The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

The unwholesome rumors of our post-Freudian age are swept aside in a new biography. (Via Hermes.)

Lewis Carroll, the elusive author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, has been the subject of enduring fascination for the past hundred years. Born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the son of a country curate, he would spend almost his entire life in the quiet, studious surroundings of Christ Church College, Oxford, shunning publicity and becoming increasingly guarded as the years went by. However, in his posthumous existence, he has been retrospectively psychoanalysed; condemned for his supposed sexual perversions and alleged addiction to opium. The destruction of many major documents about his personal life by his descendants has only magnified the mystery. Jenny Woolf’s biography, published to coincide with the release of the new Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland film, lays waste to the myths and suspicions that have obscured Carroll’s reputation by placing him firmly in the context of his own time.

...It seems to me that Lewis Carroll was even more conceptually rigorous, playful and thought-provoking – let alone surreal – than almost any artist who pays homage to him. This is the show's lesson: somehow the books stand above their author and those who are inspired by them. Their fictive world has become so ubiquitous that almost anything can be seen in relation to it: anything featuring a mirror, an uncanny twist, anything with a child lost in a seemingly incomprehensible adult world, anything that bends logic, or time and space. All roads lead to Wonderland, even if some are not worth taking.