Lewis Caroll

Lewis Carroll and the girl

With all the Epstein files broohaha going on, it seems that every person with an opinion is putting out videos on TikTok and Instagram about the monsters under our bed.

Today's target is Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, otherwise known as Lewis Carroll.

The consensus is that he was a brilliant man. Drawing from several sources, I can report that in addition to being a writer he was also a logician, mathematician, an ordained minister and a photographer. He also dabbled in poetry, children’s literature, fantasy literature, literary nonsense, mathematical logic, linear algebra, geometry, symbolic logic, voting theory, the first printed proof of the Rouché–Capelli theorem, and an invetor. Many also consider him to be a pedophile.

As a photographer, he used the painstakingly difficult wet collodion process or wet-plate photography. This requires rapid development of the plate. In addition to the heavy camera, he also carried around a box of chemicals that made the process possible.
Despite this, he took over 3,000 photos, although less that a thousand survive

Caroll destroyed many of his own works because he did not want his legacy tainted. For context, in the Victorian era, photographing children in the nude was considered a sort of capturing of innocence.

Carroll has long occupied a niche in photographic history books as the best Victorian photographer of children — especially of little girls.

He was known to have friendships with children who responded to the humor of his rhymes.

Some people were suspicious of Caroll with speculation that his "sexual energies sought unconventional outlets".

One person wrote, "We cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Charles's preference for drawing and photographing children in the nude. He contended the preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his emotional attachment to children as well as his aesthetic appreciation of their forms, his assertion that his interest was strictly artistic is naïve. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself." And "apparently convinced many of his friends that his attachment to the nude female child form was free of any eroticism",

It is further argued that Dodgson may have wanted to marry the 11-year-old Alice Liddell (the real Alice in Wonderland) and that this was the cause of the unexplained "break" with the family in June 1863

In the video that I watched, the irate narrator claims that Caroll frequently asked that the parents of the children to be photographed be not present. She also editorializes heavily with "ewwww", apparently not understanding the context of Victorian norms. For example, citing a 1995 New York Times article that states he was in love with an 11 year old woman, then rants about that.

Biographers Derek Hudson and Roger Lancelyn Green stop short of identifying Caroll as a pedophile (Green also edited Dodgson's diaries and papers), but they concur that he had a passion for small female children and next to no interest in the adult world.
Catherine Robson refers to Carroll as "the Victorian era's most famous (or infamous) girl lover". Media studies scholar Will Brooker points out that perception of Dodgson this way in the 20th century was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud's theories. Brooker considers Dodgson's alleged perversion as a product of its time that outstayed its welcome culturally:
The psychoanalytic [Freudian] interpretations of the Alice books in the 1930s were a product of a specific moment and movement... The discourses that I traced in journalism and in some biographies, that Carroll was emotionally arrested, a repressed paedophile, an obsessive, stammering social reject... -- have more to do with our own attitudes to childhood and celebrity than they do to the culture Carroll lived through."

Several other writers and scholars have challenged the evidential basis for Cohen's and others' views about Dodgson's potential exploitative behaviour. Hugues Lebailly has endeavoured to set Dodgson's child photography within the "Victorian Child Cult", which perceived child nudity as essentially an expression of innocence.

Cohen goes on to note that Carol "apparently convinced many of his friends that his attachment to the nude female child form was free of any eroticism", but adds that "later generations look beneath the surface" . He argues that Caroll may have wanted to marry the 11-year-old Alice Liddell and that this was the cause of the unexplained "break" with the family in June 1863

This was not uncommon in Victorian England such arrangements were not as improbable as they might seem; John Ruskin, for example, fell in love with a 12-year-old girl while Caroll's younger brother sought to marry a 14-year-old, but postponed the wedding for six years.

Lebailly claims that studies of child nudes were mainstream and fashionable in Caroll's time and that most photographers made them as a matter of course, including Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Julia Margaret Cameron. Lebailly continues that child nudes even appeared on Victorian Christmas cards, implying a very different social and aesthetic assessment of such material.

Interestingly, you can find many of Caroll's photos online. Simply search Lewis Caroll photographs and you'll find a very nice photo of Alice Liddel and images that appear to be painting but are actually colorized photos. Coloring of photos, or making paintings from photos was common at the time. Many of these photos are available from art vendors for a price. You can, however, find some examples in the Wikipedia entry for Lewis Carroll.

He was also a prolific diarist. Sadly, some of the volumes are missing and some have pages torn out.