Professor Cohen’s biography of the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), the culmination of thirty years’ research, begins by lamenting our not having a recording of his voice. We have Tennyson, who died six years before Dodgson, huffing out “The Charge of the Light Brigade” like an asthmatic walrus, and we have Victoria intoning bashfully, “My dear subjects,” followed by noise in which we can make out one other word (“tomatoes”). She had dried up after a brave beginning and had been prompted to describe the room where she was speaking into the large end of a megaphone connected to a wiggling needle graphing her imperial voice onto a wax cylinder. A witness remembered hothouse tomatoes in a bowl.

There survives of Dodgson’s sixty-six years his books (the two “Alice” volumes, Sylvie and Bruno and its sequel, treatises on logic and mathematics), his diaries, his photographs of Oxford luminaries and of children, and 98,721 letters. Four years of the diaries are still missing. Pages have been razored out of the others. The family at the time of his death had to remove his belongings from his rooms at Christ Church. They burned papers all day, depriving the world of a Symbolic Logic and Lord knows what else. Dodgson himself had destroyed many photographs. His life was wonderfully full and strangely empty.

At every turn in Professor Cohen’s biography we see a generous and gifted soul diligently trying to engage with a world that only occasionally appreciated or even understood his gifts. He was a teacher without students. If his career were reduced to that of an Oxford tutor, his biography (for which no biographer can be imagined) would be a grim agony of a mathematical genius trying to prepare Bertie Woosters for exams, with a subplot of campaigning for higher standards, to keep Oxford math from being a scandal among European universities.

He was a pastor without a congregation. This isn’t as Trollopean as it sometimes sounds, as his ministry was admirably Christian and unobtrusively liberal. Professor Cohen goes into Dodgson’s theology, showing how Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection guided him into an intellectually rigorous clarity. Dodgson did not believe in Hell. We do not know exactly what he did believe. He was not a Calvinist; Rome had no claims on his attention. Though he was persnickety about reverence for the cloth, his Christianity was far more broad-minded and charitable than that of his father, who rose to be a pillar of the church as both a scholar and a bastion of orthodoxy.

Dodgson was a pioneer photographer in the days when one had to be a skilled chemist as well as an artist. His portraits of Oxford luminaries (Ruskin, Liddell, Lord Salisbury) and of children constitute an oeuvre without parallel in the history of art. For his photography alone he might be remembered as a master who recorded domestic England at a time when it was having a Renaissance in prose, poetry, and science.

The “Alice” books were almost an acci- dent. They were generated, like the photography, by the Rev. Dodgson’s love of children. Contemporary psychology and ethics proscribe a love that was veritably prescribed by Greek and Roman culture, and which is distorted by historical perspective. Juliet was twelve, the age of Samuel de Champlain’s bride. Pocahontas was nine when she saved Capt. Smith’s neck. “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” was dedicated to Lady Charlotte Mary Harley, age eleven. The Roman poet Ausonius fell in love with a toddler of the Belgii, bought her, freed her, and made her his housekeeper. And there was Ruskin with his adoration of prepubescence. Professor Cohen is admirably open-minded about Dodgson’s preference for the immature. Psychology does not come to his aid: it understands arrested sexuality to be on Freud’s scale of development, which would require Dodgson’s being interested in boys, not girls, of his psychological age. Psychiatry is locked into generalities and statistics; the individual psyche must fit a pattern. It seems to me that Dodgson was a thoroughly pagan idolator. He saw something numinous and worshipful in Alice and her ilk, something doubly sacred in that Alice was not only something of a goddess but a deity for a few years only.

This poignant fact also locates a principle in Dodgson’s concerns. He was a student of metamorphosis, especially of transmutations in a logical process. Both mathematics and Christian ethics involve orderly mutations. Dodgson invented game after game of word ladders and math puzzles (one of these became Scrabble). The “Alice” books are a wonderland of the illogical, the comic, and the absurd, written with a didactic understanding that they are to be enjoyed by the logical, the serious, and the sensible child.

Dodgson’s maturest inventory of his imagination—Sylvie and Bruno (a novel, and its sequel)—has never been popular. Its contribution to psychology is immense, for in it Dodgson maps the operations of the mind that we all live with every waking moment: we perceive and we imagine simultaneously. The mind is in a constant revery (the stuff of dreams) while it mixes cake batter, orates in Congress, or drives a car. Dodgson is himself present in Sylvie and Bruno, invisibly or as a character. Sylvie is a fairy, a real little girl like Alice (but Alice’s inferior in wit and sass), and a mature woman. The setting is Fairyland, contemporary England, and a comic-opera Ruritania that bears a wicked resemblance to Christ Church, Oxford. Bruno is a baby-talking cutie that only a mother could abide or a Victorian nanny control. Dodgson gives the novel the shape of a sentimental romance while hollowing out brilliant spaces for his best surrealist poetry and for the wholly original scenes in which time runs backwards and the venues fade from one to the other. Joyce appropriated this magic effect for Finnegans Wake, as well as the device of multiple identities in one character. It is likely that Nabokov, a devoted Carrollian, was indebted to Sylvie and Bruno for the mechanics of Pale Fire and Ada.

Morton Cohen is aware throughout this deeply researched and densely detailed biography that he is recording a new kind of sensibility in English literature. It was a sensibility from which Euclid and His Modern Rivals could follow Hunting of the Snark and precede Sylvie. It was both stoic and hedonistic, chaste and erotic, masculine and feminine. Only intermittently in this biography do we get a sense of how Dodgson stood in his world. He became and persisted in being a pest as a photographer. He was a mystery and a nuisance to the parents of little girls he courted. He was a gadfly to the university in keeping up academic standards and a holy terror on committees. He was a shameless celebrity stalker; it is difficult to make out if Tennyson abided him or liked him. It is painful to see him turned away from the Liddells and other houses. Enough of Mr. Dodgson was quite enough. It is unclear whether his trip to Russia with the Rev. Henry Parry Liddon is something out of Jerome K. Jerome or a genuine exploration of other religions. (There are several editions of the Russian Journal, one edited by Professor Cohen.) Dodgson’s one trip abroad is interesting in that we can see him against a different background. He is still Dodgson, fussily master of himself and situations, intrepidly curious and keenly alive.

His vast Oxford rooms were a habitat as richly Victorian as Darwin’s famous study or Ruskin’s cluttered rooms at Brantwood. It was a true studio in which Leonardo would have felt at home. It was, in effect, a museum with Dodgson as its curator and guide. Music boxes to amuse children vied with mathematical treatises for space. It was a room in which the most delightful poetry and the most popular book in English were written, a room in which grave scholars and beautiful children were photographed. We will probably never understand the guard- ed secret of Dodgson’s polyhedral genius. Morton Cohen’s biography is as complete and searching a study of that genius as we are likely to have for some time.