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Child Friends (Little Girls)

“I am fond of children (except boys)" - Lewis Carroll

Introduction

One of the most heated controversies concerning the Alice books surrounds the alleged sexual perversity of their author. The spectrum of speculation ranges from seeing Carroll’s relationships with young girls as the slightly inappropriate and eccentric whims of lonely man to full-blown pedophilia. Martin Gardner has written a good summary of the subject in his Introduction to The Annotated Alice (1960). He writes,

“Carroll’s principal hobby—the hobby that aroused his greatest joys—was entertaining little girls. 'I am fond of children (except boys),' he once wrote. He professed a horror of little boys and in later life avoided them as much as possible.  Adopting the Roman symbol for a day of good fortune, he would write in his diary, 'I mark this day with a white stone' whenever he felt it to be specially memorable. In almost every case his white-stone days were days on which he entertained a child-friend or made the acquaintance of a new one.  He thought the naked bodies of little girls (unlike the bodies of boys) extremely beautiful.  Upon occasion he sketched or photographed them in the nude, with the mother’s permission, of course….
“There is no indication that Carroll was conscious of anything but the purest innocence in his relations with little girls, nor is there a hint of impropriety in any of the fond recollections that dozens of them later wrote about him.  There was a tendency in Victorian England, reflected in the literature of the time, to idealize the beauty and virginal purity of little girls.  No doubt this made it easier for Carroll to suppose that his fondness for them was on a high spiritual level, though of course this hardly is a sufficient explanation for that fondness.” (11-13)

Gardner goes on to argue that “Carroll’s little girls appealed to him precisely because he felt sexually safe with them,” though of course, Carroll himself “would have been horrified at the suggestion that a sexual element might be involved” when he kissed his child-friends or sealed his letters to them with 10,000,000 kisses (13). 

Images

Alice Liddell as a Beggar Girl, Lewis Carroll, 1858

To see some of Carroll's other photographs of young children visit this University of Virginia site.

 

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