Comment by mlindner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlindner | Hacker News Reader

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I mean those some of those "risky" pictures are on even on Wikipedia. Also from my understanding he followed a common Victorian era belief that was prevalent at the time and wasn't necessarily a pedophile.

Quoting wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll):

> Several other writers and scholars have challenged the evidential basis for Cohen's and others' views about Dodgson's sexual interests. 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.[88] Lebailly claims that studies of child nudes were mainstream and fashionable in Dodgson'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. 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 a response to a prevalent aesthetic and philosophical movement of the time.

And the following paragraph is also interesting.

The following paragraph:

> Karoline Leach's reappraisal of Dodgson focused in particular on his controversial 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". She drew attention to the large amounts of evidence in his diaries and letters that he was also keenly interested in adult women, married and single, and enjoyed several relationships with them that would have been considered scandalous by the social standards of his time. She also pointed to the fact that many of those whom he described as "child-friends" were girls in their late teens and even twenties.[89] She argues that suggestions of paedophilia emerged 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.

I've spent the morning digging into this, and find it frustratingly controversial (in the proper sense, of being murky and divisive). I admit I like the story of the defense you've sheared, that it was an aspect of the times, but can't deny the concerns raised by his relationship with Alice in particular (see their kisses, letters). My SO says there was a documentary which featured condemning letters from one of his yiuge girlfriend's nannies, but I haven't seen these, except perhaps in a passing mention of contemperary gossip. I do find it interesting to read mid-tentieth century psychoanalysis of his work, because it kind-of reads like the sensational speculatuon in online forum comments :p

Have you found any authoritative or reliable sources that you might share?

Do we know when and why the perception of child nudity has shifted ?

Risky click, from what I've heard about 'Victorian Era'

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