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gence, curiosity, and independence are redeemed from brattiness by a new-found sense of social responsibility. This transformation is typically brought about, as in Ewings Amelia and the Dwarfs (1870), by what Knoepflmacher calls a beneficial lowering (405) in which a bourgeois character learns his or her lesson by a temporary fall in social statusin this case drudging for dwarfsthus adapting for childrens literature a typical pattern in mainstream Victorian fiction. The word venture in Knoepflmachers title is well chosen. The book is nearly as capacious as a Victorian novel, and Knoepflmacher creates a personal voice akin to an omniscient narrator of the period always ready to venture an opinion. At times this voice is avuncular, at times dogmatic, at times digressivetwo Carroll photographs of the MacDonald family get eight fascinating pages of analysisbut at all times well informed, if not entirely consistent. The Cheshire Cat, for example, who seems to have no teeth on page 180 seems to be all teeth in the midst of a different argument on page 370. Though less direct about it, Ventures into Childland, like its dark double James Kincaids Child Loving (1992), infuses history with a concern for todays child. The double theme implicit in the book, the need to respect and nurture the childs imagination without fetishizing it, and to raise children without confounding adult nostalgia with a childs perspective, is rooted in Knoepflmachers experience as both child and parent. In his fifth chapter Knoepflmacher reproduces the photograph of a projected sororal self, the sevenyear-old Alice that Carroll appended to the first Alice book, calling it an arrested figure of Carrolls own desire. In the Introduction, Knoepflmacher describes, but does not reproduce, a photograph of his own double, narrating what Roland Barthes would call its punctum. The picture, Knoepflmacher reports, shows a boy of the authors own age and aspect in 1941 or 1942, hands over his head, being herded by a Nazi soldier toward certain death, a boy whose parents lacked either the foresight or the means to flee Europe and start over again as the Knoepflmachers did. It is the absent presence of this fell arrest that underlies the texts commitment to the sanctity not just of childhood but of growing up. Knoepflmacher is a superb reader who brings to his texts the insights of a professional lifetime devoted to nineteenth-century literature. The discursive form of Ventures into Childland allows for asides that are as interesting as the analyses. Forthright about his own historical and critical situation, Knoepflmacher invites readers to enter into a dialogue, to agree or disagree with his readings from their own perspectives on gender and generation (430). This is not merely a book that specialists should know, but that rare critical book that is a pleasure to read. Jeffrey L. Spear New York University

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 Leachs 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

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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 innocentor, 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 isnt sensational enough, Leach also posits a probable liaison (220) with one such grown-up sweetheartLorina Liddell, mother of the original Alice and wife of the Dean of Christ Church, the preeminent Oxford college of its day. If Leachs 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 Lennons 1945 Victoria through the Looking-Glass through Morton Cohens 1995 Lewis Carroll: A Biographybiographies grounded in the conviction that Carrolls frequently manifested love of what he called his child-friends (including Alice Liddell) was authentic, and notas Leach would have itoften 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 been devoted primarily to a potent mythology (9), casting Dodgson as either the worlds favorite saint or the worlds favorite pedophile (258). The evidence for this [mythologizing] is everywhere, Leach declares (9). The only way, perhaps, to excuse such irresponsible exaggerations is to consider them as rhetorical flourishes; for despite the handful of unsophisticated biographies of an earlier time, like Roger Lancelyn Greens hagiographic The Story of Lewis Carroll (1949) or Phyllis Greenacres reductionist Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of Two Lives (1955), Carrolls biographers have increasingly depicted him as the complex, engaged, and curiously unclassifiable person he most surely was. Much of the evidence for Leachs own sensational myth of a womanizing, adulterous Dodgson depends on conjecture about what is missing from, rather than on what is actually present in, the extensive corpus of published primary materials. The missing, never-accounted-for diary entries for 1853 to 1854 and 1858 to 1862, and the few small gaps created in the nine remaining diary volumes when several pages were excised some time after Dodgsons death (probably by his nieces Menella and Violet Dodgson) these lacunae are, for Leach, fertile grounds for establishing her claims. Upon them and several scraps of ambiguous evidence like Violets brief, somewhat cryptic note headed Cut Pages in the Diary (discovered by Leach in 1996 in the Dodgson family papers) and the never-explained diary confessions of generalized sinfulness in the volumes covering 1862 to 1873, she builds a melodramatic case, disregarding the mountains of extant documents and conscientious scholarship that would not support it. Leachs rhetorical style, which typically depends on all-inclusive, unqualified statements, is likely to alienate readers looking for considered and dependable judgments. Here she is, for example, on the simplistically polarized saint vs. pedophile myths: the axiom upon which the entire analysis of Carrolls life and literature depends is the assumption that the girl-child was the single outlet for his emotional and creative

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energies in an otherwise lonely and isolated life; that she was the sole inspiration for his genius and that she inhabited the place in his heart occupied in more normal lives by adult friends and lovers. This belief, and its corollarieshis loneliness and his unassailable chastityare the assumptions by which everything else about Carroll, his life and work, is evaluated. (12) Besides lacing her text with such overstatements and hyperbole (entire, single, sole, everything), Leach misrepresents her material in less obvious, more insidious ways. For instance, she quotes from an 1884 letter to an old friend, Maud Standen, written when Standen was twenty-five and Carroll fifty-two: Mrs. G. [Grundy] is no doubt busy talking about another young friend of minea mere child, only 4 or 5 and 20whom I have brought down from town. . . . Is it not an outr proceeding, well worthy of Mrs. G.s attention? (qtd. 75). The actual letter, without Leachs ellipsis, reads: whom I have brought down from town to visit my sisters (emphasis added). But Leachs book is not totally without merit. Despite its excesses, it helps (like a number of recent biographies) to dispel the stubborn popular misconceptions of Carroll as an unworldly, childlike, asexual genius, misconceptions that persist despite all the hard evidence to the contrary. It also broadens readers comprehension of the cultural matrix within which Carrolls literary and photographic works were produced and first enjoyed. This is especially true of Leachs discussions of Carrolls relations to the Romantic-Victorian child-cult, a critical issue that has recently been illuminated by such Carroll scholars as Morton Cohen, U. C. Knoepflmacher, and Hugues Lebailly. Moreover, Leach makes several worthwhile contributions to the ongoing reassessment of the relations between Dodgson and his father, an important topic in any Carroll biography. The best features of Leachs book are its lively narration and its emphatic (occasionally feverish) prose stylea style that sometimes sacrifices sense for sound, but one that enables Leach to shape her improbable premises into an arresting story, lending, as she puts it, such a bizarre air of Gothic mystery to Dodgsons contact with Lorina and her family (209). Like A. S. Byatts 1995 novel Possession, this book mixes Victorian literary scholarship with historical romance, projecting, wherever it finds an opportunity, late-twentieth-century sexual mores into mid-nineteenth-century culture. In short, despite her claims to historical accuracy, Leach has constructed a pretty good piece of historical fictionall the while representing it as the unvarnished truth about Dodgsons sexual proclivities and romantic escapades. This is not to say that there is no more room in Carroll studies for revisionist biographies like the one Leach attempts. As she graphically demonstrates, the saintly and the pedophiliac interpretations of Carroll continue to create popular icons that foster false conceptions of his life and work, conceptions she goes to great lengths to dispel. But in her own overstatements and exaggerations, she, too, misrepresents her subject, creating almost out of whole cloth a Dodgson who is an indolent hypocrite and guiltravaged adulterer, a Dodgson completely inconsistent with his letters and diaries, as well as his major literary works. For those readers who can, like Carrolls White Queen, believe six impossible things before breakfast, Leachs interpretations will not seem so fantasticalor dangerous. But the danger is there nevertheless: readers unfamiliar with the great wealth of Carrolls private letters and diaries and with the exacting modern scholarship devoted

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to them might very well view this book as a trustworthy account of their writers ingeniously hidden sexual proclivities. From there, it isnt a great leap to dismissing the significance of the manifest love for a real little girl that informs Carrolls private lovegift for Alice Liddellthe beautiful, painstakingly hand-crafted manuscript book, Alices Adventures under Groundas well as its two world-famous sequels. Donald Rackin Temple University

The Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Carrolls Use of Earlier Childrens Literature, by Ronald Reichertz; pp. 251. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997, Can$70.00, Can$36.00 paper, $65.00, $24.95 paper. Perhaps it seems a backhanded compliment to say that a principal value of Ronald Reichertzs very useful book lies in its appendices. But that may have been Reichertzs plan. He gives only a third of his bookfewer than eighty pagesto the unfolding of his argument that Carrolls fantasies incorporate an extensive literary tradition [. . .] that had been assimilated into childrens literature before the Alice books were written (4). Incorporate is the important word in his sentence. The many stories and poems he names and describes in the six chapters of his argument provide, in Reichertzs view, not just a context for Lewis Carrolls books; to an extent insufficiently remarked and studied by other commentators, they often furnish the very stuff of his writing. The five appendices that constitute the other two-thirds of the book support this claim by offering an anthology of mostly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing whose themes and tactics Carroll appropriated, adapted, parodied, or otherwise deformed into the original shapes and surfaces of the Alice books. Original is the important word in my sentence. Each appendix is organized by the topic of one of the chapters in the first part of the book. Three include extracts from texts that use the topoi of the world upside down, the world in or on the other side of the looking glass, and the world in, or as, dream. Another appendix displays the variety and pervasiveness of didactic writing for children. Yet another contains specific texts parodied or adapted by CarrollIsaac Watts and Jane and Ann Taylor, of course, but also Thomas Love Peacock, W. E. Aytoun (misidentified as Ayton), and Charles Lambs version of The King and Queen of Hearts; with the Rogueries of the Knave Who Stole the Queens Pies (1805). The appendix on dream visions also contains extracts from some of the books Carroll noted as imitations of the Alice books: Elsies Expedition (1874), Our Trip to Blunderland (1877), and Mabel in Rhymeland (1885). The evidence of this writing solidly sets Carroll among traditions and practices common in the reading of children for more than half a century before he told the stories of Alices adventures. And none of it, not even Watts, Peacock, or Lamb, and certainly not the feeble playfulness of Carrolls imitators, holds the surprise and polish and resonant mystery of any passage of the Alice books. One lesson of the argument and appendices of The Making of the Alice Books, therefore, is that Carroll practiced a form of popular writing, working variations on patterns familiar to his readers. Another lesson is that he was a very good writer who used the repertoire of his predecessors to create effects that they quite literally could not imagine.

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