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Lewis Carroll



Dodgson's friendships with young girls, together with his perceived lack of interest in romantic attachments to adult women, and psychological readings of his work — especially his photographs of nude or semi-nude girls[31] — have all led to speculation that he was, in modern parlance, a paedophile. This possibility has underpinned numerous modern interpretations of his life and work, particularly Dennis Potter's play Alice and his screenplay for the motion picture, Dreamchild, and a number of recent biographies, including Michael Bakewell's Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1996), Donald Thomas's Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background (1996) and Morton N. Cohen's Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1995). All of these works more or less unequivocally assume that Dodgson was a paedophile, albeit a repressed and celibate one.

Cohen claims Dodgson's "sexual energies sought unconventional outlets", and further writes:

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 naive. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself.[32]

Cohen notes that Dodgson "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" (p. 229).

Cohen and other biographers argue that Dodgson 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.[33] But there has never been significant evidence to support the idea, and the 1996 discovery of the "cut pages in diary document" (see above) might imply that the 1863 "break" had less to do with Alice, but was perhaps connected with rumors involving her older sister Lorina, or possibly their governess.

Some writers, e.g., Derek Hudson and Roger Lancelyn Green, who have fallen short of accepting Dodgson as a paedophile, have tended to concur that he had a passion for small female children and next to no interest in the adult world.

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"The Carroll Myth"

The accepted view of Dodgson's biography has been challenged recently by a group of scholars led by Hugues Lebailly and Karoline Leach who argue that Dodgson's diaries and letters reveal him to have been very different in many key aspects from the traditional image. Leach's book, In the Shadow of the Dream Child, in particular has raised a considerable amount of controversy.

Lebailly has endeavoured to set Dodgson's child-photography within the "Victorian Child Cult", which perceived child-nudity as essentially an expression of innocence. Lebailly claims that studies of child nudes were mainstream and fashionable in Dodgson's time and that most photographers, including Oscar Rejlander and Julia Margaret Cameron, made them as a matter of course. Lebailly continues that child nudes even appeared on Victorian Christmas cards — implying a very different social and aesthetic assessment of such material. Lebailly concludes that it has been an error of Dodgson's biographers to view his child-photography with 20th or 21st century eyes, and to have presented it as some form of personal idiosyncrasy, when it was in fact a response to a prevalent aesthetic and philosophical movement of the time.

Leach posed a new analysis of Dodgson's sexuality. She argues that the allegations of paedophilia rose initially from a misunderstanding of Victorian morals, as well as the mistaken idea, fostered by Dodgson's various biographers, that he had no interest in adult women. She termed the traditional image of Dodgson "the Carroll Myth".[34] She asserts his diaries show he was also keenly interested in adult women, married and single, and enjoyed several scandalous (by the social standards of his time) relationships with them. In later life many of those he described as "child-friends" were girls in their late teens and even twenties.[35]. She argues that suggestions of paedophilia evolved only many years after his death, when his well-meaning family had suppressed all evidence of his relationships with women in an effort to preserve his reputation, thus giving a false impression of a man interested only in little girls. Similarly, Leach traces the claim that many of Carroll's female friendships ended when the girls reached the age of 14 to a 1932 biography by Langford Reed,[36] who Leach claims intended to suggest from this that Dodgson was a "pure man" untainted by sexual desire.[37]

The concept of the Carroll Myth has been opposed by some leading Carroll scholars, in particular Morton Cohen and Martin Gardner.

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Works

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See also

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Notes

  1. ^ a b c Cohen, Morton Lewis Carroll, a biography pp. 30-35.
  2. ^ Cohen, Morton Lewis Carroll, a biography pp. 200-2.
  3. ^ a b Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson. The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, 18.
  4. ^ Leach, Karoline In the Shadow of the Dreamchild Ch. 2.
  5. ^ a b c d Leach, Karoline In the Shadow of the Dreamchild Ch. 2
  6. ^ Leach, p. 91
  7. ^ Leach, Karoline In the Shadow of the Dreamchild Ch. 2.
  8. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Cohen, Morton Lewis Carroll, a biography
  9. ^ Cohen, Morton N. (ed), The Letters of Lewis Carroll, London: Macmillan, 1979.
  10. ^ a b Leach, Karoline In the Shadow of the Dreamchild Ch. 5 "The Unreal Alice"
  11. ^ a b Leach, Karoline In the Shadow of the Dreamchild Ch. 4
  12. ^ Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling. (2002). Lewis Carroll, Photographer.
  13. ^ how much evidence is there?
  14. ^ Flodden W. Heron, "Lewis Carroll, Inventor of Postage Stamp Case" in Stamps, vol. 26, no. 12, March 25, 1939
  15. ^ http://www.parkhurstrarebooks.com/newarrivals.htm
  16. ^ The Lewis Carroll Society Website - Carroll Related Postage Stamps
  17. ^ Duncan Black, Iain McLean, Alistair McMillan, Burt L. Monroe, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation. ISBN 0792396200. 
  18. ^ http://www.lewiscarroll.org/works.html
  19. ^ http://drugs.uta.edu/laudanum
  20. ^ Dodgson's MS diaries, volume 8, October 22–October 24, 1862
  21. ^ Dodgson's MS diaries, volume 8, see prayers scattered throughout the text
  22. ^ Leach, p. 48
  23. ^ Leach, p. 51
  24. ^ Leach, pp. 48–51
  25. ^ Leach, p. 52
  26. ^ Dodgson Family Collection, Cat. No. F/17/1. "Cut Pages in Diary". (For an account of its discovery see The Times Literary Supplement, 3 May 1996.)
  27. ^ Leach, Karoline In the Shadow of the Dreamchild pp. 170–2.
  28. ^ Text available on-line. Looking for Lewis Carroll. Retrieved on 2007-05-04.
  29. ^ "The Diaries of Lewis Carroll", vol 9 p. 52
  30. ^ "The Diaries of Lewis Carroll", vol 9
  31. ^ Cohen, 1995, pp. 166–167, 254–255.
  32. ^ Cohen, 1995
  33. ^ Cohen pp 100–4.
  34. ^ "The Carroll Myth"
  35. ^ Leach, pp. 16–17
  36. ^ Leach, p. 33
  37. ^ Leach, p. 32

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References

  • Bowman, Isa (1899), The Story of Lewis Carroll, Told by the Real Alice in Wonderland, London: Dent
  • Cohen, Morton N. (1995), Lewis Carroll: A Biography, London: Macmillan
  • Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson (1898), The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, London: T. Fisher Unwin
  • Graham-Smith, Darien (2005), Contextualising Carroll, University of Wales, Bangor: PhD Thesis ([1])
  • Huxley, Francis (1976), The Raven and the Writing Desk. (ISBN 0-06-012113-0).
  • Kelly, Richard, Lewis Carroll. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990.
  • Kelly, Richard, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
  • Leach, Karoline (1999), In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll, London: Peter Owen Publishers
  • Lennon, Florence Becker (1947), Lewis Carroll, London: Cassell
  • Reed, Langford (1932), The Life of Lewis Carroll, London: W. and G. Foyle
  • Sunghyun Kim, 'Political Unconscious in Fantastic Narrative: Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland(Korean)', Yonsei University Graduate School, 2005
  • Taylor, Alexander L., Knight (1952), The White Knight, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd
  • Taylor, Roger & Wakeling, Edward, Lewis Carroll, Photographer, 2002 (Catalogues nearly every Carroll photograph known to be still in existence.)
  • Wullschläger, Jackie, Inventing Wonderland, (ISBN 0-7432-2892-8) — also looks at Edward Lear (of the "nonsense" verses), J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan), Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows), and A. A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh).
  • n.n., Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll. Yale University Press & SFMOMA, 2004. (Places Carroll firmly in the art photography tradition.)

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Persondata
NAME Carroll, Lewis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (real name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION Author, mathematician, and clergyman
DATE OF BIRTH January 27, 1832(1832-01-27)
PLACE OF BIRTH Daresbury, Cheshire, England
DATE OF DEATH January 14, 1898
PLACE OF DEATH Guildford, England



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