THE bifurcation between the Oxford mathematics don Charles Dodgson I whose contributions to symbolic logic drew the attentions of Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer, and the children's writer Lewis Carroll, whose Alice in Wonder/and has inspired a host of illustrators from Tenniel to Disney, has always fascinated biographers.
Morton Cohen, an American professor (emeritus) has now produced an authoritative and scholarly study, indispensable for its completeness, which is, however, inexpertly structured and psychologically lightweight.
Dodgson/Carroll's life was outwardly uneventful. He left England just once, on a brief trip to Russia, showed no interest in contemporary events such as the Indian Mutiny, the American Civil War or the Franco Prussian conflict, but revelled in the petty spites and ephemeral bickerings that make up the life of the Oxbridge don. He was an extremely unpleasant man, who achieved fame on the strength of one book the product of stories told in 1862 to Alice Liddell, who was then the nine year old daughter of the Dean of Christchurch (best remembered for the Liddell and Scott Greek lexicon).
The halcyon period which the deeply repressed 30 year old bachelor spent with the young Liddell girls came to an end in. 1863. Lacking the diary entries which were expurgated Cohen speculates, plausibly enough, that something of a sexual nature happened that made Dean Liddell bar his door to Dodgson thereafter. Maybe the sexual basis of Lewis Carroll's attraction to his heroine became obvious or perhaps he offended the Liddells by suggesting that he would like to marry Alice when she came of age.
Where J.M. Barrie was besotted with "lost boys" Peter Pan is confined to a pre sexual "Eden" Lewis Carroll was obsessed (not too strong a word) with pre pubescent girls who would all too soon be lost to the "horrors" of sexuality and marriage. There can be no denying the pathological basis of Dodgson's paedophiliac drive the photographs the author reproduces in this lavishly illustrated volume are alone eloquent on that point. The amazing thing was that Victorian parents should have allowed Dodgson to photograph their daughters nude.
It would be pleasant to record that Carroll/Dodgson's fixation on very young girls was an isolated example of odd behaviour, but the man was a disaster as a human being in every sphere he entered. He was one of those people who can start a row in an empty room, and Cohen's pages are replete with failed relationships and broken friendships.
Carroll was actually that bizarre creature, a humorous writer with out a real sense of humour. Although Cohen often tries to nudge us to notice his subject's comic felicities, what Dodgson mainly had was donnish wit rather than humour in the sense that with wit we laugh at others while with humour we laugh with them.
It almost goes without saying that this deeply unpleasant man vehemently hated Parnell and Gladstone's attempts to secure Home Rule for Ireland, and thought that Irish thralldom at the hands of the English was part of the natural order of things.
Pointlessly convoluted, somewhat in the manner of Conrad's Chance Cohen does not discuss Dodgson's parents until he is two thirds of the way into the book this is a "put everything in" book which badly needed editing and would have been better at half its length.
Most of all, though, the author fails to do justice to his own hard work and erudition by a dogmatic refusal to take seriously any of the interpretations of Carroll available from the depth psychologies. This is a great source book but it is not really a convincing biography.