1/21/09 2:16 PMDonald Rackin - In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll (review) - Victorian Studies 43:4

Page 1 of 3http://0-muse.jhu.edu.opac.sfsu.edu/journals/victorian_studies/v043/43.4rackin.html

Copyright © 2001 The Trustees of Indiana University. All rights reserved.

Victorian Studies 43.4 (2001) 650-653

Access provided by San Francisco State University

[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A NewUnderstanding of Lewis Carroll

In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll, byKaroline Leach; pp. 294. London: Peter Owen; Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions,1999, £19.95, $35.95.

As a piece of biographical scholarship, Karoline Leach's In the Shadow of the Dreamchildis difficult to take seriously: repeatedly proclaiming its improbable, feebly documentedcentral propositions with such an inflexible assurance, it vitiates its less spectacular,more plausible [End Page 650] observations. For this very tendentious biography insiststhat virtually all the numerous biographical studies of Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson)published since his death in 1898 have missed (or deliberately avoided) a crucial point:that this ostensibly celibate, conservative Christ Church don, generally considered aninnocent--or, at least, sexually repressed-- lover of little girls, probably had numerousgrown-up lovers ("whether or not," as Leach says of one such supposed affair, "they everengaged in the technicality of penetrative sex" [247]). And as if that claim isn'tsensational enough, Leach also posits "a probable liaison" (220) with one such grown-upsweetheart--Lorina Liddell, mother of the original Alice and wife of the Dean of ChristChurch, the preeminent Oxford college of its day.

If Leach's contentions were valid, our understanding of Dodgson, his particular upper-middle-class milieu, and even his literary and photographic achievements, would requiresubstantial revision. To begin, we would be forced to discount the trustworthiness of anumber of major biographies published in the past half-century, from Florence BeckerLennon's 1945 Victoria through the Looking-Glass through Morton Cohen's 1995 LewisCarroll: A Biography--biographies grounded in the conviction that Carroll's frequentlymanifested love of what he called his "child-friends" (including Alice Liddell) wasauthentic, and not--as Leach would have it--often merely a guise of the chaste "patronsaint of children" hoping to get at their mothers or older sisters (162).

Leach endlessly reiterates her sweeping contention that the "hundred years of biographysurrounding the author of Alice [. . .] has been devoted primarily to a potent mythology"(9), casting Dodgson as either "the world's favorite saint" or "the world's favoritepedophile" (258). "The evidence for this [mythologizing] is everywhere," Leach declares(9). The only way, perhaps, to excuse such irresponsible exaggerations is to considerthem as rhetorical flourishes; for despite the handful of unsophisticated biographies of an

1/21/09 2:16 PMDonald Rackin - In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll (review) - Victorian Studies 43:4

Page 2 of 3http://0-muse.jhu.edu.opac.sfsu.edu/journals/victorian_studies/v043/43.4rackin.html

them as rhetorical flourishes; for despite the handful of unsophisticated biographies of anearlier time, like Roger Lancelyn Green's hagiographic The Story of Lewis Carroll (1949)or Phyllis Greenacre's reductionist Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of TwoLives (1955), Carroll's biographers have increasingly depicted him as the complex,engaged, and curiously unclassifiable person he most surely was.

Much of the "evidence" for Leach's own sensational myth of a womanizing, adulterousDodgson depends on conjecture about what is missing from, rather than on what isactually present in, the extensive corpus of published primary materials. The missing,never-accounted-for diary entries for 1853 to 1854 and 1858 to 1862, and the few smallgaps created in the nine remaining diary volumes when several pages were excisedsome time after Dodgson's death (probably by his nieces Menella and Violet Dodgson)--these lacunae are, for Leach, fertile grounds for establishing her claims. Upon them andseveral scraps of ambiguous evidence like Violet's brief, somewhat cryptic note headed"Cut Pages in the Diary" (discovered by Leach in 1996 in the Dodgson family papers)and the never-explained diary confessions of generalized sinfulness in the volumescovering 1862 to 1873, she builds a melodramatic case, disregarding the mountains ofextant documents and conscientious scholarship that would not support it.

Leach's rhetorical style, which typically depends on all-inclusive, unqualified statements,is likely to alienate readers looking for considered and dependable judgments. Here sheis, for example, on the simplistically polarized saint vs. pedophile myths:

the axiom upon which the entire analysis of Carroll's life and literaturedepends is the assumption that the girl-child was the single outlet for hisemotional and creative [End Page 651] energies in an otherwise lonely andisolated life; that she was the sole inspiration for his genius and that sheinhabited the place in his heart occupied in more normal lives by adult friendsand lovers. This belief, and its corollaries--his loneliness and his unassailablechastity--are the assumptions by which everything else about Carroll, his lifeand work, is evaluated. (12)

Besides lacing her text with such overstatements and hyperbole ("entire," "single," "sole,""everything"), Leach misrepresents her material in less obvious, more insidious ways. Forinstance, she quotes from an 1884 letter to an old friend, Maud Standen, written whenStanden was twenty-five and Carroll fifty-two: "Mrs. G. [Grundy] is no doubt busy talkingabout another young friend of mine--a mere child, only 4 or 5 and 20--whom I havebrought down from town. . . . Is it not an outré proceeding, well worthy of Mrs. G.'sattention?" (qtd. 75). The actual letter, without Leach's ellipsis, reads: "whom I havebrought down from town to visit my sisters" (emphasis added).

But Leach's book is not totally without merit. Despite its excesses, it helps (like a numberof recent biographies) to dispel the stubborn popular misconceptions of Carroll as anunworldly, childlike, asexual genius, misconceptions that persist despite all the hardevidence to the contrary. It also broadens readers' comprehension of the cultural matrixwithin which Carroll's literary and photographic works were produced and first enjoyed.This is especially true of Leach's discussions of Carroll's relations to the Romantic-Victorian child-cult, a critical issue that has recently been illuminated by such Carrollscholars as Morton Cohen, U. C. Knoepflmacher, and Hugues Lebailly. Moreover, Leachmakes several worthwhile contributions to the ongoing reassessment of the relationsbetween Dodgson and his father, an important topic in any Carroll biography.

The best features of Leach's book are its lively narration and its emphatic (occasionallyfeverish) prose style--a style that sometimes sacrifices sense for sound, but one that

1/21/09 2:16 PMDonald Rackin - In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll (review) - Victorian Studies 43:4

Page 3 of 3http://0-muse.jhu.edu.opac.sfsu.edu/journals/victorian_studies/v043/43.4rackin.html

feverish) prose style--a style that sometimes sacrifices sense for sound, but one thatenables Leach to shape her improbable premises into an arresting story, lending, as sheputs it, "such a bizarre air of Gothic mystery to Dodgson's contact with Lorina and herfamily" (209). Like A. S. Byatt's 1995 novel Possession, this book mixes Victorian literaryscholarship with historical romance, projecting, wherever it finds an opportunity, late-twentieth-century sexual mores into mid-nineteenth-century culture. In short, despite herclaims to historical accuracy, Leach has constructed a pretty good piece of historicalfiction--all the while representing it as the unvarnished truth about Dodgson's sexualproclivities and romantic escapades.

This is not to say that there is no more room in Carroll studies for revisionist biographieslike the one Leach attempts. As she graphically demonstrates, the saintly and thepedophiliac interpretations of Carroll continue to create popular icons that foster falseconceptions of his life and work, conceptions she goes to great lengths to dispel. But inher own overstatements and exaggerations, she, too, misrepresents her subject, creatingalmost out of whole cloth a Dodgson who is an indolent hypocrite and guilt- ravagedadulterer, a Dodgson completely inconsistent with his letters and diaries, as well as hismajor literary works.

For those readers who can, like Carroll's White Queen, believe six impossible thingsbefore breakfast, Leach's interpretations will not seem so fantastical--or dangerous. Butthe danger is there nevertheless: readers unfamiliar with the great wealth of Carroll'sprivate letters and diaries and with the exacting modern scholarship devoted [End Page652] to them might very well view this book as a trustworthy account of their writer'singeniously hidden sexual proclivities. From there, it isn't a great leap to dismissing thesignificance of the manifest love for a real little girl that informs Carroll's private "love-gift" for Alice Liddell--the beautiful, painstakingly hand-crafted manuscript book, Alice'sAdventures under Ground--as well as its two world-famous sequels.

Donald RackinTemple University

Donald Rackin, Professor of English Emeritus at Temple University, has written andlectured extensively on Lewis Carroll since his MLA-Prize essay, "Alice's Journey to theEnd of the Night" appeared in 1966. In 1991, he published "Alice's Adventures inWonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass": Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning. He iscurrently working on Carroll's literary and intellectual relations to Tennyson.