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In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll (review)

2001; Indiana University Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/vic.2001.0112

1527-2052

Donald Rackin,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

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.