Just because you're writing about Lewis Carroll is not enough to justify writing nonsense.

At least three novels have been written about Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, and why their friendship came to an abrupt end in 1863. Each, naturally, has to come up with an explanation for the event, since we have no knowledge of what actually happened, and none of them seem interested in the explanation that makes most sense (that Alice's parents asked Dodgson to back off a little, and he, in a way typical of people with autism, escalated the conflict until the relationship was cut off). All instead insist that Dodgson's relationship with girls and young women was based on lust and was diseased, and then spin a hypothesis based on that premise. In this case, the hypothesis is that Alice's little sister Edith was jealous when Dodgson made Alice the hero of his book, and falsely accused Dodgson of inappropriate behavior. It's psychologically very improbable, but the other books' hypotheses aren't much better.

Let's start with the disclaimers that a lot of scandal-loving people don't want to hear. First, not one of Dodgson's child-friends ever accused him of inappropriate behavior (except in one instance of a relatively innocent kiss in wrong circumstances). Second, Dodgson was not interested only in girls under twelve; it is true that his early friendships were all with young girls -- but, when he could, he stayed friends with the young women when they grew up. Gertrude Chataway, possibly his closest friend after Alice, wrote that they were "warm friends always," and they spent time together when she was 28. One of the last half-dozen letters he wrote, and almost the very last not to a member of his family, was to Beatrice Hatch, of whom, it is true, he took a nude photo when she was a child -- but who was, by the time of that letter, 31 years old. Did Dodgson lust after young girls? It's possible. But it's only possible, and it is absolutely certain he never did anything untoward. Everything he did was acceptable at the time; this was before Lolita changed our perceptions; it was a time when respectable books of poetry were often full of pictures of nude "fairy" children, when parents would commission nudes of their children, when child-marriages were still common! Many of Dodgson's writings to his child-friends make me cringe -- but they weren't illegal, they were just yucky.

But ignore all that. Let's assume he was a potential child-molester. That doesn't relieve author Slavitt of the need to get his history right. The book is a strangely mixed bag in that regard. He seems to know things about Caryl Hargreaves (Alice's son) and his wife that I haven't seen elsewhere. But there are a number of errors. For example, page 198 claims that Alice's sister Rhoda was her parents' "last child." She wasn't -- she wasn't even the last daughter. Violet Liddell was the last daughter, and Lionel Liddell the last child. Page 77 has a character say, "That's when I met Lewis Carroll." But girls did not meet "Lewis Carroll." They met the Rev. Charles Dodgson -- who might reveal that he was the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (one of his standard ways of meeting children was to give them a copy of the book, which is not what happened on page 77). But Dodgson would not answer to "Carroll." And if Dodgson cared only about Alice and Edith Liddell, and not their older sister Ina (p. 195), then why do Ina and Edith have exactly equal mentions in Wonderland, and never appear in Looking Glass?

Those are nitpicks, but one error makes a hash of the whole book. One major theme is Alice's decision to sell Dodgson's original manuscript copy of Alice's Adventures Under Ground -- one of the most important literary sales in history. The book claims that the reason was to secure Caryl's financial situation. But we know why the book was sold: The sale was arranged shortly after Alice's husband Reginald Hargreaves died. Reginald had been born rich, but didn't know how to manage money; by the time he died, he had a substantial property (his home of Cuffnells), but not much cash. He was like an American planter in the antebellum period: "rich" in terms of property owned but with little in the way of negotiable assets. And Britain in 1926 was still trying to pay off the debt from the Great War. The inheritance tax was fierce -- and neither Alice nor Caryl Hargreaves (who inherited effectively everything; Alice was left with no home and only a few other properties to live on) had any way to pay off the debt. The manuscript was sold to pay off the inheritance tax. This failure to understand why Alice sold her single most valuable property utterly distorts what is going on.

And I really didn't enjoy all the time spent discussing child prostitution!

And after all that... this just doesn't strike me as a very good novel. The historical characters (Alice Liddell Hargreaves, Reginald Hargreaves, Caryl Hargreaves, and Isa Bowman) all strike me as quite artificial and quite damaged. It is true that Alice's biographers seem to think that her life was marked by sorrow, even before two of her three sons were killed in the Great War -- but the plot here just doesn't make any sense. If Alice really still cared about Dodgson seventy years later, she certainly had the chance to re-establish their friendship once she was in her twenties -- and she didn't. So: Bad novel. Bad history. And, even for someone who is always trying to find the true answer to understanding Charles Dodgson, bad waste of time. ( )