Alice in Wonderland

Tegan, I'll need to get it on 'catch-up'. I hadn't realised it was on. I love Alice in Wonderland, too! Have done since I got my first book as a child - then DGD found me a 1932 copy on eBay for Christmas one year as well.

Perhaps best not to watch it, Marelli; it rather reinforced the accusations of Lewis Carroll being a supressed paedophile . I shall blank out the programme, because I love the book so much...

I can imagine that it may have touched on that, Tegan.

I found it very interesting, and I wish I had taped it to watch again. Through most of the programme they were sitting on the fence, going over the book and how it came to be written, and showing things that had echoes in the book. They more or less said that the Victorian view of affection for children was more innocent than in modern times, and an expert on Carroll said there was no breath of complaint about him at the time, though he had a lot of child friends.

Then after the rest of the programme was recorded, they unearthed a photo in a French museum that was labelled on the back as being the older sister of "Alice" and as being by Lewis Carroll. An expert in Victorian photograph examined it and stated that it was done at the right date, and was the same medium and method and style as Carroll, and an expert on matching images matched up the eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth to those in a photo known to be the sister.

The damning thing was - it wasn't a child, it was of a young teenage girl with a developing figure, full frontal naked, and looking distinctly unhappy. And they had a letter to "Alice" from the sister, then elderly, which appeared to say that she had been interviewed and had said that the rift was because of his too much affection for Alice, because she had to explain it.

At that time, affection for a small child was looked on as innocent, but with the age of consent at 12, not for a young teenager.

The sister's interview had been just before she wrote the letter.

They did not mention something I recall hearing previously - that Carroll had paid a formal call on the girls' parents, dressed in his best (just as one would when calling to ask for a young ladies hand) What happened at the meeting was never revealed, but that was his last visit to the house, and the last time he played with the children.

And they said that, in his own drawings for the book the white rabbit had looked like a nervous suitor. I still don't know quite what to believe, but I'm biased towards not wanting to think the worst. Maybe a lot of great works of fiction and their authors have a dark side [eg Dickens]; Victorian morality probably confused the Victorians even more than it confuses us. Curioser and curioser.

Were 'banned substances' not used by some at that time - though perhaps they weren't banned then. ? Coleridge, Shelley - albeit a bit earlier on - all 'used' morphine etc as recreational drugs, did they not? Maybe this accounted for the dream-like story of Alice in Wonderland (and Through the Looking-Glass, too).

Certainly - Queen Victoria being among them. (Laudenham, cannabis)
I don't think there is any evidence at all that Dodgson was any kind of 'stoner'.

The white rabbit is supposed to have been inspired by an ancient carving of a hare with a pilgrim's bag which Carroll saw in St Mary's Church in Beverley.

While we are thinking about A in W I must tell you DS2 was an extra on the film a few years ago here in Cornwall. He was a gentleman dancing at the garden party. We watched the film a couple of times but I failed to spot him. He really enjoyed it. It was well paid and long days. He had very wild hair at the time which I think Tim Burton liked. Sadly Johnny Depp didn't appear (I think his filming was done in the US.)

I've recorded this, busy watching Spiral on BBC4 at the same time. I loved both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass as a child, read them both to my children and now my 5 year old granddaughter. Always loved the surreal feeling to them when I was young and my children did too. Now I have read how the Victorians dabbled in cannabis, Laudenham and opium, and as you say feetlebaum even Queen Victoria too it was positively respectable. Do wonder what Lewis Carroll/Dodgson was on, or could he attribute both books to a fertile imagination!

He was a very closed-in man. I think he lived a lot of his life through this imagination. that is why he could see things as a child would, and perhaps why he was happy with children as friends.

I would have said that there was nothing to justify labelling him as a paedophile, (even a thoroughly repressed and "harmless" one,) until I saw the expression on the face of the photograph of Alice's sister. That girl did not want to be photographed nude. She was old enough to have inhibitions about exposing her body, but the photographer did not respect them.

I think that he was a very repressed man with an unhealthy interest in children and young girls.He managed to take all the photographs under the heading of 'art' and may even have fooled himself.He came from a household of young girls, he had lots of younger sisters, and wasn't at all attracted to women[as in grown up.]He had hundreds of 'child friends'[Michael Jackson?]I think he was very attracted to young girls and for some reason felt able to communicate and relax with them, but not with adults.As Will Self remarked 'It's always a shame when a great book is written by a not so great person!'

That final photograph was certainly very unsettling!

It's sad that so many of the great children's books have a less than great background. There was Kipling writing all those wonderful stories for children and then sending his half blind son to certain death in the trenches. Kenneth Grahame's son died miserably under a train and E.Nesbit disregarded the doctor's instructions not to feed her (step?) son before an operation, as a result of which he died.

I know I'm still trying not to think the worst about all this in that we are dealing with past times and different ideas. I bought a book yesterday of someone and, in that book was a photograph of her taken in the nude when she was probably in her late teens by her father. Which shocked me, I have to say, but they were a very artistic family and the nude has always been painted over the centuries; perhaps photographs were just a natural progression from that?

Yes, there were a lot of artistic Victorian photographs, and it wasn't considered "unsuitable" to photograph children in the nude. It wasn 't for some time after Victorian times, either. All those pictures of baby on the rug to embarrass them when they grew up! And I have a lovely picture painted on silk of three little girls playing music among flowers - totally naked. It is titled "Moonlight Melody" and was given away with a ladies magazine over a century ago. I don't think "The Lady" will be planning to do that!

Lewis Carrol's photos were like that, rather sentimental pictures of children. Some of them were nude photos, but the children were all quite young and unselfconscious, and they were all rather charming, actually. It was at the end of the programme that they showed a photo that the French museum said was by him. Two experts in different fields looked at it. One examined it for the paper, the process, and so on, and said it was of the right date and style and so on to have been by him. The other looked at the girl, and said it was almost certainly of Alice Liddells's sister, who was a little older than her, and looked about 13.

If it was by Lewis Carroll - and who else would be photographing the Liddell children in the nude? - then it looked to me as though he was pushing his luck getting Lorena to pose without clothes. She looks exactly like a child who is doing as she has been told to by someone who has told her that it is OK, but she is not happy about it. A disturbing picture, as Deedaa says.

I watched the programme on catch-up TV the other day. In the later days the Liddell family had shunned Lewis Carroll for some reason, and some pages were missing from his diary. The photograph of Alice's sister? Well, she was no longer a child in the absolute sense of the word. She was leaving childhood behind and looked distinctly uncomfortable in the picture.