morton cohen

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a pioneering photographer, Oxford don and mathematician, who - as Lewis Carroll - gave the world not only Alice, but the Jabberwocky, the Red Queen, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Cheshire Cat and an unforgettable tea party. But who was he?

In this elegant, affectionate biography, Morton N. Cohen brings a singular expertise - drawn from some thirty years' scholarship on Carroll as well as from special access to the Dodgson family documents - to the riddle of the quiet, stammering man who liberated children's books from the moralists and whose imagination brought forth some of the funniest nonsense, wildest characters and most extraordinary cultural icons of modern times.

His life has puzzled psychologists and literary historians for generations. Now, with full mastery of Caroll's letters and voluminous diaries, Cohen explores as never before the paradox of the man: the unworldly innocent whose passionate worship of young girls has incited endless speculation; the Victorian gentleman whose sombre religious meditations shared a place in his mind with the Snark and the Boojum; the cloistered, lonely bachelor don whose magical books are known in every culture in the world today.

What emerges is a portrait that is filled with admiration for Carroll's accomplishment, delight in his playfulness and charm and sympathy for the self-reproach and emotional turbulence that lay beneath Carroll's apparently placid existence. Lewis Carroll: A Biography is an extraordinary work of literary scholarship.