This is a book worth special ordering... Jean Gattâegno does an stunning job at analizing the man we know as Lewis Carroll. Every detail- nothing left unsaid- great format with tons of references- and it comes with line drawings and pictures. This book is for Lewis Carroll fanatics or people just wanting to learn about our famous Charles Dodgen.

I don't see it listed here at the time of this review, so I'll list the details on this item since I own it. Complete and unagridged with all the original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel including 16 full-color plates. 2 small books about as big as my palm in a cardboard box / sleeve type case. Charming.

Martin Gardner avoids questionable psychoanalyticinterpretations, and instead describes the objects ofCarroll's satire that have been forgotten since the Victorian era. His notes allow us to fully enjoy Lewis Carroll's humor, and to see why Alice was so loved by children then (and by mathematicians now).

In 1886 Oxford, Charles Dodgson hosts Dr. Arthur Doyle and his wife Touie at the school. Charles feels he owes the Doyles who recently entertained him while Arthur hopes his "mentor" will look at his latest manuscript. Both hope to avoid a mystery as has happened on their previous meetings (see the three previous PROBLEM OF ... books).

However, problems exist as someone has robbed sherry, watches, and tie-pins, etc. Charles accuses surly scout Ingram without any evidence. On top of that a coed Dianna Cahill informs Charles and his guests that she has received letters telling her to leave Oxford or else. The latest included a picture of her as a naked little girl taken by Charles years ago. When Charles finds Ingram murdered, the police and the university administration argue over jurisdiction. Everyone wonders whether Charles killed the servant he publicly fired. Arthur and Charles, with some help from Touie, investigate the homicide, the thefts, and the threat.

As with the first three novels in this engaging series, the mystery of THE PROBLEM OF THE SURLY SERVANT takes a back seat to the historical fiction, especially the insight into the two famous authors. The story line is fun to follow as readers see the human sides of Dodgson and Doyle as well as a chance to glimpse at Oxford and understand Touie. The mystery is cleverly designed, but Roberta Rogow's latest pairing is first and foremost a brilliant historical novel.

Harriet Klausner

I really like Alice in Wonderland and its sequel because it is so whimsical. The way Dodgson made fun of Alice so much makes one laugh until tears come pouring down. He based the character Alice, on his friend; a real life Alice. Throughout the book, he constantly makes references to her, or something related to her. For example, when a character asks her the exact day Alice replies May 4th. May 4th is the real life Alice's birthday. Alice walks through Wonderland, and she sees many strange things, but thinks otherwise. If you like poems, you will certainly like Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, for both books contain numerous poems. However, in the book Carroll takes the original poems and creates a parody out of them. Something interesting to know is that all the poems relate to the chapters. These are all minor details, but something to muse over. On the surface, Alice in Wonderland is a book where she meets weird creatures and walks away from them always feeling humiliated, as she thinks she is smarter than she really is. That is most of Alice in Wonderland.

Alice through the Looking Glass is similar to the prequel, yet glaringly different. The whole book revolves around a chess game, and so the character's actions correspond to moves on the chessboard. Alice joins in the game, starts out as a white pawn, and proceeds to move until she becomes a queen. At each square, she meets a new character, but in one chapter, characters from the previous book are in this one too. An important thing to know in this famous classic is that everything is backwards. It makes sense since Alice is on the other side of a mirror, yet she encounters difficulty sometimes in understanding this. But in the end, she manages to become a queen and to checkmate the red king. Both books are very enjoyable, and I strongly advocate both children and adults to read it. Enjoy!! Cheers!!!!! : )

If you long to be carried away to a world of nonsense and magic, talking beasts and flowers then Alice is the best tour guide you can employ. This is a book that will find a place close to the heart of a reader of any age that has a place inside reserved for whimsy and childlike wonder. As Alice travels through Wonderland and meets many unexpected characters your imagination will soar. Run a race with a dodo bird. Have tea with the doremouse and his friends the mad hatter and the march hare. Thrill at the "Jabberwocky". Alice proves to be a very level headed young lady indeed as she encounters things that become "curiouser and curiouser!" The story meanders through forests and chessboards that are life size never ceasing to amaze the reader with charm and wit. Lewis Carroll completed a masterpiece of fantasy and social comentary in this classic tale. The book is truly a gift to any one who hopes to hold onto childhoods magic.

Alice in Wonderland is a great book. It gets your imagination going. It all starts when Alice is sitting on a bank with her sister and falls asleep. From there it is all imagination and from there your imagination never stops. Alice lets her curiosity get the best of her so she finds herself falling down a long, black, well after following the white rabbit. She follows the rabbit because she heard it say "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" Personally, I would have followed a talking rabbit also. After she hits the bottom of the well she finds all of these doors that she soon finds out are all locked. After she went around trying all of the doors she found a three legged table in the middle of the floor with a small gold key on it. The key was to small to fit any of the doors and she starts to wonder how she is going to get out of her. She then finds a curtain and she moves it. That's where she finds the door that the key fits. Once she opens the door she sees a beautiful garden but she is to large to fit in the door. Alice then finds a bottle marked "Drink Me" and when she drink it she shrinks. When she shrinks she noticed that she left the key on the table which now she is to small to get. Then she finds cookies that says "Eat Me" so of course Alice being as curiosity that she is she ate it. The cookie made her larger then what she was before. It made her so large that she got stuck. She started to cry which made her shrink once again. She cried so much that it caused a river of tears. Alice meets a lot of wonderful creatures and people during her adventure. She meets a caterpillar who gives her advice. She also meets the Duchess who has the Cheshire cat. Alice was confused about why the cat was smiling so she asked the Duchess. The Duchess said that he was a Cheshire cat and that it was supposed to smile. The Cheshire cat told Alice to go visit the Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse. The cat told her that she would love them because they were mad. Alice did as the cat told her and visited them where she sit down and had tea with them. Alice also meets the Queen of Hearts won is an evil person. The Queens tarts get stolen and she thinks Alice stole them. Alice has to go to court over this. The Queen loved to scream "Off with her head!" Alice is woke from her wonderful dream by her sister. Alice then starts to think about how her sister will be when she grows older. At the beginning when she first falls asleep it is hard to tell if she is dreaming so that is kind of confusing but otherwise this book is wonderful and very easy to read.

Lewis Carroll sends Alice on a second set of adventures in some territory that is beyond our world. This time she crosses a mirror and enters a game of chess. She will eventually become a queen but she will in all possible ways express her deep desire to rebel against a world that is seen as having too many limitations and frustrating rules. She will in a way rebel against the game of chess itself when she comes to the end of it and pulls the tablecloth from under all the pawns and pieces to have peace and quiet, to free herself of absolute slavery. But what is she the slave of ? Of rules, the rules of the game, the rules of society, the rules of education. Of words and their silly ambiguities that enable them to mean both one sense and its reverse, that enable them to lead to absurd statements and declarations that completely block her in blind alleys and impasses. But at the same time, her return to the normal world that transforms those adventures into a dream, is a rejection of such adventures and of such rebellion as being absurd and purely fantasmatic, dreamlike. There is in this book a rather sad lesson that comes out of this ending : children can dream adventures, can dream perfect freedom, but reason brings them back to the comfortable world of everyday life and submission. And there is no other way possible. This book is pessimistic about a possible evolution from one generation to the next thanks to the retension of childish, childlike dreams, forgetting that the world can only change and progress thanks to the fuel those dreams represent in our social engine.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

"Through The Looking Glass" is, perhaps, not QUITE as good as "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland", but it's close enough to still rate five stars. Not, properly, a sequel to the first book, there is no indication at any point in it that the Alice (clearly the same individual, slightly older) from this book ever had the adventures in the first one; there is no reference to her previous adventures, even when she once again meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Obviously, the two books are intended as parallel adventures, not subsequent ones.

The most memorable bits from this book are doubtlessly the poem, "Jabberwocky", as well as chapter six, "Humpty Dumpty". But all of the book is marvellous, and not to be missed by anyone who enjoys a magical romp through silliness and playful use of the English language.

(This review refers to the unabridged "Dover Thrift Edition".)

Carrol was a profound and wonderful writer, and Through the Looking Glass... is definate proof of this. Though there isn't much evidence that he was a pedophile, you shouldn't grade his works simply on who he might or might not have been. Through the Looking Glass... is one of the greatest works of literature in the english language, and will continue to be despite the author's supposed problems.

Assuming the format of a biography, this novel depicts an assumed conventional view of its hero, Lewis Carroll, as a shy recluse in love with female children, one especially (a character named Alice Liddell). The literary detective narrator, however, finds a torn scrap of paper containing a cryptic reference to AL's sister or, aha! mother?). She concludes Csrroll must be an adulterer, possibly a serial adulterer! The hypocrisy of the hero is concealed during his life time, and after his death, his family cooks the books (his diary--they chop out pages) to maintain his saintly image. If THAT wasn't bad enough, all of the biographers of the hero conspire to sustain his sanctity. And so, it turns out that the real hero of this novel is the narrator, a modern Miss Marple, who uncovers and proclaims that this beloved character who wrote stories for children and who has been for over a century viewed as a religious man who loved children, one especially, and who avoided adult females--is an adulterer who skulked his way through Victorian England and went on to win the hearts and minds of foolish biographers and academics who lacked the Marplean acumen of the narrator.

Though comparatively slight, and not strictly speaking a biography (more a thesis), it can justifiably be claimed that Ms Leach's book should take its place as one of the two most important published accounts of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson yet produced.

Adopting a satisfyingly rigorous approach to its subject matter, which is predominently (though not exclusively) an examination of Lewis Carroll's sexuality, 'In the Shadow of the Dreamchild' systematically debunks the nastiest of all Carroll myths - that Carroll was sexually attracted to pre-pubescent girls.

In the process, the author also successfully challenges a number of other Carroll myths and provides an irresistable case for a complete biographical revision of one of Victorian England's most fascinating figures. In effect Ms Leach does for Lewis Carroll what Horace Walpole achieved for Richard III (Walpole, as most professional historians, though few others, know, showed that Richard III almost certainly was not responsible for one of history's most heinous crimes, the murder of 'the princes in the Tower'). One hopes that having achieved this, Ms Leach is not to be ignored (as was Walpole) by posterity. Fortunately Ms leach has access to a rather more efficient media than did Walpole.

Using her access to the surviving Lewis Carroll Journals, published and unpublished letters, much original research and, above all, a keen understanding of Victorian mores and the complex nature of Victorian theological, political and social issues, Leach provides the reader with an insight into a supremely healthy (in the broad sense of this term) and intelligent person who, though complex, is in no way the paradoxical figure previously portrayed. She also provides us with a person who one can believe actually wrote the Alice Books, Hunting of the Snark and myriad other works without having to reduce those works to dark sexual metaphors. In so doing she has opened the Carroll Canon to serious mainstream literary examination and, hopefully, acceptance.

One does not have to wholeheartedly accept Ms Leach's own conclusions, to recognise the importance of this work - though the reader is advised to treat everything Ms Leach writes with respect.

The only note of caution regarding this work relates to the modesty of its primary aim. This was to show, by the simple device of checking freely available data, that by far the majority of Carroll's so-called 'child-friends' were actually mature women. It may have been helpful if Ms leach had been rather less modest in her ambition and placed more emphasis in demonstrating that, far from being socially inept and reclusive in regard to male companionship, Carroll was little different in this respect to others of his social class, circumstances and historical period. That he numbered among his friends many of the most notable names of the day has not been sufficiently noted - though Morton Cohen in his oddly discrepant biography does goes some way to correct this particular Carrolian myth.

This book could well be seen, not as has been prematurely (and wrongly) claimed of Cohen's work, as the 'definitive Carroll' but the beginning of true Carroll scholarship.

Dr John Tufail

There is a monotony among many contemporary biographies of Lewis Carroll. That he was child centered because he had inadequate social skills to have social relationships with adult women.

Ms. Leach reviewed the literature available to others for many years, and has found that the real issue with Lewis Carroll and adult women was that he had all together too much social relationships with adult females - especially for the Victorian times and for his role at Christ Church, Oxford. He certainly had too much social success with women for his conservative immediate family - who effectively controlled the original biographies written.

Leach has the central hypothesis that the Dodgson family wanted to erase this potential social scandal, and created the squeaky clean - but socially handicapped - false picture presented today. This is the start of the "Cardboard Lewis Carroll" - the man who could only love little girls, because if you knew the truth...... wow!

Politicians and business leaders today work at keeping their human sides for personal pleasures falsely fairly clean, as well. Remember the pecadillos of a former president, and the pecadillos of many of his accusers which caused more than one to leave public service. So, coverup of real and whispered relationships with adult females is eternal.

...M N Cohen thus clearly knew of the deep social associations with adult females, because from his books of letters, one can easily determine that there were many deep social relationships with women of all ages.

Yet, Cohen perpetuated the myth that Lewis Carroll was a near social cripple who couldn't maintain social relationships with adult women.

Why? It has been said that it is nearly impossible to get a Lewis Carroll book published unless it DOES say that he was creepy about girls and women. Like the Supermarket Tabloids, sensationalism for profit is the modern way with words and reputations of famous folks.

The first steps towards rediscovering a real human being behind the pen name of Lewis Carroll (Charles L Dodgson) is to read the work of Leach.

If you want the "Cardboard Carroll", there are many other books to select.