Lewis Carroll: Fragments of a Looking Glass

This is the twelfth biography of Lewis Carroll that I have read. You're probably thinking why read that many about one person? What I have found is that no two of the biographies are exactly the same. Each one seems to have something that the others don't. The biographies from those for young people (and don't discount these. Books for young people sometimes are extremely good) to ones that are much more academic in their nature. Also, sometimes the older ones can prove quite useful There's also a lot of photos in the book.

The book starts out with a Carroll Chronolgy.

Some of the major things that stood out in this book include:

The burning of his letters to Alice by her mother.

He did not believe in eternal punishment.

His method of keeping track of all the letters he wrote.

Changes in his outlook on life and his behavior.

Three things that had an effect on him including the shadow of his father, the weight of religion and the constraints of Victorian society.

His relationship with little girls is a topic his biographers have to deal with in one way or another.

Alice's mother, Mrs. Liddell, was his enemy.(The author of the biography explains why this was so.)

Carroll stopped taking photos or writing about photography rather suddenly. This may be done to some kind of trouble over the photos of nude little girls he was taking.

He kept negatives of the photos of the nude little girls that he had taken.

As far as plays go he very strongly was against men dressing up as women.

The story about his giving Queen Victoria some books on math that he wrote is untrue.

Some quotes from the book in reference to his relationship to little girls. :

'Carroll could not even remotely have envisaged marrying a child.'

'...it is slightly surprising to find how much stress Carroll laid on the importance of kissing all his little-girl friends.'

'...in a great many cases and even when there was no deep or lasting attachment, what Carroll felt for his little-girl friends was, from his own description, an emotion marked by all the characteristics of physical love between adults.'

Thus we can see that the author of this biography believes Carroll's relationship to little girls was not as clean and wholesome as many other biographers assume.

This is a very, very interesting biography of Carroll and takes a rather different approach to him as most other biographies do.

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