[Acrylic-bob]

Lewis Carrol was certainly an oddity. His relationship with the Liddel Family was equally odd. This much was recognised by Mrs Liddel who actually forbade Dodgson (Carrol) from seing her daughters, though this was after the publication of Alice in Wonderland. To know what Mrs Liddel made of Dodgsons behaviour, one would have to think like a Victorian upper middle-class matron.

The Victorian moral landscape is complex and often contradictory. What was unacceptable in public was often de-riguer in private life and their attitudes towards the expression of both sexuality and the emotions was so far removed from what we now expect as the norm as to make analysis and understanding nigh on impossible. Similarly their attitude towards, and the values they placed on, children was often shockingly different to to our own.

Did Dodgson harbour peadophilliac fantasies about Alice? Did he ever act out those fantasies? We will probably never know, since his neice edited and excised large portions of his diaries after his death.