LEWIS CARROLL: A Biography

LEWIS CARROLL: A Biography. By Morton N.Cohen. Knopf. 577 pp. $35

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-98) was a stammering Oxford don, a brilliant mathematician, a superb a gifted nonsense poet, an indefatigable essayist and correspondent, and the author of some 300 published works. He also wrote two children's classics, Alice's Adventures iWonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), which for many years dwarfed all his other achievements.

Now Carroll's fame as author of the Alice books seems dwarfed by another kind of fame-as a borderline pedophile who idolized little girls, such as Alice Liddell, the daughter of his Christ Church dean and the inspiration for his beloved heroine. Even in staid Victorian England, Carroll persuaded dozens of mothers to let him photograph their daughters--in company and alone, clothed and in the nude. Cohen, emeritus professor of English at the City University of New York, probes these shadows judiciously, without making too much of them. Did Carroll ever molest? Cohen gives him the benefit of the doubt, suggesting that the eccentric don's "suppressed and diverted sexual energies caused him unspeakable torments." Cohen also points out that Carroll is remembered not for suffering sexual torments (anyone can do that) but for sublimating them: "They were in all probability the source of those exceptional flashes of genius that gave the world his creative works."

-James Carman