Writer Jenny Woolf looked at Lewis Carroll through a magnifying glass and found a generous man, writes Ruth Gorb

Lewis Carroll – In His Own Account by Jenny Woolf
Jabberwocky Press, £25

The Rev Charles L Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, has for more than 100 years been a man of mystery.
The author of the best loved children’s books in the world, a great English eccentric, he has nevertheless been ascribed a less than attractive image.
He is seen as a stammering, dull and donnish loner, who was unable to relate to anyone over the age of 10.
More serious are the inferences of paedophilia.
All of it, according to Jenny Woolf, is untrue. She began to explore the true character of Lewis Carroll because she was sure that the man most biographies described could not have written Alice In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Her feeling was intuitive, but six years ago she came upon information that turned the accepted view upside down.
What she has discovered will give academics food for thought for years to come.
She herself is not an academic; she reviews children’s books, she has for years been a travel writer, and more recently has started a second-hand book business which she runs from her home in West Hampstead.
But it was her role as travel writer that led her to the Carroll/Dodgson treasure trove.
In 1999 she was asked to write about a new hotel in Oxford. It was called The Old Bank. Why? Because it was built on the site of a bank where, she was told, everyone who was anyone in the 19th century banked. It had become a branch of Barclays. Because she was a lifelong Carroll addict, and because he had lived in Oxford, she took a deep breath, telephoned Barclays, and asked if they had records of the bank account of one C L Dodgson.
“Yes,” came the shattering reply. Had anyone ever been to look at it? “No, no one has ever asked.”
Could she have a look at it. “Yes of course.”
It was the start of four years of meticulous, painstaking research. Jenny Woolf made her way again and again to a dispiriting industrial estate in Wythenshawe, Manchester, where Barclays has its archive centre.
She was brought huge, thick ledgers, crumbling into dust. She sat for hours poring over and transcribing the swirling copperplate writing that spelt out all the financial affairs of Lewis Carroll from 1856, when he was 24, until 1900, two years after he died.
What they revealed confirmed everything she had ever thought. This had not been a rigid, dull man, locked into his inhibitions and obsessed with order, but a man of extraordinary generosity.
His affairs were in a terrible mess. He had evidently never opened his bank statements, or had ignored all the red entries, because he ran up huge overdrafts. Jenny Woolf says: “He spent and spent. His overdraft at one stage was the equivalent of the price of a house. He didn’t insure his life. When he died, his brothers and sisters had to auction a lot of his possessions to pay off his debts.”
But it was the way he spent his money, she says, that gave her such insight into his character.
“He gave quite large sums to private individuals who needed it; Charles Kingsley’s brother, for instance, who was very poor; a man in Eastbourne with a large family he could not support. And he gave huge amounts to charity.”
It is those charities, to which he gave quietly and steadily, that reveal most about the man. He gave to unmarried mothers and their children; to the Association for the Befriending of Young Servants, which saw that young girls were not exploited; to an organisation that enforced the law to protect women and children from abuse and to the Lock Hospital which treated sailors and prostitutes with venereal disease.
Most significantly, perhaps, he gave to an organisation that tracked down paedophiles and saw that they were punished.
“He never cut down, just kept on giving and giving,” Ms Woolf says. “He couldn’t afford it; he didn’t make much money, considering how popular his work was. I suspect that he disapproved of money; he let people produce plays of Alice in Wonderland, for instance, without charging them for it.
“The sort of charities he supported give us a completely different picture of the sort of man he was. Far from being a reclusive, donnish figure, he knew what was going on in the world, he knew about the miseries of Victorian society and he cared enough to do something about it.”
One of the people who benefited from his generosity was a young actress he was fond of; he paid for her to have singing lessons, and she said in later life that it was his kindness that kick-started her career. He was, says Jenny Woolf, fond of rather a lot of actresses.
“He loved the company of women, and he loved the theatre,” she says, “and this was not considered proper by his family – seven sisters and four brothers, all very straight-laced.
“They were the children of an archdeacon and it was assumed that Charles would go into the church – I suspect unwillingly, as he was never fully ordained.”
He was a highly respected man, but there was a lot of gossip about his friendships with women. His sisters worried about what people would think, and after his death, so did his nieces.
They emphasised the Oxford don/Victorian gentlemen angle, and played down all the women.
“Instead, they pointed out how he loved the company of children – perfectly acceptable to them but something which set minds turning to more sinister interpretations in the years that followed.”
For Jenny Woolf, there is an undeniable indication that Carroll’s relationships with children were innocent.
“Just after he died, his nephew wrote a biography which said very briefly that the majority of his uncle’s friends were women, then went on to write two chapters on how his uncle had loved the company of little girls.
“There is no way he would have done that if there had been any suspicion of something wrong. What he was doing was taking attention away from all those warm friendships with women.”
The nephew also mentioned that his uncle had kept a register of all the letters he wrote and received.
That has gone missing. There are pages torn out of his diaries. There has evidently been some sort of cover-up job, most probably of affectionate letters to and from women, and references to them.
Much of the Carroll/ Dodgson mystery remains unsolved. But Jenny Woolf has revealed an unknown side of the man, a man of great humanity whom she is happy to think of as the creator of Alice.