AUTHOR:

Florence Becker Lennon

Lennon's biography was the first in the Freudian school that has been a prominent aspect of Carrollianism since the mid-1930s. It's in some ways an improvement on those that had gone before. Lennon was aware of the way Carroll was already being mythologised and insightfully described him as "the last saint of this irreverent world". But the Dodgson family were still refusing to co-operate with biographers, and although she struck up a friendship with Carroll's niece Menella, she was given almost no access to useful data. So, her major sources of information were Collingwood, who intentionally de-emphasised Carroll's adult relationships, and Reed who totally denied there had ever been any. She had no way of knowing Collingwood's agenda, or that Reed was quite mad and simply making things up, so she believed them both and found an understandable and very Freudian explanation for it: "people have wondered what he did with his love-life; now it can be told, he loved little girls". And thus, Carroll the pedophile was born.

SOUNDBITE:

The first hint of something nasty in the woodshed

IMPACT AND INFLUENCE:

very infuential on the Freudian analysis.

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