other hand she does not try to mask that Dodgson, in later life, did become quite a fussy and eccentric man, and that there was in fact some gossip going around about his friendships with women while he was alive.

Besides the facts, Woolf does make several assumptions herself and comes up with her own theories. Her most interesting theory is, that Charles Dodgson spent so much time with little girls because he wanted to reclaim his own innocence. He was not sexually interested in them at all - on the contrary: in the Victorian age, children were considered to be sexless and represented innocence. Dodgson was a very religious man and was very afraid of doing anything sinful. Jenny claims that Dodgson used little girls as an ‘antidote to sin’, this sin being a probable love affair with a married woman.
She also states that Dodgson may have photographed girls in the nude, instead of adult women, because he loved to study the human body, but did not want to risk being sexually aroused by it.

So although Woolf does not just state the bare facts about Dodgson, but also tries to interpret them, and we cannot be sure that her interpretations are actually correct, she does it in a most convincing and plausible way. Her biography is pleasant and easy to read and I can recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about the man who wrote ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

Seller's description:
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.

Features:

ISBN13: 9780312612986
Condition: New
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Product details:

Seller name: Amazon (Shipping rates and seller details)
Item number (ASIN): 0312612982
Author: Jenny Woolf
Dewey Decimal Number: 828.809
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0312612982
Languages:
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Package Dimensions: 130 x 610 x 930 (hundredths-inches)
Publication Date: February 2, 2010
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Release Date: February 2, 2010
Binding: Hardcover

Reviews from Lenny's visitors:

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No simple answers
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. To ofen he is judged by twenty first century standards which is niether fair nor reasonable. I'm not sure I said that well, but Jenny Woolf does.

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

- by White Night on February 25, 2010

~Stand forth, then, from the shadowy past.~

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!

- by NeVaR aSk on February 26, 2010

Amazon.com customer reviews:

Average Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Rating:

- A Product of Victorian England
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.

Rating:

- a tad apologetic
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.

Rating:

- The Real Carroll Rescued From Darkness
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.

Rating:

- The Likeable, Peculiar Man from Wonderland
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.

Rating:

- The Mystery of Lewis Caroll
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.