The Art of the Child: Turning the Lens on Lewis Carroll

The main points of this thesis include:

Some people today hold that any an unclothed child is necessarily sexualized so any photos taken of them would be wrong. This includes not just present-day photographers but even photographers who are long dead. (It also pays no attention to the nature of the society at the time the photos were taken.) Thus, Charles Dodgsonj (Lewis Carroll) is ' retrofitted' to be a pedophile.

Some biographers of him have been tweaked to as to make him a model of a pedophile.

Some interpret Alice's fall down the rabbit hole as symbolizing sexual penetration. Some people have said he was addicted to opium and apparently there was at least one article that included him as a suspect of being Jack the Ripper.

The author says that things in Victorian times that were considered sweet are now thought of as 'deviant, dangerous, repressed sexuality.'

Alice was not his only childhood friend.

He was a fatherly confidant, a spiritual guide and an entertainer.

The story Alice in Wonderland encourages children to take risks and to explore things.

He preferred the company of children to adults. (I think there are a couple of reasons for this. For one, he grew up in a large family with most of the children younger then him and most of them girls. He made up games for them and entertained them and thus was used to being around younger people. Secondly, he had a problem with stammering and nothing I've read indicated children made fun of him for it.)

(Another thing to consider is this. Nowhere in Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass is Alice actually sexualized. Compare that to the number of x-rated book and film versions of today of that has Alice in it and it seems it's today's world that has sexualized her and not the time of Lewis Carroll.)

Victorians were heavily into the concept of purity and felt young children were about as pure as you could get. They even used photos of them on Valentine's Day cards and birthday cards. If the taking of the nude photos of young children (girls, mostly) was so bad (at the time) then the parents themselves should have been held accountable.

The author goes into all the preparations for nude photography including defniite permission from the parents.

(If you want an intelligent, open-minded examination of the issue of whether or not he was a pedophile then you should definitely download this thesis and read it carefully.)

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