Sooo... my recent readings:
Lewis Carroll: A Biography
I love Lewis Carroll. I mean, I really really really love Lewis Carroll. I know about six of his poems, have read all of his children's books - even Sylvie and Bruno - and I just love love love him as an author. One of my favourite memories of my childhood is snuggling up in bed on a winter's night with my hot water bottle (really an empty orange juice cask with hot water from the tap in it - ah the residual smell of hot orange juice!) and a battered old copy of Through the Looking Glass. A while ago - last year or the year before - I read Lynne Truss's book Tennyson's Gift: historical fiction about my favouritest group of writers ever, namely, the Victorians. It's all about a summer in which Lewis Carroll (or Charles Dodgson, to give him his real name) visited Tennyson on holidays like the sorta crazy fanboy he was. I thought I would love this book - the subject matter was awesome, Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves already had me gunning for her, everything about it seemed to beg me to read it.
I hated Tennyson's Gift. I will never deliberately read a ficitonal book about real people with an eye to enjoyment again. Truss took my favourite authors and made them look like mean, unhappy idiots, all for comedic effect. If they were fictional people to begin with I could probably shrug it off - Jasper Fforde can do that, I don't mind. I rather enjoy it. But I just can't hack seeing real people I have real respect for being used and abused in a work of fiction. I can't.
And she made Charles Dodgson out to be a closet paedophile. Humourously.
Dude. What the Heck?
This is not OK on so many levels. Charles Dodgson is one of the most enigmatic, paradoxical, fascinating people I have ever read about. Reading his prayers and pleas with God over some unnamed sin, I feel actually humbled. I can see how people read this stuff and say 'paedophilia!' The man had thousands of child friends! There was something wrong in his head!
Thing is, my diary reads like this a lot of the time. Particularly when I was younger: lots and lots of weepy grovelly 'God help me to change my horrible ways!' type stuff. But writing this stuff down helped me. I am a more sane person to this day because I wrote and prayed all the heavy feelings out of my head. And, to this day, all the hundreds of child friends who talked about Dodgson never ever made any sort of claim that he ever behaved around them in an inappropriate way. Victorians were way uptight, too, as you probably know. Some relative of Dodgson's posthumously crossed out a passage in his diary about how the real Alice (Alice Liddell) was grumpy when she was sick. That's the kind of stuff they censored! I don't think we need worry about worse things having been edited out, somehow.
Dodgson was a walking talking paradox. A stern and serious professor of mathematics who was all propriety and manners with adults and a clergyman who played games with children and wrote Alice in Wonderland for a group of little girls. An awkward, stammering man who invented a type of bicycle and wanted to bowlderise Bowlder's version of Shakespeare so little kids could read it. A conscientious man who held radical views about church and charity. The universally acclaimed best photographer of the 19th century.
My favourite story in this book is about a time he was invited to a kids' birthday party. He showed up, the servant let him into the drawing room and formally announced 'Charles Dodgson, ma'am,' to its occupants... Dodgson decided to get down on all fours and pretend to be a bear for the children. He got into the middle of the room, looked up... and found out that he was in the wrong house. So he gets up and gets out of the room without a word to any of the no doubt electrified Victorian tea pary! I CAN RELATE!
So... yeah. The book was good.
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