The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

Understanding the Author of Alice in Wonderland
By Jenny Woolf

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‘This book beautifully demolishes the nonsense written about [Carroll] from the 1920s onwards’ – Edward Wakeling

Lewis Carroll, the elusive author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, has been the subject of enduring fascination for the past hundred years. Born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the son of a country curate, he would spend almost his entire life in the quiet, studious surroundings of Christ Church College, Oxford, shunning publicity and becoming increasingly guarded as the years went by. However, in his posthumous existence, he has been retrospectively psychoanalysed; condemned for his supposed sexual perversions and alleged addiction to opium. The destruction of many major documents about his personal life by his descendants has only magnified the mystery. Jenny Woolf’s biography, published to coincide with the release of the new Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland film, lays waste to the myths and suspicions that have obscured Carroll’s reputation by placing him firmly in the context of his own time.

Carroll was undoubtedly a man of contradictions. The dull mathematics don who published An Elementary Treatise on Determinants also gave us the anarchic Jabberwocky; ‘ ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/did gyre and gimble in the wabe…’ Described as ‘prim’ even by Victorian clergymen, he nevertheless ‘could have been something of a loose cannon’ given the right circumstances. His own strict moral sense dictated his behaviour, but he had little use for the arbitary conventions of society, which he personified as the despised ‘Mrs Grundy.’  In fact, he may have had more sympathy with the Cheshire Cat when dealing with the gossip of his contemporaries; ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad’.

Jenny Woolf has been a freelance journalist for UK national newspapers and was a contributing editor of the American travel magazine Islands. She continued to work for British and foreign publications and for the BBC, for whom she made a Radio 4 programme about Lewis Carroll in 2006. She has had a lifelong interest in Carroll and is the author of Lewis Carroll In His Own Account (2005). Jenny can be found online at her website: http://www.jabberwock.co.uk/

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Feature article in The Sunday Times, page 15, Sunday 14th February 2010:

Lewis Carroll ran up debts to save children

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article7026254.ece

'In her book, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, to be published next month, Woolf says the payments show that he detested the idea of children or any helpless creature being abused. He was certainly not trying to assuage a guilty conscience, she believes.'

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Review in The Sunday Times by Frances Wilson, Sunday 28th February 2010

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article7039548.ece

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Review in the Financial Times, by Matthew Sweet

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d7ac3e8c-32de-11df-bf5f-00144feabdc0.html

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Review in The Wall Street Journal Europe, Friday 5th March 2010

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126775304169756189.html?mod=rss_weekend_europe

'For decades, biographers of Lewis Carroll have been too fixated on the question of whether the author of Alice in Wonderland was a secret pedophile who got away with taking pictures of scantily-dressed girls during the Victorian era.

But a new book by English author Jenny Woolf, out today in the U.K. to coincide with Tim Burton's 'Alice' film, claims that the unearthing of never-before-published bank statements absolves him of many of the wild allegations made against him over the years. 'The Mystery of Lewis Carroll' goes beyond the central controversy over his life to shed light on a man who has proved elusive to his biographers.' - Javier Espinoza, The WSJ

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Fantasy Book Review, 18th February 2010

http://www.fantasybookreview.co.uk:80/blog/2010/02/18/the-mystery-of-lewis-carroll-by-jenny-woolf-reviewed-on-fantasy-book-review/ 

'Woolf’s research and reading of other Carroll biographies is extensive and this comes together to provide a very comprehensive and fascinating overview of the author that gave the world Alice. This highly recommended biography will allow the reader to learn much of Carroll and the times into which he was born.'

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From USA Today, 12 January 2010

'Woolf sheds more light on the mysterious Dodgson in this new biography, examining everything from his relationship with Alice and her older sister to his controversial photographing of nude young girls. 'The more closely Lewis Carroll is studied, the more he seems to slide quietly away,' Woolf writes' - Craig Wilson.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2010-01-12-alice12_ST_N.htm

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From Hollywood Today, 14/2/2010

http://www.hollywoodtoday.net/2010/02/14/books-the-mystery-of-lewis-carroll/

'The Mystery of Lewis Carroll reveals new facts about the famous mathematician and author of Alice In Wonderland. Lewis Carroll’s real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Woolf uses recently discovered facts, such as Carroll’s accounts ledger and unpublished correspondence with his Alice Liddell’s family. Alice was the daughter of his dean at Oxford and inspiration for Alice In Wonderland. Woolf explores how Carroll was repressed by the Victorian era as well as his upbringing as a cleric’s son. There were many rumors about Carroll, was he in love with young girls or was it the idea of innocents? There are also rumors that he had affairs with married women.

Woolf tries to dispel some of the worst rumors about Carroll. She talks about his love for photography and how he took photographs of friend’s children nude, a common practice during the Victorian age rather than an indication of pedophilia. There’s no evidence that he harmed any children, although some say he wished to marry 11-year-old Alice Liddell. Four lost volumes of his 13-volume personal diaries might tell that story, if they’re ever found.

Woolf got the idea for the book about Carroll after she found his personal bank account, forgotten and unnoticed in an archive for over a hundred years. Once transcribed and interpreted, it revealed much about this interesting man.

Woolf used documents and family letters to piece together Carroll’s life from various archives all over the world. “Some of them I visited in person, others list their holdings online and researchers can buy photocopies of relevant documents,” says Woolf. “Some of the material had been transcribed by other researchers and some experts and collectors kindly allowed me the run of their material.”

“I read all the biographies, plus any monographs, studies, and magazine articles, and all the original documents I could find which had not been published,” says Woolf. “I also consulted letters, published and unpublished, and the nine existing volumes of his diary. In short, a lot of work. I wanted to be sure I had seen as much as possible so I could put together my own impression of this intriguing man.”

The BBC produced a half hour program about Woolf’s discovery of Carroll’s personal bank account. “There’s been movie interest in the book from a British company doing TV co-productions,” says Woolf. “It’s been interesting to me to realize how many different types of people are interested in Lewis Carroll, from sweet old ladies to the likes of Marilyn Manson.”...

“The original publisher of this book is Haus in the UK,” says Flamini [of St. Martins Press]. “I gave all of my editorial suggestions to the wonderful editor there who worked on this book. They’ve produced a great book that is also a beautiful object.”...

The Mystery of Lewis Carroll is the perfect book for those who love Alice in Wonderland and want to know more about its unusual author.'

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Article on ABC.es, Spain (Culture section) by Emilio J. Blasco, London:

http://www.abc.es:80/hemeroteca/historico-15-02-2010/abc/Cultura/lewis-carroll-en-numeros-rojos-por-ayudar-a-niños_1133799547966.html

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The Times, 2 Mar 2010

'To coincide with the release of the film, this biography seeks to redress the misconceptions that have grown over Lewis Carroll's personal life.'

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The Telegraph, 8 Mar 2010 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7399104/Lewis-Carrolls-magic.html)

'To his adoring readers he was Lewis Carroll, the sweet-natured writer who wandered through life with a head full of stories. To his long-suffering colleagues in Oxford he was the Rev Charles Dodgson, the prickly mathematician who walked around with a poker-straight back and a head full of algebra. The two were like strangers who merely happened to inhabit the same skin.Both sides of him would have appreciated Jenny Woolf’s sensible and generous new biography, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll...

 Dodgson might ruefully have recognised the contradictions of a professional life in which he upheld standard forms of piety in public while privately devouring books about ghosts and witchcraft. Carroll might have been grateful for the detective work involved in going through his bank account, which shows that the figure post-Freudian readers have been encouraged to see as pathetically seedy, if not actively predatory, actually donated large sums to charities that supported children who had been sexually exploited. Both would have been thankful for Woolf’s dismissal of previous biographers’ more lurid hypotheses, from drug addiction to stories about Jack the Ripper, and both would have enjoyed Woolf’s own enjoyment at his verbal gymnastics and philosophical contortions. They might even have been briefly reconciled before they resumed their endless quarrel, like a real-life Tweedledum and Tweedledee.'

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Article on Book Army:

http://www.bookarmy.com/news/Authors/Lewis_Carroll_10_Facts.aspx

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A great review in the Camden New Journal:

http://www.camdennewjournal.com/reviews/books/2010/mar/books-review-mystery-lewis-carroll-jenny-woolf-west-hampstead-authors-childho

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