Armchair Freudians (as opposed to the couch type) have long had a field day with Alice in Wonderland; and biographies of Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, continue to flow thick and fast. Till now, all Dodgson's biographers have painted a picture of a bachelor of impeccable if sublimated behavior, whatever his proclivities. Now comes a smart young Englishwoman to explode the post-mortem myth that the Rev. Dodgson's interest in the opposite sex was innocently confined to pre-pubescent girls.

[Karoline] Leach has read all the material. She doesn't fault the evidence assembled by previous researchers; she simply points out that they have drawn from it the wrong conclusions. She claims that even the top Carroll maven, Prof. Morton Cohen, beguiled by Dodgson's photographs of Alice Liddell and other little girls published together with his scholarly biography (reviewed in these columns on December 4, 1996), has gone along with the myth of the sublimated pedophile. Leach reminds us that in Dodgson's day, photos of naked children were socially acceptable as symbols of innocence.