The Wonderland years

Lewis Carroll: A Biography by Morton Cohen, Macmillan $425.

CHARLES Lutwidge Dodgson is a name that will be familiar to few readers. Like so many writers before and after him, it is by a pseudonym that he is best remembered.

As Lewis Carroll, the creator of possibly the greatest work in children's fiction, Alice in Wonderland, his permanent place in literary history is assured. Morton Cohen, who has been studying this author for three decades, tries to show us the real man behind this classic, for the children's books amounted to a fraction of the work of this deeply-religious Oxford don.

Cohen believes there is much more to Charles Dodgson than the fiction, produced by rare flashes of genius, and spends more than 500 pages arguing his case. That he fails to do so has more to do with Charles Dodgson's own limitations than Cohen's scholastic efforts.

Charles Dodgson was born in January, 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire. His father, Charles senior, was curate of the parish and destined for high office in the Church of England. Young Charles was the third of 11 children. As the eldest son, he was expected to carry on the Dodgson name and follow in his father's footsteps, first to Christ Church College at Oxford University and then into the ministry.

Charles did indeed go up to Christ Church two days before his mother's sudden death from a brain haemorrhage. Charles got a first in maths but it was not the same as the father's double first. Further disappointment for the elder Dodgson would come when Charles elected to take deacon's orders, the third level of the Anglican hierarchy, and when he became a supporter of the broad church as opposed to the more formal and conservative high Anglicanism of his father.