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In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll, by Karoline Leach; pp. 294. London: Peter Owen; Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 1999, 19.95, $35.95.
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 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.
If Leach's contentions were valid, our understanding of Dodgson, his particular upper-middle-class milieu, and even his literary and photographic achievements, would require substantial revision. To begin, we would be forced to discount the trustworthiness of a number of major biographies published in the past half-century, from Florence Becker Lennon's 1945 Victoria through the Looking-Glass through Morton Cohen's 1995 Lewis Carroll: A Biography-biographies grounded in the conviction that Carroll's frequently manifested love of what he called his "child-friends" (including Alice Liddell) was authentic, and not-as Leach would have it-often merely a guise of the chaste "patron saint of children" hoping to get at their mothers or older sisters (162).
Leach endlessly reiterates her sweeping contention that the "hundred years of biography surrounding the author of Alice [ ...] has...