The Man Who Loved Children: Lewis Carroll Studies' Evidence Problem

Abstract

T h e y e a r 2 0 2 1 m a r k s T h e sesquicentenary of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a work that, like its forerunner, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), has never gone out of print.1 While it would be difficult to overstate the importance of Carroll’s conceptualization of childhood to modern culture, discussions concerning the nature of his feelings toward Alice Liddell, his muse, and his fascination with female children and adolescents more broadly have lasted almost as long as the books themselves. This subject attracted critical attention as early as 1898, when Stewart Dodgson Collingwood dedicated the final two chapters of his eleven-chapter biography to “that beautiful side of [his uncle’s] character which afterwards was to be, next to his fame as an author, the one for which he was best known—his attitude towards children, and the strong attraction they had for him.” Reflecting on this attraction, Collingwood proposed that the “one comprehensive word wide enough to explain this tendency of his nature” would be “Love” and that it is only in light of this love “that we can properly understand him.”2 Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, literary critics, biographers, and historians of childhood, sexuality, and art have drawn on the tremendous range of primary source materials that constitute Carroll’s archive (including fiction, correspondence, diaries, photography, and sketches) to approach the vexed question of what it might mean to love a child in a period governed by different social and sexual codes from the present. The author’s enduring popularity means that this topic will continue to be studied against the backdrop of changing cultural discourses. Attitudes toward the sexual preferences of prominent men have shifted dramatically in recent years, with many formerly beloved figures scrutinized