The accepted view of Dodgson's biography – and most particularly his image as a potential paedophile – has received a challenge in quite recent times, when a new and controversial analysis of Dodgson's sexual proclivities (and indeed the evolution of the entire process of his biography) appeared in
Karoline Leach's 1999 book
In the Shadow of the Dreamchild. She states that the image of Dodgson's alleged paedophilia was built out of a failure to understand Victorian morals, as well as the mistaken idea that Dodgson had no interest in adult women which evolved out of the minds of various biographers. She termed this simplified – and often, in her view, fictional – image
"the Carroll Myth".
According to Leach, Dodgson's real life was very different from the accepted biographical image. He was not, she says, exclusively interested in female children. She acknowledges he was fond of children, but says this interest has been exaggerated. She says that he was also keenly interested in adult women and apparently enjoyed several relationships with them, married and single; furthermore, she goes on to state that many of those Dodgson described as "child-friends" were not children at all, but girls in their late teens and even twenties. She cites examples of many such adult friendships, such as Catherine Lloyd, Constance Burch, May Miller, Edith Shute, Ethel Rowell, Beatrice Hatch and Gertrude Thomson, among others. Some of these were girls he met as children but continued to be close to in adulthood. Others were, says Leach, women he met as adults and with whom he shared very close and meaningful friendships. Suggestions of paedophilia only evolved many years after his death, says Leach, when his well-meaning family had suppressed all evidence of his adult friendships in order to try to preserve his reputation, thus giving a false impression of a man interested only in little girls.
According to Leach the image of "Lewis Carroll" was constructed almost accidentally by generations of biographers. One of these, Langford Reed, writing in 1932, was the first to state that many of Carroll's female friendships ended when the girls reached the age of 14, though Reed apparently only intended to suggest that Dodgson was thereby a "pure man" untainted by sexual desire. This statement, that Dodgson lost interest in girls once they reached
puberty, was later caught up by other biographers, including
Florence Becker Lennon (
Victoria Through the Looking-Glass — UK title "Lewis Carroll", 1945) and the highly influential
Alexander Taylor (
The White Knight, 1952) who remained unaware of the evidence to the contrary since Dodgson's family refused to publish his diaries and letters. By the time more evidence became available, this image was so ingrained that any revision seemed "unnecessary, even impertinent", and thus a supposed biography was preserved. This, in essence, is Leach's case.
Reactions to Leach's book have been generally polarised. She has been joined by a group of supportive scholars and writers (most notably
Hugues Lebailly) in the formation of
Contrariwise, an "association for new Lewis Carroll studies". The group argues collectively that a powerful mythology has grossly distorted our understanding of Dodgson's true nature, and that considered in the context of his real life – as opposed to the misconceptions of it – and the fashions and mores of his time, assertions of paedophilia become nonsensical and amount to a failure to understand the complexity of Dodgson's character, as well as the Victorian "Cult of the Child".
Dodgson biographer
Morton N. Cohen repudiates Leach's position as being simply a plea for the defence, and, in a recent article in the
Times Literary Supplement labeled Leach and her supporters as "revisionists" attempting to rewrite history. Similarly, in a review published in
Victorian Studies (Vol. 43, No 4), Donald Rackin wrote, "As a piece of biographical scholarship, Karoline Leach's
In the Shadow of the Dreamchild is difficult to take seriously".
Martin Gardner was likewise dismissive in an article published by the Lewis Carroll Society of North America.
Writing in
The Carrollian, Michael Bakewell takes a measured view, saying that Leach's book has irrevocably changed Carroll studies. "[W]e may not agree with it but we cannot ignore it and it should certainly be read by anyone concerned with Dodgson's life and work."