VICTORIA THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS
(UK title - Lewis Carroll - 1945)

AUTHOR:

Florence Becker Lennon

Lennon's biography is very much a product of the Freudian or Psycho-Analytical school that has been a prominent aspect of Carrollianism since the mid-1930s. But even so, it is in some ways an improvement on those that had gone before. She is, for example, aware of the strange tendency to mythologise Carroll, and accurately summarises his position as "the last saint of this irreverent world". However, her factual accuracy is perforce very low. The Dodgson family were still refusing to co-operate with biographers, and although she struck up a friendship with Carroll's niece Menella, she was given almost no access to useful data. So, her book simply rehashes the now familiar and wholly inaccurate image of Carroll as child-obsessed and uninterested in the adult world - and adds her own 'freudian' spin to this.
Most notably she was the first biographer to quite openly imply that Dodgson was a paedophile: "now it can be told, he loved little girls".

SOUNDBITE:

more Freud than fact

IMPACT AND INFLUENCE:

fairly influential