This book is almost as hard to classify as a Lewis Carroll story.

If you are a Lewis Carroll scholar, you need this book. It includes most of his surviving letters to MacMillan, his publisher, as well as detailed documents explaining what the letters mean (e.g. when Dodgson refers to a book by someone else, it documents what that book is). As a work of scholarship, it's excellent.

But, ouch, it's hard to read. The letters show Dodgson at his irascible, bigoted, hyper-perfectionist, hair-trigger worst. No fault is too small to draw a demand for satisfaction; no minor lack of clarity too trivial to draw a censure; no forgotten point too unimportant to be left unrepeated. I'm amazed MacMillan put up with these constant harangues, no matter how many thousands of books Dodgson sold. I would certainly have told him to go hang.

And that wasn't even the limit of Dodgson's requests. He asked MacMillan to handle parts of his correspondence, to do his research, even -- on many occasions -- to get his theatre tickets.

Those of you looking for evidence of his obsessions with little girls won't find it here (except that he buys some of those theatre tickets for them). Those looking for his whimsy will find even less -- I'm not sure I recall a humorous line in the entire book. All there is here is crankiness. If you want a crank, by all means, read this book. As for me, I plowed through it only for the sake of research into Dodgson's life. It took me months. It's that vicious. It's hard even to rate the book, because the contents and the annotations are so different. Give the editors five stars for their research and all they've done to enlighten the readers. As for Dodgson, I'd be tempted to give him a boot in the pants. ( )