In Jenny Woolfe's book, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, the mystery is definitely left unsolved. Sure, you learn a lot about Carroll himself, his likes and dislikes recorded by him in his diaries and journals, accounts of what his contemporaries thought of him, and the author's speculation along with that of many more she references in her biography of him. Woolfe also brings you into the time that he was in, the Victorian era, where little children could not go out without a chaperone, and ankles could not be shown. Woolfe also shows how little bits that people said can become so blown out of proportion.

 I picked out this book looking for answers. One of them being: Was Lewis Carroll a pedophile or not?  I'm not sure where I first got wind of this idea. It was most likely posted on an AOL or Yahoo News link that I clicked a while back, and had not forgotten since. According to Woolfe when Alice Liddel was still alive and was asked to be interviewed, she was too sick to be interviewed, so her older sister, Lorina or Ina, was interviewed instead. When asked why Carroll stopped coming around to visit the Liddel's, Lorina answered something along the lines of  "Mother thought that Alice was to young to be thinking of such things." Making any reader of the interview or quote infer that Alice, who was VERY young at the time perhaps between 10 and 14, I cannot quite remember, that Alice was thinking of marrying Carroll or vice versa. Along with this interview for a 1930 biography came suspicions of things not common to be speculated upon in the Victorian age, like pedophilia.

Anyways, though all of the papers of the Liddells regarding Carroll were for the most part destroyed and the diaries of Carroll during this time have been censored or gone missing, I think that Woolfe does a good job of crediting Carroll as a good, wholesome gentleman who would never hurt any little girl in any little way.

I ended this biography on a nice note. It was tied up in a nice neat package, although it would be amazing to read Carroll's own diaries, especially the missing ones. Woolfe has struck a chord of curiosity in me with Carroll and I'm very interested in reading other works of his other than Alice.  I actually saw the complete collection of Carroll's works in the library the other day, which I'd love to read, but am afraid that I will not have time this year, so perhaps over the summer, or next year.