What might have happened to Tennyson, Charles Dodgson, Mr and Mrs G F Watts, Julia Cameron, an American phrenologist and three fiendish eight-year-olds if they had spent time together on the Isle of Wight, under the shadow of Queen Victoria. Very funny, quite unbelievable (unfortunately) and yet true to the Victorian age.
For the first time since she met him, she asked herself whether Mr Dodgson was really the sunny personality she had at first imagined. Did she honestly want to spend the rest of her life with him, setting up home in a bathing machine and living on what she could catch in a shrimp net? She was only eight, she told herself.