Donald Rackin - In The Shadow Of The Dream Child_ A New Understanding Of Lewis Carroll (review) - Victorian Studies 43_4_ko_johnson

Donald Rackin - In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll (review) - Victorian Studies 43:4

1/21/09 2:16 PM

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 New Understanding of Lewis Carroll In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll, by Karoline 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 Dreamchild is difficult to take seriously: repeatedly proclaiming its improbable, feebly documented central propositions with such an inflexible assurance, it vitiates its less spectacular, more plausible [End Page 650] observations. For this very tendentious biography insists that 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 an innocent--or, at least, sexually repressed-- lover of little girls, probably had numerous grown-up lovers ("whether or not," as Leach says of one such supposed affair, "they ever engaged in the technicality of penetrative sex" [247]). And as if that claim isn't sensational enough, Leach also posits "a probable liaison" (220) with one such grown-up sweetheart--Lorina Liddell, mother of the original Alice and wife of the Dean of Christ Church, the preeminent Oxford college of its day. If Leach's contentions were valid, our understanding of Dodgson, his particular uppermiddle-class milieu, and even his literary and photographic achievements, would require substantial revision. To begin, we would be forced to discount the trustworthiness of a number of major biographies published in the past half-century, from Florence Becker Lennon's 1945 Victoria through the Looking-Glass through Morton Cohen's 1995 Lewis Carroll: A Biography--biographies grounded in the conviction that Carroll's frequently manifested love of what he called his "child-friends" (including Alice Liddell) was authentic, and not--as Leach would have it--often merely a guise of the chaste "patron saint of children" hoping to get at their mothers or older sisters (162). Leach endlessly reiterates her sweeping contention that the "hundred years of biography surrounding 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 favorite pedophile" (258). "The evidence for this [mythologizing] is everywhere," Leach declares (9). The only way, perhaps, to excuse such irresponsible exaggerations is to consider them as rhetorical flourishes; for despite the handful of unsophisticated biographies of an http://0-muse.jhu.edu.opac.sfsu.edu/journals/victorian_studies/v043/43.4rackin.html

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Donald Rackin - In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll (review) - Victorian Studies 43:4

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them as rhetorical flourishes; for despite the handful of unsophisticated biographies of an earlier 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 Two Lives (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, adulterous Dodgson depends on conjecture about what is missing from, rather than on what is actually 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 small gaps created in the nine remaining diary volumes when several pages were excised some 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 and several 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 volumes covering 1862 to 1873, she builds a melodramatic case, disregarding the mountains of extant 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 she is, for example, on the simplistically polarized saint vs. pedophile myths: the axiom upon which the entire analysis of Carroll's life and literature depends is the assumption that the girl-child was the single outlet for his emotional and creative [End Page 651] energies in an otherwise lonely and isolated life; that she was the sole inspiration for his genius and that she inhabited the place in his heart occupied in more normal lives by adult friends and lovers. This belief, and its corollaries--his loneliness and his unassailable chastity--are the assumptions by which everything else about Carroll, his life and 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. For instance, she quotes from an 1884 letter to an old friend, Maud Standen, written when Standen was twenty-five and Carroll fifty-two: "Mrs. G. [Grundy] is no doubt busy talking about another young friend of mine--a mere child, only 4 or 5 and 20--whom I have brought down from town. . . . Is it not an outré proceeding, well worthy of Mrs. G.'s attention?" (qtd. 75). The actual letter, without Leach's ellipsis, reads: "whom I have brought 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 number of recent biographies) to dispel the stubborn popular misconceptions of Carroll as an unworldly, childlike, asexual genius, misconceptions that persist despite all the hard evidence to the contrary. It also broadens readers' comprehension of the cultural matrix within 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 RomanticVictorian child-cult, a critical issue that has recently been illuminated by such Carroll scholars as Morton Cohen, U. C. Knoepflmacher, and Hugues Lebailly. Moreover, Leach makes several worthwhile contributions to the ongoing reassessment of the relations between 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 (occasionally feverish) prose style--a style that sometimes sacrifices sense for sound, but one that http://0-muse.jhu.edu.opac.sfsu.edu/journals/victorian_studies/v043/43.4rackin.html

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Donald Rackin - In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll (review) - Victorian Studies 43:4

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feverish) prose style--a style that sometimes sacrifices sense for sound, but one that enables Leach to shape her improbable premises into an arresting story, lending, as she puts it, "such a bizarre air of Gothic mystery to Dodgson's contact with Lorina and her family" (209). Like A. S. Byatt's 1995 novel Possession, this book mixes Victorian literary scholarship with historical romance, projecting, wherever it finds an opportunity, latetwentieth-century sexual mores into mid-nineteenth-century culture. In short, despite her claims to historical accuracy, Leach has constructed a pretty good piece of historical fiction--all the while representing it as the unvarnished truth about Dodgson's sexual proclivities and romantic escapades. This is not to say that there is no more room in Carroll studies for revisionist biographies like the one Leach attempts. As she graphically demonstrates, the saintly and the pedophiliac interpretations of Carroll continue to create popular icons that foster false conceptions of his life and work, conceptions she goes to great lengths to dispel. But in her own overstatements and exaggerations, she, too, misrepresents her subject, creating almost out of whole cloth a Dodgson who is an indolent hypocrite and guilt- ravaged adulterer, a Dodgson completely inconsistent with his letters and diaries, as well as his major literary works. For those readers who can, like Carroll's White Queen, believe six impossible things before breakfast, Leach's interpretations will not seem so fantastical--or dangerous. But the danger is there nevertheless: readers unfamiliar with the great wealth of Carroll's private letters and diaries and with the exacting modern scholarship devoted [End Page 652] to them might very well view this book as a trustworthy account of their writer's ingeniously hidden sexual proclivities. From there, it isn't a great leap to dismissing the significance of the manifest love for a real little girl that informs Carroll's private "lovegift" for Alice Liddell--the beautiful, painstakingly hand-crafted manuscript book, Alice's Adventures under Ground--as well as its two world-famous sequels.

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

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