Books I’ve read: Two on Lewis Carroll and Alice

IN THE SHADOW OF THE DREAMCHILD: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll by Karoline Leach is a revisionist biography that argues Charles Dodgson—supposedly a shy, asexual stutterer whose only emotional connections were with little girls—was, in his own time, seen as a charming, witty, social butterfly whose relationships with his “child friends” (a term he applied to women all the way into their twenties) were the subject of much gossip at Christ Church college. Leach does a fine job looking at the college politics surrounding Dodgson, his life and the image of innocence that little girls represented back then (with speculation Dodgson and his biographers may have played up his “child friends” to boost his respectability, never realizing how it would be interpreted in our own time) and ponders how much our interpretation of his life and times are shaped by the assumption Alice Liddell was his muse (so his adult love poems are ignored, as they’re clearly not about her). She’s much less convincing propounding her own pet theory, that Dodgson had a secret affair with Alice Liddell’s mother, but this is still an excellent book.
ALICE’S ADVENTURES: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture by Will Brooker is a broader look at how the public, the media and biographers have come to perceive Dodgson and his work: Balancing the image of asexual purity with possible pedophilia, building towers based on dubious ground (a claim by his nephew that Dodgson had a secret tragedy became not only accepted with little evidence, but inspired later claims that the tragedy was the Liddells refusing a request to marry Alice) or outright inaccuracies (the “golden afternoon” of his boat ride with the Liddells was overcast and possibly rainy), how much influence Tenniel had on our view of Wonderland (“Carroll doesn’t describe his characters much-pretty much everything we know about their appearance comes from his artist.”) and how much each generation constructs its own ALICE (Freudian theories in the thirties, drug trip in the sixties, pedophilia in the past couple of decades). Very good.