The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll - 1898

AUTHOR:

Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

Still the only 'official' biography, sanctioned by the Dodgson family, it was written by Carroll's nephew and published just 11 months after his death in December 1898. Is principally concerned with presenting an acceptably saintly and admirable image both of Carroll himself and of the whole Dodgson family, and has very little in-depth information about Carroll's real life. It accidentally seeded the entire image of Dodgson as a pedophile by deliberately suppressing all the evidence for his often somewhat unconventional relationships with women. Collingwood did this, presumably, to preserve the family's sense of decency, and almost certainly had no idea of how his actions would affect the progress of his uncle's biography in the 20th Century. His book is also notable for the small glimpses of a deeper, pre-mythic, reality he lets slip - like Dodgson's passion for Swinburne's sensual and 'scandalous' poetry - and for the fact that, alone of any biographer until the modern day, he admitted - or at least implied strongly - that Dodgson had experienced an unhappy love affair. The writers who came after him soon got rid of all that however.

SOUNDBITE:

The start of the mythic 'Carroll' - with Dodgson peeking through

IMPACT AND INFLUENCE:

Highly influential up to a point; but it didn't really invent the classic 'Carroll'; that was done by later writers.