Lewis Carroll Books

This is trying to be a great book, and it does manage to be good. It is in fact very informative, interesting, and intriguing. It has many new views, questions, answers,and insights that I would never have thought about. It is wierd, it is creepy, it is fun, it is all the things you need to begin a great conversation with someone who thinks they know the Ripper tales. Good read. 3 ***

James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper. He was, that's all.

The contents of the Maybrick/Ripper Diary, which display extraordinary in-depth knowledge of both "May" and "Jack", not readily available to the public, as well as a number of other historical factors which blend in perfectly with the story unfolded by the Diary allow for no other reasonable conclusion. James Maybrick WAS Jack the Ripper.

The Ripperology establishment and its groupies, however, continue to disdain the obvious, ever conducting an ostrich-like search for the "real" Ripper and looking for the "forger" of the Diary under every bed.

It's reminiscent of the way that shaggy leftist JFK conspiracy theorists stick their heads into black holes of grassy-knoll fantasia while lying to themselves and to the public in order to exonerate fellow leftist Lee Harvey Oswald and pin the assassination on the Right.

Nevertheless, Richard Wallace's book purporting to show or suggest that the Whitechapel killer was actually children's and fantasy author, Lewis Carroll, is more scholarly than given credit for.

Wallace himself declares an interest in the Maybrick/Ripper diary, as have other psycho-analysts, noting that the diary seems to be "sincere and well-done". But he allows conventional Ripperology to direct his attention from the diary - which is a little like using Saudi intelligence to find Osama bin Laden. Wallace is also misdirected by his own interest in Carroll, of course.

But contrary to what he has been charged with, Wallace isn't just playing word games. Before writing this book, he wrote a different one, based on his training as a therapist, in which he describes a dark side of Lewis Carroll's persona observable behind the upbeat fantasy of his works, and the conclusions that he draws in this book are at least as much based on his therapist training as on his analysis of Ripper letters and Carroll works.

Wallace remarks in this book that at some point, he wondered if he had fully plummeted the uncharted depths of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in his first book.

All right, Wallace DOES go awry. He wonders if Carroll, who lived near London at the time of the Ripper murders found a vent for the suppressed rage that Wallace observes in Carroll's works, in the slaughter of Whitechapel prostitutes. And if the terrible secret that he was holding might ITSELF need an outlet which might be encoded somewhere.

Carroll was a lover of anagrams - might he have hidden clues as to the Ripper's identity in any Ripper correspondence or Carroll work? Wallace "anagrammatizes" these writings, and sure enough...

But as other critics have noted, the English language with 26 letters, flexible syntax, and assortment of homonyms is very malleable, and this sort of deciphering can be misused, however inadvertently. Wallace even suggests that the introduction "Dear Boss" (from the famous "Dear Boss" letters) can be anagrammatized into "sob dears" or "dare boss" ("Dares was another Dodgson nom de plume) or "sores bad" (an associate of Carroll's was afflicted with gout).

But how does one normally start a letter WITHOUT the word "dear"? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Moreover, just suppose that Carroll had desired to create a work of fancy of 50 words or more and had desperately intended to write it in such a way that the letters couldn't be possibly be rearranged to indicate some unintended secret meaning. How would he have gone about it? Clearly, it wouldn't have been possible, and therein lies the rub.

Anyway, if Carroll NEEDED a confessional outlet for Ripper crimes, he could have included a non-encoded straightforward confession of them in his OWN diaries, to be released to posterity after his death, but as Wallace acknowledges, Carroll's own diaries contain no such thing.

No, Wallace's anagrammatic analyses can be disregarded, but he does come up with other interesting nuggets. The "Eight Little Whores" poem, originally introduced by Donald McCormick and hinted at in the Maybrick Diary, really does have a meter similar to Carroll's "A Game of Fives", written in 1883.

Assuming that the meter isn't a familiar or well-used one, does this similarity really mean that Carroll was the Ripper or does it just mean that Maybrick - I mean the Ripper - read Carroll's poem?

Wallace also has an interesting idea on just where the Whitechapel killer might have gotten the pedigree for the nickname of "Jack" and even a possible pedigree for the modus operandi of the Ripper murders themselves.

Intelligent Maybrickians should assume the air of chess players already comfortably in the middle game of a "Hunt the Ripper" match while shrill critics scream over the dimensions of the game board. Maybrickians should act with an eye toward history and toward a more receptive future generation of Ripper historians. Wallace might have identified some lines of inquiry that will facilitate this.

Finally, Wallace might deserve some commendation for acknowledging the sustaining presence of God in his life while immersing himself in the exploration of the darkest side of the human condition. By allowing light to flood his mind and soul, Wallace likely ensures that he himself will never become part of the Ripperology establishment.

Anyone who still believes that there is some credence to the anagram idea, should simply go to google, type in "anagram generator" and choose one of the finds, and type in some sentence. You will get absolutely swamped by the output. Try it, see for yourself.

First off, this book doesn't prove that Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper. It doesn't even come close. What it does do is show how a fertile imagination can take a few facts and run wild with them: it's speculative nonfiction at its finest, or more accurately, speculative non-narrative fiction. I'd be disappointed to discover that Wallace believes in his lunatic thesis, but I wasn't at all disappointed to read it. It's berserk and methodical at the same time, a shining gem of surreality.

As another reviewer has already pointed out, when an excerpt of this book appeared in Harper's Magazine, Francis Heaney and Guy Jacobson wrote a letter to the editor in which they came up with an anagram for the first paragraph of Wallace's excerpt that was far "superior" to any of the anagrams that Wallace had found in Lewis Carroll's work!

Since part of that review seems to have been cut off, I will repeat this wonderful anagram here. The original text was: "This is my story of Jack the Ripper, the man behind Britain's worst unsolved murders. It is a story that points to the unlikeliest of suspects: a man who wrote children's stories. That man is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of such beloved books as Alice in Wonderland."

The anagram by Heaney and Jacobson reads: "The truth is this: I, Richard Wallace, stabbed and killed a muted Nicole Brown in cold blood, severing her throat with my trusty shiv's strokes. I set up Orenthal James Simpson, who is utterly innocent of this murder. P.S. I also wrote Shakespeare's sonnets, and a lot of Francis Bacon's works too."

It seemed so implausible to me that they could come up with such a perfect anagram that I actually checked on the computer to verify that it is an exact anagram! I think that this anagram shows (better than a thousand arguments about how easy it is to anagram fairly large passages!) that Wallace's thesis is bunk. Or else we must put Wallace at the top of our suspect list for Nicole Brown's murder!

Not a biography at all, but a strange imaginative exercise. Reed had almost no data at his disposal, as Carroll's family wouldn't provide any, so he simply made a lot of it up -including the 'fact' that Carroll lost interest in girls once the reached the age of 14 -. But that didn't stop later biographers repeating a lot of it as if it was true.
For a good summary of Reed see Karoline Leach's 'In the Shadow of the Dreamchild'

This was the second full-length biography of Lewis Carroll. (The first, by his nephew, appeared in the year of his death.) Reed was able to talk to many people who knew Carroll, and even to the sexton who buried him, so this book is a significant source of information. Reed includes several interesting letters from Carroll (some, amazingly, not reprinted in Carroll's collected letters) and photos. On the down side, Reed's speculations are often more nonsensical than anything Carroll wrote. This book probably started the myth that Carroll had a split personality - the lecturer in mathematics from Oxford being somehow detached from the writer of children's stories. It would be unfortunate if this down side stopped people admiring the rich store of information in this book.

It turns out this book is about anagrams; it is not a deep exploration of Lewis Carroll's life. Supposedly, Charles Dodgson AKA Lewis Carroll used anagrams to encode homosexual messages into his work. A quick trip to anagramfun.com convinced me that one can find anagrams for anything in anything. I even found a clever one for the title of this work, which amazon.com won't let me print.

The author of this book repeats over and over how he set a very strict rule of using all the letters in a phrase for constructing anagrams. Let us now turn to page 40, and I quote, "There are fifty letters in the verse aqnd with eight removed an anagram emerges which I believe represents a manifesto..."

The anagram is then used as one of the epigraphs of the book.

So what was that about a strict rule?

This book is simply filled with bizarre assumptions. The underlying assumption is that Lewis Carroll filled his poems and stories with a variety of anagrams that tell about his homosexuality, his lust for young children, his desire for dalliances with animals, his hate for his father, and on and on. Every incident in a story must mean something sordid. Every phrase must be turned into the most foul and vulgar anagram possible. I'm reminded of the Freud quote; "Somtimes a cigar is just a cigar." Mr. Wallave would have done well to heed this thought.

One possible anagram for this title:
ANGRY SELECTOR ILL OAF WHO
wrote this darn book.

Richard Wallace has based his book upon the incredibly dubious principle that the secret to all of Lewis Carroll's inner demons can be found by searching for the most vile anagrams possible in his works. The anagrams are preposterous, the analysis pathetic, and you are left wondering why anybody would waste their time on such an enterprise. The ultimate injustice comes when Wallace actually removes eight letters from a fifty letter verse to make up an anagram that suits his needs! Nobody needs or deserves this book.

I was sorry to see the negative review of this book. I read it and the following book with great interest. I've read extensively about criminology, psychology, and serial killers, including all the current thought on Jack the Ripper. Overall, I think the book makes an interesting case. And, it's well written and just plain interesting. We have such a nostalgic view of Carroll's work, it's difficult to see it challenged. But, that's one reason I like the book & author; a cherished subject is not often examined critically and when it's well done (as this is), it provides a new lens to view the subject.

Like the other two reviewers, I am a collector of 'Alice' books and had eagerly awaited this title. The ONLY color illustration is ON THE COVER. THERE ARE NO interior illustrations - ONLY black and white initial capitals and some typical flowery bits. VERY disappointing!

I, too, was very disappointed upon receiving my copy to discover virtually no illustartions. As an "Alice" collector I had looked forward to Mary Engelbreit's interpretations of this classic tale. Imagine my dismay.

As a collector of Alice in Wonderland books, I thought a version put together with the Mary Engelbreit name would be a charming addition to my collection. I may not have read the fine print, but I was surprised to find there were virtually no illustrations in an edition put out by a famous illustrator. Silly me.

This was a waste of pennies as there is very little that Cliff Notes can tell you beyond the text or book. It really IS that simple!

I bought this book thinking that I was going to get an extensive commentary about Alice In Wonderland. This book is by no means an in-depth commentary on the piece. There are no more than ten pages of commentary in the whole book. The rest of the book is just the actual text of Alice In Wonderland with large side-margins that occasionally include definitions of words or phrases.

Definitely one of the worst book purchases I have made in the last few years...

This e-book contains both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. It was obviously created by scanning in the text, and was not spell-checked. The typos were jarring, and interrupted the flow of my reading.

For me, it was not worth the price that I paid. Mis-spellings in published works are a pet peeve of mine. I can forgive one or two in a text, especially when the errors are not detectable by a spell-checker, but an error every page is ridiculous.

while the content is vast, the kindle version has no table of contents awareness and has some corruption.
For 10.00 I was expecting a professional ebook conversion.

OK plot, but I was appalled by the shallow characters and weak, repetitive writing style. At a certain point I started counting the number of paragraphs that started with the words "Carmella shrugged", but I lost count.

Some authors improve with each new book, others just crank them out. In this case, the author and publisher are clearly on auto-pilot.