This work offers a fresh insight into the highly complex and contradictory character of the Reverend Charles Dodgson, a man who was as strange and singular as any of his alter ego's fabulous creations. According to Bakewell, everything that Dodgson was stemmed from his rectory childhood, a past from which he never truly escaped, and his constant need for the company and love of little girls was both the joy and the tragedy of his life.