Lewis Carroll: A Biography.

This book deals less with the works of the pseudonymous Lewis Carroll than with his creator, the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who, in turn, sounds like one of the quirkier characters of Vladimir Nabokov. He was very fond of female children, preferring them to grown women who were less trusting or more demanding of qualities and prospects he could not offer. Moreover, as a pioneering child photographer, he took nude pictures which occasioned some disapproval, though not as much as one might expect.

Like Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, Dodgson's obsession was doomed, if not tragic. As the girls grew older, they became unsuitable as models for reasons of propriety as well as taste and unsatisfactory as friends because they moved beyond the games, tricks, and stories with which he had held their attention.

The ingenuity with which he constructed these lures was also Nabokovian. His "Doublets" anticipates "word golf" in Nabokov's Pale Fire, a novel which, like Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno, has a bewildering structure and even an index. Dodgson applied mathematics and logic, his two major academic fields, to everything conceivable, including seeding for tennis tournaments and electoral for tennis tournaments and electoral reform. He had a childish love of toys and gadgets, many--including a device which allowed him to write under the bedcovers in the dark--of his very own invention. Were he alive, he would be the king of computer nerds.

Besides all this, he was a deacon in the Anglican church, perhaps because taking orders was a condition of his holding his first and most permanent Oxford appointment. Liberal in theology--he implicitly rejected the doctrine of Original Sin and explicitly rejected that of eternal damnation for sinners--he was horrified at any hint of levity about religion. But he refused to condemn the theater, befriended many actresses, including some beyond the age of consent, and helped to found the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He wrote about these and many other subjects and kept up a correspondence that, in the last thirty years of his life, included nearly a hundred thousand letters sent and received. He continually reproached himself for idleness and unworthiness.

The picture created by these superficial details, especially the attraction to young girls, is obviously open to sensational or solemn probings of Dodgson's psychosexual problems. Cohen has avoided the extremes because he realizes that, as Evelyn Waugh put it, his subject was "an extreme but perfectly intelligible type of his age and class."

Dodgson was a High Victorian. Born in the year of the first Reform Bill as the eldest son in a clergyman's large family, he died in the year of the Diamond Jubilee. Imperialist without thinking much about it, he remained insular save for one trip to Russia. He was conservative in politics, especially academic politics, where he fought most suggestions of change, including those of Dean Liddell, father of the Alice who was the inspiration of and audience for his most enduring tales. His concern for the weak and helpless was Dickensian, based on sentiment rather than coherent ideas about society. In fact, his favorite authors were the Romantics, Tennyson, and Dickens. His serious poetry and much of his voluminous correspondence seem cloyingly sentimental or embarrassingly facetious to modern readers.

Rather than defending or blaming Dodgson for his tastes and behavior, Cohen provides the context in which they can be understood. In the process, he demonstrates that the Victorians were very different from you and me. Thus, while he speculates about the source of Dodgson's love of young girls, he does not attempt to account for it. Instead, he explains the sources and dimensions of the Victorian cult of the child and the belief, held by Dodgson and many parents, that young girls were by definition safe with respectable-looking older men. (He was horrified at public revelation of the traffic in young virgins, thinking them inflammatory, and wanted to bowdlerize Bowdler to render Shakespeare suitable for young girls.)

Cohen's broader picture of Victorian life and institutions is even more successful. He not only explains the hierarchy and examination system of Oxford but creates a picture, not unlike that in the early pages of Brideshead Revisited, of what the day-to-day life was like. He is lucid on the theological divisions within the Church of England, and is especially good on F. D. Maurice and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, two of the major influences on Dodgson's religious thought.

At times, one could wish that Cohen were not so deeply immersed in Victorian writing, for it has affected his diction. He begins the chapter on the Alice books with "It had to happen." Supposed but undocumented crucial events are presented in a barrage of conditionals, rhetorical questions, exclamations ("But wait"), comments ("one shudders"), and cliches ("The die was cast" and "The rest is history" in the same paragraph).

Cohen is even more familiar with Dodgson's archival material--he edited a large portion of it--than with Victorian social history. Readers may feel that he is too deeply immersed, since he quotes diaries and letters not just to illustrate Dodgson's interest in an idea or person but to record, as with the Liddell family, every single mention.

The pace of the book is further slowed by its organization. Cohen claims that, with a few exceptions, he proceeds chronologically, but most chapters are organized rather loosely by topic. This leads to a confusing welter of dates and considerable repetition of details and even quotations from one section of the book to another.

Still, this is a careful and balanced account of a man's life, concluding with a value judgment that "there is something noble, selfless, and generous in what Charles Dodgson fashioned of himself and in the way he reined in his impulses and set them to serve his family, his young friends, his society, his God--and himself." In the days of prosecutorial biographies like Michael Selden's on Graham Greene and Martin Stannard's on Evelyn Waugh, actually liking one's subject is so old-fashioned as to seem revolutionary.

Robert Murray Davis is the author of a memoir, Mid-Lands: A Family Album (University of Georgia Press).