Say again? Whose dream child is it exactly?

This book is the first real biography of Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves, who as a ten-year-old inspired Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll to write the two "Alice" books. Thus there is some reason to call her his dream child. He certainly seems to have loved Alice -- he went into a profound depression when he could no longer meet her, and spend thirty years trying to get her to be his friend again.

But Alice was a good deal more than that -- she was herself a fine artist, an extremely intelligent woman, a very determined manager who was probably loved by a prince and ended up marrying, at a relatively late age, a very wealthy sportsman. She lost two of her three sons in World War I. She earned an honorary doctorate at eighty. Her story would be well worth telling even if she hadn't inspired Dodgson to write one of the world's greatest works of nonsense.

So this book needed to be written. I'm not disputing that. But I am bothered by the way it comes out. The Alice it portrays strikes me as more than a little unreal. Alice seems to have loved Dodgson as a child -- and despised him as an adult. At least, that's how she acted, although their relationship has extreme ambiguities (e.g. she named one of her sons "Caryl"). This biography seems to be too intent on making the relationship work. In other words, it puts too much "Alice" in Alice. That makes it hard to trust.

On the evidence, Alice Liddell was not just Charles Dodgson's dream child. In this book at least, she was Anne Clark's dream child also. ( )