The story of Alice is one we all know well but what perhaps many of you do not know is that Lewis caroll was in love with alice. There is no evidence to suggest that anything happened between them, other than Lewis Carrols photography which although not acceptable in todays world, was not so unusual then. Here is a modern interpetation written in an article for the telegraph:
The Arrest and Trial of Lewis Carroll
Children's writer Lewis Carroll was a
"seriously unmarried bachelor" who befriended pre-pubescent girls and
told them ambiguous tales while taking their photographs, the Old Bailey
heard. In the latest showbusiness paedophile scandal his behaviour was described as "curiouser and curiouser". Carroll, 31, who is being tried under his real name Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson, is a mathematics lecturer at Oxford University who
writes unusual books for children. "He'd never get away with it today,"
said Robert Prude, QC, prosecuting. The court was told of Carroll's love
for Alice Liddell, whom he first met when she was four. "We became
excellent friends," he wrote in a diary seized by detectives.
Carroll enjoyed picnics with little girls, took them on boat
trips to a shaded park, and even allegedly proposed to 11-year-old
Alice when he himself was 31. He is a quiet man, prone to bouts of
melancholy. He was arrested last month in an all-units police raid, part
of "Operation Wonderland". The middle-aged logician and maths don, who
has never married, was charged under the Retrospective
PaedophileHysteria Act, in connection with a stash of suspicious
photographs. They were removed from his Oxfordshire house.
He has been suspended from his teaching duties at Christ
Church. Bookshops are removing his work from their shelves."The poor
fellow is ruined," said his solicitor. Outside the Central Criminal
Court, protesters screamed insults. Mr Justice Mobb broke his gavel
trying to bring the court to order after hissing and shouts of "Perv!"
from the public gallery.
Mr Prude said that Carroll wrote stories about a girl called
Alice who meets various animals including a snake and oysters. One
involved Alice in "the Queen's garden".
Judge Mobb, sharply: "Queen? What sort of queen?"
Mr Prude: "Well might you ask, m'lud."
Evidence was heard from a psychoanalyst who remarked that
Carroll's stories were fraught with sexual imagery. "That business with
the rabbit hole, I mean, it's obvious," said an expert psychiatric
witness. "And the Cheshire pussy-cat? Please."
Carroll was an early buyer of "photographic apparatus" and
at the heart of this case is the fact he had shot hundreds of portraits
of children - scores of pretty young things who were commonly asked to
pose with naked feet or in short boots with white socks.
Young Alice Jane Donkin was shown climbing out of a window
for an 1862 photograph called "The Elopement". Irene MacDonald, aged
four, was snapped in her nightie, brushing her hair. "Grooming," noted
Mr Prude, a word now shorn of its innocence.
Many of the photo sessions were conducted in the garden of
another celebrity, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Mr Rossetti has been
questioned by police and released without charge - but not before police
had tipped off the media.
Mrs Liddell, Alice's mother, said she found Carroll's
photography tiresome. She recalled that one winter she and her husband
left for Madeira. The first day after their departure Carroll presented
himself at the door of the Liddells' house and stayed to "nursery"
dinner. Alice was not always accompanied by her governess, Miss
Prickett.
Carroll, who is close to his aunt, is a complex man who has
difficulty making adult friendships. He stammers, is a fastidious
opponent of smoking and prone to melancholy.
"To some he sounds like an obvious child molester,"
Carroll's defence counsel said. "Is it just possible that he is simply a
lonely, creative oddball who knows his genius can only be ignited by
the company of what in one elegy he has called 'a childish sprite' "?
This makes interesting reading, and it is easy to see how by modern standards, Lewis carroll could be viewed as a peadophile. But is Lewis Carroll was alive today, it is very probable that he would not have acted in this way, and therefore we cannot judge him to harshly as he was afterall living in a different time. If we look at him in the context of his own time Lewis Carrol become less of a preditor and more of a tragic story teller who fell in love with a little girl called alice. Again I stress that there is no evidence that he molsested her or harmed her in any way. Indeed, acorrding to Katie Roiphe's book
she still haunts me his feelings for alice where romantic, not those which we would ordinarly asociate with somone acused of being a peadophile.
My interest in alice stems from my wonderment as to what it must be like to be alice, to have this older man feel these things for you. What must alice think about all of this? We know a little about what Lewis Carroll felt about it, he was troubled by it and did not find it an easy thing to bear. But he seemed to deal with it by entertaining her, by immersing himself in her world. Telling her stories to amsue and entertain her. What must it have felt like to alice to have this man who was so enchanted by her, want to spend his time with her. I think she must have felt like a very special little girl to have had all this attention! Perhaps she loved him to in an innocent sort of way, in the way child loves a parent. Perhaps as alice grew older this love blossomed, perhaps not. Perhaps as she grew older she became disturbed by Carrolls treatment of her, we will never know. What I do know is how I felt at that age, as a young adult.
when I was a young teen I did have strong sexual feelings for older people who I knew were not attainable because I was not old enough. Perhaps I only like the story of alice becasue I imagine myself as alice getting such attention from somone older, a father figure, and how great that would have felt. I was so despirate for love and to be noticed at that age and I really wanted somthing to happen, to feel cherished in the way that alice was by lewis carrol. To be made to feel like a princess is what every girl wants, to be loved and to matter to somone who is willing to take care of you. When you are a child you are so utterly dependant on those around you that it can cause anxiety. This anxiety is relived when you are reasured that you are not a burden, that you are loved and wanted. Now that I am an adult, of course my sexuality is wound up in all this, and it is natural for me to feel sexual urges towards those who offer me this kind of love and thus blossoms the D/lg dynamic.
