For some reason I didn’t receive any e-mailed notifications of comments readers made at this essay along with one other ‘story’. I wanted to reply, but, to my great disillusionment, I was frozen out (which is kind of strange when considering it was my posted ‘story’, after all). “COMMENTS ARE CLOSED ON THIS STORY.”
The first part of my essay reads:
“WITH celebrity sexual assault and harassment scandals flowing from the showbiz industry, some people (including one CNN-based commentator) wonder whether they’ll feel comfortable consuming quality products involving seriously offending entertainers and producers. Meantime, some big-celebrity fans will continue viewing their favorites nonetheless, while others may indefinitely remain in denial, as superstardom’s brightness can be blinding — especially when the product becomes legendary.
(The late Michael Jackson’s questionable history of having young boy sleepovers at his Neverland Ranch, comes to my mind as a current example, because of the enormous organized vicious attacks via various media on anyone, including big TV producers, who dare suggest that the legendary pop-music artist was a pedophile. He simply was — and still is — that great and loved.)
As a pre-broadcast-era artist example, many people to this day have great difficulty accepting, or perhaps even caring, that acclaimed author Lewis Carroll — writer of the Alice In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass children’s novels — enjoyed having little girls pose nude for his camera. ….”
One reader, clearly a big Lewis Carroll fan, was the most critical, with a few other readers seeming to follow his lead.
I don’t take lightly the content I post, especially the more controversial essays/commentary, which is largely why I, unlike some other posters, attach my true identity.
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niemann
May 26, 2022 at 08:17:17 PM
As someone who has been involved with Lewis Carroll for the last thirty-plus years … has illustrated a number of his works … and who has known most of the leading Carroll scholars and biographers during that time ...
My reaction to this diary is basically … so, more of this urban legend BS. How about referencing some actual Lewis Carroll scholars and biographers?
Many photographers and artists did portraits of nude children at the time. It was part of the Victorian aesthetic. There is ZERO evidence that Dodgson was a “pedophile” or did anything wrong. Despite what people think, the majority of his photographic work didn’t involve children at all, and of the work that did, only a tiny portion involved nudity.
Not one child ever accused him of anything indecent in later life. On the contrary, most had very positive memories of him. The more slightly critical memories tended to go in the opposite direction — i.e. that he was a bit uptightly moralistic and priggish.
In recent years the biographer Jenny Woolf had the idea to look at Dodgson’s private bank records, held in his bank. No one had ever thought to do that before, and what was found was enlightening. Among other things, he quietly gave much of his money away to many charities — and that included charities devoted to helping sexually exploited women and children — including one that helped prosecute men who sexually abused children. What an odd thing for a supposed “pedophile” to do.
niemann
niemann
May 30, 2022 at 02:54:09 PM
Well, I’ve just checked back to see if any more comments have appeared to this diary. What a surprise: All these inconvenient facts, which go against what certain people want to believe, have passed without response or acknowledgment, as if they never even came up.
No doubt those people will blithely continue on, slanderously claiming, as if it were fact, that Lewis Carroll was a dark, sick, twisted pedophile who sexually abused little girls.
By the way (not that I expect anyone will see this comment) … In response to democratos below: I knew Martin Gardner. He had a watercolor of mine hanging in his house. I still have a houseplant he and his wife gave me thirty years ago. I’ve known Mark Burstein almost that long. I’m mentioned several times in that 2015 edition of The Annotated Alice. Peter Heath wrote the introduction to the first book publication of a Carroll play I was the first to illustrate.
niemann
democratos
May 27, 2022 at 12:34:22 PM
… Alice Liddell never posed for him nude. There are just basic facts to be respected here, despite what people want to believe. …
While he downplayed his connection to the works of Carroll for reasons of privacy, in certain contexts he had no problem at all being known as the author and talking about his works (for example, when classes of children would write asking him about them). …
He was just the one person. His childhood work reads like Lewis Carroll, and the wider Dodgson family humor had a very “Carrollian” vein. His lighthearted private letters read exactly like Lewis Carroll, but are signed with his real name. That was just his humor and personality. (Remember, he first improvised the Alice story in private company, among friends, as Charles Dodgson, with no thought of “Lewis Carroll”.) Why is it so hard for modern people to just accept that someone was basically a decent, fairly well-adjusted, imaginative person?
niemann
MorrellWI1983
May 27, 2022 at 10:35:11 AM
That’s basically what these know-nothings do: Latch on to some simplistic cartoon urban legend caricature, and then show off how iconoclastically “hip” they are to be knocking over some beloved figure. … But the fact is, in this case, pretty much everyone who knew Dodgson agreed that he was a very nice person.
Eccentric in some ways, definitely; a little prickly and opinionated in others, yes; but the overwhelming picture that comes down is someone who was kind and compassionate in the extreme … caring, empathetic, and loving … gentle, sensitive, and humble … witty and good company … and very, very concerned with what was right and moral (to the point of it almost being too much, according to some).
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At another forum, which I won’t name, I posted a piece similar to the essay at issue, and it got deleted. What really pissed me off was that it was wholly censored not by the automated filter, which promptly deletes material that specifically breaches clearly defined rules, but rather by a living ‘moderator(s)’ for the Lewis Carroll section within the website (a sub-site which, to me, read quite like Carroll fandom). As punishment, I was banished from commenting or contacting anyone there — like I was some sleazy troll. Apparently, it miffed a powerful Lewis Carroll enthusiast or two, there. And I was given no means of communicating with any of the Carroll-site 'moderators' in regards to the unjustified blatant censorship.
I was accused of calling Lewis Carroll “a pedophile”. I did not, though the implication could be perceived, understandably, especially by his defenders. My post included factual information, mostly quotes with full citation, from academia and writers; it included different sources (pro, con and in between) on Carroll’s prolific proclivity for taking nude photos of little girls who trusted him. That photography is a plain, basically undisputed fact. However, while there may be strong suspicions he had done so, I have not read anything, including in his or others’ correspondence, about Carroll inappropriately touching his little girl friends.
The piece was the most journalistic and researched post I have seen on that website, yet I was brazenly told to “please do some actual research”.
Perhaps typically, there was/is no means by which to contact that website’s Lewis Carroll section’s gatekeeper on this. At least not anything that was made visibly available. Thus I was given no means by which to question the flagrant suppression. Where was I? China? Russia?
DailyKOS.com’s niemann similarly asks, “How about referencing some actual Lewis Carroll scholars and biographers?”
How about the writers and academics I referenced and quoted in my original posted essay?: https://ww.dailykos.com/stories/2022/5/26/2100613/-Few-People-Seem-to-Know-or-Care-About-the-Man-Behind-That-Great-Book?_=2022-05-26T19:21:52.000-07:00
I used to get comfortable to watch the weekend-long Great Books marathons on TLC, way back when it really was The Learning Channel and not its later form with so much schadenfreude content.
Besides Alice In Wonderland, I have four other collector’s editions of The Great Books series documentaries, albeit on VHS — Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick — all of which I’ve watched many times. (I’d like to get many of the others, like Plato’s Republic and Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, but they are no longer available to me.
Besides via some reading, with all five documentaries, though especially with Alice In Wonderland, I took down notes and quotes almost every time I’d watch them, sometimes repeatedly rewinding and replaying to make sure of the notes’ accuracy.
Ironically, the most memorable scholars included in the Alice In Wonderland documentary for me are those who talk glowingly of the author while — unlike the critics of my Lewis Carroll essays — apparently having come to terms with his predilection for naked-little-girl photography.■