"New" biographical work

[mikeindex]

Edward Wakeling, that (self-)noted expert, apparently has plans to publish an entirely new and groundbreaking work on Lewis Carroll:

www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/18/new-lewis-carroll-biography-relationships-children?commentpage=1

Just a couple of remarks:

1) Practically everything Wakeling claims as original research has already been publicised by Karoline Leach and/or Hugues Lebailly; he's not even the first to plagiarise it, Jenny Woolf got there first.

2) How wonderfully (indeed positively Carrollianly) ironic that the man now accusing commentators as brilliant and unfailingly professional as Lebailly, and as massively erudite (if misguided in places) as Morton Cohen, of "sloppy research", should be the one who contrived to edit and publish Lewis Carroll's diaries without even noticing that someone had sliced three pages out of the first volume.

[GoetzKluge]

Nov 24, 2014 12:27:36 GMT -5 mikeindex said:

Edward Wakeling, that (self-)noted expert, apparently has plans to publish an entirely new and groundbreaking work on Lewis Carroll ...

Many headlines in the articles on Wakeling's book are about what relations CLD may or may not have had done to children. Surely it is easier (and catches more attention) to take issue at that rather than to focus on his writings. The Alice sesquicentennial is not far away with all the business that goes along with such an occasion. Could it be that readers look too much for "Carroll" in his writings and not enough for events (e.g. groundbreaking scientific discoveries) in the Victorian era and for works by other writers which he may have addressed in his own writings?

Oct 13, 2014 0:29:23 GMT -5 GoetzKluge said:

There was an old man of Port Grigor,
Whose actions were noted for vigour;
He stood on his head
till his waistcoat turned red,
That eclectic old man of Port Grigor.
Edward Lear, 1872

He was black in the face,
and they scarcely could trace
The least likeness to what he had been:
While so great was his fright
that his waistcoat turned white -
A wonderful thing to be seen!
Lewis Carroll, from "The Hunting of the Snark", 1876

I don't know whether Edward Wakeling's biographical book will be as much fun as Carroll's (and Lear's) verses, but I won't criticize the book before having read it.