On Saturday night at 9 PM on BBC 2 there was an excellent programme on 'The secret world of Lewis Carroll' which studied his life and in particular how he came to write Alice in Wonderland.
The programme lasted an hour but over a third of it explored the case as to whether there was anything 'odd' with his dealings with children - this bit being the BBC at its worse.
Nothing concrete was produced, concerning his relationship with children, other than he was clearly enamoured with the 3 daughters of the Dean at Oxford and in particular of course Alice. The only 'proof,' if you can call it that, that there was anything 'sexual', was the fact that he took photographs of young girls including of course Alice.
However I have discovered that only 50% of his photographic work includes children, some admittedly in naked poses, but this is based on the fact that around 60% of his work is missing. Also, and to be fair it was briefly mentioned, Lewis Carroll lived from 1832 to 1898 when until 1875 the age of consent was 12 then rising to 13 and in 1885 rising to 16.
So why spend over 20 minutes of the programme exploring this 'secret' when it appears, based on the values at the time, nothing was really amiss. Of course the BBC couldn't resist getting Will Self to actually say he must have been a 'repressed paedophile' but none of the other commentators thought so including somebody who had studied him for 40 years.
Perhaps the BBC, after their culpability in the Jimmy Saville saga, reckons its fair game to tar others with the same brush even though in this case we are talking about the mid to late 1800s.
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