James Playsted Wood (1905–1983)

The waning of the Middle Ages was a lousy time.

There are, I think, three eras in the writing of biographies of Lewis Carroll. The first era ran roughly from his death in 1898 to his centenary in 1932. There were very few sources available in that period, so basically people took their information for Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll's life from the writings of his nephew Stuart Dodgson Collingwood and the biography by his friend Isa Bowman, plus a few items Dodgson had written himself. The results were, frankly, "pwecious."

In 1932, people realized that Alice Hargreaves was still alive, and so they talked to her. Then Evelyn Hatch published the first real collection of Dodgson's letters. Other sources also turned up, and eventually Roger Lancelyn Green was allowed to publish an extremely heavily redacted version of Dodgson's diaries. In this era, it began to be possible to study the real Dodgson -- but it was also the era of Freudianism and psychoanalysis, and there was a lot of literary criticism and psychological stupidity.

The modern era came with Edward Wakeling's publication of the unexpurgated diary (not that it had really needed expurgating), and Morton Cohen's (almost) full edition of Dodgson's letters, and a lot of data-gathering. I still think the biographies of today fall short -- but that's not for lack of data, or some neo-Freudian stupidity; it's just that Dodgson had autism, and biographers who don't understand autism don't quite understand what that means. They still do a lot better than the older writers.

This is a biography from the middle era, with all the faults that that implies, and it's further weakened by a failure to cite sources. It's a little too willing to pass judgment on Dodgson's various writings (most seem to be treated as great or lousy, with little in between), it doesn't really understand his interest in photography, and it goes on a little too much about how he loved little girls and hated little boys. (The truth seems to be that he liked polite girls, and at least tolerated polite boys -- but boys were less likely to be polite, because that's the way Victorian England worked.) It isn't a trivial biography, but neither is it deep.

I read this book because I'm trying to gather as much information about Dodgson as possible. There were only about three times when I hesitated and thought about adding something to my files. And, in the end, I decided against it, because of the lack of documentation.

This is not one of the destructive biographies of Dodgson -- the ones that pretend he was Jack the Ripper, or a paedophile, or the like. It's sympathetic. But I really don't think it adds much, either to our knowledge of Dodgson or to our knowledge of his writings. Like the Middle Ages, its time has passed.… (mehr)