Lewis Carroll: A Biography

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 Drawing on Carroll's published and unpublished diaries and letters, full of self-castigation and torment, Cohen reveals that Oxford mathematician Dodgson saw himself as a repeated sinner.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.)