ALICE in Wonderland cried ``curiouser and curiouser'' and nobody was more curious about Alice than the possibly dirty old man who put her on the literary map of an admiring world.

The Rev Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98), so great a Victorian that even the Queen was amused by the work he published under his pseudonym Lewis Carroll, may have been quintessentially Victorian in his vices, not his virtues.

Once upon a time, before Freud had time to fantasise on the guilty sexual secrets of humankind, it all seemed innocent enough. On the ``golden afternoon'' of Friday, July 4, 1862, Dodgson and his friend, the Rev Robinson Duckworth, took three young sisters - Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell - on a three-mile rowing trip from Folly Bridge, near Oxford, up the Thames to Godstow.

Dodgson amused the children by telling them fantastic tales and Alice remembered that ``nearly all of Alice's Adventures Underground was told on that blazing summer afternoon with the heat haze shimmering over the meadows where the party landed to shelter for a while in the shadow cast by the haycocks near Godstow''.

After the trip Alice implored Dodgson to ``write out Alice's adventures for me''. Dodgson obliged and spent almost the whole night writing down what he could recall of the tale. At the end of 1864 Alice received, as ``a Christmas present to a dear child in memory of a summer's day'', a handwritten copy of Alice's Adventures Underground, complete with Dodgson's own illustrations.

Dodgson was a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and the dean of his college was Alice's dad, Henry George Liddell, a lexicographer. Fascinated by photography, Dodgson delighted in taking pictures of Alice: as early as 1856, when she was three years' young, he pointed his camera at her.

He adored this precocious child, this daughter of a man mad about words, this young one inevitably in love with language games. She was flattered by Dodgson's gift of the manuscript version of the tale of a child who bolts down a rabbit hole for some light relief. She was delighted when Dodgson presented her, on the third anniversary of the golden afternoon in the little boat going to Godstow, with the first printed copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as the story was retitled at Dean Liddell's suggestion.

She was not, however, amused when Dodgson made it known he wanted to marry her. He may have first asked her parents' permission to have her hand in marriage when she was 11, but evidence for his possibly paedophiliac passion for her is elusive.

Alice's mother destroyed all the letters Dodgson wrote to his heroine when she was young and Alice herself, who married a rich man at the age of 28, recalled in old age only how she was enchanted by the poor old Dodo (Dodgson stuttered his surname as Do-Do-Dodgson) as a man who told tall tales and encouraged her to dress down as he took his photographs of her.

Alice's way of remembering is disturbing if we accept Freud's vision of the Victorian way of life. Wrote Alice: ``Much more exciting than being photographed was being allowed to go into the dark room, and watch him develop the large glass plates. What could be more thrilling than to see the negative gradually take shape, as he gently rocked it to and fro in the acid bath? Besides, the dark room was so mysterious, and we felt that any adventure might happen there! There were all the joys of preparation, anticipation, and realisation, besides the feeling that we were assisting at some secret rite usually reserved for grown-ups.''

For Freudians, it sounds like so much Malice in Wonderland. All that excitement.

Donald Thomas is not impressed by the girl who meant so much to Dodgson. he describes Alice as ``a rather dull member of a rather dull class''. He feels Dodgson was a man who was done down by a girl who was not up to his ideals: ``To suggest that anything other than the joy of photography and a delight in children motivated him consciously in choosing such subjects (as Alice in tattered dress slipping off her shoulders) would be unjust. He was, by his highest standards, scrupulous in his dealings with young models.''

Alice, Thomas reckons, was the one great disappointment in his life as she did not want to be his eternal child. No wonder.

From 1865-1880 Dodgson took photographs of naked little girls - Thomas calls them ``a score of otherwise uninteresting little girls''. Dodgson gave up his photographic sessions, as they could have got him in trouble, but continued to pursue little girls, including Isa Bowman, with whom Dodgson spent what he called a ``honeymoon'' in Eastbourne, and Enid Stevens, a girl of nine when 59-year-old Dodgson met her in 1891.

The more you read about Dodgson the more you loathe him. The more you read by Carroll the more you love him; more's the pity, as it tells the same old story - a literary master can be a monster.

Despite the enthusiasm for the main man in Thomas's book, Dodgson comes over subliminally as a Victorian monster, and his alter ego Carroll comes over as a subtle Victorian master. Thomas makes the most of Dodgson by making him out to be a child of his time, but this won't wash as there is no chronological excuse for a man who was so outrageously racist he fantasised about having a black servant whose face he could polish up with a blacking-brush; who had a serious interest in battering those he regarded as badly behaved children; who, as a photographer, emotionally abused his subjects.

Thomas feels Dodgson did no wrong: ``Those passages in his writing which might cause the politically sensitive to squirm with greater agility than even the rumours of paedophilia, when written, represented inoffensive and good-natured banter...... His jokes on race or the flogging of ill-behaved children in the nineteenth century embarrass the twentieth as the chatter of the twentieth will make its own successor wince.''

It is not only the chattering class of today which finds the likes of Dodgson a menace to society. Upstanding members of the caring class of his time found him a man who might massacre innocence, which is why they kept him away from children he wanted to influence in an unwholesome way.

As an apologist for Dodgson, Thomas has a theory to support his theme of a much-maligned man. Dodgson's only sin was, so Thomas says, to suffer from onomatomania, a compulsion to create intellectually problem-solving puzzles to stop sexual images from invading his mind.

Dodgson wrote a book, revealingly entitled Pillow Problems (1893), advising insomniacs to allow themselves to be sucked into a mathematical swamp to escape from the erotic thoughts that came in the night.

During the day Dodgson read books on the sexual activities of others, always having a collection of sexually explicit books to hand. Thomas never seems to be shocked by Dodgson's dodges. Dodgson he reveres as ``this man who died a virgin (yet) knew more about the sexual physiology of women than the great majority of husbands - or wives - of his day.''

Dodgson was fascinated by fallen women, greatly interested in young girls, obsessed by such events as the amputation of a man's leg, though Thomas feels he went to see such an operation as a way of testing his nerve.

Dodgson, as Thomas tells it, was a good as well as a Great Victorian - but don't you believe it. If Dodgson was around today he would be carted off by officials offended by his photographs. If Carroll was around today he would be booked as a master, and we can only wonder at the mystery of his masterpiece as he was a man of genius who became curiouser and curiouser. One man can become two.

LEWIS CARROLL: A Portrait with Background

By Donald Thomas

John Murray, #25