Letting people live their lives and GALing...

[AntoniaB]

Ha ha Cadet, I can totally answer this! I read a book last year which is historical fiction called Alice I Have Been which is about the Lewis Carroll/Alice controversy from her perspective, but it's not entirely accurate to real life. There is a big author's note at the end that describes which parts of the story are real and which are conjecture. There is also a book called The Lives of the Muses which IS accurate, by Francine Prose, and there is a chapter on Carroll's "muse" and is historically accurate.

Ok this might be a long post till I explain, just warning: Carroll was never comfortable around adults. He was a strange person and very introverted, and he had this fascination with photography, especially of children. Now in the Victorian era, children were seen as "angelic", almost cherub-like, when pictured in photos. They were idealized. The controvery came when a photograph of Alice Liddell was made by Carroll where she is wearing a peasant girl's dress and she has this sort of seductive look on her face, and the dress shows a fair amount of skin. Children had to stand a long time for the photo to be developed, meaning that this look seems deliberate, no accident. It's a very adult look on the young girl's face. Between this, other photos, and the sort of obsession Carroll had with this child, this controversy arose suggesting some impropriety between him and Alice, at least in terms of how he saw her, but no one will ever truly know.

From what I've read Carroll was bothered when children grew up and lost their "innocence." This is why he preferred children as photographic subjects and why it seemed he did not keep relationships with young girls when they became older. By most accounts he wrote the Alice in Wonderland story to entertain Alice Liddell and her sisters.

In terms of MLC I've never read anything that suggested he was in MLC, only that at worst, there were suggestions of pedophilia, and at best, just a personal attachment to the innocence children represented. But this fascination of his seemed to be with him his whole life--it's not that he aged and then suddenly wanted to be around young girls, like so many in MLC who want to rediscover their youth. It's more like Carroll seems a perpetual child in some ways himself--a childlike mind stuck in a grown man's body.

I have talked with a member of the boards about Carroll's photography and we agree that people get worked up over these photos now because we are so wary of pedophilia, but that if we were in the Victorian era and evaluating them, we'd probably find the photos not risque at all.

So I hope that answers your question, and you can read either of those books to get more info.