Lewis Carroll - In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: New Understanding of Lewis Carroll [Hardcover]

Charles Dodgson - aka Lewis Carroll, the author of the Alice books - was interested in photography, and his enthusiasm for photographing naked small girls has meant that he has come to be regarded as a passive paedophile. This new book sets out to show that this reputation is undeserved, and does so triumphantly. Dodgson's family appear to have tolerated the accusations of paedophilia in order to disguise a more enthusiastic interest in mature women - a less forgivable moral lapse! The book is a strange, fascinating and entirely original piece of research, showing considerable insight into Victorian social attitudes. (Kirkus UK) --.

In a vigorous effort to subvert the "potent mythology" surrounding Lewis Carroll, ne Charles Dodgson (1832-1898) - that he was a "Victorian clergyman, shy and prim, and locked to some degree in perpetual childhood," and, oddly at the same time a pedophile - Leach, a British playwright, claims that Dodgson had relationships with several mature women, albeit often selfish and cruel ones. These included the artist Gertrude Thomson and the writer Anna Thackery. The eponymous "dreamchild" is Alice Liddell, the daughter of Dodgson's dean at Christ College, Oxford, upon whom Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is based and for whom Dodgson assumed the role of attentive father figure. But by studying the "psychological crisis" evident in Dodgson's fragmentary journals (many pages were cut out and destroyed by relatives who feared scandal), Leach suggests Dodgson was more involved with Liddell's wife than with Alice and proposes that the seemingly suggestive photos of young girls that Dodgson took stem, in part, from "strange Victorian child-cult" in which "innocence was expressed ultimately through an affected and devotional love of children." As artfully told as a fine detective story, Leach's story of what truly seems a conspiracy among Dodgson scholars cogently argues that although new materials on Carroll have been released since the late 1970's (his unexpurgated diary, Leach says "is at present being prepared for publication"), the permanent sabotage of many of his papers has made it virtually impossible ever to attain a clear picture of this unusual individual. --Publishers Weekly

'Persuasive . . . Leach makes a good case'

'Excellent'

In the Shadow of the Dreamchild uses new research to show that the long-standing image of the life of Charles Dodgson, better known to millions of fans around the world as Lewis Carroll, as exclusively child-centred and unworldly, his pre-occupation with Alice Liddell and his supposedly unnatural sexuality are all in fact nothing more than myths: that they belong to an invented persona, created around the name 'Carroll', and have almost nothing to do with Dodgson's real but overshadowed life.

Meticulously researched, the book traces the development of this false persona and demonstrates how generations of biographers have helped to create fictions about Dodgson's life, rather than bring the documentary facts before the public. It uses the data to re-create a startlingly new picture of Dodgson's personality, his experiences and, crucially, his all-important relationship with the Liddell family.

The dismantling of the myth and the new image that is put in its place are inevitably controversial, and since the first whisper of the book's conclusions became known last year reaction in the press and from Carrollian scholars has been intense. After all, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild challenges almost every scholastic and literary insight on Carroll that has developed over the past century.

Karoline Leach has written for the theatre since the early 1990s, with her play The Mysterious Mr Love being staged to critical acclaim in the West End's Comedy Theatre in 1997