Volume 43, Number 3 · February 15, 1996
Alice, or The Art of Survival
By John Bayley
Lewis Carroll: A Biography
by Morton N. Cohen
Knopf, 577 pp., $35.00
The Complete Sylvie and Bruno
by Lewis Carroll, iillustrated by Renée Flower
Mercury House, 394 pp., $30.00
The Reverend C.L. Dodgson, whose invented pen name was Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, was certainly a man with two profiles, if not more. The reminiscences of those who knew him, neatly assembled and edited by his biographer,[1] give a more vivid and contradictory impression of him than a modern biographical analysis can manage to do. Take the question of that stammer. Some who knew him, like Mrs. Shute, the wife of one of his colleagues at Christ Church, Oxford, and author of the above passage, maintain that it was no more than an effective device for telling stories, a tic that its owner made adroit use of. Others, like the Bishop of Oxford in Dodgson's time, insist that it was a serious and embarrassing handicap which prevented its devout owner from proceeding to full orders and becoming a priest. He escaped conducting services if at all possible, although he would preach sermons, over which he took immense pains, 'avoiding the words which tripped him up in speech.' And with these sermons he always 'held his audience.'
Review, 4566 words
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