Lewis Carroll

Blurb

Lewis Carroll: A Biography is a 1995 biography of author Lewis Carroll by Morton N. Cohen, first published by Knopf, later by Macmillan. It is generally considered to be the definitive scholarly work on Carroll's life. Cohen's approach is mainly chronological, with some chapters grouped by theme, such as those on Carroll's religion, his love of little girls, and his guilty feelings. Cohen, a Carroll scholar for 30 years, opts to use Dodgson's first name, Charles, throughout the work, because it "seems most appropriate in a book dealing with the intimacy of his life".
The book generally assumes that Carroll's love of little girls was not just emotional but sexual—that he was a paedophile, albeit a suppressed one. In the book Cohen writes:
"We cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Charles's preference for drawing and photographing children in the nude. He contended that the preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his emotional attachment to children as well as his aesthetic appreciation of their forms, his assertion that his interest was strictly artistic is naïve. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself."