Was Lewis Carroll a pedophile?

[NoJo]

I wouldn't convict him on that poem. Me as well as anyone here knows that a written fantasy isn't what one would always want in reality.

I guess [and this will sound very strange] is that one motive I might have thought for paedophilia would be to feel young again. If he was a paedophile, then it only made him very much aware of his age and mortality. So I could be wrong or right or not even close.

Interestingly, he was the oldest of 12 children, and shared in his sibling's care. He was made to grow up very quickly. He went to Rugby school, made infamous through "Tom Brown's Schooldays", where bullying and violence were common, and survived by becoming physically tough and emotionally aloof. He certainly must have felt cheated out of his own childhood.

 

[Lady_Silver]

Interestingly, he was the oldest of 12 children, and shared in his sibling's care. He was made to grow up very quickly. He went to Rugby school, made infamous through "Tom Brown's Schooldays", where bullying and violence were common, and survived by becoming physically tough and emotionally aloof. He certainly must have felt cheated out of his own childhood.

I agree. The contrasts between his role in child care (though it can be rough, the innocence makes it worth it) and the school experience must have made a lasting impression. I would say "obviously", but nothing is obvious. Knowing this explains a lot about what I've been reading on this thread.

 

[oggbashan]

Victorian Photography

Lewis Carroll's photographs were in the mainstream of Victorian Romantic Photography. Other photographers e.g. Julia Margaret Cameron took more stylised pictures of children. I don't think, in contemporary terms, Lewis Carroll could be accused of anything beyond appreciating the aesthetics of young girls as photographic subjects. All we do know is that the proprieties of the time were scrupulously followed by Lewis Carroll.

Deathbed pictures of children were commonplace. Children as 'cute' were common. I have owned a 19th missionary book about Southern India that was profusely illustrated with photos of naked boys and girls. The text described them as 'living in a state of nature [i.e. completely nude] until age 10 or 12".

What has to be remembered is that Lewis Carroll was of his time. What was acceptable then was different. It has been the same in my lifetime. In the 1950s a child, male or female, under the age of 10, could be naked on a sunny beach in the UK without attracting any comment. Bikinis or swimsuits for 2 year olds didn't exist.

In the parts of the UK up to the 1920s and in some remote areas until the 1930s boys might wear their sisters' outgrown dresses to go to school because there was no money to buy clothes for younger siblings. The boys put up with it because it was normal for their society at that time. It wouldn't be possible now.

Lewis Carroll's interaction with young girls was always in the presence of a parent, older sibling or governess and therefore unexceptional AT THAT TIME.

I am surprised that no one has mentioned Lewis Carroll's alter ego Charles Dodgson, nor his fame as a mathematician.

Og

 

[Aurora Black]

philias... HERE

Thanks.

 

[Svenskaflicka]

I couldn't see anything pedo-like in that poem, not even though I actively searched for it. I saw an aging man with a depression, that was relieved to find youthfulness and livelihood in a young child.

The photos were much more questionable, but compared to the photos in commercials today, I think Carroll's hobby was pretty tame.

If he WAS a paedophile, atleast he handed it the right way - by always having company present when he was with a child, and by not going any further than getting a few photos he could use for jerk-off material. (Instead of, say, hiring a child prostitute.)

Though I'm against child pornography, I think the photos we saw weren't THAT bad, and the fact that he preferred arranging rather decent photos in the company of a sibling or an adult of the child, rather than buying some REALLY sick stuff (I'm sure it existed as early as then!), shows that he wasn't so lewd that he'd let children suffer just because he himself was sexually deviant.

 

[Pure]

svenska flicka--that sounds like a humane, tolerant view that makes a lot of sense. it's too bad it's so uncommon in the US.

 

[RPguy]

I couldn't tell you where or when, but I have read/heard that he was into children. I have heard this numerious times but hearing something doesn't make it true.

I HATE to hear of anyone doing anything to children.

 

[Sex and Death]

Yeah, they're very suggestive:

http://www.margencero.com/Magazine/lumiere_carroll/carroll7.jpg

http://www.marvelligallery.com/img/MotiCarrollsock1.jpg

http://libweb2.princeton.edu/rbsc2/portfolio/lc2/fi/00000014.jpg

The key human quality that makes any projective visual tests useful is that what we see says more about us than it does the image.

It seems clear form the taboo energy invested that we still have some deep repression to deal with around sexuality as ahuman quality, and not a quality of "adulthood."

Socially, consent is a line of demarcation. Within the dark steamy jungle of the human psyche, consent is simply one style of how we may do sex.

i am not advocating nonconsensual sex of any kind. It is unarguable that socially non-consensual sex is can be deeply damaging to the receiver and shows some social deficit of character and/or development in the initiator.

Even if w ewanted to we couldn't control our fantasy life. The problem comes when literalizing fnatasy and acting it out becomes the primary goal above allowing our fantasy life to provide vital energy to feed our life. "Eros" is the energy of all life, not just the energy of sex.

 

[NoJo]

The key human quality that makes any projective visual tests useful is that what we see says more about us than it does the image.

It seems clear form the taboo energy invested that we still have some deep repression to deal with around sexuality as ahuman quality, and not a quality of "adulthood."

Socially, consent is a line of demarcation. Within the dark steamy jungle of the human psyche, consent is simply one style of how we may do sex.

i am not advocating nonconsensual sex of any kind. It is unarguable that socially non-consensual sex is can be deeply damaging to the receiver and shows some social deficit of character and/or development in the initiator.

Even if w ewanted to we couldn't control our fantasy life. The problem comes when literalizing fnatasy and acting it out becomes the primary goal above allowing our fantasy life to provide vital energy to feed our life. "Eros" is the energy of all life, not just the energy of sex.

Yes. What we see is what we see, not what is seen.

 

[Guest]

svenska flicka--that sounds like a humane, tolerant view that makes a lot of sense. it's too bad it's so uncommon in the US.

Bravo, Pure. I was moved by Svenska's post. I too think it an uncommon perspective in the states.

If it matters, from all I've read and seen on paper, I cannot believe LC ever acted on whatever desires young girls might have aroused in him. I've always thought him an outstanding moral man, even for his time.

Perdita

 

[Norajane]

I'd never seen any of Carroll's photographs before. If those three photos were presented to me outside the context of this thread, only the third picture would seem remotely sexual to me. She reminds me of a book cover sketch I've seen of Cosette, actually.

 

[NoJo]

I'd never seen any of Carroll's photographs before. If those three photos were presented to me outside the context of this thread, only the third picture would seem remotely sexual to me. She reminds me of a book cover sketch I've seen of Cosette, actually.

Many of his photos were destroyed -- the nudie ones. But as I said at the beginning of this thread, if he had pedo tendencies, it's unlikely he acted on them beyond a little scopophilia. But maybe it was like lesbianism used to be: It was literally unspeakable, and therefore non-existent.

 

[Pure]

Victorian paintings

To show what was floating around in Victorian times, and is still considered 'art' are the following Bougereau's


http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bouguereau/kiss.jpg

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bouguereau/cupidon.jpg

Probably their 'art' status, being in museums, etc. protects them from the enforcers.

 

[shereads]

Two observations:


1. We judge certain images as either threatening to the innocence of children, or harmlessly playful, depending on where we live as much as the times.

In its U.S. advertising, Club Med avoids showing pictures of children being hugged or held by members of the staff; in Europe, parents find those pictures reassuring, as they are meant to be.

As paranoid as we can be about child molestation and the potential harm when children are exposed to internet porn, Americans are remarkably tolerant of sexually suggestive images that are targeted directly at children.

A quote from the CEO of Candies, a line of shoes for young girls: "There's nothing wrong with letting girls look a little promiscuous, as long as it's innocent."

Also in the U.S., we remain so fixated on the murder of child beauty-pageant star Jon-Benet Ramsey that a decade after her death, it's hard to find a supermarket checkout counter where some weekly rag doesn't have her photo on the cover - hair bleached to a silvery blonde, lips glossed, mascara thicker than Tammy Faye Baker's. The kid was barely six years old, for chrissake. Her own parents turned her into a pedophile's dream date. The year after the child was murdered, the number of parents who entered their toddlers in beauty pageants skyrocketed.

----------

2. When I was googling for the Victorian-era legal age of consent, I found some disturbing articles about sexuality. Being the target of an adult's obsessive admiration would have been only one of the dangers faced by girls Alice's age. Based on advice from physicians, and the need to protect girls' virginity so they could make financially and socially beneficial marriages, it became generally accepted that sexual desire in women was an aberration. Marital rape couldn't exist, according to the courts, because women naturally found sex abhorrent and would always refuse if their husbands gave them a choice.

Girls were kept ignorant of their bodies. They were taught to close their eyes when changing clothes so they wouldn't see their more shameful parts; they didn't even bathe naked, but wore a cotton chemise. With men equally ignorant of women's sexuality, the wedding night must have been a nightmare. In one physician's study, more than half of married women described sexual relations as "brutal, painful, terrible." Masturbation was even worse; in women, it was said to cause leucothymia, a disease of the white blood cells.

Women could not sue for divorce, could not retain custody of their children if their husbands chose to divorce them, could not own property, keep any income if they worked, and were virtual non-persons. One legal sholar wrote, "A husband and wife are one person, and that person is the husband."

Poor Alice. No wonder she followed the rabbit.

 

[Aurora Black]

Jesus Christ for both observations!

Why would they enter more children into those pageants after the murder??? Has everyone gone nuts?

 

[zeb1094]

Jesus Christ for both observations!

Why would they enter more children into those pageants after the murder??? Has everyone gone nuts?

Yes indeed!

 

[devoted lilgirl]

Women could not sue for divorce, could not retain custody of their children if their husbands chose to divorce them, could not own property, keep any income if they worked, and were virtual non-persons. One legal sholar wrote, "A husband and wife are one person, and that person is the husband."

That was William Blackstone who said that wasn't it...very reputible source of an observation of life in that time...

This aspect of women's history and history in general has always intrigued me, but it seems I can only find information in bits and pieces...even down to the facts about how doctors would masturbate women for medicinal reasons to cure hysteria (although, I know, the actual rate of occurance is up for debate...) still, makes for a topic just itching to be further researched...

 

[CharleyH]

Having spent the last months reading the two latest thoughtful and detailed biographies of Carroll, which were written after new facts have emerged about the man and his life, I'm still puzzled by the poem.

Sher: As always lol - but forget babysitting, would you marry him and have a plethora of babies?

Joe: I am a big fan of the absurdists, and Carroll is just brilliant and always has been in my eyes. Thank you for the poem. I will look at it more closely, (as I have never seen it) in the days to come. What puzzles you? (other than - lol - this word you use may very well be in Carroll's style.)

 

[Lady_Silver]

...This aspect of women's history and history in general has always intrigued me, but it seems I can only find information in bits and pieces...even down to the facts about how doctors would masturbate women for medicinal reasons to cure hysteria (although, I know, the actual rate of occurance is up for debate...) still, makes for a topic just itching to be further researched...

www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/vwwplib.pl? Sorry, don't know how to insert a hyperlink here. This is the URL for the Victorian Women Writers Project. You will find a number of papers written by women of the Victorian period concerning issues, opinions, advice, etc. In it I also discovered that single women could be taken sexually by any man. If the father (can't remember if it applied to husband in the case of married women, but don't think so)was not damaged or aggrieved by the rape, then there was no grounds for lawful reprimand of any kind.

Lovely time to live. Reading of some of these Victorian authors is fascinating. Happy reading.

 

[Lady_Silver]

Oh, how about that. It makes a hyperlink when it's submitted. Cool.

 

[Aurora Black]

Oh, how about that. It makes a hyperlink when it's submitted. Cool.

Welcome to Lit, Lady Silver. I tried to say it earlier in a PM, but you know...

 

[Lady_Silver]

Nothing like learning on the fly...whatever that means.

 

[Svenskaflicka]

The year after the child was murdered, the number of parents who entered their toddlers in beauty pageants skyrocketed.

*SKIP*

Masturbation was even worse; in women, it was said to cause leucothymia, a disease of the white blood cells.

Did those parents hope that their kids would get murdered as well? Wouldn't a parent who wants his/her child to live stay the hell away from a place associated with the murder of a child?

Masturbation was considered VERY dangerous for women in the Victorian age - it could cause the uterus to snap loose and start wandering around inside her body! I swear to the Goddess! I don't make this up! People actually BELIEVED this - because that's what the most advanced doctors in the field told them.
The only cure for masturbating girls/women, was to have them circumsized. And if cutting off most of their pussy, including the inner labias and the clitoris, wasn't enough, a lobotomy could be arranged.

The Victorians were terrified of female sexuality.

 

[Norajane]

Masturbation was considered VERY dangerous for women in the Victorian age - it could cause the uterus to snap loose and start wandering around inside her body! I swear to the Goddess! I don't make this up! People actually BELIEVED this - because that's what the most advanced doctors in the field told them.
The only cure for masturbating girls/women, was to have them circumsized. And if cutting off most of their pussy, including the inner labias and the clitoris, wasn't enough, a lobotomy could be arranged.

The Victorians were terrified of female sexuality.

Why such fear? Where did it come from, or why did it bloom in the Victorian era?

Dumb guys. They screwed themselves a million times over by repressing female sexuality. Just imagine all the blowjobs and fan-freaking-tastic orgasms they missed out on by repressing rather than celebrating and encouraging.

 

[Svenskaflicka]

Why such fear? Where did it come from, or why did it bloom in the Victorian era?

Dumb guys. They screwed themselves a million times over by repressing female sexuality. Just imagine all the blowjobs and fan-freaking-tastic orgasms they missed out on by repressing rather than celebrating and encouraging.

There are still men who prefer to keep women's sexuality suppressed to a minimum. They mutilate women's sexual organs to make sure they can't get sexually aroused, they refuse women foreplay, and they call sexually active women sluts or whores.

I guess the power they get over their women makes it worth it losing out on all the wonders of consensual, reciprocal sex.