He often photographed his Lisa, but was Lewis Carroll really a pedophile?
Kush ishte në të vërtetë Lewis Carroll, autori i “Liza në botën e çudirave” ? Jo vetëm një shkrimtar, por edhe një fotograf: portretet e tij të vajzave nuk kanë reshtur së diskutuari!
2021-12-28 10:29:21
TiranaPost
More than 150 years after its publication, "Liza in Wonderland" is still one of the most read and loved children's books in the world. Written in 1865 by British writer, photographer and mathematician Lewis Carroll, the novel has never ceased to fascinate children and adults, despite the fact that the life of its author contains a controversial chapter on the origin of the book.
A documentary made in 2015 by the BBC, entitled Lewis Carroll's Secret World, recently explored the relationship between Lewis Carroll and the girls he photographed. In particular, his relationship with little Lisa Liddell, considered by many to be the true inspiration of his book, ended under a magnifying glass. In the documentary, Carroll was described as a "repressed pedophile" who owned and photographed naked girls. The discovery of one of these shots reopened the debate: who was actually the author of "Lisa in Wonderland"?
Lewis Carroll, real name Charles Lutheidge Dodgson, was born in Daresbury, Cheshire, to Irish parents. Anglican and conservative, most of the Dodgson family belonged to one of two typical upper-middle-class occupations, namely the military and the church. Equipped with great intelligence, Lewis Carroll was a mathematics teacher for 26 years after graduation, although he found teaching a profession without incentives.
He decided to dedicate himself to writing only after meeting fairy tale writer George MacDonald, to whom he had read the first draft of "Lisa in Wonderland". It was the enthusiasm of the MacDonald girls that persuaded him to try out a career as a writer, but with a whole new name. Lewis Carroll was in fact a distortion of his real name: Lewis was the English version of Ludovicus, from which Lutwidge is derived, while Carroll was the anglicization of Carolus, the Latin for Charles.
However, long before he wrote, his real passion was photography, which he approached in 1856 thanks to an uncle. As is known, the subject of most of his photos were girls. His favorite model was Alexandra Kitchin, otherwise known as "Xie," whom Lewis Carroll portrayed about fifty times between the ages of 5 and 16. His most famous model, however, is definitely Alice Liddell or otherwise known as Liza.
The daughter of the rector of Christ Church, where Lewis Carroll taught, she began meeting the writer in 1856 along with her parents and two sisters Ina and Edith. The Liddell family and the writer enjoyed spending time together, taking trips and picnics. In 1862, during an afternoon together, Carroll invented the plot of a fantastic story to entertain the three girls. Alice asked him to write it and I gave birth to a manuscript entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground.
However, little Alisa was also the protagonist of many of his beautiful and bucolic shots. Through photography, Lewis Carroll wanted to portray a fairy world, in which his young models turned into forest fairies and creatures, light years away from the rigid image of girls in Victorian society. He suddenly stopped photographing in 1880, after 24 years in business and over 3000 photographs. Less than a third of these images have survived, while some have been deliberately destroyed by the author himself.
The first to talk about the controversial nature of these photographs was Langford Reed, with his 1932 essay The Life of Lewis Carroll. Without openly alluding to pedophilia, Reed noted, however, that Carroll's friendship with the girls ended when they reached puberty. Thus it was that his essay gave way to much controversy that still surrounds the figure of the writer today, as recalled from an article in The Republic.
Morton Cohen, in Lewis Carroll, a Biography (1995), returned to the question much later. "We can not know to what extent Charles's preference for children in drawings and photographs hides a sexual desire. He himself argued that this preference had strict aesthetic reasons. But given her emotional connection to children and the aesthetic appreciation of their forms, the claim that her interest was strictly aesthetic is naive. He probably felt more than he wanted to admit, even to himself. "Of course, he always tried to have another adult present when the subjects posed for him."
In the biography "In the Shadow of the Dreamchild", written by Karoline Leach in 1999 and published in Italy by Castelvecchi, another truth emerges. "Carroll was a normal person with a very normal sexual taste, sociable and interested in theater. "Many lies have been written about her," said Leach, according to whom the writer had some relationships with adult women, which he preferred not to reveal. "Everything goes back to his second biographer, Langford Reed, who without citing sources transfers his obsession with Carroll's daughters."
Leach was able to find, among the files of the Dodgson family archives, the three missing pages of Lewis Carroll's 1863 June 27 diary. Carroll had listed there the reasons for the split with the Liddell family. "According to the official version, Carroll had asked to marry the child. "There is no line in which Liza is mentioned, instead she talks about the possibility of a departure to avoid further rumors about Ina, who could be her older sister or mother, Lorina Liddell called her Ina".
What is the truth? It's impossible to say for sure, but it's worth listening to the words of Vanessa Tait, Liza Liddell's great-granddaughter and the author of a biography of the great-grandmother. "He was a strange but admirable man," he told Carroll in the BBC documentary. "I do not want to stigmatize him with accusations of pedophilia that everyone seems to be obsessed with today. "I find it sad that it's the only thing everyone wants to know about it."
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