Book Review - The Mystery of Lewis Carroll by Jenny Woolf

Synopsis:  Lewis Carroll was brilliant, secretive and self contradictory. He reveled in double meanings and puzzles, in his fiction and his life. Jenny Woolf’s The Mystery of Lewis Carroll shines a new light on the creator of Alice In Wonderland and brings to life this fascinating, but sometimes exasperating human being whom some have tried to hide. Using rarely-seen and recently discovered sources, such as Carroll’s accounts ledger and unpublished correspondence with the “real” Alice’s family, Woolf sets Lewis Carroll firmly in the context of the English Victorian age and answers many intriguing questions about the man who wrote the Alice books, such as:

• Was it Alice or her older sister that caused him to break with the Liddell family?
• How true is the gossip about pedophilia and certain adult women that followed him?
• How true is the “romantic secret” which many think ruined Carroll’s personal life?
• Who caused Carroll major financial trouble and why did Carroll successfully conceal that person’s identity and actions?

Woolf answers these and other questions to bring readers yet another look at one of the most elusive English writers the world has known.

First Line:  "The more closely Lewis Carroll is studied, the more he seems to slide quietly away."

Random Quote:  "The gossip which circulated about Carroll also explains why so many of the young women who were close to him make the point in their recollections of how young and childlike they were.  It also suggests why other women asserted that he was usually only interested in little girls and that they were the exception.  It made everything in the whole scenario seem so much more innocent."

Review:  I was looking forward to this because I think it's interesting to look at the debate surrounding Carroll and the attempt to place him within the context of his era is interesting.  Due to the loss of his diaries (it's likely his family destroyed them), Carroll is in many ways a cipher - he's a blank canvas for the biographer to write themselves on.  It is this quality of him, so consonant with his books and poems, that makes it all so fascinating.  This, however, is not a fascinating book.

Lewis Carroll via last.fm

The book is written in such a dry fashion that it was really difficult to get through until finally I gave up and skimmed for more interesting bits (there aren't many).  This ground is well-covered in other places and while the book's big new discovery, the records of Carroll's bank accounts, is definitely a new discovery it's also not incredibly illuminating or interesting, or at least this writer didn't make it so.

At the end of the day maybe this just wasn't the book I expected or the book I wanted.  It was a bore and sucked the life out of its subject and that's really too bad.

Reading Challenges:  Once Upon a Time IV Reading Challenge, 2010 100+ Reading Challenge, 2010 Support Your Local Library Reading Challenge

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• Lewis Carroll, Through a Glass Darkly (online.wsj.com)