In The Shadow of the Dream Child: The Myth and Reality of Lewis Carroll

The original version of this book was dated 1999. There was at least one more version and then then there was the 2015 version which this review is about. The last one is the largest and the best.

The author takes no prisoners as she challenges much of what has been written about Lewis Carroll and what type of man he was, stripping away the myth and getting down to the reality. Some of the main points of this book include:

Information about the 'missing pages' of his diaries.

He did not hate boys as is often said.

He did have a lot of grown-up women as friends.

Some of those women he had relationships with and some of them actually stayed overnight at places he was staying.

The earliest biographies left out lots of the facts and basically gave the picture that Dodgson was only interested in little girls and he was almost saint-like in his behavior and personality.

This was done so much that it is as if his reality was receiving a whitewash by biographers.

A lot of the early biographies would say he did or did not do such and such a thing but gave absolutely no actual evidence to back up their claims. Further biographers just repeated those things, thus continuing an inaccurate picture of the man.

Many works tend to paint him as a pedophile, again without any hard evidence to back up that claim. The 'trouble' he did get in actually involved relationships with grown women.

19th century feelings were around a romantic view of young girls who were considered to represent purity and innocence. The nude photos taken by various photographers were reflections of this.

The book goes into the types of books he had in his personal library and some of them were about sex and a variety of other topics.

He did go through a period of very intense self-criticism (almost self-hatred I think) and he often asked for divine help to deal with his 'sins.' This was intense during a certain period of his life but then it changed. This seems to be related to something that happened when he was 26 years old.

His father was very puritanical and his death seemed to have a very profound effect on Dodgson's behavior and how he thought about himself.

Much of his personal writings were destroyed on purpose by the family. The reason they did so is unknown.

There is a reasonable chance, based on his writings and other things, that he may have had a sexual relationship with a woman and that they eventually broke up and this had a very negative effect on him.

The time he broke with the Liddell family was probably due to rumors about his visits to where they lived, visits which did not always include the Lorina's husband being there.

The view of Alice that has developed is along the lines of a 'dream' child and does not reflect the reality of Alice Liddell.

There's a lot more in the book, including several Appendix entries.

The book is carefully written, carefully researched and uses logic to determine just what did and did not happen in his life. It is without doubt the single best biography of Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll.