Professor Cohen’s biography of the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–98), the culmination of thirty years’ research, begins by lamenting our not having a recording of his voice. We have Tennyson, who died six years before Dodgson, huffing out “The Charge of the Light Brigade” like an asthmatic walrus, and we have Victoria intoning bashfully, “My dear subjects,” followed by noise in which we can make out one other word (“tomatoes”). She had dried up after a brave beginning and had been prompted to describe the room where she was speaking into the large end of a megaphone connected to a wiggling needle graphing her imperial voice onto a wax cylinder. A witness remembered hothouse tomatoes in a bowl.

There survives of Dodgson’s sixty-six years his books (the two “Alice” volumes, Sylvie and Bruno and its sequel, treatises on logic and mathematics), his diaries, his photographs of Oxford luminaries and of children, and 98,721 letters. Four years of the diaries are still missing. Pages have been razored out of the others. The family at the time of his death had to remove his belongings from his rooms at Christ Church. They burned papers all day, depriving the world of a Symbolic Logic and Lord knows what else. Dodgson himself had destroyed many photographs. His life was wonderfully full and strangely empty.

He was a pastor without a congregation.

At every turn in Professor Cohen’s biography we see a generous and gifted soul diligently trying to engage with