Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a shy Oxford mathematician, reverend, and pioneering photographer. Under the pen name Lewis Carroll he wrote two stunning classics that liberated children’s literature from the constraints of Victorian moralism. But the exact nature of his relationship with Alice Liddell, daughter of the dean of his college, and the young girl who was his muse and subject, remains mysterious.Dodgson met Alice in 1856, when she was almost four years old. Eventually he would capture her in his photographs, and transform the stories he told her into the luminous Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass. Then, suddenly, when Alice was eleven, the Liddell family shut him out, and his relationship with Alice ended abruptly. The pages from Dodgson’s diary that may have explained the rift have disappeared.
In imagining what might have happened, Katie Roiphe has created a deep, textured portrait of Alice and Dodgson: she changing from an unruly child to a bewitching adolescent, and he, a diffident, neurasthenic adult whose increasing obsession with her almost destroys him. Here, too, is a brilliantly realized cast of characters that surround them: Lorina Liddell, Alice’s mother, who loves her daughter even as she envies her youth; Edith Liddell, Alice’s resentful little sister; and James Hunt, Dodgson’s speech therapist, an island of sanity in Dodgson’s increasingly chaotic world.
Synopsis
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a shy Oxford mathematician, reverend, and pioneering photographer. Under the pen name Lewis Carroll he wrote two stunning classics that liberated children's literature from the constraints of Victorian moralism.
Publishers Weekly
Roiphe (The Morning After; Last Night in Paradise) takes as the subject of her latest effort the relationship between the elusive Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the child-muse for whom he wrote Alice in Wonderland. The true nature of their acquaintance was Dodgson sexually attracted to Alice, or was he merely an acolyte in the Victorian cult of the child? is fertile ground for Roiphe's first novel, a product of prodigious research and empathy for the stuttering young mathematics lecturer. His infatuation does not go unnoticed: Alice's mother's suspicions of him mount over the years, and eventually he is cut out of the family's life altogether. Fascinating though a fictional exploration of Dodgson's life may be, Roiphe's tale is problematic on a number of levels. Her prose is often bloated with excess adjectives and a reportorial voice intermittently intrudes. Invented diary entries purportedly by Dodgson are turgid and ponderous, clashing with the drollery of his published work, even when one acknowledges that public and private personae are often opposed. Early in his acquaintance with Alice, he writes, "one can see the heat of her unhappiness rising off the photograph her desire so palpable to be & not just appear to be some creature other than what she is." His passion, the way Roiphe describes it, comes very near to turning him into a weak, meek Humbert Humbert minus the evil wit that made Nabokov's antihero so appealing. When Dodgson ruins a photograph of his beloved Alice by mistakenly rubbing out the features of her face, the resulting blur seems to mirror the novel: despite great care, what is meant to be a clear psychological portrait rendersits subject fuzzy and distorted. National advertising. (Sept. 11) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.