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.

Says Cohen: 'But the son was deaf in his right ear from childhood, a stammerer, not vigorous, by many accounts unassertive, by some accounts a recluse . . . who did not marry, who desired the companionship of female children.' It is easy to read too much into Charles' fiction. Freudians have had a field day with the Alice books but Cohen feels that the 'brutish, unfeeling, father-king, queen-duchess-caterpillar' characters, might have been influenced by an uneasy father-son relationship.

That uneasiness is seldom mentioned in Charles' voluminous diaries which he began in 1854 shortly before getting his maths lectureship at Christ Church where he was to remain for the rest of his life. Indeed, he felt saddened by his father's death in 1868 and took over the financial support of the family.

As for the 'female children', those relationships are described at length in his journals. They inspired his greatest work and generated gossip and conjecture. The most influential of these relationships began in April, 1856, when Charles met the three daughters of the Dean of Christ Church, George Henry Liddell. He was enraptured by all of them, but especially by Alice who was almost four. In November he started photographing the children, pictures which showed immense skill on his part. They became firm friends and made several outings around Oxford.

On July 2, 1862, on one such trip, Alice asked Charles to tell another of the stories that he ad-libbed with ease. He had already had some stories and nonsense verse printed. Later, at her insistence, he wrote the story down for her. It was called Alice's Adventures Underground. It would take a further three years before this impromptu tale was published to worldwide acclaim, as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. During those three years, certain things had happened which had led to a distinct cooling of relations between Charles and Mrs Liddell in particular.

Cohen has to speculate because crucial pages from Charles' dairy are missing. But it is possible that at the age of 31, Charles made a proposal of marriage to Alice, aged 11, through her parents, and was promptly ordered to stay away from the girls. Such proposals were not unheard of in the mid-19th century. The age of consent had not yet been raised from 13 to 16.

Whatever actually did happen, it did not hamper his friendships with other young girls. In 1866 he began to take pictures of them partially naked, then completely naked, at all times with the permission of the parents.

In questioning Charles' motives and inclinations it is important, as with the proposal to Alice, to look at what he was doing within the context of the century in which he lived. However, if he believed his motivation was entirely innocent, how are we to explain the entries of self-loathing in his diaries, many of which precede and coincide with the years of the risque pictures? Here is one typical entry: 'Would that I could leave my old bad habits behind. Help me, oh God . . . ' Cohen has charted these self-chastisements. In 1863, there are 24, 1865, 14 and the following year, 17.

There is no suggestion that at any time Charles Dodgson molested underage girls in the way that so many 'respectable' Victorian men did. Indeed, when the girls - then adults - looked back on their friendship with Charles it was with affection. They remembered him as someone who did not speak down to them but treated them as friends on an equal footing. This is one reason why the Alice books succeeded.

His guilt, says Cohen, probably came not from actions but thoughts he could not expel when alone at night as he tried to sleep: 'That is where Charles commits his sins, in his nocturnal waking hours and in his dreams. Perhaps for dreams we should read fantasies.' (His italics.) Cohen believes that this repressed sexuality was re-channelled into his best creative work as Lewis Carroll - the two Alice books, the second being Through the Looking Glass and the long nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark.

As Cohen puts it: 'The forces within him that endure most luminously and that matter to posterity, add up to the flashing wit and soaring imagination of the Alice books, some of the short stories, and some of the verse.' It may have also accounted for his prodigious output of essays and books on mathematics, written as Charles Dodgson. He had chosen a pseudonym to keep his academic work separate from his literature.

The problem with this biography is that apart from the moments of literary genius, there is not a lot to work on. Most of Dodgson's other stories and poems have not worn well with the passage of time. He led a secluded, strictly ordered and unexceptional existence for most of the time. When he died of bronchial complications at the age of 65, his young friends had grown up and married and he was lonely, and depressed.

However, because of the Alice books, obituaries appeared in papers throughout the world. Apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, of all English-language texts, the two Alice books, are, says Cohen, 'the most widely and most frequently translated and quoted'.

This biography is at times disjointed and therefore hard to follow. It starts chronologically and then veers off at tangents, which leads to repetition. Many of the letters and essays quoted make heavy reading.

Nevertheless, he deals sensitively with the question of Charles' sexuality and with the evidence available I think he has come to the right conclusions.