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Title: In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll by Karoline Leach ISBN: 0-7206-1044-3 Publisher: Dufour Editions Pub. Date: 29 March, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $41.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.71 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: She Shows Lewis Carroll as Human, Not a Cardboard Oddity
Comment: There is a monotony among many contemporary biographies of Lewis Carroll. That he was child centered because he had inadequate social skills to have social relationships with adult women.
Ms. Leach reviewed the literature available to others for many years, and has found that the real issue with Lewis Carroll and adult women was that he had all together too much social relationships with adult females - especially for the Victorian times and for his role at Christ Church, Oxford. He certainly had too much social success with women for his conservative immediate family - who effectively controlled the original biographies written.
Leach has the central hypothesis that the Dodgson family wanted to erase this potential social scandal, and created the squeaky clean - but socially handicapped - false picture presented today. This is the start of the "Cardboard Lewis Carroll" - the man who could only love little girls, because if you knew the truth...... wow!
Politicians and business leaders today work at keeping their human sides for personal pleasures falsely fairly clean, as well. Remember the pecadillos of a former president, and the pecadillos of many of his accusers which caused more than one to leave public service. So, coverup of real and whispered relationships with adult females is eternal.
...M N Cohen thus clearly knew of the deep social associations with adult females, because from his books of letters, one can easily determine that there were many deep social relationships with women of all ages.
Yet, Cohen perpetuated the myth that Lewis Carroll was a near social cripple who couldn't maintain social relationships with adult women.
Why? It has been said that it is nearly impossible to get a Lewis Carroll book published unless it DOES say that he was creepy about girls and women. Like the Supermarket Tabloids, sensationalism for profit is the modern way with words and reputations of famous folks.
The first steps towards rediscovering a real human being behind the pen name of Lewis Carroll (Charles L Dodgson) is to read the work of Leach.
If you want the "Cardboard Carroll", there are many other books to select.
Rating: 4
Summary: Shadows Foreshortened
Comment: Though comparatively slight, and not strictly speaking a biography (more a thesis), it can justifiably be claimed that Ms Leach's book should take its place as one of the two most important published accounts of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson yet produced.
Adopting a satisfyingly rigorous approach to its subject matter, which is predominently (though not exclusively) an examination of Lewis Carroll's sexuality, 'In the Shadow of the Dreamchild' systematically debunks the nastiest of all Carroll myths - that Carroll was sexually attracted to pre-pubescent girls.
In the process, the author also successfully challenges a number of other Carroll myths and provides an irresistable case for a complete biographical revision of one of Victorian England's most fascinating figures. In effect Ms Leach does for Lewis Carroll what Horace Walpole achieved for Richard III (Walpole, as most professional historians, though few others, know, showed that Richard III almost certainly was not responsible for one of history's most heinous crimes, the murder of 'the princes in the Tower'). One hopes that having achieved this, Ms Leach is not to be ignored (as was Walpole) by posterity. Fortunately Ms leach has access to a rather more efficient media than did Walpole.
Using her access to the surviving Lewis Carroll Journals, published and unpublished letters, much original research and, above all, a keen understanding of Victorian mores and the complex nature of Victorian theological, political and social issues, Leach provides the reader with an insight into a supremely healthy (in the broad sense of this term) and intelligent person who, though complex, is in no way the paradoxical figure previously portrayed. She also provides us with a person who one can believe actually wrote the Alice Books, Hunting of the Snark and myriad other works without having to reduce those works to dark sexual metaphors. In so doing she has opened the Carroll Canon to serious mainstream literary examination and, hopefully, acceptance.
One does not have to wholeheartedly accept Ms Leach's own conclusions, to recognise the importance of this work - though the reader is advised to treat everything Ms Leach writes with respect.
The only note of caution regarding this work relates to the modesty of its primary aim. This was to show, by the simple device of checking freely available data, that by far the majority of Carroll's so-called 'child-friends' were actually mature women. It may have been helpful if Ms leach had been rather less modest in her ambition and placed more emphasis in demonstrating that, far from being socially inept and reclusive in regard to male companionship, Carroll was little different in this respect to others of his social class, circumstances and historical period. That he numbered among his friends many of the most notable names of the day has not been sufficiently noted - though Morton Cohen in his oddly discrepant biography does goes some way to correct this particular Carrolian myth.
This book could well be seen, not as has been prematurely (and wrongly) claimed of Cohen's work, as the 'definitive Carroll' but the beginning of true Carroll scholarship.
Dr John Tufail
Rating: 1
Summary: fictional biography
Comment: Assuming the format of a biography, this novel depicts an assumed conventional view of its hero, Lewis Carroll, as a shy recluse in love with female children, one especially (a character named Alice Liddell). The literary detective narrator, however, finds a torn scrap of paper containing a cryptic reference to AL's sister or, aha! mother?). She concludes Carroll must be an adulterer, possibly a serial adulterer! The hypocrisy of the hero is concealed during his life time, and after his death, his family cooks the books (his diary--they chop out pages) to maintain his saintly image. If THAT wasn't bad enough, all of the biographers of the hero conspire to sustain his sanctity. And so, it turns out that the real hero of this novel is the narrator, a modern Miss Marple, who uncovers and proclaims that this beloved character who wrote stories for children and who has been for over a century viewed as a religious man who loved children, one especially,--is an adulterer who skulked his way through Victorian England and went on to win the hearts and minds of foolish biographers and academics who lacked the Marplean acumen of the narrator.
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Title: Lewis Carroll : A Biography by Morton N. Cohen ISBN: 0679745629 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 26 November, 1996 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Lewis Carroll, Photographer by Roger Taylor, Edward Wakeling ISBN: 0691074437 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 25 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
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Title: Reflections in a Looking Glass : A Centennial Celebration of Lewis Carroll, Photographer by Morton N. Cohen, Mark Haworth-Booth, Roy Flukinger ISBN: 0893817961 Publisher: Aperture Pub. Date: 30 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $50.00 |
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Title: Discoveries Lewis Carroll in Wonderland by Stephanie Lovett Stoffel ISBN: 0810928388 Publisher: Harry N. Abrams Pub. Date: 01 February, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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