Lewis Carroll: A Biography

Who was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the pioneer photographer, Oxford don, and mathematician who, writing as Lewis Carroll, gave the world the Jabberwock, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Red Queen, the Hatter, the March Hare, and an unforgettable tea party? In this elegant, affectionate biography, Morton N. Cohen brings his singular expertise - gained from some thirty years' scholarship on Carroll as well as from special access to the Dodgson family documents - to the riddle of the quiet, stammering man who liberated children's books from the moralists and whose imagination brought forth some of the funniest nonsense, wildest characters, and most extraordinary cultural icons of modern times. What emerges is both an extraordinary work of scholarship and a portrait that is filled with admiration for Carroll's accomplishment, delight in his playfulness and charm, and sympathy for the self-reproach and emotional turbulence that underlay his apparently placid existence. A major literary biography.